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CREATING THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF AMERICAN GIRLHOODS

“During [girlhood], we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own. This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred for and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.”

—FEBOS 2021:XIII

“As a term, ‘girl’ is polarizing: feared for how tightly it connects youth and desire, reviled for its infantilizing, passivity-inducing properties. On the face of it, girlishness is simply dismissed as being frivolous, immature, unmasculine, disempowering, reductive. At worst, the girl is an apolitical neutralizer of direct action. At best, she is simply enjoying herself with the junk society has given her. In either state—harmless or neutralizing, hedonic or willfully ignorant—the girl becomes an attractor of hatred, envy, and fear. As opposed to mainstream narratives of female empowerment and their sliding scale of access to power and resources, the girl is a far more politically ambivalent state.”

—QUICHO 2023:PARA. 4

Clinical psychologist and author Mary Pipher theorizes the subject position and construction of the girl as one of crisis and peril and argues that at adolescence, girl selves are lost in social turmoil, going so far as to refer to the United States as a “girl-destroying place” (1994:44). Social psychologists have echoed this concern, labeling it the “girl-crisis movement” (Farady 2010). As the opening quotes epitomize, to be a girl is to be in dilemma, in crisis, in a state of ambivalence. In her widely acclaimed book Girlhood (2021), author Melissa Febos traces this excision of the self in favor of privileging the needs of others, a gendered phenomenon that often carries over into adulthood. Alex Quicho, a speculative futures scholar, writes frequently about the “girlification” of the Internet and demonstrates in the excerpt at the start of this chapter how girls are all at once loved, loathed, desired, and feared—a perpetually equivocal subject position.

This chapter explores how the contemporary social, cultural, and political conditions of American girlhoods came to be, operating at a nexus of multiple schools of thought, social theories, realities, and imaginings that shape tween girls’ lives and constitute the enduring and conflicting cultural models tween girls exist within and are called on to navigate. Throughout the analysis, I take a social constructionist approach to understand the sociopolitical and sociocultural landscape in which American tween girls dwell—not looking for any singular truth but recognizing that American tween girl as a category is socially, culturally, and politically determined, indefinite, and subject to shift and change according to time, place, and circumstance. Social constructionism, body politics, Western philosophies, Protestant theology, postfeminism, neoliberalism, digital sociology, contemporary feminisms, and girlhood studies all come together in elucidating how and why social media matters in American tween girls’ experiences of living in physical and digital worlds.

The Body

What are the contemporary social conditions of tween girlhoods in the United States today, and how did they come to be? These questions begin with the body. The body has long been theorized as a critical entity and a useful tool in the negotiation of public life and within identity discourses (Bobel and Kwan 2019; Bordo 1993; Douglas 1970; Foucault 1976; Giovanelli and Ostertag 2009). The body can be understood as 1) a sociocultural and historical phenomenon and conduit of social/cultural meaning and value, and 2) an active participant in the social world and agent that may create change (Reischer and Koo 2004). Tween girls doing digital performances of their bodies through selfies, videos, or other content creation on social media become meaningful cultural texts that reveal much about contemporary American girlhoods.

French social theorist Michel Foucault defines biopower as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (1976:140). Mechanisms of control by state institutions manage and regulate entire populations of bodies to produce docile bodies, which may be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (1976:136). For Foucault, the modern power of social institutions is enacted to produce and normalize bodies toward serving hegemonic ideologies of dominance and deviance. Via the theory of the panopticon, bodies self-regulate through self-surveillance.

Additionally, the proliferation of neoliberalism beyond the economic realm and across a wide swath of social and cultural mechanisms bolsters contemporary expectations of how bodies are supposed to produce, reproduce, self-regulate, discipline, and perform (Adamson 2017; Rose 1999; Rottenberg 2018). The discipline of the body by the self that inhabits the body maintains power relations and protects the status quo. Power, according to Foucault, is not a top-down effect but rather a noncentralized force, neither intrinsically acquired or kept but negotiated in dynamic relationships of push and pull, power and resistance. Foucault’s theories of biopower and docile bodies remain salient in historicizing and theorizing the social, cultural, and political functions and constraints of female/feminine/femme bodies.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Western feminist theorists such as Sandra Lee Bartky (1988) and Susan Bordo (1993) took up Foucault’s notions of docile bodies and the self-governing subject, filtering them through a lens of gendered oppression. Female and feminine bodies are regulated in ways distinct from male and masculine bodies and arguably to a more extreme degree, contributing to greater sustained and systemic gender-based oppressions (Diamond and Quinby 1988; King 2004; Reischer and Koo 2004; Weitz 2010). Throughout the twentieth century, the female/feminine body was theorized primarily by way of the reproductive framework, the corporeal project of achieving and maintaining a stringent standard of beauty, and the Madonna-Whore myth. Cultural constructions of beauty and ideal femininity remain principal sites of understanding how gender is performed or achieved, extending to sociopolitical ideas surrounding female/feminine sexual subjectivities. These constructions reproduce corporeal hierarchies that become more complex when taking an intersectional approach, considering race, size, ability, age, and other facets of identity.

