Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: ‘becoming’ a woman, ‘becoming’ a star

The importance of [not] being Miley: Girls making sense of Miley Cyrus

“…Thus, girls demonstrated their awareness of the age-based norms that govern in/appropriate female sexuality. Rather than a text of possibilities for ‘tweens’ ‘be-coming’ young women (Kennedy, 2014), our examination of girls’ talk suggests that Cyrus serves as an exemplar of undesirable femininity, an impossible be-coming.…”

“…Once again, girlhood appears, to coin Projansky’s (2014) term, to ‘cling to’ Cyrus and inflects ways that girls make sense of her performance. It is also possible that Cyrus’ construction as inauthentic by Olivia is deepened through the lingering centrality of ‘staying true to yourself’ in her girlhood Hannah Montana character (Kennedy, 2014).…”

“…Although the young female celebrity consumer has been of academic interest as a theorised audience (e.g. edited collection in Inness, 1998; Kennedy, 2014; Projansky, 2014), the girl-audience in media studies has historically received comparatively little attention (Kearney, 2011). In recent years though, the pre-teen girl-audience has been brought into the limelight via mediated ‘moral panics’ about the contaminating sexual influence of ‘sexualised’ media (Egan, 2013).…”

Authenticity and Aspiration

“…As widely argued by scholars including Natalie Coulter (2014) and Melanie Kennedy (2014), the tween, as a contemporary icon of girlhood emerges out of a neo-liberal and postfeminist cultural context. The tween is understood broadly as a paradigm of girlhood that is inextricable from consumer culture and, as Coulter suggests, is "discursively articulated in the synergistic relations of the mediated marketplace" (2014: 4) and "defined by her ability to engage with" (9) this.…”

“…The following examples demonstrate where the CBBC tween connects with broader transnational paradigms and how these are, in turn, informed by the gendered discourses of postfeminist culture. Key areas of commonality are found in relation to ideas of selfdetermination, success, and empowerment as primary markers of contemporary girlhood (Charles 2012;Gonick 2006;Harris 2004;Kennedy 2014). These "calls to agency" (2013: 229), as Sue Jackson and Amanda Lyons term them, constitute narratives of girlhood via discursive threads of competency, authenticity, and achievement which in turn, as Joanne Baker points out, rely upon "the idea that girls and young women are particular beneficiaries" (2010: 2) of neoliberal, postfeminist cultures.…”