Colliding Feminisms: Britney Spears, “Tweens,” and the Politics of Reception

Video-games, cartoon violence, and “shoot-em-up” action movies provoke school shootings. Ever-shrinking supermodels and actors encourage eating disorders. Heavy metal music lures boys to Satanism and suicide. Hollywood teaches girls passivity and submission. Or so we learn on the nightly news. Scores of studies that seem to support an influence of media content on audience beliefs and behavior drive our ever-current “blame-the-media” political climate. These high-profile studies, many of them policy oriented, typically conclude that the social wellbeing of a particular group is endangered by the frequent depiction of violence, sex, sexism, racism, consumerism, and even light “PG” violence or sexual innuendo. Concerning body image and the health of women and girls, effects researchers tend to concentrate most intensely on the role that advertising, fashion magazines, and celebrities—actors and supermodels in particular—play in shaping female body perception. Feminist writing, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, often argues that images of women in subordinate, passive, or even nontechnologically savvy roles encourage societal adherence to patriarchal notions of femininity. The popular press itself, typically the perpetrator in media crimes, now frequently toes the line. The cover of the February 14, 2000 People Weekly, for example, reads: “Pop princess Britney Spears: Too sexy too soon? Little girls love her, but her image makes some moms nervous.” The message is loud and clear: Mom, be nervous; be very, very nervous. Much recent academic literature in communications studies, however, challenges the direct influence of media content suggested by mainstream effects research. Connections between what an audience takes in and how it thinks and behaves are complex, ambiguous, and highly dependent on individual identity, family and peer groups, and social relationships. Postfeminist criticism likewise questions a cause-and-effect approach, particularly the images-of-women theorizing that dominated second-wave feminism. No longer do we assume an unproblematic relationship between image and audience, one in which the text clearly transmits meaning and the viewer easily decodes it. Taking cues from literary criticism, academic writers about film, comic books, literature, soap operas, professional wrestling—in short, nearly any and all artifacts of popular culture— increasingly understand meaning not as something intrinsic to a text but rather realized and performed by an audience. Meaning is constantly negotiated and highly dependent on context of consumption and identity of consumer. In this qualitative study of early adolescent girls and their complex relationship to singer Britney Spears, I engage this audience not as passive recipients of questionable material but as active agents in the creation of their own culture. The