Gender is read by others as a successful achievement when the body in question is performing prescribed ideas of masculinity or femininity in a context of cis-het normativity (Bartky 1988; Butler 1990; Westbrook and Schilt 2014; West and Zimmerman 1987). To be effectively read as a woman or girl, the self is responsible for disciplining the body via White-centered Western colonialist constructions of body and beauty work that include (but are not limited to) using cosmetics or makeup, wearing acceptably feminine-coded clothing, removing virtually all body hair, wearing head hair long and straight or wavy rather than short, curly, or kinky, using small gestures and appropriate vocal timbre, and intensely regulating body size toward a thin imperative.

The Power of the Feminine

But where there is power, there is resistance. Female and feminine bodies across intersecting identities are remarkable sites of cultural meaning making, sites where exchanges of power, resistance, violence, and change are made legible over time. Within the canon of body politics, which demonstrates the myriad ways bodies facilitate and mediate lived experiences and navigate a dynamic push-pull between social control and personal agency and autonomy, feminist theory and scholarship has established the inherent power of female and feminine bodies (Bordo 1993; Bobel and Kwan 2011; Doyle 2019; Erdman Farrell 2011; Griffith 2004; Weitz and Kwan 2013).

Author Sady Doyle writes that “men define humanity, and women, insofar as they are not men, are not human. Thus, women must necessarily be put under male control—and to the extent that we resist this control, we are monstrous” (2019:xiii). The feminine has been conceptualized against the masculine; that which is not masculine or is a lack of masculine (see Beauvoir 1949 and Irigaray 1985) exists as a threat to cis-hetero, patriarchal social order because it is earthbound, closer to nature, uncontainable, difficult to control in its excess and spectacle, and a provocation to sexual temptation and all other manner of sin.

The Madonna-Whore myth warrants ongoing critique for its exacting depictions of female and feminine sexualities and of women as either pure/chaste/good or promiscuous/loose/bad. There are endless representations and renditions of the power and threat of the female and feminine, as both object and subject. Societally speaking, we create the desirable feminine object and fear the desirous feminine subject but discipline and regulate both. Female and feminine identifying and presenting people have historically been punished for displaying deviance from socially prescribed norms.

Pandora opens the box. Eve eats the apple and unleashes sin on the world. Lesbians during the feminist second wave were deemed by figureheads of the movement such as Betty Friedan as the “lavender menace,” considered “toxic” to the mainstream, assimilationist, liberal feminist agenda. Transgender women have been pathologized, policed, and targeted, often experiencing heightened surveillance, violence, and hostility within feminist spaces, so much so that contemporary lexicon includes the acronym TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). Tropes of femininity out of control include the heavily (and falsely) racialized figure of the welfare queen who lives in excess and cheats the state for personal gain (Demby 2013); Glenn Close as the terrifyingly incorrigible Alexandra Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987); Hillary Rodham Clinton, wearing a pantsuit and using powerful political rhetoric, called a criminal, vilified, and openly despised; Kathy Bates’s naked, aging, fat body in About Schmidt (2003); the problematic spectacle and entertainment of Black men playing fat, Black, and often hypersexualized women in movies and on television—Big Shirley on Martin (1992), Eddie Murphy as Rasputia in Norbit (2007), and Tyler Perry as Mabel “Madea” Simmons (multiple films); the manipulative bitch; the psycho lesbian; the femme fatale. These tropes of femininity out of control are reproduced time and again, reinforcing the Madonna-Whore myth and demonstrating the downfall of the woman (or girl) who steps out of line. To counter the threat of the excess, powerful female and feminine bodies are disciplined in multiple ways.

Within a neoliberal, postfeminist, consumer feminist landscape, women and girls are themselves complicit in engaging with an oppressive capitalist system of female subordination that sells and promises individually realized empowerment and confidence via consumption but ultimately reinforces perpetual self-regulation, discipline, and bodily improvement. The body remains the project, the most important project, for achieving successful femininity, even with the contemporary resurgence of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018; Orgad and Gill 2022; Rottenberg 2018).

