Mediated Girlhoods

Mary Celeste Kearney is Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Girls Make Media (2006), and editor of The Gender and Media Reader (forthcoming 2011), and founding director of Cinemakids.

«‘Mediated Girlhoods’ is essential reading for the field of Girls Studies – as well as for scholars in other disciplines, parents, and anyone else interested in how girls live in a culture that is permeated by media of all kinds. Ranging widely across time, space and diverse categories of identity, this ambitious book brings together a collection of essays that include studies of representation, reception and media production. Both readable and theoretically sophisticated, ‘Mediated Girlhoods’ offers compelling insights into how girls experience and use the vast array of cultural forms and technologies available to them, from movies, music and dance to to cell-phones and on-line videos.» (Kathleen Rowe Karlyn is Professor of English and Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Oregon. She is the author of ‘Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter’ (Texas 1995), and ‘Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen’, Texas 2011)«This is a wonderfully rich collection of work that moves girls’ media studies way beyond the conventional and into important territory of production and critical engagement, innovative methodologies and new voices. ‘Mediated Girlhoods’ takes us on a fascinating journey through the times and spaces of girls’ media culture, present and past, material and virtual, subversive and mainstream. From early twentieth-century Japan to 1970s’ rural Australia, from downtown high tech Singapore to the religiously traditional communities of northern Israel, this fabulous set of essays invites us to be guided by girls themselves through the diverse and dazzling terrain of the mediated cultures through which girlhoods are imagined, constructed, lived, and resisted globally. A truly important book for girls’ studies.» (Anita Harris, Associate Professor at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, and author of ‘Future Girl: Young Women in the 21st Century ’)«Including historical and contemporary examples; addressing representation, use, and production of media; and insisting on attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality, ‘Mediated Girlhoods’ does nothing short of delineating a growing area of thought called «Girls Media Studies,» and then challenging that scholarship to reconsider its boundaries and objects of study. A must read for anyone interested in the nuances and complexities in girls’ lives and cultures. A crucial reference for any student or scholar interested in how we might move Girls Studies forward.» (Sarah Projansky, Associate Professor, Media & Cinema Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

• Contents: Mary Celeste Kearney: Introduction: Girls’ Media Studies 2.0 – Yuka Kanno: Love and Friendship: The Queer Imagination of Japan’s Early Girls’ Culture – Sarah Nilsen: All-American Girl? Annette Funicello and Suburban Ethnicity – Kirsten Pike: «The New Activists»: Girls and Discourses of Citizenship, Liberation, and Femininity in Seventeen, 1968-1977 – Kristen Hatch: Little Butches: Tomboys in Hollywood Film – Angharad N. Valdivia: This Tween Bridge over My Latina Girl Back: The U.S. Mainstream Negotiates Ethnicity – Rebecca C. Hains/Shayla Thiel-Stern/Sharon R. Mazzarella: «We Didn’t Have Any Hannah Montanas»: Girlhood, Popular Culture, and Mass Media in the 1940s and 1950s – Catherine Driscoll: Becoming a Country Girl: Gough, Kate, the CWA, and Me – Shiri Reznik/Dafna Lemish: Falling in Love with High School Musical: Girls’ Talk about Romantic Perceptions – Sarah Baker: Playing Online: Pre-Teen Girls’ Negotiations of Pop and Porn in Cyberspace – Sandra Grady: Role Models and Drama Queens: African Films and the Formation of Good Women – Jennifer Woodruff: «She was like…»: Re-framing Hip-Hop Identity Politics through Dance and Gesture – Jane Greer: Remixing Educational History: Girls and Their Memory Albums, 1913-1929 – Sun Sun Lim/Jemima Ooi: Girls Talk Tech: Exploring Singaporean Girls’ Perceptions and Uses of Information and Communication Technologies – Leslie Regan Shade: Surveilling the Girl via the Third and Networked Screen – Sarah Banet-Weiser: Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube.