Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture [Paperback]

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. InTweenhood, Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream, pre-adolescent girls' films, television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards, includingA Cinderella Story(2004),Hannah Montana(2006) andCamp 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.Melanie Kennedyis 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.

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 turns 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 makesTweenhooda pleasure to read, Melanie Kennedy illustrates the centrality of tweens both to the celebrity industry and to discourses of pol³!