In 2020, a video of celebrity actress turned activist-politician Cynthia Nixon reciting Camille Rainville’s poem “Be a Lady They Said” went viral. The poem, originally written and posted on Rainville’s personal blog in 2017, chronicles an exhausting thicket of contradictory directives set forth for one to follow to be a lady. An excerpt from the poem reads as follows:

Standards of feminine beauty in the United States are context driven and pliant (Howard 2018; Stearns 2002; Walker 2007). The relationship between consumer and consumable is dynamic, and the current ethos of celebrating internal and real beauty and promoting body acceptance and self-love is, on the surface, most welcome. The 2023 Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, brings the paradoxes of contemporary American womanhood to the big screen, inciting a great deal of public cultural conversation about (a particular brand of) feminism, gently taking stringent gendered scripts to task, and mocking the patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Yet Barbie could hardly be expected to disrupt structures such as White supremacy, imperialism, and capitalism, the continued existence of which are bound up together and contingent on the ongoing oppression of women and girls; the film was, after all, sponsored by Mattel.

On closer inspection, the present-day championing of body positivity and self-love within mainstream “femvertising” (Abitbol and Sternadori 2016; Becker-Herby 2016; Varghese and Kumar 2022) insidiously distracts from larger structural inequities, precludes radical transformation, and serves only to bolster an amoral, capitalist bottom line that cannot create any tangible disruption to oppressive systems as they stand. Even as we see increased representation of different identities in popular media (e.g., a fat Barbie, a trans femme Barbie, a Black Barbie who is also president) and emphasis on body inclusivity and broader acceptance, body positivity remains a capitalistic device divested from radical and revolutionary roots of self-care championed by Black queer feminist thinkers and organizers. As author, fat liberationist, and abolitionist Da’Shaun L. Harrison writes of Black liberation and anti-Black violence in particular, “What is the utility of ‘body positivity’ if it only seeks to provide one with a false sense of confidence rather than to liberate all from that which cages the body?” (2021:2).

The Racialized Feminine, the “Othered” Body

Black female and feminine bodies have historically been characterized by excess and represented as hypersexual and “out of control” (Hill Collins 1990; hooks 1992; Weitz 2010). The Mammy figure (the dark-skinned, fat, Black, feminine caretaker), on the other hand, manifests excess through care for White children—an unending flow of love and labor that serves the interest of White families, controlled via invisibility of her own family life and interests. The Mammy is nonthreatening, nonsexual, and poses no danger or imposition to the White woman as a potential object of sexual desire for the White man (Bogle 2001). The enduring design of White supremacy seeks to shrink and eradicate feminine Blackness out of fear of Black liberation and abundance. Anti-Black racism and colorism (privileging lighter-skinned members of a particular racial or ethnic group) also bolster misogynoir (Bailey 2021), a particular animus toward Black women and girls.

Whiteness has been and remains the feminine ideal of beauty, even as phenomena such as “Blackfishing” (Balanda 2020; Cherid 2021) become more common among young, White, cisgender female influencers on social media. White women and girls engage in the politics of featurism, co-opting elements of Black and Brown beauty and embodiment and benefiting from those elements (whether in terms of social capital or material capital), yet the enduring privilege of Whiteness shields them from racialized oppression. Skin lightening markets worldwide are only growing (BusinessWire 2022). Featurism becomes more prominent as increased emphasis is placed on having curves in the right places. Lip injections, brow threading, and waist training are all highly popular modes of beauty work (London 2021). Somewhere around 2014, the Brazilian butt lift (BBL) rapidly became a sought-after cosmetic surgery, especially among wealthy White women (Jennings 2021), and as rumors circulated that Kim Kardashian had had butt fillers removed, conversations abounded on social media surrounding the downfall of the BBL moment and a new era of slimmed-down backsides (Rodriguez-Garcia 2023). The target moves once again.

Per the theory of the beauty myth (Wolf 2002), as gender relations change over time and (certain) women and girls gain greater access to power and resources, ideals of feminine aesthetics become increasingly narrow. The already elusive ideal of femininity becomes more elusive (Bordo 1993). Even with a hiked, prevailing emphasis on loving your body, a notably swollen wave of body-positive social media content, and woke brand femvertising, the social and aesthetic capital that come with embodied privilege surrounding proximity to Whiteness, thinness, youth, able-bodiedness, and cis-hetness remain striking. The body of a female pop star may fit the bill of the ideal feminine if she is thin and toned, but the line between toned and muscular is tenuous indeed, and it can be exceptionally easy to cross constructed borders into deviant embodiment. Heightened public discourse and pop culture attention on the appeal of curvy or “slim thicc” women complicate notions of the ideal feminine, and White women are disproportionately rewarded for embodying historically and traditionally Black and Brown corporeal characteristics (hooks 1992; Mosley and Biernat 2021). We need look no further than the Kardashian empire and how it has collectively capitalized on everything from detoxes, diets, and cosmetic surgeries to culturally appropriated hairstyles, lip plumper, waist trainers, shapewear, and the rise and fall of the Brazilian butt lift.

