{"title":"“It’s the Time You Got to Wear Whatever You Wanted”: Pre-Teen Girls Negotiating Gender, Sexuality and Age through Fashion","authors":"Julie Blanchard-Emmerson","doi":"10.1080/17569370.2022.2118974","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Worries about the marketing of fashion to pre-teen girls and the power of fashionable clothes to sexualize these girls, have been on-going for some time. However, there is little research with this age group of girls that explicitly explores the ways in which fashionable clothes are understood and worn by the girls themselves and the impact on their sense of identity. Yet girls are increasingly considered in childhood sociology to be competent social actors able to articulate something of their own interactions and understanding of their social worlds. This study uses focus groups, participant photography and interviews with 32 predominately white, middle-class girls from the South of England, to examine pre-teen girls’ fashion practices to address this gap in knowledge. This article argues that young girls are active and thoughtful in their consumption of dress, aware of the construction of gender norms in responding to aged sexual expectations as they decide what to wear. In considering the context of their constructions of aged, gendered and (a)sexualized identity, girls code-switched between identity forms, actively constituting their subjectivity through clothing.","PeriodicalId":44329,"journal":{"name":"Fashion Practice-The Journal of Design Creative Process & the Fashion Industry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Fashion Practice-The Journal of Design Creative Process & the Fashion Industry","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17569370.2022.2118974","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Worries about the marketing of fashion to pre-teen girls and the power of fashionable clothes to sexualize these girls, have been on-going for some time. However, there is little research with this age group of girls that explicitly explores the ways in which fashionable clothes are understood and worn by the girls themselves and the impact on their sense of identity. Yet girls are increasingly considered in childhood sociology to be competent social actors able to articulate something of their own interactions and understanding of their social worlds. This study uses focus groups, participant photography and interviews with 32 predominately white, middle-class girls from the South of England, to examine pre-teen girls’ fashion practices to address this gap in knowledge. This article argues that young girls are active and thoughtful in their consumption of dress, aware of the construction of gender norms in responding to aged sexual expectations as they decide what to wear. In considering the context of their constructions of aged, gendered and (a)sexualized identity, girls code-switched between identity forms, actively constituting their subjectivity through clothing.
期刊介绍:
Fashion Practice fills this major gap by providing a much-needed forum for topics ranging from design theory to the impact of technology, economics and industry on fashion practice. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, Fashion Practice addresses the entire business of fashion, including: innovation in fashion design and practice sustainability and ethics within the industry micro- and nano-technologies within the fashion context “smart” textiles and digital fashion materials, design, concepts and process fashion consumption and production from retail/e-tail to performance fashion new developments in fashion and clothing retail.