"Choir Practice" in three movements : analysing a story of girlhood through Deleuze, Butler, and Foucault

In this chapter, we are interested in the relationship between theory and data. More particularly, we focus on feminist post-structural theories and ask how different theories open possibilities for thinking with the narrative data of one collective biography story. Post-structural feminist paradigms have been particularly influential across the interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies for their capacity to attend to the nuances and contradictions of gendered subjectification within complex and constantly changing social, cultural, and discursive fields. For examples, Catherine Driscoll suggests that post-structural theories of unfixed and non-essentialized subjectivities are useful for understanding young femininities “as a sign of both incompletion and promise” (2002, p. 160), because these approaches are more able than structuralist accounts to recognize the “complex power relations that make puberty possible and articulate in its current forms” (2002, p. 104. Similarly, Marnina Gonick argues that post-structural approaches to girlhood enable critical analysis of the “discursive structures and signifying relations of gender, race, class, and sexuality” within which girls are constituted “and the distinct cultural and social formations that result” (2003, p.16). Broadly, post-structural scholars understand subjectivity as multiple, desiring, and discursively constituted; power as unstable, capillary, and productive; and agency as radically contingent (Gannon & Davies, 2012; Gonick et al., 2009).