The thin imperative for female and feminine bodies is inextricably bound up with White supremacy (Strings 2019). The well-established moral code of bodies in the West—the code of which bodies are deemed good and worthy and which are deemed bad and in need of correction—is the result of historical differentiation between Whiteness and Blackness (Harrison 2021; Strings 2019); the conflation of thinness with goodness; the emphasis on youth as worthy of celebration and admiration; the separation, isolation, and invisibility of people with disabilities; the proliferation of mass media channels; the rise of the global marketplace, novel modes of consumption, and late capitalist neoliberalism; and the onset of new digital technologies. The hierarchy of bodies that privileges Whiteness, thinness, ability, youth, cis-het normativity, and wealth is legitimated in confluence with increased economic, social, and political opportunities for women, as well as an emphasis on consumerism and the onset of neoliberal economic principles during the Reagan and Clinton eras of the 1980s and 1990s (Eisenstein 2010; Erdman Farrell 2011; Rottenberg 2018). It is no accident that the commercial diet industry in the United States absolutely exploded while the women’s liberation movement was gaining substantial ground in the 1970s, seeing success in policy changes and widespread recognition of feminist organizing around a White, liberal feminist agenda fixed on institutional assimilation and gender equality.

Achieving standards of feminine beauty is a direct conduit to female and feminine power within a White supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy (hooks 1981; hooks 1984)—arguably the most direct. The empowered woman of the 1980s and 1990s was playing by the rules of a man’s world, and postfeminist sensibility became prominent alongside the underground, counterculture sensibility and intersectional emphasis of the feminist third wave (Crenshaw 1989; Walker 1992). In rendering the body an individual neoliberal project that promises personal empowerment via consumption toward self-improvement and confidence (Orgad and Gill 2022), women are effectively curbed from external pursuits of power, structural transformation, and collective liberation as they focus inward on corporeal concerns and fundamentally participate in their own oppression from the inside out.

Already privileged female and feminine bodies (White, cis, thin, able-bodied) that quite literally demonstrate personal responsibility, regulation, and self-surveillance achieve more social capital, which translates into increased success in various social institutions and processes such as college admissions, workplace advancement, far-reaching representation in all forms of media, and heightened respect in the political realm. Meanwhile, female and feminine bodies set apart from the White, cis, thin, young, able-bodied ideal are subject to increased scrutiny, policing, discipline, exploitation, and violence. And all the antithetical, impossible expectations associated with the ongoing gendered, raced, and classed neoliberal body project certainly extend to tween girls as well.

Tween Girlhoods and the Body Project

Tween girls across identity categories have historically experienced psychosocial conditioning leading to lower self-worth, low self-efficacy, and body dissatisfaction. This conditioning begins early in life and often carries into adulthood. Negative body image, increased risk of disordered eating practices, and focus on appearance enjoy decades-old recognition as being normal parts of growing up as a girl in the United States (Brown and Gilligan 1992; Brumberg 1997; Hesse-Biber 2006; Orenstein 2016; Pipher 1994). The culturally constructed crisis of negative body image among female adolescents is both born out of the limited social and political power of girls in the United States and reified by it. Disordered eating practices and other elements of self-harm such as cutting are all too common in the body narratives of tween girls (Adler and Adler 2011; Bordo 1993; Hesse-Biber 2006; Leaf and Schrock 2011).

Negative body image and body dissatisfaction carry over into the matter of sexuality, with the simultaneous virginal/hypersexual, Madonna-Whore myth of American girlhood and womanhood rendering the navigation of authentic sexual subjectivities exceedingly complex for tween girls. As Jackson and Vares write,

The hypersexualization of young women in popular media fundamentally contributes to the continued, shared cultural imaginary of female adolescent body dissatisfaction as a foregone conclusion in tween girls’ body narratives (Egan 2013). This hypersexualization of girls’ bodies also substantiates public anxiety surrounding female adolescent sexualities and contributes to the cyclical nature of gendered moral panics and the reproduction of gendered social control (Buckingham et al. 2010; Renold and Ringrose 2013; Thiel-Stern 2014).

