This study advances understanding of how a normative feminine beauty ideal is maintained through cultural products such as fairy tales. Using Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, the authors explore the extent and ways in which “feminine beauty” is highlighted. Next, they compare those tales that have survived with those that have not to determine whether tales that have been popularized place more emphasis on women's beauty. The findings suggest that feminine beauty is a dominant theme and that tales with heavy emphases (...) on feminine beauty are much more likely to have survived. These findings are interpreted in light of changes in women's social status over the past 150 years and the increased importance of establishing forms of normative social control to maintain a gender system. (shrink)

This research illuminates struggles over cultural definitions of femininity by examining how cultural gatekeepers respond to girls' vocal critique of inauthentic media images. Interviews with 10 editors at two national girls' magazine organizations provide a rare glimpse into their contradictory responses to requests for depicting “real girls.” Editors legitimate and share in the critique, claiming they should change images but cannot. In these accounts, they reveal struggles over altering narrow images of femininity at the organizational and institutional levels. Editors also (...) delegitimate girls' critique as misguided by calling on the media organizations' norms and schemas about how the reader is supposed to understand the images. Paradoxically, here, editors claim that they can change images but should not. Ultimately, the power of girls' resistance is tempered, as both sets of responses lead to the girls' critique being inefficacious in redefining femininity. The study contributes to an understanding of how femininity-defining cultural institutions operate to create and sustain gender stratification. (shrink)

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because (...) my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity. (shrink)

More than 3.5 million people participate in cheerleading in the United States, with 97 percent being female. A staple of American schools, American life, and popular culture, the cheerleader, however, has received scant attention in scholarly research. In this article, the authors argue that a feminist poststructuralist reading of cheerleading situates cheerleading as a discursive practice that has changed significantly in the past 150 years to accommodate the shifting and often contradictory meanings of normative femininity. They maintain that the ideal (...) girl of the new millennium embodies both masculinity and femininity and that cheerleading offers a culturally sanctioned space for some girls to embody ideal girlhood. They argue that cheerleading is a gendered activity representing in some ways a liberatory shift in reconstituting normative femininity while simultaneously perpetuating a norm of femininity that does not threaten dominant social values and expectations about the role of girls and women in society. (shrink)