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Abstract
Celebrities feature prominently in the media and popular cultural landscape of ‘tween’-aged girls. While there has been much speculation about the potential influence of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens on ‘tween’ girls, particularly with respect to ‘growing up too fast’ and becoming ‘sexy too soon’, research with tweens is lacking. This paper draws on material from a research project that explores the ways in which some preteen girls in two cities in New Zealand engage with the popular culture they encounter in their everyday lives. The focus is on the ways in which the participants respond to the image of Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2008, in particular, their critiques of this previously popular celebrity. We explore the ways in which the framing of Cyrus as a ‘bad role model’ and ‘slut’ is used to regulate celebrity identifications, viewing practices and girlhood identities.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund for the financial support of the research project ‘Girls, “Tween” Popular Culture and Everyday Life’. They are immensely grateful to the girls who gave their time and energy to participate in this study.
Notes
1. In New Zealand, primary schools have students from age five (Year 1) to age 13 (Year 8).
2. In New Zealand, intermediate schools have only Year 7 and Year 8 students.
3. The following excerpt is from the information sheet given to potential participants: ‘Do you watch TV, read books and magazines, listen to pop music, go to the movies, use a computer, or play video games? These are just some of the types of media that many girls like to use. And in a lot of those media girls your age are being focused on more and more, sometimes showing girls in ways that make them seem older than they are. Although we know girls your age like to use media we don’t know very much about what they think about the media they use or what they think about the way girls are shown. Also, we don’t know much about how girls use media in their everyday life. So we are doing a research project to find out more about these things’. We made every effort to enable participants to talk about the popular culture that was meaningful to them, and although we referred to the ‘growing up too fast’ discourse in general terms we kept the focus on participants’ experiences and understandings. Celebrities were a topic of discussion in all focus groups and v-logs. Participants introduced talk about Miley Cyrus and Vanity Fair in both contexts as it had significant media attention at the time the research was being conducted.
4. The decile rating of schools (from one to 10) relates to economic and social factors of the community immediately surrounding it. Schools in Decile 1 have the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic backgrounds, while schools in Decile 10 have the highest proportion. A school’s decile does not indicate the overall socio-economic mix of the school. Deciles are used to provide funding to state and state integrated schools. The lower the school’s decile, the more funding they receive. See http://www.minedu.govt.nz.
5. Transana is software that enables researchers to analyse digital video or audio data. Transana enables one to transcribe the audio component of videos, identify analytically interesting clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, and so forth.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Tiina Vares
Tiina Vares is Senior Lecture in Sociology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the areas of gender, sexualities, the body and popular culture with a focus on the reception of popular cultural texts. She is currently working on the research project ‘Girls, “Tween” Popular Culture and Everyday Life’, supported by the New Zealand Royal Society Marsden Fund.
Sue Jackson
Sue Jackson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Much of her previous research and publication work has centred on young women’s negotiation of sexuality and the ways sexuality is represented in girls’ popular culture. Currently her research centres on a three-year project examining preteen girls’ engagement with popular culture in their everyday lives, supported by the New Zealand Royal Society Marsden Fund.