Girls’ and Young Women’s Participatory Cultures Across History

This collection traces girls’ and young women’s participatory cultures across history. Exploring the ways in which girls’ and young women’s creative productions imitate, adapt and transform the texts they have encountered—whether as part of formal programmes of education, guided acts of engagement or recreation, independently, or communally—it reads a global history of gendered and aged fannish practices. Through attention to a range of case studies from the seventeenth century to the present day in manuscript, print, and digital media, it explores the history of gendered participatory cultures, developments in genre and media, global and local frameworks, and the gendered dimensions of fandom to reclaim practices that have often been overlooked as “amateur” and to argue that girls’ participation in textual cultures offers modes of creative expression, identity formation, social activism, and community building.