teenage girlhood

Together, Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair are known as The Girls—an artistic partnership that has revolved around intense tableaux self-portraits, live performances, videos and installations. Along with exhibiting regularly in the UK, they’ve shown at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and Milan’s UNO+UNO. Whether they’re taking on recognizable people and reimagining them, or creating entirely new and vibrant characters, you’re sure to be drawn in. I wanted to quiz The Girls about their most controversial pieces, their future projects, and how feminism fits into the picture.

Lots of songs are slow, but to recall the awkward, needlessly dramatic tradition of the junior or senior high school "slow dance," tunes need to have several additional qualities for me:

• They must speak of a love most intense and cinematic.
• They must have a late-'90s sensibility, regardless of when they were actually recorded.
• They must sound just... so pretty, despite my initial desire to dislike them out of cynicism.

Tracks and space for your own jams after the jump!

Pageant competitors in a dire situation? It sounds like a recipe for an overly catty misogyfest (or, let's be honest, a terrible porno). Instead, Libba Bray has crafted a complex, blistering satire that is, dare I say, one of the most explicitly feminist novels I have ever read.

Sometimes, products are all the more disappointing when they sounded pretty cool at first.

Case in point: Mattel's blockbuster franchise, Monster High. This series of dolls is centered around the children (mostly daughters) of werewolves, mummies and other classic beasties of horror tales. When speaking about the franchise to the New York Times, Tim Kilpin of Mattel said, "Who doesn't feel like a freak in high school? It started with that universal truth." Of course, high schoolers aren't Mattel's target market; in fact, most Monster High products are officially listed as "Age 6-8." Still, dolls that promote not buying into superficial mainstream standards would be neat, right?

Yeah, they would. Too bad that's not what's happening here.

Alarming pics and video after the jump!

Group pic via tvguide.com.

On Tuesday, Glee aired their second vaguely Lady Gaga-inspired episode, "Born This Way." Like the first, Season One's "Theatricality," it was, to quote Alyx Vesey, "a mixed bag stuffed to the purse strings."

What Would Your Mother Do? Conversation Underwear sells panties and t-shirts in stereotypically girly colors such as white, "pale mint" and "lavender pink," adorned with the phrases "Not tonight," "Zip it!" and "Dream on!"

Lori Aurelia Williams has been one of my favorite authors since high school, when I was lucky enough to stumble across When Kambia Elaine Flew In From Neptune. Williams' debut novel was a poetic, mesmerizing story of a working-class family in Houston. It also was the rare story to deal with sexual abuse in a believable yet unexploitative manner, as the narrator slowly discovered that her friend, the title character, was being prostituted by her guardian. Williams went on to write sequel Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues and additional novel Broken China, and while the latter drew controversy for its depiction of teenage motherhood and stripping, I admire both of those works as well.

So it was that I approached Maxine Banks is Getting Married with astronomical expectations. Williams' first published book in five years, Maxine Banks features a seventeen-year-old protagonist, her oldest yet and arguably her strongest. Seeing her friend Tia's (a character from Williams' first two books) happiness at marrying her longtime boyfriend, Maxine suspects that marriage is the answer to her own life's inadequacies. After all, she loves her sweetheart, Brian... and hates living with her hypercritical mother and her mother's many abusive lovers.

On Friday, I saw the Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, and Tak Sakagucki-helmed Japanese flick Mutant Girls Squad as part of the Northwest Film Center's Portland International Film Festival (PIFF.) From the synopsis, I expected a girl power-y saga of young women bonding over their new superpowers and fighting off comic book-esque villains at each other's behest... something like X-Men meets D.E.B.S. (the latter of which I will defend until my death, and not just because of name loyalty). Basically, I went into Mutant Girls Squad thinking it would be ridiculous and entertaining. I was half right.

Comments, spoilers and a gruesome trailer after the jump!

We close week five of our series of movies that pass the Bechdel Test with the first star-making vehicle for a lead actress. Honduran American novice America Ferrera charmed audiences with her feature debut in director Patricia Cardosa's 2002 indie sleeper Real Women Have Curves, which was distributed by HBO Films.

In 2008, 58 teenage girls published their take on body image, family, politics, and pop culture in the anthology Red: Teenage Girls in America Write on What Fires Up Their Lives Today. Page Turner caught up with five of them to talk about feminism, teen-girl falsehoods, and what's happened in their lives since their essays left off.