The adultification of Black girls (especially those in lower socioeconomic circumstances) within White supremacist systems has functioned to make Black girlhoods invisible or, at the very least, obscured in broader social and scholarly imaginings (Morris 2015; Stokes 2007; Toliver 2018; Wade 2019a). Representations across media landscapes reify racialized, controlling images of Black girls as being too much or causing trouble, marring the intersections and intricacies of growing up as both Black and girl (Nunn 2018; Rosario, Minor, and Rogers 2021). As Black girlhood studies scholar Dominique Hill writes, “Blackgirls’ bodies do not operate as their own and are tattooed by historical tropes and cultural expectations” (2019:278). Too often, Black womanhood and Black girlhood are conflated or mapped onto each other in linear or monolithic ways, belying a reality of varied Black girlhoods, embodiments, and ways of being. Ashleigh Greene Wade writes in her work on Black girlhoods and digital media production that “marking Black Girlhood Studies theory as its own epistemological framework avoids conflating girlhood and womanhood and superimposing Black women’s experiences onto those of Black girls” (2019a:14).

Regarding girlhood embodiments and disability, Deborah Stienstra (2015) implores us to consider girls with disabilities as integral to ongoing knowledge building within girlhood studies. Disability studies and girlhood studies scholar Sarah Hill clarifies this point, emphasizing that “disability is often framed as a problem or lack, and that experiences of disability for girls appear to trump or silence other experiences, such as those of sex and gender, and the intersections that exist between these” (2017:114). Furthermore, as Susan Wendell suggests,

Girls have been theorized as disabled by virtue of their existence in patriarchal societies (Young 2005). The subtleties of embodied and lived experiences across identities for girls with disabilities remain woefully underexplored, especially as disability itself can be understood as socially constructed, vast, and context specific. In the United States, girls with disabilities continue to lack significant, meaningful representation in public and popular media, frequently marked as nonsexual or without sexual agency and subjectivity, and presumed to be perpetually child-like in character and interests.

We still have very little empirical scholarship on the experiences of trans, gender queer, and nonbinary girls. Indeed, nonbinary gender identity and expression are often coded as masculine, and nonbinary femme people are often attributed cisgender identities even as they do not identify in this way. Existing literature on experiences of trans youth tends to put youth together into one category, without due attention to specificities of gender identity and expression (Cavalcante 2016; Craig et al. 2015; Horak 2014; Jenzen 2017; Laukkanen 2007; Raun 2016). Additionally, recent attacks on transgender youth across the United States, especially surrounding gender-affirming care, support, and resources as well as participation in social arenas such as school sports and athletics, have not only served to perpetuate violence and harm against trans girls but also bolstered the image of the White, cisgender girl being robbed, her opportunities for empowerment and success contingent on the exclusion of trans girls and cis BIPOC girls. Media studies scholar Jennifer McClearen (2023) is contributing important and novel framings to this area of inquiry.

Only in recent years have we seen more visible, concentrated emphasis on producing media content for tween girls across intersecting identities that employs popular discursive strategies such as body positivity, self-love, personal empowerment, and confidence (Banet-Weiser 2018; Orgad and Gill 2022), but this content is notably raced and classed. Much popular visual media is still underrepresenting or misrepresenting and stereotyping people in minority groups, especially in relation to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender identity, sexuality, size, and disability (Rogers et al. 2021)—more reason why tween girls’ self-representations on social media can disrupt enduring and harmful tropes that offer little to no nuance or specificity across and within girlhood identities (Bailey 2021; Hill 2017; Wade 2019a).

Even with increased public attention to girls and somewhat more complex representations of girlhoods in contemporary American media, a tween girl’s body, and what she does with it (or what may be done to it), still too often defines who and what a girl is and, moreover, what society expects her to be. Much of the knowledge required to become a successful feminine subject (dress, beauty work, body size regulation, consumption, etc.) is learned, negotiated, and implemented during adolescence, coming into tween girlhood as a social and cultural status, consumer group, and liminal space between childhood and adulthood (Banet-Weiser 2014; Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009; García-Gómez 2018; Harris 2004b; Kennedy 2018; McRobbie 1990). These negotiations and implementations are entangled with aspects of identity including race, ethnicity, size, ability, and gender expression. Certain markers of tween girlhood can be recognized and emphasized across identities, but how a tween girl’s body and behavior is understood, surveilled, and policed depends greatly on how she is categorized—as a can-do girl or an at-risk girl (Harris 2004a), as prude or promiscuous, innocent or unruly. Social conditioning and disciplining of girls rely on the continual construction and reproduction of an elusive feminine ideal, and girls are expected to maintain pursuit of that ideal over the course of their entire lives or face the consequences of subversion and resistance.

