Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture

by Melanie Kennedy

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788316644
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Series:	Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Melanie Kennedy is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research examines media representations of gendered, age-defined, classed, raced identities (in particular tweens, young female celebrities, and teenage mothers), and the popular culture that addresses these subjects.
Melanie Kennedy is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Series Editors' Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Who is the Tween?
1. The Reconciliation of Femininity and Feminism
2. Narratives of Celebrity
3.Narratives of Father–Daughter Transformation
4. Growing Up Female with Miley Cyrus, Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana
5. Falling in Love with the Jonas Brothers
Conclusion: Doing Tweenhood
Filmography and Teleography
Discography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating, often unsettling, story of how tweens are promised fame in exchange for conformity to strict ideals of how women should look and behave.” —Times Literary Supplement

“The best of girls' media studies-as an interdisciplinary field-identifies and turbans a keen and exacting eye to the crucial role that girls play in popular culture and thereby challenges the various disciplines on which it draws to rethink some of its founding assumptions, methodologies, theories, and findings. This book is no exception. With a clear and engaging style that makes Tweenhood a pleasure to read, Melanie Kennedy illustrates the centrality of tweens both to the celebrity industry and to discourses of post-feminism, and thereby rewrites the understandings of authenticity, identity, choice, and femininity that are so germane to these bodies of thought.” —Sarah Projansky, Professor, Film & Media Arts and Gender Studies, University of Utah, USA

“Melanie Kennedy's Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture is an enlightening and comprehensive consideration of the tween girl in Anglophone culture and her power as consumer, fan, and media maker in the twenty-first century. In prose that is both incisive and accessible, Kennedy elucidates why the tween is a category of immense importance to feminism and media culture.” —Brenda R. Weber, Department Chair of Gender Studies, Indiana University, USA

From the Publisher