Abstract
Our paper looks at three popular tween shows premised on tween girls creating digital content—iCarly, Bizaardvark and Coop & Cami Ask the World. Using the theoretical frameworks of critical digital labor studies, girls’ media studies, and feminist theory, we argue that the tween-coms imagine the tween content creator as a post-feminist neoliberal subject in three ways: first, by hiding the labor behind the affective sentiments of play; second, by obscuring the misogynistic structure; and third, by framing childhood digital spaces as separate from adult spheres, legitimizing corporate encroachments into children’s digital lives. The shows are a distillation of the neoliberal, post-feminist ideologies that define late-stage capitalism. The discursive formation of digital girls on children’s television has been overlooked in the field of digital studies and girl studies. Our paper explores how digital content creation is discursively constructed within the cultural imaginaries of children’s media.
Somehow the world will change for me And be so wonderful. . . So, wake up the members of my nation, it’s your time to be You can spend all day on a swing eating a baguette. But why do boring things like that when there’s the internet? Let’s go make some videos! Hey! Hey! Would you rather do this? Would you rather do that? Don’t matter what we do, we’re doing it with you
The lyrics from the theme songs of three popular live-action tween sit-coms (tween-coms) on Disney and Nickelodeon—iCarly (2007–2012), Bizaardvark (2016–2019), and Coop & Cami Ask the World (2018–2020)—reverberate with the rhetoric of girl power. The lyrics reveal vague suggestions for changing the world, resisting social expectations, and making choices—all with the camaraderie of other girls. However, as scholars such as Benjamin (2019), Dosekun (2015), and Butler (2013) remind us, these digital spaces are not the utopias that Disney and Nickelodeon want audiences to believe; the lyrics of these tween-coms theme songs effectively obscure what it means to be a tween girl online.
The main storyline of these three tween-coms follows content creator protagonists each with quirky personalities and a desire to connect with an intimate public of fellow tweens. On iCarly, Carly and her best friend Sam create a weekly web show for the fictional website SplashFace. Frankie and Paige from Bizaardvark produce videos for Vuuugle (a fictionalized YouTube), and on Coop & Cami Ask the World, Cami and her brother Coop crowdsource choices for both mundane and ludicrous questions for their livestreamed web show Would you Wrather? (WyW). Each tween-com portrays girls’ digital content creation as an unproblematic, playful activity, which is in direct contrast to mainstream alarmist narratives on tweens (girls) that often pathologizes their social media use. The shows frame content creation as fun not dangerous, play not labor, and kids’ own rather than adult driven, obscuring many of the realities of being a girl online. Ultimately, the shows validate the neoliberal logics of digital capitalism and post-feminist ideologies for the digital girl.
While the premise of girl digital content creators may be fresh content for Disney and Nickelodeon, the main characters replicate the stale labor conditions of digital creators as neoliberal cultural workers who aspire to build their audiences based on authenticity and affect (Abidin 2018; Duffy 2016). The shows deploy neoliberal feminist ideologies by smoothing over the uncomfortable realities of precarious work in the platform economy (Duguay 2019; Fuchs 2010; O’Meara 2019). The representation of tween content creators in each tween-com reinforces entrepreneurial logics of post-feminism inscribed within the neoliberal subjectivities of the immaterial laborer, replicating what Knotts (2022) has called “the imagined neoliberal subject of the creative child worker.” The tween-coms imagine the tween creative worker as a post-feminist neoliberal subject in three ways: first, by hiding the labor involved in digital content creation behind the affective sentiments of play; second, by obscuring the misogynist realities of being a girl online; and third, by framing childhood digital spaces as separate from adult spheres, legitimizing corporate encroachments into children’s digital lives.
Drawing on critical digital labor studies, girls’ media studies, and feminist theory, we examine the contradictions inherent in the shows. The shows portray a benign kind of social media engagement while concealing the realities of what it means to be a girl creator of digital media. We question how Disney’s and Nickelodeon’s portrayal of tween digital content creation erases labor and at the same time, genders this erasure. Girlhood, as Bettis and Adams (2005) have succinctly argued, is a “construction made and remade through the material realities and discursive practices of the society” and ideal girlhood constantly being rewritten (p. 9). We use critiques of entrepreneurial feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018; Gill 2016) as a lens through which to read the rewriting of the digital girl. These shows are part of a post-feminist digital media culture that “naturalizes tenets of feminism, like women’s ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’” while simultaneously “disregarding feminist politics or community because the work of feminism is perceived as finished” (Rossie 2018, 26). iCarly, Bizaardvark, and Coop & Cami Ask the World contribute to representations of the girl as a neoliberal subject by employing a logic that valorizes individualism and self-responsibility.
