This article modifies Donna Haraway's concept of (counter) myth building as a way to facilitate social action. Counter myth building, as both a resource and a process, recognizes limitations on individual agency but foregrounds the productive capacity to be more than a social and historical construct. Because myths are multiple and enactments are unpredictable, both building and enacting counter myths are at best complicated. GirlZone and RadioGirl provide two sites for investigating these complications. As grassroots projects, GirlZone and RadioGirl are explicitly devoted to building counter myths as part of an activist agenda for social change. These sites illustrate how the complex semiotic and material processes of myth building may provide potential resources for these and other activists.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Abu-Lughod, L.
(1995). A tale of two pregnancies. In R. Behar & D. Gordon (Eds.), Women writing culture (pp. 339-349). Berkeley: University of California Press.
2.
American Association of University Women
. (1991). Shortchanging girls, shortchanging America. Washington, DC: Greenberg Lake Analysis Group.
3.
American Association of University Women
. (1992). How schools shortchange girls: A study of the major findings of girls and education. Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation.
4.
American Association of University Women
. (Eds.). (1994a). Schoolgirls: Young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday.
5.
American Association of University Women
. (1994b). Shortchanging girls, shortchanging America. Washington, DC: Greenberg Lake Analysis Group.
6.
American Association of University Women
. (1998). Separated by sex. Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation.
7.
Bakhtin, M.
(1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
8.
Bakhtin, M. M.
(1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds., V. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas.
9.
Bazerman, C.
(1994). Systems of genres and the enactment of social intention. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). London: Taylor and Francis.
10.
Brand, M.
(2000, November 15). Powerpuff girls. In National Public Radio's “Morning Edition.” Retrieved November 20, 2000, from http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=11%2F15%2F2000&PrgID=3
11.
Butler, J.
(1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
12.
Butler, J.
(1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.”New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
13.
Carter, K.
(1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22, 5-12.
14.
Cole, M.
(1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
15.
Conquergood, D.
(1985). Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature and Performance, 5(2), 1-13.
16.
Cushman, E.
(1996). The rhetorician as agent of social change. College Composition and Communication, 47, 7-28.
17.
Cushman, E.
(1998, April 16). “An everyday fight for us to get simple respect”: Institutional language in an inner city [Invited Lecture]. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
18.
Cushman, E.
, & Monberg, T. (1998). Re-centering authority: Social reflexivity and repositioning in composition research. In C. Farris & C. M. Anson (Eds.), Under construction: Working at the intersections of composition theory, research, and practices (pp. 166-198). Logan: Utah State University Press.
19.
Davies, B.
(1992). Women's subjectivities and feminist stories. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 53-78). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
20.
Dyson, A.
(1997). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
21.
Elizabeth & Angie
. (1997, July 27). GirlZone: Expanding girls' horizons. The Octopus, p. 10.
22.
Encisco, P. E.
(1998). Good/bad girls read together: Pre-adolescent girls co-authorship of feminine subject positions during a shared reading event. English Education, 30(1), 44-62.
23.
Finders, M.
(1998). Raging hormones: Stories of adolescence and implications for teacher preparation. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42, 252-263.
24.
Gee, P.
(2000). The new literacy studies: From “socially situated” to the work of the social. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 180-196). London: Routledge Kegan Paul.
25.
GirlZone
. (1998). Grant proposal to Girl's Best Friend Foundation. Champaign, IL: Author.
26.
Goffman, E.
(1961). The moral career of the mental patient. In Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates (pp. 125-169). Garden City, NY: Anchor.
27.
Goffman
. (1982). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
28.
Gutierrez, K.
, Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: James Brown vs. Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 445-471.
29.
Haraway, D.
(1989). Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
30.
Haraway, D.
(1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
31.
Haraway, D.
(2000). How like a leaf: An interview with Thyrze Nichols Goodeve/Donna J. Haraway. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
32.
LeCourt, D.
(2000, April 13). Rupturing the culture/bodily binary: Materialist feminism's challenge to composition. Paper presented at the Conference of College Composition and Communication, Minneapolis, MN.
33.
Leont'ev, A. N.
(1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
34.
(Reprinted from USA Today, 1990, March 13)
35.
Merli, M.
(1997). She's hitting the street: Kate skateboards rings around “guys-only” myth. The News-Gazette, p. B8.
36.
Mincer, J.
(1994, January 9). Boys get called on. The New York Times, p. 27.
37.
Miriam
. (1999, February 11). Want to be on the air? YOU GO, GIRLS: WEFT turns over radio station for kids' show every other Sunday. The News-Gazette, p. B-8.
38.
Mitchell, M.
(1999, January/February). Radio Girl: Giving voices to youths. The WEFT Revue, p. 3.
39.
Mudita & Brittany
. (1999, August 29). Best of RadioGirl Show. In Ayleen (Producer), RadioGirl. Champaign, IL: WEFT.
40.
(Reprinted from The Gender Reader, 1990)
41.
Pipher, M.
(1994). Reviving Ophelia. Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York: G. P. Putnam.
42.
Sadker, M.
, & Sadker, D. (1984). The report card on sex bias. Washington, DC: MidAtlantic Center for Sex Equity.
43.
Sadker, M.
, & Sadker, D. (1986). Sexism in the classroom: From grade school to graduate school. Phi Delta Kappa, 67, 512-515.
44.
Sadker, M.
, & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America's schools cheat girls. New York: Scribner.
45.
Spivak, G.
(1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
46.
Swords, F.
(1998, October 15). These girls rock. The News-Gazette. p. B-8.
47.
Takayoshi, P.
, Huot, E., & Huot, M. (1999). No boys allowed: The World Wide Web as clubhouse for girls. Computers and Composition, 16, 89-106.
48.
Warner, M.
(1994). From the beast to the blonde: On fairy tales and their tellers. London: Chatto & Windus.
49.
Wertsch, J. V.
(1997, January 13). The meaning of the past: Official history in the former Soviet Union [Invited Lecture]. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
50.
Wertsch, J. V.
(1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.
51.
Wertsch, J. V.
(1999). Revising Russian history. Written Communication, 16, 267-295.
52.
Wilson, D. E.
, & Ritchie, J. S. (1994). Resistance, revision, and representation: Narrative in teacher education. English Education, 26, 177-188.
