Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture

(Paperback)

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A powerful female, pre-adolescent, consumer demographic has emerged in tandem with girls becoming more visible in popular culture since the 1990s. Yet the cultural anxiety that this has caused has received scant academic attention. In Tweenhood, Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream, pre-adolescent girls' films, television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards, including A Cinderella Story (2004), Hannah Montana (2006) and Camp Rock (2008). Her book forges a dialogue between post-feminism, film and television, celebrity and most importantly; the figure of the tween. Kennedy examines how these media texts, which are so key to tween culture, address and construct their target audience by helping them to 'choose' an appropriately feminine identity. Tweenhood then, she argues, is transient and a discursive construct whose unpacking highlights the deification of celebrity and femininity within its culture.

Reviews

A fascinating, often unsettling, story of how tweens are promised fame in exchange for conformity to strict ideals of how women should look and behave. * Times Literary Supplement *
The best of girls' media studies-as an interdisciplinary field-identifies and turns a keen and exacting eye to the crucial role that girls play in popular culture and thereby challenges the various disciplines on which it draws to rethink some of its founding assumptions, methodologies, theories, and findings. This book is no exception. With a clear and engaging style that makes Tweenhood a pleasure to read, Melanie Kennedy illustrates the centrality of tweens both to the celebrity industry and to discourses of post-feminism, and thereby rewrites the understandings of authenticity, identity, choice, and femininity that are so germane to these bodies of thought. -- Sarah Projansky, Professor, Film & Media Arts and Gender Studies, University of Utah, USA
Melanie Kennedy's Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture is an enlightening and comprehensive consideration of the tween girl in Anglophone culture and her power as consumer, fan, and media maker in the twenty-first century. In prose that is both incisive and accessible, Kennedy elucidates why the tween is a category of immense importance to feminism and media culture. -- Brenda R. Weber, Department Chair of Gender Studies, Indiana University, USA

Author Bio

Melanie Kennedy is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research examines media representations of gendered, age-defined, classed, raced identities (in particular tweens, young female celebrities, and teenage mothers), and the popular culture that addresses these subjects.