'Just a Girl' in the World of Her Bedroom (or not).

It is mid-April 2024. I am preparing to return to Oxford for the last term of first year. Four walls, one window, a wardrobe and bed, two doors (one of which has rarely been shut), some jellycats, and many boxes. This is what I see in one of the final moments I will have in my childhood bedroom.

Fast forward to today, and it has been over a year since leaving that space. Much has occurred since then. I will burn out, hate music, want to leave Oxford (and never come back), experience a breakup that knocks my confidence, and be haunted by nightmares for months. I will also get a hobby, relight my spark, be excited for my future, strengthen friendships, read books that change my perspective on existence, learn how to take up space in life, and be reminded that there is truly nothing stronger than the sisterhood. I love our new house, but I think I do miss my childhood bedroom. Life was a little simpler then.

In more recent weeks, I have started to think about what girlhood means- both in an academic sense, and in a personal one too. The darker days of November 2024 prompted me to ponder on what truly encapsulated girlhood for me. The answer? Slumber parties. Never have I ever felt more like 'just a girl' than a bedroom surrounded by my childhood best friends as we attempted to paint nails, do face masks, and avoid actually getting some sleep. There is something about that space that epitomised my experience of girlhood.

Enough of the soppy nostalgia, because there are things I want to discuss. Firstly, 'girlhood' is something that I physically cannot objectively define (at least right now). I think there is something inherently subjective about one's experience of being a girl, which makes girlhood difficult to define. Whilst I do feel as though my girlhood has indeed ended over the past year, I wouldn't say I have officially entered womanhood (another term I can't define), and I don't think I'd actually be able to define girlhood from my own personal perspective. For ease, I would say that my own girlhood spanned from the ages of four to 19. I'm currently sitting on the fence deciding if I actually fancy diving into womanhood or not.

Secondly, I wish to tackle this idea of bedroom culture. Because I was definitely 'girled' somewhere, but I don't think it was in my bedroom, but that does not diminish its importance in my experience of girlhood. Frith (1968) would argue that 'girl culture starts and finishes in the bedroom', but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this. I will probably yap away about my own experiences but I might talk a little about music, music videos, and films too. I'm sure my thoughts will only scratch the surface of all of this, and I hope it encourages you to consider the spaces that shaped your sense of self during your childhood, and how, for me, 'there lives a young girl in me who will not die' (Ditlevsen, 1939. I love her poetry endlessly).

Our understanding of girlhood is ever-changing. McRobbie and Garber came forth with their ideas in 1976 in 'Girls and Subcultures', analysing the participation of girls in subcultures and arguing that girls developed a 'culture of the bedroom', fuelled by their consumption of magazines and music leading to their creation of 'teenyboppers', who were young female fans of pop stars.

However, so much has changed since these theories were proposed, and whilst it is undeniable that the bedroom is still an important space, it certainly occupies a complex one. As highlighted by Kearney 2007, McRobbie and Garber's theory does not take into account race, ethnicity, or class, all of which have an influence on whether and to what extend a bedroom culture may be fostered. As a south-east Asian neurodivergent person growing up in the UK, I do think that the way in which domestic spaces functioned in my households were different to those of my white peers. Their study also comes from heterosexual orientation, thereby excluding queer people too. Though bedroom culture aims to be inclusive in its idealised locus of girlhood the sisterhood, it is ultimately trapped in a double bind of being simultaneously inclusive and exclusive.

So, where does this leave us? Is there an alternative site of 'girling' that is more inclusive? Perhaps it is not a place but a series of events? Why are we being 'girled'? Do we need to undergo 'girling' in order to experience girlhood? TLDR; I really really don't know. This is a late-night brain dump fuelled by blueberry pancake tea and some mango that is so cold its practically frozen. But I want to move on to talk a little about bedroom culture in music and film.

Where are my Dance Moms fans at? Anyone remember Mack Z's 'It's a Girl Party' music video? I never thought I'd be analysing it but here we are. The video starts with the girls in the dance studio and at the barre, thus placing them in another stereotypically feminine space. As the song breaks out into the chorus, the girls are at a slumber party set in a bedroom. In this situation, I would read the bedroom as not only the hub of the sisterhood, but also as a site of freedom. They break free from the rigid technicalities of ballet and dance class, then move to the bedroom before ending up at what looks like a party venue later on in the song, furthering this progression of freedom and utilising the bedroom as a vehicle for this. The final chorus switches between the bedroom and party venue, conflating the two to suggest that a girl's bedroom was truly the place to be. Freedom, empowerment, and friendship are the big themes in this video, and the bedroom is the place for these ideas to be explored.

On a slightly more retro note, Judy Blume's 1970 novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (which was adapted into a film in 2023), also utilises the bedroom as a space for the fostering of girl culture. I confess to not having read the book, but so much of the movie resonated with my own tween experiences, which made for both a comforting and nostalgic watch. One of the scenes that stuck with me was when the four girls start their own secret club, which convened in one of their bedrooms. As they wrote in their secret diaries, read magazines, and engaged in gossip, those scenes, to me, summarised canon events of being a tween girl. No matter how hard we try, the bedroom continues to be a sacred space to many girls, both fictional and real.

Circling right back, I wasn't girled in my childhood bedroom. In part, because I don't think I spent very much time there. Perhaps I was girled in the living room, playing the violin before school every morning, or sat at the dinner table doing my homework in the evenings. Maybe it was in my first experience of being in a mixed science lab, or in orchestra, or maybe 'girling' and the construction of one's girlhood is some trippy phenomenon that we are all making up. Young girls and adolescents are now becoming increasingly aware of the ways of the world through social media and technology, so perhaps the location of girling is now a digital one rather than a physical space. However, there is no denying that the childhood bedroom holds a privileged place in society, and has done so for a while. I wonder how important and influential childhood bedrooms are to us as individuals today, and I am curious to see the developments of these ideas in media and culture.

I miss my childhood bedroom, not necessarily the space, but the associations it brings with it. I miss slumber parties. In the words of No Doubt, I miss being 'Just A Girl'.