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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