New girl heroes: the rise of popular feminist commentators in an era of sexualisation

Abstract

The level of public interest in what has variously been called ‘raunch culture’, ‘pornification’ or more broadly ‘sexualisation’ of culture, has created new opportunities for enterprising women. In recent years, a number of immensely popular books have emerged raising concerns about girls and sexualisation by female authors across Western nations such as the USA, Australia and the UK. Here, I explore the media work of two prominent Australian media commentators on girls and sexualisation, Melinda Tankard Reist and Dannielle Miller. I explore how, in their educative work designed to empower girls and free them from the stifling, damaging aspects of sexualised popular culture, these commentators may be citing and performing other normative dimensions of contemporary young femininity that go unremarked upon and are thus reinscribed as normal and expected.

Keywords:

• femininities
• social class
• popular culture
• girls

Notes

Miller appears regularly on the popular Australian commercial television talk show The Kerri-Anne Show, in which host Kerri-Anne Kennerley invariably introduces her as an ‘expert’ on body image, cyber bulling, and other issues related to young people and identity, particularly girls.

Scholars have shown how fiercely girls and women who do not live up to the standards set by the glossy neoliberal image are denigrated within various forms of popular culture such as makeover television programs (McRobbie 2004b; Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008; Skeggs 2005; Tyler 2008). They have explored how this is one of the key ways in which class difference is played out in contemporary Western culture.