A Multimedia Exhibition & Guide to Un-Mediafying Your Life
June 6—August 16, 2008
Opening Night Reception
Friday, June 6, 2008 • 7-10 PM
In partnership with the National Conference for Media Reform. Features keynote by Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D, author of Packaging Girlhood and co-creator of Hardy Girls Healthy Women and follows with an evening of great dialogue, art-making, networking and celebration hosted by Intermedia Arts and Project Girl in partnership with The Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council, Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys, The Emily Program, and New Moon Girl Media. Special thanks to Red Stag for providing catering for this event.
7 PM — Keynote Address
Speaker: Lyn Mikel Brown
Lyn Mikel Brown is the author of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers Schemes. She is professor of Education and Human Development and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Colby College in Maine and co-creator of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the health and well being of girls and women. She writes extensively on the relational life of girls, the influences of race, class and gender on girls' lives and girls' feelings of anger, self-knowledge, loss, hope and desire. Lyn's acclaimed work on girls' social and psychological development has consistently broken new ground and challenged old perceptions. She is the co-author (with Carol Gilligan) of Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (Harvard University Press, 1992), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that helped spark an international debate about the lives of girls and redefine our understanding of female development. Dr. Brown, a founding member of the renowned Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, has written two other acclaimed books on girls' social and psychological development: Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York University Press, 2003). Her current research focuses on girls' psychological and social development in diverse contexts, girls' anger, girlfighting, and media and marketing to girls.
In Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters' From Marketers' Schemes, Dr. Brown guides parents through marketers' attempts to claim their daughters. She shows parents the image of girls (sexy, diva, boy-crazy, shoppers) that's being packaged and sold, pretty in pink. She writes about how girl power has been co-opted by marketers of music, fashion, books, cartoons, TV shows, movies, toys, and more to mean the power to shop and attract boys, and how girls are encouraged to use their voice to choose accessorizing over academics, sex appeal over sports, and boyfriends over friends.
