Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research

On the Margins

Catherine Phil MacCarthy — 2026-03-16

These poems reflect on different stages of girlhood and womanhood. In the first, 'Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Self-Portrait, 1889,' the speaker observes her daughter, and recalls an image of an Irish artist from the turn of the last century; 'The Eight Amendment, 1982, captures the impact of a referendom on a friendship in the early 1980's in Ireland; 'Conversations' evokes a childhood friendship between two girls; and a contemporary teenage girl is dramatised in 'Venus on Sandymount Green'.

The Garden

Marisa Rapela Palacios — 2026-03-16

A poem concerning male validation and how it can make a woman lose herself, portraying womanhood and girlhood as the only way out.

Rituals of Sisterhood: Queer Girlhood and Trauma in Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (2024)

Marta Aguza Berral — 2026-03-16

This article examines Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (2024) through the intertwined lenses of intersectional girlhood, queer identity, and trauma theory. Drawing on recent work in girlhood studies, the analysis foregrounds Armfield’s depiction of three sisters—Isla, Irene, and Agnes—who struggle to navigate familial estrangement, the burdens of intergenerational trauma, and the precarities of queer adolescence within a climate-crisis dystopia. The study situates the novel against postfeminist cultural backdrops, resisting narratives of seamless empowerment and instead highlighting how trauma unsettles narrative and lived experience. Intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000) underpins the discussion of privilege and vulnerability among the sisters, while queer theory (Sedgwick 1993; Halberstam 1998) illuminates Agnes’s affective and embodied navigation of sexuality and identity. Literary trauma theory is used to interpret Armfield’s narrative techniques, including fragmentation and nonlinear chronology, which reflect the persistence of wound and memory. Ultimately, the article argues that Private Rites advances contemporary fiction by probing the unstable ties of sisterhood, the affective volatility of queer girlhood, and the cyclical inheritance of trauma, offering a textured vision of survival that is marked by misrecognition, longing, and endurance.

Queering Girlhood: Sapphic and Trans Girlhoods in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Tolulope Akinrinde — 2026-03-16

In an era where girlhood is increasingly commodified in postfeminist and digital cultures, queer girlhood, particularly sapphic and trans forms remains contested, underrepresented, and structurally silenced. This paper examines the complex literary representation of intersectional queer girlhoods in two contemporary Anglophone novels: Emily M. Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet (2019). Drawing on the frameworks of queer temporality (Halberstam 2005), intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991), and affect theory (Ahmed 2004; Muñoz 2009), the paper interrogates how these texts disrupt normative paradigms of development, innocence, and heteronormativity that often define girlhood in literature. In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, the repression of sapphic desire under Christian moralism is juxtaposed with moments of subversive agency, silence, and queer kinship. In Pet, Emezi constructs a speculative future where a Black trans girl protagonist must confront concealed structural violence despite narratives of supposed safety. By analysing how both novels deploy genre (realism and speculative fiction), voice, and affect to articulate queer resistance, this study foregrounds girlhood not as a universal or stable category, but as a site of becoming, inflected by race, sexuality, gender identity, and sociocultural power. Ultimately, the paper argues for a reading practice that attends to the pluralities of queer girlhoods, not merely to represent but to reimagine the political stakes of visibility, recognition, and refusal in contemporary literature.

“I’m Selfish because I Have to Be”: Postfeminist Vibes and Girl Power Politics in Girls State

Emily Bent — 2026-03-16

This article examines the 2024 documentary Girls State which chronicles a week-long immersive political leadership program hosted by the American Legion Auxiliary for girls in Missouri. The film, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, captures girls’ experiences with creating their own governments and political parties, campaigning for elected office, and adjudicating legal disputes in mock simulations of the democratic process. It bears witness to their political development while bringing viewers face-to-face with the promises and failures of postfeminism to deliver authentic forms of empowerment. Drawing from girls’ commentary, I suggest Girls State elucidates the paradoxes of exceptionality for girl leaders today. I mobilize Harris and Dobson’s “casting of girls as ‘suffering actors’” to underscore the current political moment in American girls’ lives and to appreciate the shaping of girls’ political selves across postfeminist scripts of neoliberal girl power (154). The article concludes with alternative patterns for girls’ political recognition.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Punk) Woman in Cristina García's Novel Dreaming in Cuban