Tween Television
With rise of tween girls as a viable audience/market in the 1990s (Coulter 2021), Disney and Nickelodeon began to heavily invest in girlhood to expand their audience share. Nickelodeon first proved that girls could be cast as leads without losing the boy audiences when they premiered Clarissa Explains it All (1991–1994). This trend continued with The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994–1998) and Zoey 101 (2005–2008). By the early 2000s, Disney began to capitalize on the same strategy by creating shows such as Lizzie McGuire (2001–2004), That’s So Raven (2003–2007), and Hannah Montana (2006–2011). The networks did more than “simply exploit the commercial market of girl power,” they were also “significant producer[s] of girl power culture” (Banet-Weiser 2004, 121). They portrayed tween girlhood through the corporate rhetoric of “girl power” which meant individual achievement, personal happiness, and a can-do attitude expressed “through career, fashion, and lifestyle choices” (Projansky 2014, 5). Centering on girl power attracted girl audiences and allowed the networks to maintain their status as global media dominators (Blue 2017).
Girls’ studies scholars (Blue 2017; Kennedy 2018), music scholars (Bickford 2020), and media studies scholars (Bell 2020; Oppliger 2018; Turner 2012) have begun to take up how Disney and Nickelodeon tween-coms discursively rewrote girlhoods. Yet, the literature on girlhood subjectivities in popular culture requires more attention, especially how the digital girl is rewritten. Existing research focuses on either girls themselves as content creators (Abidin 2016a; Bishop 2018) or girls’ use of social media (Keller 2015, 2019). Little research addresses tween girls as content creators within the cultural imaginaries of children’s media aside from Brittney Knott’s enlightening exploration the Nickelodeon show Game Shakers (2015–2019). We begin to fill this void by exploring the discursive constructions of girls’ as digital content creators and how the “contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity” (Knotts 2022) are expressed to young people through tween-coms.
The Shows
Each of the shows iCarly, Bizaardvark, and Coop & Cami Ask the World centers upon young female protagonists who create digital content. The shows have been among the highest rated on their respective networks and have all ranked as the top show in their time slots for tweens aged 9–14. All three shows are on heavy rotation in syndication on cable stations, are available on various streaming services (Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime) and are widely available on digital platforms such as YouTube. While we assess each show separately, we read them together as a specific genre of texts that exemplify girls live-action media and contribute to a particular kind of collective representation of girls’ digital cultures.
Of the three shows, iCarly was the most successful franchise. It premiered on Nickelodeon in September 2007 under the production of veteran producer/creator Dan Schneider (more on him later). Carly Shay (Miranda Cosgrove) and her two best friends Sam (Janette McCurdy) and Freddie (Nathan Karl Kress) produce a weekly web show called “iCarly” from Carly’s home in Seattle where she lives with her artsy brother/legal guardian. After Freddie accidentally uploads a video of Carly and Sam making fun of the school secretary, they go viral and decide to make a weekly web series. By its final season in 2012, iCarly had become one of the highest-rated shows on basic cable with audiences reaching 12.4 million. iCarly also extended its reach on digital platforms. As early as 2007, the show had videos and promotional content available online with some YouTube videos being viewed over 19 million times.
Bizaardvark premiered on Disney Channel in June 2016. This show features tween girls Paige Olvera (Olivia Rodrigo) and Frankie Wong (Madison Hu) hosting a popular digital media channel, Bizaardvark, where they post inane music videos to their 10,000 subscribers on the fictional social platform, Vuuugle. The show follows Paige, Frankie, and their friends as they make content for their Vuuugle channels. Mostly, the show takes place at Vuuugle studios, but in season 3, the duo moves into the Vuuugle house (similar to social media content houses such as the Hype House). The videos produced as part of the show are also posted on the Disney’s website and on YouTube, where they receive as many as 22 million views.
Coop and Cami Ask the World premiered in October 2018, telling the story of tween aged siblings, Coop and Cami Wrather, who use live-streamed, crowd-sourced polling to help them make daily decisions, both playful—“Would you Wrather (sic) eat a disgusting mixture of leftovers or take a bath in it?” (S1:E3)— and serious—“Would you Wrather (sic) embarrass yourself or let down a loved one?” (S1:E12). Cami is a self-identified perfectionist while Coop is more laid-back and oftentimes messes up his stunts or mishandles situations, leaving Cami more or less in charge of decisions for their channel. The main storylines follow Coop and Cami’s online and offline lives as they navigate tweenhood.
