Constructing meanings through popular culture: Self-initiated drawing in the lives of preadolescent girls

This dissertation advocates a view of children's self-initiated drawing as a lived sociocultural practice, a view that emphasizes the image production process and considers the many interconnected social and cultural influences surrounding image making, including peer verbal interactions and gendered culture, children's lifestyles and economic backgrounds, social beliefs about children (particularly girls), and popular cultural artifacts. The study positions children as active producers of the culture which serves as an arena for their daily meaning negotiations and resistance to prevailing sociocultural ideas and representations. It draws upon the multidisciplinary perspectives of post-Marxist cultural studies, sociology of childhood and preadolescence, third-wave feminist/girlhood studies, ethnographic approaches to children's drawing, and philosophical hermeneutics.;The presented research investigated how two 10-year-old female participants rework dominant sociocultural ideas through their verbal interactions, collaborative image making, and related daily practices. The study involved nine months of extensive field work in the contexts of participants' bedrooms, school recesses, summer camp, and the researcher's home; it included tape-recorded individual and group interviews (as open-ended hermeneutic conversations), observations documented in field notes and memos, and the examination of relevant artifacts of popular culture. All written data were analyzed using constructivist grounded theory.;This study revealed the preadolescent participants' desire to play with and challenge dominant social and cultural ideas about gender as well as iconic female representations, thereby illuminating peer-shared drawing practice as an occasion for sociocultural critique. The ideas that took center stage in the participants' construction of meanings included (a) the projection of contemporary female roles; (b) challenges to the idea of girl popularity; (c) resistance to being identified with overly sexualized female appearances and iconic female appearances directed toward the gaze of boys; (d) subversion of the conventional boundaries of the female body; and (e) a celebration of popular icons for self-empowerment.;Suggested implications of this study for elementary art curricula include (a) employing peer- and gender-based learning strategies; (b) utilizing students' self-initiated drawing for surveying students' interests and concerns, and as an essential part of a dialogic, identity-based curriculum; and (c) considering children's means of oppositional play such as humor, irony, and parody.