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The final MediaCom Seminar of the academic year in the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester will take place on Friday 26 May with Professor Natalie Coulter (York University, Toronto). The seminar is hosted by the Media and Gender Research Group.
The seminar will take place 3:00-4:30pm on Friday 26 May in Bankfield House Lecture Theatre – all welcome.
School of Media, Communication and Sociology
University of Leicester
Bankfield House
132 New Walk
Leicester
LE1 7JA
"Happy girls are the prettiest":
Depoliticizing tween girls one t-shirt at a time.
In the current neoliberal marketplace the tween girl plays an important role in
anchoring the activity of consumption as a space of fun. The fun aesthetic is
woven through much of tween culture. The tween girl that we often see in
photographs in catalogues, magazines, stock photos and corporate online spaces
is repeatedly shown in a state of fun. There is a ubiquity of images of
tween girls laughing and smiling as they tell secrets to each other and feign
surprise. They squeeze together to pose for selfies in such spaces as the
beach, the bedroom and the mall. The girls are in a perpetual state of fun.
Obviously the overt message of this corporate framing aligns tween consumption
as fun. But there is more to it than simply using fun as part of the corporate
brand as a means to sell goods. The work of tweenhood, as we are told by the
cultural industries of girlhood is the work of fun. The positioning of tween
girls as the “celebrators of fun” reveals much about the cultural expectations
of girls and girlhood in the marketplace.
The purpose of this paper is to theorize the affective spaces of young tween
girls in the current moment of neoliberal capitalism. The paper will use both
Cook’s (2011) notion of consumer epistemologies in children’s marketing and Sara
Ahmed’s (2014) work on happiness as affect to explore how the representation of
fun is a political practice that legitimates the tween market and positions the
“fun” girl as an idealized neoliberal citizen who fetishizes consumption as an
apolitical site of fun.
Dr Melanie Kennedy
Lecturer in Media and Communication
Programme Director of BA Media and Communication and BA Media and Society
School of Media, Communication and Sociology
University
of Leicester
Bankfield House
132 New Walk
Leicester
LE1 7JA
Tel: 0116 223 1624
https://leicester.academia.
Book Reviews Editor for Celebrity Studies (Routledge)