The main female characters of the three shows—Carly, Paige, Frankie, and Cami—are typical of mainstream tween shows. They are smart, moral, and goofy. They are the embodiment of the “rhetoric of girl power.” Their enthusiasm, intelligence, high energy, adaptability, and independence subtly reinforce the post-feminist notions that the neoliberal girl can have it all (Projansky 2014, 11–12). On the surface, the shows are politically committed to vague notions of girl power, where the female leads “lean in” to feminist politics with vague assertions of equity. Yet, as Blue (2017) notes, while Disney and Nickelodeon build their tween shows on the silent assumptions of equality, this slowly dissolves under closer inspection, as they indicate “post-feminism at work” (2017, 35). The girls are models of post-feminist subjectivities, framed by neoliberal discourses that emphasize the market logics of entrepreneurialism and self-confidence (Banet-Weiser 2018; Gill 2016; Gill and Orgad 2018). Carly, Paige, Frankie, and Cami exemplify the ideal tween subject that Harris (2004) suggests is an ideal neoliberal citizen: she is “flexible, adaptable, compliant, enthusiastic, intelligent and an energetic participant in commodity consumption, personal responsibility, and mobile work” (p. 6).
Method
The research for this paper was conducted during COVID-19 home quarantine in the spring of 2020 when schools shifted to being fully online. 1 Like many female academics, we struggled with the ability to conduct our academic research in the context of this new reality (LaRochelle et al. 2020). Pressed between the professional stresses of working on a funded research project and the struggles of tween girls staying engaged with online school and being inspired by child-centered participatory research methods (Barker and Weller 2003; Gallacher and Gallagher 2008; Hill 2006; Punch 2002) we enlisted two tween girls as researchers onto the project. These two tweens were enlisted as research informants, not participants. We are drawing on traditions of community-based participatory research (CBPR) that appreciates community members as knowledge holders (Flicker 2007; Israel et al. 2006). Through bringing the tween girls into the research process, we validated their perspectives and experiences as they helped produce new knowledges and perspectives from the position of being the target audience of these shows.
Like most community research projects, we used an iterative approach whereby the research team worked together in an equitable manner; we produced knowledge in a co-learning space (Godrie et al. 2020) that encouraged all of us to learn along the way and take the insights made in each session to build on the next. These sessions were collaborative in nature and included observing, reflecting on, and discussing different episodes of the three television shows with the hopes of coming to a better understanding of what they represented. The tween researchers followed research protocols, watched and coded the shows drawing upon their own expertise, and provided unique insights during the weekly team research meetings that took place over 5 weeks in the spring of 2020.
Using the lens of critical digital labor studies and girls’ media studies, we critically analyzed the overall themes of the shows, as well as what they convey as a specific genre of children’s television. The focus is on the television shows themselves, however, in order to get a complete picture of the scope of each show, we consulted a variety of paratexts available online—such as the show websites, Wiki pages, IMDB descriptions, and episode guides. The paratexts were used to inform a purposeful sampling of 15 episodes that specifically dealt with content creation, from the 209 episodes across all the shows (iCarly: 97 episodes; Coop and Cami Ask the World: 49 episodes; Bizaardvark: 63 episodes). We accessed these episodes on YouTube. We also conducted close readings of 10 episodes per show using random sampling of what aired in Canada on the Nickelodeon affiliate channel YTV and The Disney Channel during our research period. We then coded these according to themes that arose in our weekly discussions.
Guided by a grounded, participatory methodology, we met as a research team weekly to reflect on our analyses of the assigned episodes. In sessions, we focused on key themes including gendered content creators, representations of digital labor, and entrepreneurialism. We used our weekly discussions to shape our focus for the following week. We began with questions like: “How do the shows frame girlhood?” and “How is girlhood experienced in digital spaces?” The research informants reflected critically on the nuances of gender based on their lived experiences. Over the 5 weeks, we developed a vocabulary for naming the contradictions and complications on the shows. Our analysis was ongoing and collaborative throughout our research.
Obscured Labor, Invisible Gender
The theme songs quoted at the opening of this article reverberate with sentiments of fun, adventure, and belonging, where “you” are invited to come along for the ride, as the digital is an intimate site of sociability. Both the songs and the shows themselves portray digital content creation as a fun, playful activity, and a means to express tween creativity while making friends. Like the fashion bloggers analyzed by Duffy and Hund (2015), the shows present a “socially mediated version of self-enterprise” that “obscures labour, discipline and capital” (p. 2). The shows’ protagonists content creation is portrayed as a fun activity effortlessly woven into their everyday lives. We never see Carly, Paige and Frankie, or Cami worry about buying the right technological equipment, or struggling late at night to edit shows. Instead, we see them goofing off in their home studio (iCarly), joking with fellow Vuuuglers while creating videos (Bizaardvark), or popping out to their backyard to finish a livestream before school (Coop & Cami Ask the World). They are always camera ready—never worrying about appearances, rehearsing lines, or storyboarding; they are able to say anything on camera—and the environment is always production-ready. The shows hide the true nature of the work of content creation which, as Abidin (2016a, 2016b) reminds us, is a deeply labor-intensive practice. On the three shows Carly, Paige and Frankie, and Cami produce value for the platforms they post on, while simultaneously masking the actual conditions of such labor, which is largely uncompensated. This portrayal mirrors the experiences of actual content creators (Abidin 2016a, 2016b, 2018; Duffy and Hund 2015; Terranova 2000, 2004).
On the shows, labor is further obscured as compensation is never mentioned. Unsurprisingly, topics such as contracts, corporate alignments, or click-through rates are not part of the storylines. The protagonists never discuss money or monetizing content, despite its centrality to the form. Occasionally, the business and financial aspects of social media are part of a storyline, however, they are treated as comedy. For example, all shows include sponsored content in the storylines without explanation. Coop and Cami start many of their livestreams by saying: “This video is brought to you by. . ..” The sponsor is always a local business such as “Gary’s Optic Barn” or “Gary’s Exotic Pets,” with the joke being Gary’s constantly evolving business ventures. On Bizaardvark (S1 E10), Paige and Frankie get tasked with endorsing fellow Vuuugler’s hair shampoo “Perfect Perfection” at Pretty-Con, a beauty convention, but this venture fails with comedic results. On iCarly, Carly realizes a product she promotes is made by an unethical company forcing her to find a loophole to get out of the sponsorship deal (S1 E18).
The financial workings of social media are treated as frivolous and a distraction from the main purpose of content creation as a fun way to authentically express quirky selfhood. Digital content creation is deemed playful and silly, not work and labor. Part of the humor in the shows is the girl’s naivety and their failure to understand the adult world of business—reinforcing the child/adult boundary. On the rare occasion that characters imply a business acumen, it is negated with a punchline that undercuts their expertise. For example, Paige and Frankie often talk about their goals for the future, which include touring with their Vuuugle videos where they will “swim in pools of $100 bills, yo!” The naivety here belies their business knowledge and reinforces the aspirational nature of the work, with the promise of social and economic capital that is not actually achieved since any gesture toward achieving it is punctured by a joke. By obscuring the financial workings of digital content creation, these tween characters further exemplify Harris’s (2004) tween as an entrepreneurial feminist, flexible and adaptable in mobile work, which is never really acknowledged as work for the tween but produces capital for the fictional digital platforms. The protagonist’s content creation is a form of labor that merges neoliberal ideations of work with play and elements of personal identity exploration, reflecting the neoliberal tensions of content creation.
Hiding unpaid labor behind the artifice of pleasure and fun is in line with legacies of domestic labor. Kylie Jarrett argues that digital labor, like domestic labor, is hidden, unpaid care work. Through the figure of the “digital housewife,” she places the gendered dynamics of digital labor within the pre-existing structures of gendered labor distribution (Jarrett 2015, 3). She calls for the rethinking of forms of “immaterial [and] affective labour that are exploited in the economic circuits of the commercial web” (Jarrett 2015, 3). We draw on Jarrett’s figure of the digital housewife in framing the immaterial and affective labor of content creation as fun and pleasurable, and simultaneously not considered work despite being central to digital capitalism.
The connections between digital housework and traditional housework are not simply metaphorical on these shows: the lead female characters are often responsible for maintaining the domestic space. The adult in Carly’s home is her lovable but inept older brother Spencer, whose failures in the domestic sphere inspire many jokes, while Carly is responsible for the affective labor of solving these domestic mishaps. When Frankie and Paige move into the Vuuugle house for the summer (season 3), they are affectionally called the “moms of the house.” Despite resisting this title, they end up doing housework while the male Vuuuglers play video games. At one point, Frankie and Paige even tell the others when to go to bed. Similarly, Cami is often tasked with looking after her younger brother Ollie, and like Carly, it is often up to her to solve the Wrather family’s problems.
