Lesbian Youth and the “Not Girl” Gender: Explorations of Adolescent Lesbian Lives through Critical Life Story Research

Abstract

“Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Boys are made of sticks and snails and puppy dog tails.” Gender and sexuality are not only intertwined, but, as constructs, each is dependent on the other for its loaded heterosexual meaning (Ingraham, 1996; Williams and Stein, 2002; Thorne and Luria, 2002). Resistance to gender enculturation is resistance to the cultural system that pairs anatomy with prescribed gender roles and sexual scripts. A key component in gender resistance is agency. Giddens (1979) states that agency “does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together, but to a continuous flow of conduct” (55), which is intrinsically related to power and contains within it the recognition of choice—the actor has chosen to act in a certain way but could have acted otherwise. It is a striving for self-determination and mastery of possibility. Agency is “transformative capacity” (Giddens, 1981, 53).