“They’ve Always Got Flat Tummies and It Really Bugs Us”

Abstract

In a contradictory fashion, media re/produce girls’ bodies as problematic whilst also circulating the representations purported to ‘cause’ girls’ troubled body/self image. In recent years, concerns that media are having damaging effects on girls’ embodied sense of self have intensified within the context of claims that girls are being ‘sexualised’, in part, through their engagement with popular culture’s emphasis on the slim, ‘sexy’, ‘hot’ body. However, the evidence used to support claims of harm to girls has relied on media effects research and psychologising frameworks which obscure the complexity of the relationship between girls’ embodied identities and media images. Strikingly, research with girls themselves to illuminate the ways they make sense of popular culture representations in relation to embodied self is sparse. Drawing on a media video diary study about ‘tween’ popular culture with 71 pre-teen girls, this chapter contributes an understanding of relationships between media images and girls’ embodied identities. In particular, the chapter highlights girls’ affective experiencing of media images as they engage in a complex relationship with the bodies and body practices represented in popular culture. On the one hand, girls voiced desire to conform with beauty practices designed to achieve appearance norms, but on the other they critiqued ‘faked’ perfection and unrealistic body images. Such findings underline girls’ embodied self-understandings in relation to media representations as multi-layered and irreducible to linear ‘media effects’.