Teens, Tweens, and In‐Betweens

Abstract

Feminist scholarship on teen and tween film and television is an emerging field, largely developing in the 1990s and expanding in recent years. Teen and tween genres are often identified as being centrally concerned with issues of gender and sexuality as teen and tween characters negotiate the liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, or childhood and adolescence respectively. The field's emergence coincides with a proliferation of images of girls in popular culture more widely, often connected by scholars to the rise of postfeminism during the same period. Scholarship in this area has been dominated by a focus on representations of femininity, and the relationship between these depictions and feminism, particularly within US, and to a lesser extent, UK texts. There is a smaller body of work on representations of masculinity, gendered sexualities, gender inequalities, and sexual violence. This work is often interdisciplinary, drawing from various fields such as film studies, television studies, media studies, sociology, and the more nascent field of girls' studies. Teen film scholarship has the longest history, with feminist teen television scholarship developing in the 1990s at the same time as teen television cemented itself as a coherent genre. Feminist scholarship on tween film and television is even more recent, increasing in the early 21st century as tween media culture has become more pervasive.