Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Within the discipline of communication there has been a long history of studying the relationship between girls, media, and other cultural artifacts. Until recently, however, the focus of such studies has been almost solely on girls as consumers of media and other products and/or as passive victims of mediated portrayals of femininity (→  Gender: Representation in the Media ). For example, the norm for academic studies of girls has, until recently, been to define girls as potential victims of the culture that surrounds them – a definition guiding much of the research examining how girls are affected by teen magazines, romance novels, popular music, and other cultural artifacts. This tendency of the academy to label girls as victims of mass culture found a parallel in public discourse as well, a predisposition that was evident throughout the twentieth century and particularly during the 1990s. At that time several influential and high-profile studies of girls were published addressing such issues as girls’ declining self-esteem, negative body image, and poor school performance. Paramount among these was Mary Pipher's controversial book Reviving Ophelia , in which Pipher argued that girls were living in a “girl poisoning culture” (1994, 12). What was missing, until very recently, however, were studies of girls as able to resist and negotiate cultural messages as well as girls as ... log in or subscribe to read full text