Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Girlhood Studies
Locating Tween Girls
http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/_uploads/ghs/ghs_cfp_tween.pdf
Since more than a decade spans early tween studies in the culture of
girlhood from Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2005) to the contemporary work in
this area of Natalie Coulter (2014) and Melanie Kennedy (forthcoming), we
invite articles that explore the spaces and places of tween girls.
Positioned in the liminal spaces between childhood and adolescence, the
tween girl, aged roughly between 7 and 12, is a discursively constructed
consumer subject with her own distinct cultures and experiences. She is a
marketized subjectivity of pre-adolescence. While the tween has been
recognized as a significant figure since the early twenty-first century
most of the research on girls in the field of girlhood studies assumes
that the girl is the teenage one and this means that work on the younger,
pre-adolescent girl has been minimal and/or marginalized. Part of this may
be the result of methodological issues related to the difficulty of
accessing young girls, as well as the tendency to treat the cultures of
younger girls as frivolous since the rebellion and resistance of the
(usually older) can-do girl that is the focus of so much work in girls?
studies appears less overtly at the tween stage. A further reason may be
that tween media culture is perceived, largely, as being corporate media
culture.
The primary goal of this Special Issue of Girlhood Studies is to address
these oversights by focusing specifically on the cultures, politics, and
experiences of pre-adolescent girls in their own right, rather than as an
extension to or subcategory of children or teenage girls. It will provide
a timely opportunity to explore the significance to girlhood studies of
the development of tweenhood and to question the continued usefulness of
the definitions of tweens offered in academic writing and popular
discourses at the turn of the twenty-first century.
This issue will raise critical questions on the tween girl and her
position in the field of girlhood studies.
How do we define the pre-adolescent girl and the tween in this field?
Do studies on the tween girl push a reframing of the field of girlhood
studies?
What methodologies are required in the study of tweens and preadolescent
girls?
How do we work with the discursive framings of the tween girl who has been
a predominantly western, white, middle-class, heteronormative, and
able-bodied subject?
These questions leads to broader questions on the lived experiences of
actual girls.
How do girls engage with, negotiate or resist the framing of tween as,
largely, a western, white, middle-class, heteronormative able-bodied
subject?
What do girls do with the tween cultures that are produced for them but
rarely by them? Where are the spaces in which pre-adolescent girls produce
their own cultures?
How do girls weave tweenness?as a potential resource of subjectivity?into
and out of their experiences of everyday life?
We are particularly interested in work that incorporates the voices of
girls themselves.
Potential topics for this issue include, but are not limited to:
the question of girls as a category
the pre-adolescent girl within and beyond commodification
the language and methods specific to tween research
theorizing the tween and tweening theory
the potential of a pretween subjectivity
tweenhood as a site of subjectivity
the liminality of tweenhood
the tween as a potentially neoliberal subject
the tween in postfeminist spaces
global or local tweenhoods and tween cultures
tween resistances and rebellions
the materialities of tweenhood
media for, about, or by tweens
tween media cultures, and the cultural industries of the tween girl
(advertising, retail, marketing, media, digital media, gaming and so on)
the intersectionality of tweenhood with race, class, sexuality, disability
and such like
the history of tweens and preadolescence
Article Submission
Please direct inquiries to Guest Editors, Natalie Coulter (
[log in to unmask]) or Melanie Kennedy ([log in to unmask]) and send
expressions of interest and/or abstracts to either of them by 01 November
2016. Full manuscripts are due by 01 May 2017.
Authors should provide a cover page giving brief biographical details (up
to 100 words), institutional affiliation(s) and full contact information,
including an email address.
Articles may be no longer than 6,500 words including the abstract (up to
150 words), keywords (6 to 8 in alphabetical order), notes, captions and
tables, acknowledgements (if any), biographical details (taken from the
cover page), and references. Images in a text count for 200 words each.
Girlhood Studies, following Berghahn?s preferred house style, uses a
modified Chicago Style. Please refer to the Style Guide on the website.
Guest Editors
Natalie Coulter is currently an Assistant Professor at York University in
the department of Communication Studies. Her research interests are in
girls? studies, critical advertising studies, children?s media, and
consumer culture. She has published in Canadian Journal of Communication,
Journal of Children and Media, Popular Communication, and Jeunesse. She
is a founding member of the Association for Research on the Cultures of
Young People (ARCYP). Melanie Kennedy is currently a Lecturer in Media
and Communication at the University of Leicester. Her research is rooted
in feminist media and cultural studies, and her interests include tweens
and tween culture, postfeminist film and television, neoliberal reality
television, and young female celebrity. She is the book reviews editor for
the Routledge journal Celebrity Studies.
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Natalie Coulter, PhD | Assistant Professor | Communication Studies |
York University
| 3042 TEL Building | 4700 Keele St. | Toronto ON | M3J 1P3 | Canada
| ( 416.736.2100 x 77849 | * [log in to unmask]
My new book, Tweening the Girl, can be found here:
http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=71179&cid=335
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