Meenakshi Gigi Durham

In the past decade, adolescent girls’ culture has become the focus of enormous scholarly and popular discussion. Following the publication of such best-selling works as Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia and Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out, girls’ adolescence and the “perils” of this developmental stage have been examined from a variety of perspectives. Various sociocultural factors have been identified as influences on the “troubled crossing” of girls’ teen years. Media, as a cultural form that is highly salient to adolescents’ lives, have been somewhat undertheorized in these debates. In particular, girls’ fashion and beauty magazines such as Seventeen and YM call for formal analysis: they enjoy great popularity among girls, and they offer cultural “scripts” intended to guide girls’ behaviors and viewpoints. These scripts are fairly narrow and are driven by the magazines’ need to secure advertising revenues. Many of these scripts center on girls’ bodies in terms of sexuality and desirability. In this talk, I will discuss the research—my own as well as others’—on the mainstream media and its targeting of girl audiences, as well as the implications of these targeting strategies. Specifically, I will discuss the framing of adolescent girls’ sexuality in conjunction with the consumerist imperatives of the magazine industry. In addition to an analysis of the textual content of girls’ fashion and beauty magazines, I will discuss the implications of this content in girls’ lives, as well as the possibilities for negotiating and resisting these texts.

Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication