Abstract
Girls’ identities and roles as consumers have been increasingly discussed in popular media and academic scholarship. Much of this debate surrounds how a hyperconsumerist culture negatively impacts girls’ sexualities and young femininities. MacDonald’s book thus comes at a time where tween girls, their consumption and consumer identities have become increasingly visible. Located in between childhood and teenhood, MacDonald highlights how girls of this age often form the topic of concern, as they are framed as unaware of the risks and deeper implications of what they want to buy.
However, MacDonald argues that such an understanding can be myopic. Tween girls’ consumption is not solely appearance based, and their consumption behaviours may be highly intertwined with their desires to develop some sense of belonging. She underscores how girls may find a need to own certain consumer products, in order to be seen and heard among their peers.
Furthermore, in recognizing that the meanings and values girls attach to their consumption practices may not necessarily be those that adults ascribe, MacDonald conducts an ethnography with 13 girls, aged 11 to 12. In addition to spending an entire year in a predominantly white, middle-class primary school in Melbourne, Australia, she attended most of the girls’ extracurricular activities. Through this period of time spent with tween girls both in and outside of school, MacDonald makes the argument that despite the glittery and sparkly world presented to girls by consumer-media, it is important to note that girls still lead ordinary lives. MacDonald’s way of conceptualizing ‘ordinary’ reminds both readers and scholars on girlhood to avoid a ‘spectacularization’ (Projansky, 2014) of girls’ consumption. She explains that it is difficult to argue that consumer-media fully accounts for girls’ proclivities to consume, with it being more significant than the localized social and cultural contexts that young Australian girls grow up in.
More specifically, MacDonald suggests that girls’ emerging role as consumers should be understood beyond the global commercial landscape because she found that rather than girls visiting shopping malls with an aim to consume, their trips to malls blended with their desires for friendship, autonomy and independence from their families. Through in-depth conversations with girls, MacDonald makes an important contribution to scholarship by noting that there is a need to make a distinction between the art of consuming and the act of consumption when examining girls’ consumption practices. In theorizing shopping centres and malls as ‘theatres of their day’, MacDonald highlights how trips to these places helped girls develop their social and cultural identities. Rather than fuelled by an intent to consume, girls’ visits to the malls were made in effort to build stronger friendships.
Apart from their visits to the malls, most of the girls that MacDonald spoke to revealed that they wanted to participate in more popular forms of digital culture. MacDonald notes that girls’ desires for social media were also influenced by how some of these platforms were owned by other family members, but not by the girls themselves. Most of the girls wanted smart phones, to be on Facebook and MSN, knowing that their older sisters had access to the same things. Nonetheless, through the extended conversations with the girls in her study, MacDonald found that their desires for technology and social media were a mismatch with what their parents thought girls their age should engage with.
The girls in Macdonald’s study explained that their parents were afraid of the dangers that they might be opening up themselves to, if they were granted full access to technology or digital platforms at their age. MacDonald illuminates that this was also informed by the moral panic surrounding children’s roles as consumers of digital culture. However, the girls in MacDonald’s study showed that they were not passive consumers of digital culture. They mentioned that they were aware of the dangers that lurk online and expressed that they knew how to deal with such problems, should they arise.
Furthermore, the girls in MacDonald’s study asserted that they were not interested in communicating with strangers or the other boys from school. They mainly wanted technology and to use social media sites to extend their girl-friendships outside the domain of school. On this note, MacDonald makes an important point that parents are most of the time unaware of how their influence and control can deeply impact girls’ negotiations of friendship. It was also through the responses of ‘not yet’, ‘next year’ or ‘you are too young’ that tween girls’ liminal position of being in between childhood and teenhood was amplified by adults, which contributed to their frustrations.
In her later chapters, MacDonald further contextualizes girls’ consumption by examining the spaces in school that girls usually negotiate their friendships in and the importance of friends within their social worlds. While it would have been useful to present these findings earlier in this monograph, MacDonald’s field notes are crucial in revealing the limited informal spaces in school that girls usually conduct their friendships in, away from the scrutiny their parents. Such findings indicate why certain girls in her study may yearn for technology or social media to expand and extend their girl-friendships.
In synthesizing both global and local meanings of what it means to be a preteen girl, MacDonald’s book provides a crucial input to studies of girlhood. Her work reveals that while it is often taken-for-granted that tween girls are preoccupied with consuming, it is presumptuous to assume that all girls easily adopt and engage with this tween-age identity. Additionally, MacDonald asserts that while the role of the family is often relegated to the background in most research concerning girls, it would be useful to bring this paradigm back to the centre when analysing girls’ consumption. She argues girls’ desires for certain consumer products were strongly informed, yet mitigated by the adults in their everyday lives.