Lil’ Gangstas and Good Girls: Tween Girls’ Racial Performances Online

• In Event: 4167 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Children & Youth Roundtable 6: Adolescent Education

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the importance of tween girls’ visibility on social media through a lens of racial identity. In particular, I explore how the historical contexts and stereotypes associated with racial differences and girlhood related to body image, sexuality, and behavior, mediate the risks and rewards of social media visibility for tween girls. In a society where being a “good girl” is directly connected to being pretty, it follows that girls place a great deal on emphasis on this connection, often equating pretty with being likeable, valuable, and otherwise “good.” But what it means to be a “pretty girl” becomes more complex when taking race and racial subjectivities into account. In this chapter, I consider how tween girls “do race” on social media by analyzing performances of race in the Pretty or Ugly trend (Butler 1990; Butler 2013; Markus and Moya 2010; West and Zimmerman 1987). I also discuss how postfeminism plays a critical role in shaping these racial performances, especially in regards to the choices girls make in presenting themselves in the videos. Notably, some white girls exhibit and appropriate Black culture within the trend, while some Black girls embody Black respectability politics that allow them to survive in a culture that associates ideal femininity and being a “pretty girl” with whiteness. However, many Black girls are also rejecting these notions of ideal femininity, and “doing race” on social media in ways that center and celebrate the myriad experiences and realities of what it means to be both Black and a girl.

Author

• Katherine A. Phelps, University of Massachusetts-Boston