Sparkle: luminosity and post-girl power media

Abstract

This article aims to broaden critical discussions of postfeminist culture and mediated girlhoods through attention to the visual stylistics operating at their convergence – 'post-girl power' film and television. Complicating Angela McRobbie's theory of postfeminism, this project analyzes the phenomenon of 'sparkle' in contemporary US girls' media. As well it updates Rachel Moseley's pioneering work on luminous aesthetics in teen-girl film and television, while enlarging the scope of her analysis beyond texts featuring witches. Expanding our understanding of sparkle's relationship to post-girl power media, this study also deploys queer theories of camp and femininity to offer an alternate perspective on sparkle's significance to female youth and feminism. It problematizes the binary of constraint/agency often raised in scholarship on (post)feminism by considering girls' negotiations of post-girl power discourse via their own forms of sparkly media.