For Carly, this blurring of care and digital work takes place at home which doubles as her studio. The blurring of digital work with care work along with the affective labor of maintaining domestic stasis extends to their roles in the digital sphere. The female lead characters not only take care of keeping their digital channels on track but are also responsible for creative direction and general orderliness. For example, after not making the dance team, Cami quits WyW to take a break from her chaotic life (S1 E20). Coop struggles to keep WyW afloat—even though he states that “the show is in very good hands.” But without Cami, the props fall apart and storylines breakdown until Cami eventually returns to fix WyW and restore its image (S1 E21).
Jarrett’s figure of the digital housewife is reminiscent of Ahmed’s (2010) 1950s happy housewife as a “fantasy figure [that] erases the signs of labour under the signs of happiness” (p. 5). For Ahmed, the public fantasy that women perform unwaged labor for the happiness of herself and her family functions to obscure the exploitative reliance on free labor that keeps capitalism running. For tween girls, the promise of happiness is articulated as a promise of fun (Coulter 2021). Carly and Sam, Frankie and Paige, and Coop and Cami create digital content because it is fun, a space outside of the scrutinizing world of adults, where the girls can playfully engage in silly antics such as dressing up as chocolate covered bananas (Bizaardvark) or catapulting people out of DIY contraptions (Coop & Cami Ask the World). For tween girls, it is the promises of fun outside of the confines of adult expectations that hide the free labor, a twist on the fashion bloggers of Duffy’s (2017) groundbreaking scholarship, where fashion bloggers work for the aspirational promise of social and economic capital, what she calls the “siren call to get paid to do what you love” (p. x).
For the tween protagonists, the promise is not in future compensation, as that would complicate the middle-class moral code that children are not workers. A running plot on each show is the character’s clumsy attempts to increase their viewership/followership with the clumsiness functioning as a plot tool to discount the girls as serious workers. Instead, the girls are promised fun with an intimate public of viewers. There are many episodes in which the digital intimacy with a girls’ public provides affective compensation. For example, Paige and Frankie introduce a segment on their channel where they answer viewer questions, hoping “to have a positive impact on their lives” (S3 E16), while Coop and Cami’s 100,000+ followers—the Wratherheads—answer polls and help them solve problems including finding their lost brother at a mall (S1 E6). It is the promise of affective compensation, not economic, that demarcate these tween subjects as ideal neoliberal citizens, “enthusiastically” and “energetically” (Harris 2004) participating in the platform economies of digital capitalism.
Post-Feminism and Glossy Misogyny
In typical neoliberal fashion, the affective promises of “solving problems” and “improving lives” is inherently empty as it only applies to the character’s articulations of their own digital content and does not extend to the Disney and Nickelodeon shows themselves. The shows gloss over the to the mediated abuse that girls can face when online (Keller et al. 2018) such as trolling (Bishop 2014), targeted messages of sexualized violence (Henry and Powell 2016), and digital and physical stalking and hate speech (Daniels 2008). The shows also ignore the potential of online spaces for feminist activism movements like #feminism, #metoo, or #blacklivesmatter. Instead, Disney and Nickelodeon frame any threats to girls online as simply silly, benign annoyances at best and non-existent at worst.
Followers and fans are presented as supportive, helpful, and positive. The girls are rarely apprehensive about sharing their personal details online including information of their homes and schools, other members of their family, and their everyday whereabouts. The shows do address “superfans,” whose “passion” is framed as annoying and a little creepy but mostly misunderstood. For example, iCarly’s “superfan” Mandy Valdez follows Carly and Sam incessantly and refuses to leave them alone (S1 E13), but in the next season (S2 E16) Mandy reappears to help save the iCarly webseries from being canceled. On Bizaardvark, superfan Belissa engages in what many would consider disturbing activities such as collecting the girls’ hair or going through their garbage, yet she is also the webmaster of the fan site “I Heart Vark” and becomes a recurring character whose unwavering passion for the show is eventually appreciated by Frankie and Paige.
