'90210': A Study of How the Female Body Changes Over Time

My new column was just posted on FlowTV, and I thought I'd give a little recap because it's about a topic that is near and dear to many grown-up girls who like media and thought that Jason Priestly was a total fox back in 1990. A new "90210" is in town, and it hit me like a ton of bricks how the girl's and women's bodies on this show literally demonstrate Susan Bordo's point that culture imprints the body over time. Indeed, Bordo can be a little theoretically heavy, but if these two photographs do not make the point crystal clear (and please ignore the outdated 90s fashion and just concentrate on what's under these women's clothes for a minute). Notice that the original characters have hips and thighs (poor Andrea Zuckerman must be standing on blocks, but I think that's the only photo enhancement going on here), for example.

More subtle but just as startling is the age adjustment that has always gone on. As I wrote in the column, we thought the original cast looked WAY too old to be in high school -- maybe in the realm of 23 or 24, which actually was true in a couple of their cases. The new cast looks similarly old. You can read the column to see my theories on this, but the fact that even the adults now seem to be averaging out at age 28 in looks is an important difference to note. Anyway, you can read the column on Flow and tell me what you think. I find it tremendously disturbing on so many levels.

And despite all of this critiquing, of course, I'll tune in to the new one in September. I've been addicted to "Gossip Girl" from the first show and own every season of "The OC" on DVD. As a scholar, it's fascinating stuff. As a guilty-pleasure-TV-lover, it would be impossible to ignore it.

Cool New Site Alert: Girls Make Media

I'm on vacation with a slow connection and borrowed computer, so I'll just post this quickly and urge you to check it out yourself:

Girls Make Media, a site devoted to honoring and mobilizing girls' media-making:

http://girlsmakemedia.blogspot.com

This was put together by girls studies scholar and all-around cool woman
Mary Celeste Kearney, who is a professor at the University of Texas. (I discussed
her book in a previous blog post, though you'll have to wade through some first-person stuff
about my own media-making first.)

Fantastic idea, Mary!

New Moon Girls

I just read an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the New Moon magazine seeking investors so that it can move its operation entirely online, and I'm embarrassed to say that I've never heard of New Moon even though it has 20,000 subscribers and is all about producing media for young girls that doesn't make them feel like they should be ultra-thin, sexy consumers.  Much of the content is reader-produced and they don't accept any advertising, and from what I saw on their Web site, it looks like a fantastic idea.  Check out this sample copy. I love that they have an article on Suffrage as well as a piece that debunks the myth about chewing gum being stuck in your stomach for a seven-year digestive process if you swallow it. It sounds like the proposed online version will include even more user-generated content, and there will be a teen and tween-geared component. 

Are there any subscribers out there? I'd like to hear more about this. I'd also be interested in whether people are going to be up for paying for their subscriptions online (the Strib article says something about a $19.95 annual fee for the Orb28 and New Moon Club content for the older girls). I suspect there's a good research study in here -- just what I've been looking for!

Just Girls by Margaret Finders: Way Ahead of the Curve in Girls Studies

Hello. I'm back, and I'll try to make up for lost time.  First, as promised, a return to showcasing some great research about girls: I want to call your attention to Margaret Finders' 1996 book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. [I first learned about the book years ago from Cynthia Lewis, a member of my graduate committee who was based in the College of Education at Iowa (and now, fortunately for me, she's at the University of Minnesota), and who has done some excellent girls studies research in her own right.]

The book is an ethnographic look at a group of girls in a junior high and how books play a central role in their social lives as well as their construction of identity. Finders echoes some of the earlier scholarship about girls that discusses how many get caught up in a pattern of perfection and being nice. Although this particular stereotype has been completely overshadowed by the new stereotype of the mean girl, I think it is still so relevant -- maybe even moreso now that popular culture and media no longer represents girls as "troubled" (i.e. Reviving Ophelia), and now that they are reportedly outshining boys in the classroom (you can see an earlier blog about my feelings about this so-called "boys crisis").  Finders really captures the entire junior high/middle school scene so well with her conversations with and observations of girls, and that makes the book truly a pleasure to read. 

Also, one of her main observations is that girls are often dismissed for their reading choices, and that so much of their reading is not the traditional, school-oriented reading but rather, "hidden" literacies, such as note-writing, graffiti, zine reading. She sees this type of reading as very important with regard to gender and identity negotiation even though it is unsanctioned and viewed as unimportant by most adults and school authorities. This argument reminds me of the article that ran in last Sunday's New York Times about whether digital literacy -- chatting with friends, reading and writing fan fiction, and generally, just reading online -- is as important as traditional reading of traditional materials and questions whether traditional reading will be displaced.  While I personally value traditional reading -- books and newspapers being at the top of my list, obviously -- I agree that it's a mistake to dismiss alternative literacies and their importance within adolescent social culture. Frankly, if we want these traditional reading cultures to survive at all, we should be paying much closer attention to how these new forms of literacy can enhance and work with them. (Do you hear me, old-school newspaper executives?!)

In any case, it's more than a decade old now, but I highly recommend Just Girls because its arguments are still poignant and examples are still relevant. 

