Preteen girls, magazines, and the negotiation of young sexual femininity

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The focus on, and concern about, young girls and preteens or ‘tweens’ relates to the ‘sexualisation’ of girlhood and the notion that girls are ‘growing up too fast’ and becoming ‘too sexy too soon’. In both popular and academic accounts, ‘tween’ magazines and the increasingly ‘sexualised’ images in teen magazines have been framed as significant contributors to this process. Yet, research on the ways in which preteen girls read these magazines has been notably absent. In this paper, we examine the magazine consumption and reading practices of 71 preteen girls in a New Zealand study. We employ a feminist poststructuralist approach to explore the ways in which participants employ the interpretative repertoires of ‘too young’, ‘too old', and ‘just right’ to categorise ‘tween’ and ‘teen’ magazines based on their sexual content and mark belonging to and/or distance from the categories of child, ‘tween', and teenager.