ABSTRACT
The city presents to girls a complex, often contradictory social space to make sense of and inhabit. This chapter discusses how young women find pockets of freedom for themselves in the city, how urban girlhood is made, and how it, in turn, makes the city. As popular culture has “power to dramatize collective dreams” (Berman, 2017: 78), looking closely at imaginaries of urban girlhood can help us develop ideas for and understanding of how these dreams can be realized. Zooming in on imaginaries of urban girlhood in contemporary popular culture (with focus on Céline Sciamma’s 2013 film Girlhood), the chapter explores the collective nature and shared experiences of girlhood and theorizes it as a condition of being together in the city with “girls like us”.
