Childhood and Tween Girl Culture

Childhood and Tween Girl Culture

Author: Fiona MacDonald

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-23

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1137551305

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This book explores the ways in which notions of childhood are being influenced by a rapidly expanding consumer-media culture in the 21st Century. It has been argued that new stages of childhood are being created and defined by children’s role as consumers. The concept of ‘tween’, girls aged between 9 and 14, has generated the greatest debate. While the fantasy world of ‘tween’ offers girls a space to fashion a young, feminine identity it has been widely argued that the consumer-media’s messages pressure tween girls to consume and adopt highly sexualised appearances and behaviours. The author considers how the art of consumption for ‘tween’ girls is intrinsically linked with their desire for independence and belonging, and how their consumption is interwoven with other important social and cultural influences. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Childhood and Youth Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist and Women’s Studies and Sociology.


Seven Going on Seventeen

Seven Going on Seventeen

Author: Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780820467719

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The tween is the «new girl on the block» in girlhood studies. Although the study of tween life may have derived from a particular marketing orientation at the end of the twentieth century, it is not limited by it. On the contrary, this collection of essays shows that «tween» is not a simple or unified concept, nor is it limited to a certain class of girls in a few countries. This collection by an international group of authors highlights specific methodologies for working with (and studying) tween-age girls, provides challenges to the presumed innocence of girlhood, and engages in an analysis of marketing in relation to girlhood. In so doing, this book offers a reading on these three or four years in a girl's life that suggests that this period is as fascinating as the teen years, and as generative in its implications for girlhood studies as studies of both younger and adolescent girls.


Tweenhood

Tweenhood

Author: Melanie Kennedy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1788316630

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A powerful female, pre-adolescent, consumer demographic has emerged in tandem with girls becoming more visible in popular culture since the 1990s. Yet the cultural anxiety that this has caused has received scant academic attention. In Tweenhood, Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream, pre-adolescent girls' films, television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards, including A Cinderella Story (2004), Hannah Montana (2006) and Camp Rock (2008). Her book forges a dialogue between post-feminism, film and television, celebrity and most importantly; the figure of the tween. Kennedy examines how these media texts, which are so key to tween culture, address and construct their target audience by helping them to 'choose' an appropriately feminine identity. Tweenhood then, she argues, is transient and a discursive construct whose unpacking highlights the deification of celebrity and femininity within its culture.


Spectacular Girls

Spectacular Girls

Author: Sarah Projansky

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-02-07

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0814724817

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"As an omnipresent figure of the media landscape, girls are spectacles. They are ubiquitous visual objects on display at which we are incessantly invited to look. Investigating our cultural obsession with both everyday and high-profile celebrity girls, Sarah Projanskyuses a queer, anti-racist feminist approach to explore the diversity of girlhoods in contemporary popular culture. The book addresses two key themes: simultaneous adoration and disdain for girls and the pervasiveness of whiteness and heteronormativity. While acknowledging this context, Projansky pushes past the dichotomy of the "can-do" girl who has the world at her feet and ..."--Publisher description.


Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Author: Peggy Orenstein

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-01-25

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0062041630

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Peggy Orenstein, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex and Schoolgirls, offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults. Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as the source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe; eventually they grow out of it . . . or do they? In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.


Tween Girls' Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore

Tween Girls' Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore

Author: Bernice Loh

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 9811695113

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This book provides an insight into girls’ cultural identities and young femininities through an understanding of tween girls’ dressing in Singapore. The book adopts a girl-centred approach to shed light on the narratives and experiences of young Singaporean girls that have often been overlooked. It draws on the conversations with young Singaporean girls aged 8 to 12 to understand how they wanted to dress, from where they gained their inspiration, and what the social factors were that influenced their dressing. Through understanding how girls want to fashion themselves, the book shows that it is imprecise to discuss issues based on the assumption that there is one dominant, ‘correct’ way to grow up as a young person in Singapore. This book unpacks how young Singaporean girls negotiate their cultural identities through clothing that do not simply conform to or reflect their roles as students. It also shows how girlhood in Singapore is multi-faceted and the values and meanings that tween girls’ attach to their dressing intersect at the personal, social, and cultural level. The book offers new ways of approaching and looking at girls’ adult-like dressing that move beyond the discourse of sexualisation. In establishing a space for young Singaporean girls’ voices in an area that has been dominated by studies from the West, this book also shows how the focus on tween girls in Asia can contribute to and advance the current state of girls’ studies.


Children and the Politics of Sexuality

Children and the Politics of Sexuality

Author: Liza Tsaliki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-08-13

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 113703341X

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This book discusses already established accounts about the sexualization of children through a theoretical and an empirical framework which bring together popular culture, consumption, sexuality, selfhood and childhood. Adopting the view that the debate about the sexualization of childhood is socially constructed, it pushes beyond the dominant preconceptions about ‘the risks of childhood’. Moral judgements about children’s welfare are perhaps nowhere more transient and controversial than when it comes to children’s sexuality, something that has deep historical roots. However, and contrary to recurrent fears and moral panics about the loss of childhood as a result of a tidal wave of a sexualizing culture, this book theorizes the notion of children’s sexualization within the social construction of myths of childhood innocence while also taking into account the extent of young people’s actual engagement with media and technology in contemporary Western societies. It is within such a contextual framework that this book unfolds, bringing together a historical contextualization of childhood, sexuality and pornography with contemporary empirical accounts regarding the ‘presentation of the self’ and self-management.


The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

Author: Claudia Nelson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 1000984524

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Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.


Vulnerability in a Mobile World

Vulnerability in a Mobile World

Author: Helen Forbes-Mewett

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2019-11-25

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 178756911X

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Populations across the world are becoming increasingly mobile for many different reasons. Some are searching for a better and safer life, others migrate for economic or environmental purposes, education, or identity formation. While mobility may bring better life-chances, this book shows that for some it means experiencing vulnerability.


Tween Pop

Tween Pop

Author: Tyler Bickford

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-04-03

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1478009179

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In the early years of the twenty-first century, the US music industry created a new market for tweens, selling music that was cooler than Barney, but that still felt safe for children. In Tween Pop Tyler Bickford traces the dramatic rise of the “tween” music industry, showing how it marshaled childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. The industry played on long-standing gendered and racialized constructions of childhood as feminine and white—both central markers of innocence and childishness. In addition to Kidz Bop, High School Musical, and the Disney Channel's music programs, Bickford examines Taylor Swift in relation to girlhood and whiteness, Justin Bieber's childish immaturity, and Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana and postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.