Girls’ Embodied Experiences of Media Images

Abstract

Historically within western societies, girls’ embodied sexuality has persistently been problematized within discourses of risk and danger. In more recent years, these discourses have been reenergized in moral panics about preteen girls’ premature “sexualization ,” argued to occur through their exposure to a sex-saturated media culture. Anxieties particularly cohere around Hyper-sexy bodies, characterized by body-revealing clothing and sexual moves. The process of sexualization, claimed by proponents of a sexualization argument, positions girls as readily influenced by media images such that they emulate the hyper-sexy images prolifically found in “tween” popular culture . Such claims of girls’ uncritical consumption and self-production as “sexualized” have been challenged by an emergent feminist literature that finds girls’ relationships with media are considerably more complicated. The goal of this chapter is to engage with this literature in order to paint an illuminating picture of the ways that girls make sense of the hyper-sexy images they encounter in popular culture and the extent to which they view them as a possibility for self. In so doing, the chapter identifies appropriateness, grounded in class, morality, and age discourses as a recurrent theme in girls’ sense-making about hyper-sexy embodiment in relation to self and others. The appearance of the figure of the “slut” in girls’ negotiations of hyper-sexiness suggests that regulatory discourses of female sexuality exert a significant constraining presence in ways the embodied sexual self may be understood. The chapter argues that the challenge for feminist research is to find ways to work with and for girls that will open up spaces for exploring pleasure in embodied practices of self that escape repressive, limiting boundaries.