‘Too many bad role models for us girls’: Girls, female pop celebrities and ‘sexualization’

Abstract

In recent years the ‘sexualization’ of pre-teen and younger girls has been a dominating presence in the media and popular press. Female celebrities’ hypersexual performances and styling, in particular, have been significantly implicated in claims about girls being launched into premature sexuality under the influence of their idols. Yet, despite the claims, relatively little is known about how pre-teen girls make sense of ‘sexualized’ media in relation to self and others. This paper contributes to an emergent feminist literature that aims to expand our knowledge about pre-teen girls’ understandings and negotiations of sexually saturated popular culture. Drawing on material from a project in which 71 pre-teen girls recorded media video diaries about their everyday engagement with popular culture, the paper examines girls’ negotiation of female pop celebrity performances of hypersexual subjectivities. Our discursive analyses highlight girls’ negotiations of hypersexual celebrity as necessarily complicated and contradictory, reflecting their location in intersecting discourses of age, sexuality, and femininity.