Review: Elisabeth von Samsonow, Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl

Abstract

Self-released on cassette and distributed through underground punk DIY networks in 1991, Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now ignited the countercultural Riot Grrrl movement in the United States by giving voice to the anger and resentment felt by young, working-class, disenfranchised women in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The power of the movement was situated in the figure of the youthful girl positioned as the site of protest and revolution against patriarchal structures of oppression. It coalesced in the enunciation of ‘Girl Power’ – before its reductive appropriation by the Spice Girls – as a slogan and formulation of feminist identity. In the intervening decades, the figure of the girl and her accompanying ‘girlhood’ has become part of the symbolic order of feminist discourse. She operates at moments as a temporal disrupter of current states of being (Freeman, 2000), as a cynical figure through which to critique notions of empire, capitalism and gender (Tiqqun, 2012), or as a recapitulation toward heteronormative structures through the co-opting of ‘Girl Power’ in popular culture in the late 1990s (McRobbie, 2009). In the social sciences, the proliferation of ‘girlhood studies’ since the early 2000s emphasizes the psychological and social development of girls across varying cultural, religious and geographic backgrounds. The figure of the girl in these discourses becomes either a literalization of the lived experience of young women or an empty signifier to be used. Thus the ‘girl’ is never fully realized or theorized as more than a symbolic tool; or rather, as an empty vessel to be filled with meaning from the outside. She is always becoming something else, even within the social sciences, where the emphasis is on her growth or change. It is this notion of the girl as becoming-woman (via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) that opens Elisabeth von Samsonow’s discussions of the figure of the girl in Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl as a fully theorized being, whose symbolic capital is not predicated on her ability to stand in as a signifier, but rather as a figure whose full realization is crystallized through the formulation of ‘Anti-Electra’ as an ‘outline of a future world’ through her relationship with the pre-Oedipal, the animal, and the technological (p. xvi).