NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. There is social, cultural, and political debate on the recommendation of using uppercase B versus lowercase b when referring to Black subjects. My original feeling in formatting the text was that Black should be capitalized. Historically and in much of the social science and feminist scholarship I have read, Black has been capitalized and white remains lowercase. This formatting feels correct to me. Yet there are arguments to be made that keeping white lowercase allows white people to be understood as individuals, normalizing whiteness as somehow devoid of racial meaning or categorization, especially within white supremacist systems. I also want to be mindful of how the w in white has at times been capitalized and weaponized as violence to assert white dominance. The ASA style guide indicates racial groups should be lowercase, while the APA guide follows principles of capitalization for racial groups and identities. Though there are multiple ways to go about this, I have made the decision to capitalize all references to racial categories and identities (Black, White, Latina, etc.) to emphasize the weight that racial identities and embodiments hold in shaping experiences of tween girls, both online and offline, and to underscore the crucial politics and histories of racialization as they intersect with girlhood embodiments. Exceptions are made for direct quotes from works by other authors.

2. Social media and its impacts on populations is far from fully understood (Anderson et al. 2022; Valkenburg, Meier, and Beyens 2022; Valkenburg et al. 2022). Social media platforms shift and expand, and their utilization is context driven and specific. As Papacharissi writes, “our understanding of social media is temporally, spatially, and technologically sensitive—informed but not restricted by the definitions, practices, and materialities of a single time period or locale. How we have defined social media in societies has changed, and will continue to change” (2015:1). For clarity, I use the following definition of social media in this work: “Social media are web-based services that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build community by enabling them to create, co-create, modify, share, and engage with user-generated content that is easily accessible” (McCay-Peet and Quan-Haase 2017:17).

3. A New York Times article published in March of 2022 lays out recent data from a survey study conducted by the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, in particular commenting on increasing amounts of screen time among children during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey collected data from an eight- to twelve-year-old demographic but was not able to pinpoint use of specific platforms among this demographic because it is a protected class. The article notes the difficulty of situating this data in broader social context, as federal law (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA) prohibits companies from collecting data of children under the age of thirteen, the established minimum age for young people to create accounts on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. This age restriction is not regularly enforced, as children younger than thirteen are highly visible users of social media platforms. Yet they are also an invisible demographic online given the limited data available on their use of social media.

4. I opted to give Pretty or Ugly video subjects pseudonyms for the analysis not only for the sake of clarity in referring to various videos throughout the book but also because, even though these videos are public and available to view on YouTube and to use in academic research via the fair use doctrine (Stim 2019), I deemed it important to offer an added layer of protection to the girls who may use channels that are not their own, make videos without parental/guardian permission, or want to maintain some level of anonymity, not expecting their video to extend beyond friends and family in terms of viewership. Because it was not ethically or logistically feasible to reach out to video subjects directly, I felt it best to use less direct identifying information and use pseudonyms across the entirety of the study, for both Pretty or Ugly video subjects as well as the tween girls I interviewed.

5. In videos in which a subject does not articulate a specific gender identity, I assumed a gender category of girl by assessing whether subjects are wearing feminine-coded clothing, speaking and gesturing in feminine ways, and exhibiting other markers that indicate a girlhood identity. I estimated tween age category and assumed racial and gender categories for inclusion in the sample for the textual analysis. I fully recognize the limitations of this subjective estimation. Ideally, each video subject would identify themselves in terms of age, race, and gender so that if others were to watch and analyze the same set of YouTube videos, recognition of the subjects therein would be consistent. I was not able to reach out to video subjects individually for multiple reasons. According to fair use legal doctrine, YouTube videos can be reused for academic purposes (YouTube Copyright and Fair Use; Stim 2019). For my research, I looked at and analyzed YouTube videos as public content, but because I could not be certain whether specific YouTube channels posting Pretty or Ugly videos belonged to the video subject, a family member, or another party entirely, I could not ensure direct outreach to video subjects. Furthermore, given that the video subjects are minors, the ability to obtain parental consent to speak with girls directly was outside of feasibility for this project. I could not contact parents/guardians of the tween girls in the videos because the only point of contact would be through the YouTube channel itself. The ethical considerations of trying to contact video subjects through YouTube were questionable and could have put the girls at risk. I was most interested in analyzing the Pretty or Ugly trend broadly and at face value and felt the best option was to make certain defensible assumptions about the identities of the video subjects.

CHAPTER 3

1. I was not entirely familiar with the function of this social media app at the start of my research and subsequently learned that Musical.ly shut down after its merger with TikTok, which was the most downloaded app in the United States in 2018 and rapidly grew to be the social media platform du jour during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At the time of writing, TikTok remains the most popular app among tween girls second only to YouTube (Kennedy 2020; Perez 2020).