‘Perfect skin’, ‘pretty skinny’: girls' embodied identities and post-feminist popular culture

Abstract

The relationship between idealised femininity images in the media and girls' experiences of self and body has long been of interest to feminist scholars. Over recent years, this interest has organised around sexualised post-feminist media in which the female body must be worked upon towards norms of perfection, slimness and also ‘sexiness’. Approaches to researching relationships between girls' embodiment and media images within this post-feminist sexualised context have been dominated by (harmful) effects and psychologising frameworks which obscure the complexity of the relationship between girls' embodied identities and media images. This paper contributes an understanding of this complex relationship through an analysis of media video diary narratives drawn from a project with 71 pre-teen girls about popular culture in everyday life. Our analysis indicates that girls experienced media images through affective registers and that their relationship with images was complex; desire pulled girls to conform with post-feminist beauty practices and product consumption but they also pushed away from the beauty mandate through critiques of dubious product claims, ‘faked’ perfection and unrealistic bodies. These findings importantly emphasise that the relationship between girls' embodied self-understandings and post-feminist media bodies is multi-layered and cannot be reduced to linear effects.