Studying Sexualities in Girls’ Social Worlds: Ethical and Effective Methodologies for Research with Preadolescent Girls

• In Event: 588 - Student Forum Paper Session. Gender and Sexuality on the Margins

Abstract

The latest “moral panic” related to the well-being of American girls concerns the influence of increasingly sexualized media content on their developing sexualities and identities. Unfortunately, work in academia and the popular press on the implications of media sexualization are not based on ethnographic or survey data elicited from girls about the meanings they ascribe to media images and messages in the context of their social worlds, but rather upon the authors’ adult-centric readings of these media texts. Without discounting the dangerous consequences of constructing girls as willing sexual actors, it is essential to critically examine adult assumptions about girls’ subjectivities and their hermeneutics for interpreting sexualized media content within their social contexts that underlie the current moral panic surrounding media sexualization. Toward the goal of exploring the ways in which girls’ ages, demographic backgrounds, and social contexts influence their relationships to sexualized media content, I conducted a series of two in-depth interviews with 22 girls between the ages of 9 and 11 combined with girls’ development of email diaries and digital image collages that allowed participants to share their insights verbally, in writing, and through images. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of engaging with preadolescent girls as a discrete age group to understand their developmentally specific strategies for interpreting sexualized media content in the context of their social worlds and to describe methodological approaches that may be fruitful for other scholars to consider in designing qualitative research with preadolescent participants.

Author

• Margaret McGladrey, University of Kentucky