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Abstract
This article aims to broaden critical discussions of postfeminist culture and mediated girlhoods through attention to the visual stylistics operating at their convergence – ‘post-girl power’ film and television. Complicating Angela McRobbie's theory of postfeminism, this project analyzes the phenomenon of ‘sparkle’ in contemporary US girls' media. As well it updates Rachel Moseley's pioneering work on luminous aesthetics in teen-girl film and television, while enlarging the scope of her analysis beyond texts featuring witches. Expanding our understanding of sparkle's relationship to post-girl power media, this study also deploys queer theories of camp and femininity to offer an alternate perspective on sparkle's significance to female youth and feminism. It problematizes the binary of constraint/agency often raised in scholarship on (post)feminism by considering girls' negotiations of post-girl power discourse via their own forms of sparkly media.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Notes on contributors
Mary Celeste Kearney
Mary Celeste Kearney is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on girls' media culture. She is author of Girls Make Media and editor of The Gender and Media Reader and Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture. She is currently completing work on Power Chords and Groupie Chicks: Gender and Rock Culture. Her essays have appeared in Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Journal for Children and Media, and the NWSA Journal.