The Discourse of Moral Panic and Girls in Public

The three of you who occasionally read this blog might be wondering where I've been and what I've been up to, other than slacking off with regard to blog writing. I promise I haven't just been running through the sprinkler and penguin-diving into a Slip-N-Slide in the backyard all July -- not that it doesn't sound nice -- but I have actually been working on some research and writing of my own, including one article that I'm about to present at the annual conference for the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago next week about media representations of girls and young women on MySpace and Facebook that compares and contrasts these representations with coverage from 100 years ago about girls and young women going to dance halls. 

My argument is that the media coverage of these two phenomena employs surprisingly similar language and tactics to stir up public fervor -- or moral panic -- about the notion that girls and young women would place themselves in potentially unsavory and unladylike ways in public space. In the case of dance halls, merely going to the dance hall, dancing and speaking with members of the opposite sex caused an uproar in 1908; in the case of social networking sites, the same moral panic appears to be in place with regard to girls and young women posting "sexy" photos of themselves and potentially, talking with members of the opposite sex. While there might have been some danger in both of these cases (sexual predators, for example), research has shown that the danger is overblown through the media and that the actual statistics about girls being in danger doesn't hold up to reality. However, the moral panic that is created through all of this newspaper coverage (which is done in a variety of ways that I won't go into here) essentially and not-so-subtly seeks to place young women and girls back out of the public eye into the private, and even domestic, realm. 

Anyway, it's fascinating and fairly troubling stuff, and I am excited about the project. Hopefully it can be expanded into a larger piece of work, though admittedly, the idea of writing another book sort of scares me at this point.

FlowTV Column on the Significance of Exile in Guyvile

I had the honor of being asked to serve as a guest columnist for FlowTV, a publication devoted to critical analysis of television and media culture published through the RTF department at the University of Texas (in Austin, one of the greatest cities in the world), and my first column, which is basically, my feelings about the 15th anniversary re-release of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" and accompanying DVD, was just posted. 

Oddly, it wound up being one of the most difficult pieces I've had to write (yes, a 140-page dissertation was somehow easier in a lot of ways), I think because it posed so many conflicting feelings for me. 1) I love the album and have such nostalgia for the time that it was released, and it was such an influence on me as a girl, as a musician, and later, as a scholar, and 2) The way culture has changed in 15 years -- and I will argue that things ARE different now than they were 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago with regard to women, girls and sexuality -- has complicated my feelings about what Phair did even more, and 2) I'm not much of a fan of anything that she's done in the past 10 years, nor did I find myself feeling better about it while watching the accompanying DVD. Anyway, here's the column (and do read some of the incredibly well articulated responses afterward -- I think a few are better argued than my piece!):

Interpreting Exile in Guyville's Legacy: 15th Anniversary of Liz Phair's Seminal Album Conjures Questions About the Packaging of Sex, Girl Culture and Feminism 

(Thanks so much to Kristen Lambert, my editor at Flow, who very kindly let me go past deadline and my word limit. I'll do better next time, I promise.)

Now that I'm finished with the first column, I vow to get back to the primary mission of this blog -- showcasing relevant research on girls and media. On deck... Review/discussions of The Lolita Effect by Gigi Durham, Just Girls (an oldie but a goodie) by Margaret Finders and Maiden USA by Kathleen Sweeney.

Surprisingly good article on Kit Kitteridge

My apologies for being a little less than attentive to this blog over the past week or so, but I've been butting up against a few major deadlines (the kind that have to do with my getting tenure, and so my job security depends on them -- you know how it goes) and the blog had to pushed down on my list of priorities. However, the New York Times published -- as I'll repeat from my really boring headline above -- a surprisingly good article reflecting on the American Girl phenomenon in general and on the new "Kit Kittredge" film. Unsurprisingly, this is written by A.O. Scott, one of the best critics out there, in my opinion. Here's a link to the whole article and an excerpt is pasted below. Enjoy:

"... Look at one of the dolls, and you see a kind of anti-Barbie, a sturdy, nonsexualized body whose proportions are more or less those of a real girl. (Since 1998 American Girl has been part of Mattel, which is also Barbie’s corporate home.) Her clothes are both practical and authentic, and her activities are a healthy mix of chores, games and career preparations.

While some of the historical adventure books acknowledge that opportunities for girls — especially poor and nonwhite girls — were limited in earlier times, they emphasize optimism, good will and self-reliance as the ever-available antidotes to injustice or deprivation. This is certainly the lesson of “Kit Kittredge,” which does not shy away from showing some of the hard realities of the Depression, including homelessness, unemployment and the scapegoating of the poor.

It celebrates, in the midst of hard times, an appealingly ordinary brand of heroism. Kit is brave, smart, determined and kind, but never off-puttingly full of herself or intimidatingly superior. You would want her for a friend. You could easily imagine yourself in her place.

Which may be at least some of what girls want, and what they get from American Girl. As the son and husband of feminists, I can’t entirely suppress a tremor of unease. Is the brand reflecting tastes, or enforcing norms of behavior? Is it teaching girls to be independent spirits or devoted shoppers?

Probably all of those things, and more. I have spent a lot of time, over the years, with Felicity and some others of her kind, and I still haven’t figured her out. She doesn’t say much, and even though her expression is always fixed in a pleasant smile, she seems to change according to the moods and interests of her playmates. She is an athlete, a musician, a clothes horse, a bookworm, a pet owner, a loner and a confidant. A typical American girl, as far as I can tell."