Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture: Library of Gender and Popular Culture

Illustrates the centrality of tweens both to the celebrity industry and to discourses of post-feminism, which reframes our understanding of authenticity, identity, choice, and femininity

Melanie Kennedy is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research examines media representations of gendered, age-defined, classed, raced identities (in particular tweens, young female celebrities, and teenage mothers), and the popular culture that addresses these subjects.

List of FiguresSeries Editors' ForewordAcknowledgementsIntroductionWho is the Tween?1. The Reconciliation of Femininity and Feminism2. Narratives of Celebrity3.Narratives of Father-Daughter Transformation4. Growing Up Female with Miley Cyrus, Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana5. Falling in Love with the Jonas BrothersConclusion: Doing TweenhoodFilmography and TeleographyDiscographyIndex

A fascinating, often unsettling, story of how tweens are promised fame in exchange for conformity to strict ideals of how women should look and behave.
The best of girls' media studies-as an interdisciplinary field-identifies and turns a keen and exacting eye to the crucial role that girls play in popular culture and thereby challenges the various disciplines on which it draws to rethink some of its founding assumptions, methodologies, theories, and findings. This book is no exception. With a clear and engaging style that makes Tweenhood a pleasure to read, Melanie Kennedy illustrates the centrality of tweens both to the celebrity industry and to discourses of post-feminism, and thereby rewrites the understandings of authenticity, identity, choice, and femininity that are so germane to these bodies of thought.
Melanie Kennedy's Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture is an enlightening and comprehensive consideration of the tween girl in Anglophone culture and her power as consumer, fan, and media maker in the twenty-first century. In prose that is both incisive and accessible, Kennedy elucidates why the tween is a category of immense importance to feminism and media culture.