Hell is other girls: belonging and identity in three plays by Joan MacLeod

Abstract

A good number of books published around the turn of the millennium attempt to address the complexities of feminist identity for young women, suggesting that girls have a wider array of possible identities and empowering identifications than ever before. Yet we live in a time when there is a great deal of tension between the variety of role models available to girls, on the one hand, and the stultifying restrictions of a culture that still makes them unable to value and emulate any but the most conventional and conventionally beautiful of those models, on the other.