Girls, however, have historically been pretty spectacular at challenging the status quo, both publicly and privately, from embodied resistances to launching protests (Kahn 2023a). There is a distinct and crucial difference between what girls’ empowerment is manufactured to look like via individual consumption (i.e., “The Future Is Female!”) versus what it can look like in practice. But what has become strategically more complex and confusing in recent years is how the feminine ideal of successful girlhood in the United States has become directly tied to empowerment narratives, confidence culture, and consumption (Banet-Weiser 2018; Kennedy and Coulter 2018; Favaro 2017; Orgad and Gill 2022). The decades-long cultural model of “Girl Power!” endures and makes it seem as though tween girls today have every opportunity laid before them, like they are valued beyond what their bodies look like and what makes them attractive to boys and men. And indeed, we are queering girlhoods (Brickman 2019; Driver 2007; Gonick 2006; Kearney 2011; Monaghan 2016). We are starting to see a broader range of tween girl bodies in representation. Even in the midst of significant social and political change and greater recognition of the power and agency of tween girls across identities, the reality remains that notions of “Girl Power!” are discordantly bound up with a society that insists on playing by patriarchal, White supremacist, classist, cis-het normative rules, and all the woke femvertising and emphasis on individual empowerment (i.e., improvement) do little to disrupt and subvert these power structures.

Contemporary “Girl Power!”—expressly related to a resurgence in popular feminism and consumer feminism—positions the body as not only a project but a marketed product, particularly with the continued growth of social media and emphasis on digital corporeal expression and visibility in recent years (Banet-Weiser 2018; Brumberg 1997; Orenstein 2016; Zeisler 2016). Postfeminist digital culture (Shields Dobson 2015) complicates the tween girl subject—who and what a girl is supposed to be (Kennedy 2018) and how she is supposed to behave. And until the onset of social media at the beginning of the twenty-first century and tween girls’ prolific use of these platforms, narratives of girlhood in the United States were understood primarily via recognizable tropes depicted in public and popular media.

Princesses, Mean Girls, and Troubled Teens

In a 2004 review of the teen smash film Sleepover, famed movie critic Roger Ebert wrote, “I take it as a rule of nature that all American high schools are ruled by a pack of snobs, led by a supremely confident young woman who is blonde, superficial, catty, and ripe for public humiliation” (Ebert 2007). The trope of the popular girl, placed on a pedestal while covertly disdained precisely because of her enviable status, has occupied popular culture and the American public imagination for decades (Oppliger 2013). The popular girl is both villain and superhuman, the simultaneously loved and hated version of the feminine ideal (Blaikie 2018). She is most often White, definitely thin, certainly able-bodied, generally wealthy, and absolutely heterosexual. She hovers between girlhood and womanhood and is afforded privileges of both. She is sexually active, or at minimum assumed to be sexually active by her peers. Above all else, she is pretty, sexy, and embodies ideal beauty, and indeed her popularity is rendered impossible without the celebration of her aesthetic. The popular girl trope is the classic case of the media perpetuating the hypersexualization of girls while reifying the cultural anxiety of girls losing their presumed innocence (Vares, Jackson, and Gill 2011).

In her seminal work on Black feminist thought and intersections of institutional oppression, Patricia Hill Collins conceptualizes controlling images as “designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (1990:69). Mainstream media and popular culture generate controlling images of discernible girl character tropes that are geared toward tween girl audiences but also influence the broader public imagination of who a girl is or should be. Girl characters across film and television are notably represented as older and frequently portrayed by older actresses (Smith et al. 2017). Girlhood and media studies scholar Sarah Projansky writes that

Some of these well-trodden but persistent tropes include the popular mean girl and the funny, quirky, often “ugly” girl who ultimately triumphs in love (and therefore life), but usually only after a makeover and almost always in a context of heterosexual romance. There are reality tropes of teen mothers, bad girls, and other girlhood “cautionary tales” specifically marked by raced and classed connotations. These enduring tropes align with the competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!”

