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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