Girl Power Play Rationale

Ann Cooper

Meredith Tweed

WST 4022

October 25, 2012

Girl Power Play Rationale

            Girl Power Play, created as a part of the UCF Day for the Young Women Leaders Program (YWLP), has four main objectives: facilitate activities that will demonstrate the diverse and often overlooked ways in which our bodies perform; reveal how leadership is enacted through the body and its many functions; experience how bodies work and lead in different ways to do different things, and when they work together to complete common goals, community is created; feel and utilize the strength and power of our bodies, however they emerge and manifest.  These four objectives, of which are important in changing the discourse about the body, will be accomplished through activities such as the Human Pyramid and the Blindfold Challenge.

            “Big” and “strong” are just not used to describe little girls in our society.  Already, at birth, the molding of a girl into an object of beauty—and nothing else—begins (Cabell, 162).  Gender norms and the conversations around them begin at very young ages for both boys and girls as Cabell discussed in “Broken Up Over Gender Bias”.  By guiding the girls in activities that will give them a different view of their body and how it functions, works, and performs we can begin to re-address the term “strong”.  Through strength and leadership activities they themselves will learn ways to change the dialogue surrounding them.

            At the same time that it is important to address societies, and possibly the girls, views on being “strong” we can work to reach goals that Torres set out for herself: my mind had to be convinced that my body could do the impossible (222).  Though we are not implying that things are “impossible” for the girls of the YWLP, we are asking them to think outside the box and look at what more their body can do.  By becoming less focused on the way their body looks and more concerned with what it can do (Torres, 222) the girls again can change the dominate discourse involving the body as only something to be discussed in terms of looks. 

            The UCF Day lesson plan, Girl Power Play, may only be a small part of their day, week, or even year.  The goal of the plan is to send them away with a message; to help them see a different perspective than the one portrayed in the main-stream media.  As many of the readings have suggested, and in particular “Broken Up Over Gender Bias” girls are given the idea that they can’t be “strong” from an early age.  The girls will see that they can be strong and with that strength they will be able to form relationships of teamwork and leadership with their peers and their bodies.  By meeting our objectives we will aid the girls in understanding their bodies and what they can do (Torres, 221).

Work Cited

Matilsky, Sarabeth.  “Broken Up Over Gender Bias.”  blue jean: What Young Women are Thinking, Saying, and Doing.  Ed.  Sherry S. Handel.  Rochester, NY:  blue jean press,  2001.  160-166.  Print.

Torres, Allison.  “At Home in My Body.”  Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image.  Ed.  Ophira Edut.  Emeryville, CA:  Seal Press,  2003.  219-224.  Print.