“It’s the Time You Got to Wear Whatever You Wanted”: Pre-Teen Girls Negotiating Gender, Sexuality and Age through Fashion

Abstract

Worries about the marketing of fashion to pre-teen girls and the power of fashionable clothes to sexualize these girls, have been on-going for some time. However, there is little research with this age group of girls that explicitly explores the ways in which fashionable clothes are understood and worn by the girls themselves and the impact on their sense of identity. Yet girls are increasingly considered in childhood sociology to be competent social actors able to articulate something of their own interactions and understanding of their social worlds. This study uses focus groups, participant photography and interviews with 32 predominately white, middle-class girls from the South of England, to examine pre-teen girls’ fashion practices to address this gap in knowledge. This article argues that young girls are active and thoughtful in their consumption of dress, aware of the construction of gender norms in responding to aged sexual expectations as they decide what to wear. In considering the context of their constructions of aged, gendered and (a)sexualized identity, girls code-switched between identity forms, actively constituting their subjectivity through clothing.