Abstract
In recent years, the girl has risen in popularity in the media, from girl-focused movies like Barbie to the rise of TikTok influencers like Charli D’Amelio. Girl power is celebrated in popular culture, on social media, and in teen clothing stores. Disabled girls, immigrant girls, racialized girls, and other marginalized girls are being celebrated as activists and champions of feminism. At the same time, however, girlhood continues to be painted as being in crisis, with alarmist news reports of mental health issues, low self-esteem, hypersexualization, and hypochondria, with platforms like TikTok pinned as the problem. Girlhood is being commodified on a widescale and written about in major news outlets, but the voices of actual girls are frequently being left out of the conversation.
Two timely books, Cripping Girlhood (Todd) and Digital Girlhoods (Phelps), provide a key intervention, centering the voices and perspectives of girls to understand how they are navigating this neoliberal cultural landscape. Both Todd and Phelps understand girlhood as socially constructed and particularly look to the demands and expectations of American girlhood situated within neoliberalism, popular feminism, and capitalism. While these books both consider the harmful discourses that are being levied against girls, they also center the perspectives of girls themselves to understand how they negotiate competing cultural models of female empowerment, protectionist discourses, and postfeminist and popular feminist understandings of girlhood. Cripping Girlhood and Digital Girlhoods specifically look to girls’ media use and content creation to demonstrate how girls are actively engaging with these discourses.
In Cripping Girlhood, Todd considers the implications of newfound cultural visibility for (some) disabled girls, reading across media texts by and about disabled girls. Todd considers how a colliding set of factors, including Web 2.0, girls’ empowerment narratives, disability rights movements, and neoliberalism have made way for some disabled girls to be held up as ideal “future girls” representing productivity and social possibility (p. 9). Each chapter closely considers a group of related media texts created by and/or about disabled girls as a way to consider the disabled future girl, as well as the disabled girls which are assumed not to have futures. Cripping Girlhood provides a key intervention into feminist disability studies, where age has not been a central part of analysis, as well as Girlhood Studies, where the disabled girl has historically been invisibilized.
In Chapters 1 and 3, Todd provides an analysis of media texts including How to Dance in Ohio, Miss You Can Do It, and Dogs, to demonstrate how media texts about disabled girls reinforce systems of oppression in their efforts to create what she calls a “disabled future girl” (p. 36). She considers how the intersecting systems of race, class, cisheteronormativity, and neoliberalism function to hold up certain disabled girls as ideal subjects who have overcome the struggles of their disabilities to thrive in a neoliberal, capitalist, post-ADA society. Conversely, Chapter 2 and a portion of Chapter 3 examine content created by disabled girls, through which Todd demonstrates how disabled girls are negotiating and rejecting the constricting narratives thrust upon them by popular media. Exploring the content of “girl crip-fluencers,” Todd recognizes how young disabled girls are using social media to build community and intimacy with other girls (p. 66). She explores how girls reflect their lived realities as neither “inspiration porn” nor tragedy, examining the complicated relationships that they have toward disability. Through a reading of two accounts run by disabled girls with service dogs on TikTok, Todd unpacks how disabled girl handlers understand their relationships with their dogs as interdependent, subverting feel-good, cure-based narratives perpetuated in popular media. Chapter 5 provides a nuanced, critical analysis of media surrounding Jerika Bolen’s “last dance,” a party thrown as a dying wish for a young Black, gay girl with spinal muscular atrophy type 2 who chose to discontinue treatment and enter hospice at the age of 14 (p. 139). Todd carefully holds both the understandings that Bolen’s death may have been accelerated by sociopolitical conditions such as ableism, neoliberalism, and racism, while also understanding her choice as an enaction of her own desire that honored her frequently marginalized voice (p. 142). Through her analysis of disabled girl media, Todd carefully works to decenter her voice (and that of other adults), situating disabled girls as authorities in arenas where their voices have often been silenced. The book draws on literature from broad disciplines such as feminist disability studies, cultural studies, media studies, and animal studies. The author effectively makes complex theoretical concepts from these fields accessible to a wide audience of readers, making this book a good read for anyone interested in gender and disability, regardless of theoretical background.
Phelps’ Digital Girlhoods draws on an analysis of YouTube videos in the “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” trend and interviews with 26 tween girls (ages 10–13) to center the perspectives of tween girls in conversations about their social media use. Phelps argues that tween girls are being simultaneously fed two competing cultural models, the idea of “Girl Power!” and protectionist discourses that assume they are particularly vulnerable to outside harm and must negotiate these cultural models in their day-to-day lives (p. 51). In particular, she is interested in the ways that these narratives are leveraged in relation to tween girls’ social media use, including how social media is said to be the root of tween girl crisis including low self-esteem, mental health issues, and eating disorders, as well as how girls are considering these models in their orientations toward social media. Central to Phelps’ analysis is the “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” YouTube trend, where young girls post videos asking viewers to evaluate their appearance. Critiquing popular media responses that framed tween girls as either attention-seeking or having low self-esteem (and associated this with social media use), Phelps argues that asking this question is a reasonable response to the demands placed on tween girls and one that has not been invented by social media.
Chapters 1 and 2 situate Phelps’ research, providing background on the current conditions of American girlhood and the narratives told about tween girls in particular. Chapters 3 to 6 draw on Phelps’ interviews and discourse analysis to each unpack an aspect of the relationship that tween girls have to social media. Discussing topics such as bullying, self-esteem, privacy, and popularity, Phelps positions tween girls as agential, capable subjects who effectively draw on their own skillsets and support from adults to navigate social media and the societal demands put on them. Reinforcing the views of her tween girl research subjects, Phelps takes on a nuanced view that positions social media as neither utopian nor the source of societal ills, while recognizing the central role that it has in girls’ everyday lives and ability to connect with others, explore their passions, and express their identities. She consistently considers her position in relation to age, race, class, body size, and other social identities to recognize the way these impact her analysis and re-center the perspectives of her tween girl participants. Phelps includes the perspectives of tween girls in their own words, placing them at the forefront of her analysis. She expertly considers the way that each participant’s intersecting identities impact their unique experiences navigating the internet, treating each participant and video subject as a unique individual shaped by race, class, body size, and gender.
As Phelps argues in the conclusion to Digital Girlhoods, we need to recognize “tween girls as agential subjects across social arenas, including social media” (p. 178). Both Cripping Girlhood and Digital Girlhoods embody this call throughout their pages, with the authors decentering adult perspectives to honor the expertise of girls in issues that impact them. Todd and Phelps provide key examples of doing respectful, intersectional research that honors the lived experience of young people. These books are key reading for scholars in Girlhood Studies and Media Studies, particularly anyone whose work falls within the intersection of these fields.
