Tiina Vares

‘The whole playboy mansion image’: Girls’ fashioning and fashioned selves within a postfeminist culture

This article is located in contemporary feminist interrogations of postfeminism and postfeminist popular culture. Fashion articulates a postfeminist ideology through notions of empowerment via sexuality and consumption, and engages a postfeminist aesthetic of the ‘sexy’, desirable young woman. Recognising the potential complications of these postfeminist constructions and practices for embodied identities of girls within discourses of child innocence, in this article we explore how girls negotiate contemporary postfeminist meanings of femininity marketed to them in fashion. To do so, we examine narratives extracted from a media video diary component of a ‘tween’ popular culture project with 71 pre-teen girls. Using a psycho-discursive approach within a feminist poststructuralist framework, the analyses focus on ways girls engage with and disengage from postfeminist identities constituted through ‘girlie’ and ‘sexy’ clothing. Our findings illuminate the fluidity of girls’ subjectivities as they positioned themselves in some moments within constraining discourses of girlhood femininity (e.g. influenced by media) and at other times as critical ‘savvy’ consumers, rejecting marketing ploys and ‘sexy’ identities. In narratives of clothing practices we found careful, situated negotiation of clothing styles open to sexual meanings and distancing from ‘sexy’ dress through refusals, derogation of other girls and negative affective responses. These practices intersected with class and age and commonly used regulatory and constraining discourses of femininity. We argue that the challenge for feminisms and feminists is to find ways to research and work with/for girls that will open up spaces to explore meanings of femininity that escape limiting, repressive boundaries.

The Discursive Condition of Viagra

This research investigates the socio-cultural implications of Viagra as a biomedical solution to a medically defined problem. This New Zealand-based research involved interviews with 33 men, to examine how they discursively constituted meanings around masculinity, erections, and the role of Viagra. It is argued that the relationship between discourses of mechanistic functionality of erections, the primacy of the male as performer, and the partners pleasure as measure of success, create the conditions of possibility for a pharmaceutical solution directed at the male. The problem is configured as the uncertainty accompanying the instability evident in the relationship between these discourses. The mens discourse on the solution, Viagra, confirms this analysis.

Spreading the Word, but What Word is That? Viagra and Male Sexuality in Popular Culture

Viagra was released in 1998 and, as Abraham Morgentaler so aptly wrote in his book The Viagra Myth (2003), ‘the world has not been the same since’. Representations of Viagra appeared in a variety of popular cultural and media texts and participated in the ‘craze’ known as ‘Viagramania’. Drawing on, and extending the work of Meika Loe, The Rise of Viagra (2004) in the United States, we explore some of the changes in depictions of Viagra and masculine sexualities in the New Zealand context under the framings: ‘Viagra-as-Joke’, ‘Legitimate Viagra’ (which includes ‘Romance Drug Viagra’ and ‘Masculinity Pill Viagra’), and ‘Party Pill Viagra’. We suggest that changes in popular portrayals of Viagra from 1998 to the present, as well as a decrease in the range of popular genres/forms in which Viagra appears, contribute to a narrowing in discourses of masculine sexuality in which the emphasis is increasingly on penile performance and enhancement.

Media ‘Sluts’: ‘Tween’ Girls’ Negotiations of Postfeminist Sexual Subjectivities in Popular Culture

In recent years ‘tween’1 girls in Anglo-American societies have emerged from relative obscurity to become the focus of public and academic scrutiny. The gaze directed at them is a particularized and often anxious one, grounded in notions that these girls might be growing up too fast, more specifically that they are precociously sexualized. Concerns about ‘tween’ girls’ sexualization have largely made their way into the media and public domains through a growing collection of popular culture texts such as The Lolita Effect (Durham, 2008), What’s Happening to Our Girls (Hamilton, 2007) and So Sexy So Soon (Levy and Kilbourne, 2008) as well as through various reports (e.g. APA Task Force Report on the Sexualisation of Girls, Corporate Paedophilia). However unintentionally, these texts strike an alarmist chord that produces all girls as ‘in trouble’ and create a flurry of media response. Somewhat paradoxically, as Gill (2007) points out, media generate concerns and perhaps revive moral panics about girls’ sexuality while also being cast as the source of girls’ assumed premature sexualization.

‘Too many bad role models for us girls’: Girls, female pop celebrities and ‘sexualization’:

In recent years the ‘sexualization’ of pre-teen and younger girls has been a dominating presence in the media and popular press. Female celebrities’ hypersexual performances and styling, in particular, have been significantly implicated in claims about girls being launched into premature sexuality under the influence of their idols. Yet, despite the claims, relatively little is known about how pre-teen girls make sense of ‘sexualized’ media in relation to self and others. This paper contributes to an emergent feminist literature that aims to expand our knowledge about pre-teen girls’ understandings and negotiations of sexually saturated popular culture. Drawing on material from a project in which 71 pre-teen girls recorded media video diaries about their everyday engagement with popular culture, the paper examines girls’ negotiation of female pop celebrity performances of hypersexual subjectivities. Our discursive analyses highlight girls’ negotiations of hypersexual celebrity as necessarily complicated and contradictory, reflecting their location in intersecting discourses of age, sexuality, and femininity.

Reading celebrities/narrating selves: ‘tween’ girls, Miley Cyrus and the good/bad girl binary

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.

‘My [asexuality] is playing hell with my dating life’: Romantic identified asexuals negotiate the dating game:

While academic attention to asexuality has increased in recent years, there is still relatively little research into the relational lives of romantic identified asexuals, and less still on the gendered dimensions of these. This article aims to address these research gaps by examining the ways in which 13 self-identified romantic asexuals living in New Zealand experience and navigate dating practices/finding somebody. I employ a feminist poststructuralist approach to explore the ways in which the pervasiveness of hook up culture and gendered discourses of sexuality both constrain and enable possibilities for developing partnered relationships with non-asexuals.