Tweenhood

A powerful female pre-adolescent consumer demographic has emerged in tandem with girls becoming more visible in popular culture since the 1990s. Yet the cultural anxiety that this has caused has received scant academic attention. In Tweenhood Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream pre-adolescent girls'' films television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards including A Cinderella Story (2004) Hannah Montana (2006) and Camp Rock (2008). Her book forges a dialogue between post-feminism film and television celebrity and most importantly; the figure of the tween. Kennedy examines how these media texts which are so key to tween culture address and construct their target audience by helping them to ''choose'' an appropriately feminine identity. Tweenhood then she argues is transient and a discursive construct whose unpacking highlights the deification of celebrity and femininity within its culture.