Third-wave feminism has played a crucial role in moving girls’ narratives from the cultural margins to more visible and central positions within contemporary American and Canadian literature and culture. The aim of this panel is to examine how contemporary girls’ narratives redefine girlhood as a contested and unstable category. Bringing together approaches from Girlhood Studies, third-wave feminism, and critical regionalism, the panel approaches these narratives as discursive and relational formations rather than as fixed representations of development or identity. Across the three contributions, girlhood emerges as a site of negotiation shaped by competing cultural logics: queer reconfigurations of narrative form and identity, regional structures of gender formation, and the disruption of cosmological frameworks under colonial modernity. This panel builds on the development of Girlhood Studies as an interdisciplinary field that has established girlhood as a critical category of analysis, while also engaging with perspectives informed by third-wave feminism, which emphasize agency, multiplicity, and the cultural production of girlhood. Instead of imposing a unified theoretical framework, the panel foregrounds how the texts themselves generate critical insights into gender, representation, and cultural belonging. In recent decades, these narratives have expanded beyond traditional coming-of-age paradigms. No longer confined to linear and teleological developmental models (Bildungsroman), they increasingly foreground contradiction, affect, and diverse forms of resistance. This panel situates these tensions within the framework of critical regionalism, asking how such narratives are shaped by specific contexts. Rather than treating girlhood as an abstract or universal category, the panel approaches it as a situated and contested process. American and Canadian girls’ narratives and culture thus provide a productive site for examining how these texts register competing pressures between possibility and constraint.

Each contribution develops this argument from a distinct perspective. De Vido will begin by examining how contemporary fiction reworks traditional coming-of-age narratives in Sylvia Brownrigg’s Pages for You (2001) and Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl (2016), foregrounding queer girlhood and articulating forms of resistance that challenge heteronormative models of development. Drawing on the concept of queer optimism, her contribution explores how these texts open new affective and formal possibilities for representing adolescent identity. Patterson will then analyze girlhood as a site of gender formation in Anne of Green Gables, Brutes, and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, examining how expansiveness, attachment, and excess are alternately nurtured, contained, or punished across regional contexts. Her contribution positions gender as an adaptive and relational practice shaped by regional expectations, surveillance, and material constraint, while also revealing how such configurations sustain forms of optimism within and against these limitations. Turynová will turn to Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth, examining how the text reimagines violence in Indigenous girlhood through Inuit cosmology, particularly through the figure of Sedna. Her contribution shows how the novel mobilizes mythic structures of transformation and survival while also exposing how colonial modernity disrupts these frameworks, producing a form of girlhood marked by unresolved tension.

Rather than offering a unified definition of girlhood, the panel seeks to interrogate the assumptions that underpin the term and to explore how contemporary literature and culture reshape its meanings. Taken together, these contributions show that girls’ narratives offer a productive site for examining expansive forms of girlhood. They thus emerge as dynamic sites in which gender, space, and cultural meaning are continuously negotiated. In particular, resistance and its possibilities are explored.

The panel will consist of three presentations of approximately 15–18 minutes each, followed by a brief moderated exchange among the panelists. A minimum of 15 minutes will be reserved for open, unstructured discussion with the audience, ensuring active participation and collective engagement with the questions raised.