| Girls in Black and White: The Iconography of Teenage Girls in Post-Feminist America investigates a conundrum of contemporary adolescent girls' culture: the status of teenage girls as both consummate victims and powerfully self-assertive heroines. Drawing on methods from cultural studies as well as women's studies, and on critics as diverse as Angela McRobbie, Carol Gilligan, Doris Witt, and Susan Bordo, this project includes a range of literary and mass cultural texts, such as film, music video, adolescent fiction, and advertising. It argues that the nineties will be remembered as a time when two competing narratives of girlhood emerge: on the one hand, girls are considered seriously “at risk” for school drop-out, poor self-esteem, and alcohol abuse; on the other, they experience a Girl Power makeover and use their cultural clout to help create and sustain icons like the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.; The work considers how and why these two ideologies—Girl Power, on the one hand, and what I call “Girl Crisis,” on the other—can coexist. By situating both discourses within current feminist generational debates, this project helps further define Third wave feminism as both indebted to and different from Second Wave feminism. Moreover, it questions how current narratives of girlhood can profess sensitivity to diversity issues, but ultimately rely upon racial logics that privilege whiteness. One chapter, for example, focuses on African American teenage tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams to examine how Girl Power has facilitated the emergence of a physically strong body as a kind of ideal for girls, while simultaneously denying racial specificity through the commodification of its elite female athletes. Another chapter tackles the flip-side of this strong body image: the perplexing world of eating disorders. Exploring adolescent fiction, autobiography, and other popular accounts of eating disorders, it investigates why, despite evidence to the contrary, this particular “crisis” continues to be perceived as “a white thing.” This project is an intervention in contemporary race studies, in current feminist activism and scholarship, and in a sub-discipline of U.S. cultural studies—the growing field of Girls' Studies. |
