Girlhood Studies

“Girlhood Studies” explores female childhood experiences, focusing on girls’ role-play and sexual behaviours, shaped by pop culture, specifically television shows. The research situates the domestic environment as the primary stage where, through play, repetition and mimesis, the child experimentally and transgressively performs gender, power, and sexual interaction. Drawing on my own experience of growing up in Uzbekistan in the 2000s, I research how young girls generally reinterpret adult behaviours through play, and how those games reflect their understanding of sexuality, romantic relationships, and social roles.

It started as an attempt to situate my childhood experiences that felt suspended and unresolved, yet very influential, and to come closer to sex as an idea. Thus in my research I approach sex not as a firsthand embodied experience but as a distant, mysterious concept filtered through media and the observed adult behaviour. I trace the tension between “innocence” (by which I mean an absence of experience, not as a moral connotation of purity) and experience, between knowledge and unawareness, between a child and an adult. “Girlhood Studies” consists of an experimental film and a printed research publication in the form of a glossary.

The film is a sequence of learning and re-enacting: two girls in their 20s pretend to be teenagers, watch erotic TV shows and perform learned gender roles through forms of play both physical and virtual.

The glossary extends the film by unpacking the research's key notions: Home, Television, Imitation, Repetition, Sexuality, Performativity and Transgression. It brings theoretical references into dialogue with personal experience and cinematic examples. The research situates the domestic environment as the primary stage where, through play, repetition and mimesis, the child experimentally and transgressively performs gender, power, and sexual interaction.