Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters with Bieber Culture

Authors

Kortney Sherbine, Framingham State UniversityFollow

Abstract

In this article, I draw on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming to consider the ways in which these encounters with people, materials, and technologies are productive, creating space for Beliebers to come into relationship with one another and with popular culture in ways that are new and that I never could have anticipated during my more carefully organized and school-curriculum-driven interactions with girls during my six years as an elementary school teacher. Through my current research into young girls’ after-school fanaticism, I have been able to come to know girls differently than I knew them in schools. I will argue that these after-school girls are engaged in passionate interactions that enable them to experiment with what it might mean to interrelate with other bodies, materials, and ideas to create new and exciting possibilities for themselves.

Author Biography

Kortney Sherbine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University, where she teaches reading and language arts methods courses to preservice teachers. Much of her work is grounded in theories of multimodalities, as she seeks to engage her students with the notion of a permeable curriculum. In her research, she works with Deleuzoguattarian concepts in considering youths’ encounters with popular culture.

Recommended Citation

Sherbine, K. (2013). Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters with Bieber Culture. Occasional Paper Series, (30). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1037