Only in the most recent years has popular media produced films and television series targeting teens that might swerve from conventional narratives and champion storylines of the underdog. In those representations, however, the girl in question can only be diverse in her representation along one intersection of identity at a time. If she is fat, she is White and able-bodied (Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, 2018; Dumplin’, 2018). If she is non-White, she is thin and otherwise traditionally pretty or viewed as a model minority (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, 2018). If she is queer, she is thin and femme presenting (Crush, 2022). Narratives of physical disability in popular media are tremendously rare, and it is exceptionally difficult to find a film or series that positions a girl with a physical disability as the protagonist or romantic lead (and most often, able-bodied actors inhabit these roles) (Smith et al. 2017). Invisible disabilities such as anxiety, depression, or chronic pain, just to name a few, may be represented in girlhood narratives in popular media but are often not critically, politically, or relationally positioned as disabilities; they are rather shown as dramatized gendered afflictions that are the fault of the individual girl in question and/or situated as tragic.

More dramatic series of late, including the revamped Gossip Girl (2021), Pretty Little Liars (2010), Riverdale (2017), 13 Reasons Why (2017), and Euphoria (2019), feature thin, White, rich teenage girls with trendy clothing involved in devastating mishaps with drugs, sex, betrayed friendships, criminal behavior, suicide, and intimate violence. These dramatic representations of teenage girls demonstrate the hypervisibility of the oversexualized girl set against the middle-class norm of appropriate (hetero)sexuality (Renold and Ringrose 2011; Rossie 2015).

Given their Whiteness, cis-ness, heteronormativity, classism, and ableism, these tropes reify the image of the can-do girl and uphold the innocent girls in need of protection cultural model. Set against them are different girl tropes that reify the “Girl Power!” model, all intrinsically entangled with popular feminisms, consumer culture, and the empowerment marketplace for tween girls. In the last decade or so, corporations such as Disney have created strong female protagonists such as Merida from Brave (2012), Elsa and Anna from Frozen (2013) and Frozen II (2019), and Moana from Moana (2016). These female characters are all animated and created without the primary heteronormative end goal of marriage to a prince (an important departure from representations in the past), yet they are marketed alongside every other character produced by the Disney machine, whether villain, victim, or victor. The challenges they face relate to being different and going against the grain while having extreme privilege as royal princesses positioned within fantasy. They are represented as traditionally pretty, thin, able, and generally constructed within conventional notions of ideal femininity even as they become empowered by overcoming individualized obstacles. While these characters prioritize internal traits such as goodness, fairness, and following your heart, these traits are channeled and made legible through the characters’ conventionally desirable appearances. Historically, goodness has been represented via beauty, Whiteness, and thinness, and evilness via ugliness, fatness, Blackness, and deformity (Alter et al. 2016; Erdman Farrell 2011; hooks 1992; Laine Talley 2014). The empowerment marketplace targeting tween girls, “Girl Power!” and popular feminist rhetoric, and contemporary representations of girls in mass media and popular culture have all contributed to shaping an era in which girls are positioned in a very specific way—at the nexus between empowerment and disempowerment.

Postfeminism, Popular Feminism, and “Girl Power!”

The past two decades have produced feminist scholarship centered on gender, power, and the neoliberal characterization of the relationship between them (Banet-Weiser 2018; Gill and Scharff 2011; McRobbie 2008; Tasker and Negra 2007; Zeisler 2016). Postfeminism has given way to a resurgence of popular feminism, and we cannot dismiss how much consumption and emphasis on individualism play into the contemporary feminist landscape. Postfeminism endures as a framework for understanding a social epoch defined by individual identity, empowerment via consumption, and performing femininity (and now feminism) in ways that align with hegemonic gender expressions. Where postfeminism rendered feminist principles common sense and thus no longer necessary to fight for, resurgence of popular feminism has put second wave feminist principles of fairness and equality squarely in the spotlight. But that spotlight signals feminist identity for purchase. People can still march for what they believe in, but now more than ever, they can also purchase and wear something mass produced that demonstrates a feminist belief system on the body, literally. Gonick et al. write,

Demonstrative of this paradox is how tween girls can readily articulate “Girl Power!” ideology (something that revealed itself time and again in my interviews) and wear these messages on their clothing while still experiencing limited economic, cultural, and political freedoms and internalizing protectionist discourses that manifest in tween girls policing their own, as well as other girls’, behaviors, whether online or in physical space. The tween girls I interviewed judiciously recognized these contradictions and constraints, taking in much of the adult-centered fear and anxiety related to their bodies and sexualities and frequently expressing annoyance toward the expectations projected onto them to look and behave in certain ways, especially because, in their view, tween boys are not subject to the same kind of expectations.

