our mission
The Girl House Project is about the power of collectivity.
We are building a Girl House; a physical, mobile, interactive space that will travel and display stories as they accumulate, occupying public spaces. The Girl House will be an ever-growing collective biography; telling our stories, within all of their dimensions, of gender, sexuality, injustice, community, and resilience.
We are collecting narratives through our website and in-person during installations of our Girl House that will shed light on the experience of sexual injustice as a facet of coming of age. Our goal is to honor the autonomy of the story-teller, and to foster a community with the potential to support and validate previously isolated experiences.
Our belief is that your story, when you control the narrative, has transformational power - for you and also for other current and former girls who may find commonality with your experience. As a community, we can learn from each other, process our histories, and grow in solidarity.
let’s be clear: this is in resistance to rape culture
We live in a patriarchal society. The system of sexism is woven into our interpersonal relationships, the foundations of our institutions, and facilitates our day-to-day starting as children. As adolescents we learn a language and operation of sexuality; heteronormativity, objectification, concepts of virginity, sexual abundance and lack thereof as shameful. These lessons are powerful and stay with us as we transcend youth and enter adulthood. This system relies on enforcing gender roles that confirm heterosexuality, condemn queerness, and weaken the female and non-cis body and existence. They affirm masculinity, instating a gender hierarchy through the systemic teaching of sex and gender norms.
These lessons are contextualized within girlhood and coming of age as teenagers/young adults approach a time of sexualization and sexual exploration. Within this period, manifestations of patriarchy are reinforced and revealed in new dimensions.
Sexual injustice, the systemic enforcement of patriarchal lessons of sex, is another facet of sexism- and therefor just as pervasive and unavoidable within the experiences of growing up. The teaching and enforcement of this system results in a violent rape culture.
We reject a system of patriarchy that teaches us about our bodies through an agenda of sexist supremacy. We condemn violent-masculinity that surrounds us. We stand against the language, actions, teachings and experiences that plague girlhood and prevent a true and deserved experience of agency, positivity and exploration in the early years of sexual awakening and experience.
