Spectacular girls : media fascination and celebrity culture / Sarah Projansky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Projansky, Sarah, 1965- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women in mass media.

Celebrities in mass media.

Mass media and girls.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2014]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

As an omnipresent figure of the media Landscape, girls are spectacles. They are ubiquitous visual objects on display at which we are incessantly invited to look. Investigating our cultural obsession with both everyday and high-profile celebrity girls, Sarah Projansky uses a queer, anti-racist feminist approach to explore the diversity of girlhoods in contemporary popular culture. The book addresses two key themes: simultaneous adoration and disdain for girls and the pervasiveness of whiteness and heteronormativity. While acknowledging this context, Projansky pushes past the dichotomy of the "can-do" girl who has the world at her feet and the troubled girl who needs protection and regulation to focus on the variety of alternative figures who appear in media culture, including queer girls, girls of color, feminist girls, active girls, and sexual girls, all of whom are present if we choose to look for them. Drawing on examples across film, television, mass-market magazines and newspapers, live sports TV, and the Internet, Projansky combines empirical analysis with careful, creative, feminist analysis intent on centering alternative girls. She undermines the pervasive "moral panic" argument, which blames media itself for putting girls at risk, by engaging multiple methodologies, including, for example, an ethnographic study of young girls who themselves critique media. Arguing that feminist media studies needs to understand the spectacularization of girlhood more fully, she places active, alternative girlhoods right in the heart of popular media culture. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: finding alternative girlhoods

Pint-sized and precocious: the girl star in film history

"It's like floating" or battling the world: mass magazine cover girls

What is there to talk about? twenty-first-century girl films

"I'm not changing my hair": Venus Williams and live tv's racialized struggle over athletic girlhood

Sakia Gunn is a girl: queer African American girlhood in local and alternative media

"Sometimes I say cuss words in my head": the complexity of third-grade media analysis

Conclusion: girlhood rethought.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2014. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.

Other Format:

Print version: Projansky, Sarah. Spectacular girls : media fascination and celebrity culture.

ISBN:

9780814764794

OCLC:

872635024

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.