As Bulger et al. find in their 2021 report The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media, “tweens and teens are accustomed to having a great deal of control in how and when and where they express themselves online. By contrast, when they encounter content that is developed by adults without youth input, it often strikes them as perpetuating stereotypes about teens or as being out of touch” (6). Tweens desire more authentic representation of their experiences from public media, but public and popular media are often stereotyped and may not land with tween audiences as intended. One way around this? Tween girls make the media themselves.

Tween Girls Go Digital

Tween girls making themselves visible on social media is now a central part of the extant body project. Shields Dobson writes that “scholars of girlhood and culture have theorized the kind of youthful ‘new femininities’ that have come to prevail as centered around energy, vitality, capacity, and entrepreneurial spirit, along with public visibility and self-exposure” (2015:159). For tween girls, visibility on social media has become paramount to self-expression, and to facilitate the call to be visible, routine digital participation has become the norm for a large majority of American tween girls. An interesting element that makes tween girl social media participation especially difficult to pin down in terms of broader implications and potential impacts is that girls under the age of thirteen are not technically allowed to be on social media platforms, as invoked by federal law (COPPA) and platform policies, yet these rules are not strictly enforced. Tween girls are a simultaneously hypervisible/invisible demographic on social media platforms, in particular on platforms that hinge on visual content.

American youth are now living fluidly between offline and online spaces and engaging in self- and social development in ways specific to their generation (boyd 2014; Buckingham 2008; Farman 2012; Kennedy 2020; Palfrey and Gasser 2016). The transition from adolescence to adulthood and processes of becoming and embodying tween girlhoods are facilitated by social media participation. Social media is not set apart from reality for tween girls; it is their reality (Underwood and Ehrenreich 2017). They are building this reality and participating in novel dimensions of what constitutes public space, using social media as a primary vehicle of communication.

Reckoning with the colossus social media has become, the social sciences are continually working out ways to effectively study social media platforms and other digital spaces (Lupton 2014; Marres 2017; Orton-Johnson and Prior 2013; Selwyn 2019; Sloan and Quan-Haase 2016). Changes in platform popularity move fast, and we have barely scratched the surface of measuring the overall impact of social media on youth and at different intersections, exploring different variables. One recent study that looks across several large datasets to measure various elements of Internet use among youth finds very little impact, negative or otherwise, between digital technology use and adolescent well-being (Orben and Przybylski 2019). A Pew Research report from 2022 finds more of the same, with most respondents (ages thirteen to seventeen) indicating either a positive (32 percent) or neutral (59 percent) overall effect of social media in their lives and 9 percent reporting a negative effect (Anderson et al. 2022).

Taking a more gendered approach, some topical studies suggest that there is no significant correlation between social media use and body dissatisfaction (Burnette, Kwitowski, and Mazzeo 2017; Maes and Vandenbosch 2022). Still others indicate that it is the type of social media engagement and content that matters most in determining health outcomes for adolescents online (Markey and Daniels 2022; Steinsbekk et al. 2021). Two earlier Pew Research studies (Anderson and Jiang 2018a, 2018b) surveying American youth (ages thirteen to eighteen) on their feelings about social media find that young people have mixed feelings about it, with most respondents indicating social media having a positive impact (31 percent) or neutral impact (45 percent) on their lives; 24 percent of respondents indicated it has a negative impact. It is interesting to see from the 2022 Pew Research study that the percentage of respondents reporting net negative impact dropped substantially, from 24 percent to 9 percent. Further studies consider tweens and the specific matter of privacy on social media, finding mixed and nuanced results on its importance in how young people use and navigate platforms (De Leyn et al. 2021; Kim and Davis 2017; Shin, Huh, and Faber 2012).

By talking to tween girls about social media and analyzing examples of gendered embodied performances on YouTube, I seek to expand sociological knowledge of how the realities and complexities of new media cultures intersect with the realities of tween girls’ coming of age in contemporary American society. Tween girls today toe an increasingly blurry line between adolescence and adulthood and the physical and digital. Their experiences of “growing up girl” in online space and navigating those choppy waters involve risk and opportunity, regulation and experimentation (Ringrose 2011). It is important to explore these subtleties of experience. As Shields Dobson writes,

This research expands on conceptualizations of gendered power relations and body politics through the lens of the digital, situating tween girls as the experts in their own digital narratives and exploring how online body performances reflect the competing cultural models of innocent girls who need protection and “Girl Power!” The reflection of social life for tween girls via social media participation is essential in conceptualizing and understanding contemporary American girlhoods. And because gender identities for women and girls are underpinned by work on and performance of the individualized, neoliberal body project, the roles of the body and corporeal visibility on social media have become crucial to the theoretical and empirical investigation of American tween girlhoods today.