Girls Make Media

Mary Celeste Kearney is Assistant Professor of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

"This book makes a major intervention in the discourse on U.S. girl culture—refiguring girls as active producers rather than passive consumers of media. While there is a growing emphasis on exploring the recent turn toward learner-centered education and young people's interactive relations with popular culture, the focus is still usually on young males—whether gamers, rap performers, hackers, web designers, or remix artists. Building on the pioneering work of Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber and her own previous writings on Riot Grrrl (a feminist youth movement from the early 1990s), Kearney succeeds both in theorizing and defining what is unique in the American cultural practices of girl power"–Marsha Kinder, author of Kids' Media Culture and Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Videogames"An important groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of girls' studies--contains some of the best analyses I've read of the production of specific girls' cultures in the realms of publication, music, video, and film, subcultures, and identities." -- Douglas Kellner, author of Media Culture and Media Spectacle"The truly unruly activities detailed in Girls Make Media come from smart, involved girls who are active agents breaking down the narrow confines of gender, sexuality, race, age, and class, and exercising power through a new female gaze. ... I recommend it to anyone who is interested in youth-produced media, media education, adolescence, and/or girl culture."--Amy Aidman, Popular Communication

• Introduction: Producing Girls I. Contexts 1. Delightful Employment: Girls’ Cultural Production Prior to the Late Twentieth Century II. Sites 2. Brought to You by Girl Power: Riot Grrrl’s Networked Media Economy 3. Girls’ Media Education: Critical Viewing or Control of the Image? III. Texts 4. Grrrl Zines: Exploring Identitiy, Transforming Girls’ Written Culture 5. Developing the Girl’s Gaze: Female Youth and Film Production 6. Cybergurls: Female Youth, Digital Fluencies, and Web Design