Abstract
As Marnina Gonick, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, and Lisa Weems note, there is a “current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture.”1 In a similar vein, Sarah Projansky argues that “since approximately 1990, girls have appeared often and everywhere in U.S. media culture.”2 She supports this claim by tracking the number of girls to appear on the cover of mass market magazines such as Newsweek and Time, and analyzing the most discussed of the “literally hundreds of films featuring girls as central characters” released in US cinemas in the period 2000–2009. For John Hartley, commenting on the contemporary public sphere and its expression in the press, “a new figure has appeared in this already feminized, privatized, suburbanized and sexualized landscape; the figure of the young girl.” He considers that girls are “up to their ankles, if not their necks, in public signification, becoming objects of public policy, public debate, the public gaze.”3
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Notes
Marnina Gonick, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose and Lisa Weems, “Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes after Girl Power?,” Girlhood Studies 2:2 (Winter 2009), 1–9 (1).
Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 2.
John Hartley, “‘When Your Child Grows Up Too Fast’: Juvenation and the Boundaries of the Social in the News Media,” Continuum 12:1 (1998), 9–30 (15).
Mary Celeste Kearney, Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 2.
Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), p. 2.
Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 4.
Carol Dyhouse, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London: Zed Books, 2014), p. 70.
Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller, eds., The “Bust” Guide to the New Girl Order (London: Penguin, 1999).
This definition of the role of film in culture comes from Hilary Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 9.
Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2004).
The “Princess Panic” books referenced are Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2011);
Jennifer Harstein, Princess Recovery: A Guide to Raising Strong, Empowered Girls Who Can Create their Own Happily Ever Afters (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011);
and Rebecca C. Hains, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls through the Princess Obsessed Years (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2014).
Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 9. Kearney traces the desire to distance women from (girl) children to the problem their close identification posed for the advancement of women’s suffrage and claims to equality before the law recognized from at least the time of the Victorian reformer John Stuart Mill. As Kearney explains, in a section of his Principles of Political Economy Mill specifically opposed women to immature and incapable youth in constructing his arguments for women’s rights as citizen-subjects. “The larger women’s movement developed an increasingly adult-centered perspective and thus uneasy relation to female youth as it narrowed its focus to gaining women the right to vote.”
See Kearney, “Coalescing: The Development of Girls’ Studies,” NWSA Journal 21:9 (2005), 1–28 (16).
Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10:2 (May 2007), 147–166.
Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 9.
Catherine Driscoll, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Berg, 2011), p. 2.
Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel, Youth Culture in Global Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007).
Roz Kaveney, Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars (London: IB Tauris, 2006), p. 2
Kathleen Sweeney, Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), p. xi.
Anita Harris, All about the Girl: Culture, Power and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. xx.
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1997).
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 576.
Michelle M. Lazar, “Entitled to Consume: Postfeminist Femininity and a Culture of Post-critique,” Discourse and Communication 3:4 (2009), 340–371.
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, “InFocus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies,” Cinema Journal 44:2 (2005), 107–110 (109).
Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film edited by Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 19–29 (19).
Chantal Akerman, “Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman,” Camera Obscura 2 (1977), 118–119.
Angela Mc Robbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009), p. 18.
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© 2016 Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones
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Handyside, F., Taylor-Jones, K. (2016). Introduction. In: Handyside, F., Taylor-Jones, K. (eds) International Cinema and the Girl. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_1
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