Community Profile

This is a commmunity for exploring "girl canon", i.e. fiction that is or was very often read by young girls. It doesn't matter if you identify now or ever as a girl. Girls' series books were a genre that developed in the mid to late 1800s. Often they're Improving Books about being good and patient and sweet while still playing basketball for your boarding school and solving a mystery. They portray friendships between girls and often have a moral component that includes lessons on how to "properly" socialize yourself as female, as well as messages about class, race, and ethnicity. Imperialism (for series books from the U.K.) and "manifest destiny" (in the U.S. series) were other important subtexts.

Let's talk about these books and their effect on us as we grew up. And let's delve into both fun stuff like fic, and fun stuff like completely eviscerating the books' subtexts and politics! We can see the older books and traditions in a continuum with manga and other current forms of series books meant for girls.

p.s. Animal books, especially horse books, certainly count.

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I'm looking for co-moderators and someone to help write up a general Policy for the comm! - badgerbag (message me or write to me at liz@bookmaniac.net)

Help rewrite this community description!


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GirlyCon policies!

Harassment and abusive language will not be tolerated. Please keep everyone's fannish and other identities private and separate. All genders are welcome, it doesn't matter your gender identity, just have something to say about "girl canon" books.

(This section should be rewritten, but this is the general idea.)


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GIRLYCON!!!!!!

Simply posting about books is great but here's the concept behind holding an instance of GirlyCon. Have a sleepover, a party, an evening get together, a weekend retreat at your house and invite a bunch of people. Do readings out loud of various girls' books and then have discussions. Do weird craft projects, write fic, have quiet reading time, and swap books. Or whatever! Then write it up and post about it and cross-post here.

At some point we could have a bigger con, but the central idea is that girlycon is everywhere and anytime - just declare it's happening, host it, and write it up. Tag whatever you produce with girlycon or #girlycon. Original discussion of this idea is here: http://badgerbag.dreamwidth.org/287005.html