Elena Canido Muiño — 2026-03-16

This paper provides an analysis of the portrayal of the young woman artist in Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992) to examine the importance of creativity and art-making processes in the development of a girl’s identity. In this modern female künstlerroman, García reformulates stereotypical images by putting forth the independence, autonomy, rebellion, and determination of the novel’s protagonist, Pilar Puente, a Cuban-born, American-raised girl who employs different art-making processes throughout her coming of age as a second-generation immigrant in the 1970s. Issues dealing with the socio-cultural construction of her girlhood are thus at the centre of inquiry and will be considered from various methodological perspectives within the field of Girlhood Studies, which addresses precisely the experiences and representations of girls in a range of formats and manifestations (Mitchel, Reid-Walsh and Kirk 2008). Furthermore, this study highlights the fact that the role of creativity and arts integration in any field are powerful interdisciplinary tools for both girls and women to connect their current reality with their desired states of mind and accomplishments. Ultimately, this article will discuss the dichotomy between what has been socially and culturally expected from girls in opposition to how this young punk artist chooses to be.

“We Refused to be Cordial”: Girlhood and Anger in Dizz Tate’s Brutes (2023)

Claudia García Pajín — 2026-03-16

In 2018, Sarah Banet-Weiser wrote that: “The #MeToo movement has forced all of us to confront female rage – a rage at the injury of being harassed and assaulted, a rage at not being believed, at being called hysterical and out of control.” #MeToo flooded social media with anger-filled testimonies, which soon started circulating into popular forms of fiction. Considering “anger” as a socialized emotion, “rage” as an intensified emotional state, and “affect” as a relational category, this paper explores the representation of girlhood anger in Dizz Tate’s Brutes (2023). I contend that the novel reframes girls’ anger as a socially learned and structurally conditioned affect crucial to their development, rather than an individual emotional excess. Drawing from Sarah Ahmed’s feminist affect theory and Soraya Chemaly’s contemporary analysis of female anger, I show the “coming-of-age” factor of the novel as defined by the evolution of the protagonists’ uses of anger — from a form of norm-defiance and agency-claiming to a collective response to sexual violence and systemic harm. Through close reading, I demonstrate how the novel locates anger within broader mechanisms of resistance against sexual violence. In doing so, Brutes resonates with the affective dynamics surrounding the #MeToo movement, foregrounding anger as a mode of solidarity and political recognition among girls.

"I don’t have a defective version of what you’ve got": Literary Representations of Neurodiverse Girlhoods

Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh — 2026-03-16

This essay analyses a selection of texts written about and by girls, who because of their neurodivergence are unable to learn the complex, often unstated, rules that govern the language, representations and social interactions on which participation in contemporary society is contingent. Research into cultural representations of girls who are unable to fulfil their socially mandated roles due to a variety of reasons, including neurodiversity, suggest they are at best stereotyped, at worst completely ignored. Caitríona Lally’s Eggshells (2015) and Alice Franklin’s Life Hacks for a Little Alien (2025) interrogate the language and spaces of girlhood as sites of restriction and coercion for their neurodiverse protagonists. However, the novels suggest that the marginal status that results from this exclusion from the mainstream can also render visible the often invisible strategies by which social roles and identities are constructed, facilitating a significant site of critique. The novels suggest that the liminal, unnarrated social spaces occupied by their protagonists are where the potential to forge new and inclusive modes of girlhood will be found.

The Realities of Girlhood in Contemporary Ireland in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2015)

Danielle O'Sullivan — 2026-03-16

This article examines the representations of girlhood in contemporary Irish fiction, in which sexual assault is normalised, and victims are silenced in response. It looks specifically at A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimear McBride, 2013) and Asking for It (Louise O’Neill, 2015). Girlhood in these novels is dominated by the threat of sexual assault and the existence of rape culture, especially in a digital age and #MeToo era. In post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, critics have noted a growth in YA literature, especially female authors addressing “uncomfortable but important matters in their works”, including “violence against teenage girls and women in Ireland” (Seijas-Pérez 66). Both protagonists in these novels, the Girl in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and Emma in Asking for It, experience sexual assault. The reactions of the local community and close friends or family to both girls’ experiences of sexual assault illustrate community and institutional responses to trauma in an Irish context. The article will analyse themes of shame and trauma, using close readings from the novels to break down the aftermaths of each individual experience of sexual violence within a broader cultural context. The works of Cathy Caruth and Susan Cahill, amongst others, will be used in this analysis in order to expose the lived realities of girlhood in contemporary Ireland.

Editorial Note

Iria Seijas-Pérez — 2026-03-16

Introduction to the Special Issue, Visibilizing Intersectional Girlhood(s) in Contemporary Anglophone Cultural Manifestations

Review of Plett, Casey. A Safe Girl to Love. Topside Press, 2014

Alicia Martínez-Martín — 2026-03-16

Review of Leaf, Savanah, director. Earth Mama. A24, 2023

Marina Vega González — 2026-03-16