These storylines mirror rape culture in multiple ways: the superfan characters are decidedly not stalkers, their obsession is not read as an act of danger but an act of love. Additionally, the main characters eventually come to appreciate the passion of the misunderstood superfan instead of feeling threatened. Rendering the superfan as an annoyingly overzealous girl, and not a hateful, misogynistic male troll, denies the reality of toxic masculinity (Banet-Weiser 2018). Through the lens of post-feminist logics, the shows illustrate the empowering possibilities of girls as content creators for their own digital spaces, while denying the dangers of being female in these spaces—spaces where girls experience cyberbullying and body shaming at disproportionate rates (Benjamin 2019). Also erased from the storylines is the reality of how mediated misogyny is often compounded by racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism (Manne 2017; Slater and Liddiard 2018), which are built into social media algorithms.
Most of the characters on the shows (Carly, Sam, and Cami) are white, straight, cis-gendered, able bodied, and privileged. As such, they are an example of Angela McRobbie’s notion of the double entanglement where “certain privileged white, cis-gendered women are able to come forward and participate in public life on the condition that they withhold critique of patriarchy” (as cited in Mendes et al. 2019, 9). Frankie and Paige, who are Asian and Latinx respectively, also affirm the continuation of the status quo rarely acknowledging their racialized identities or calling attention to sexism or racism.
The tween girls on these shows exemplify a post-feminist subjectivity—as outlined by Gill (2017) and Banet-Weiser (2018)—that skims over or erases feminist struggles and relegates toxic masculinity as irrelevant, inconsequential, and silly. In the rare instance that the shows touch on these topics, it is quickly brushed off. For example, in iCarly (S2 E18)
Here at iCarly, we get about 4,000 e-mails a week.
And about half of those e-mails are sent in by one guy named Chad from Wisconsin. What’s the matter with you, Chad?
Don’t be mean, Chad loves us.
Yeah, and I love pork, but you don’t see me sending 2,000 e-mails a week to Mr. Piggles.
. . .
Okay, so our fan Chad asked Sam, Freddie and I, if we would each draw a picture of a bunny and show ‘em right here on iCarly.
You got a lot of problems, Chad.
But we did draw bunnies just for you.
This exchange encapsulates the neoliberal framings of girlhood. Carly performs the affective work of ensuring niceness and not challenging toxic masculinity. To anyone online, 2000 emails a week is not love; it is terrifying. Sam—the sharp-tongued, quirky sidekick, often referred to as a “tomboy” for not adhering to the strict codes of girl culture—sees the danger and calls it out, only to have it downplayed by Carly who reminds Sam not to be mean and acquiesces to Chad’s request for a bunny drawing. The message here is clear: girls must be nice. Sam is often a foil to post-feminism as she calls out bad behavior but is brushed off as an overreaction or misinterpretation of male behavior. One of the running gags on the show is that Sam often misinterprets situations as dangerous and responds in the extreme, only for it to be revealed later that she misunderstood the situation.
The glossing over of rape culture in these shows extends beyond the show’s storylines and into the production realities of iCarly. Dan Schneider is the producer and creator of many of Nickelodeon’s live action tween shows. 2 He has faced public accusations dating back to 2011 of sexual assault of the child stars of his shows (Andreeva 2018; Shukman 2018; Yahr 2018). Allegations that Schneider has sexualized tween star’s feet was amplified when the Twitter account for Sam and Cat (a spinoff of iCarly) asked fans to tweet pictures of the bottoms of their feet. Schneider’s shows notoriously contain scenes where the lead characters massage, stroke, and in at least one instance squirt ketchup on, people’s feet. These scenes are presented as part of Nickelodeon’s whacky comedy but become a more sinister form of sexual assault when read against Schneider’s well-documented foot fetish (O’Reilly 2018). In 2018, Nickelodeon abruptly cut ties with Schneider and his production company, Schneider’s Bakery. Despite multiple allegations at the time of writing this article, 3 Schneider has been spared from being held accountable in any meaningful way. Girl fans have been denied the opportunity for the collective feminism of a #metoo movement against Schneider. By glossing over such issues, Disney and Nickelodeon miss an opportunity to show girls the possibilities of digital feminist activisms (Mendes et al. 2019) and instead reinforce the idea that these toxic behaviors should not be taken seriously. Girls should, as Carly stated, “not be mean” as the toxic behavior is because men, like Chad, “love them” A statement that becomes even more disturbing when it comes to light that the show’s 50-year-old creator was engaging in such forms of toxic behavior to his young female stars who were in their early teens at the time.
Exclusive Kid Spaces
A long-standing trope of tween live comedy is the absent or clueless parent/adult figure that creates a vacuum where kids can takeover. This trope has been central in Nickelodeon’s programming since the early 2000s, and it has generated an imagined state of childhood oppression through the constant reiteration of a cultural divide between adults and children (Banet-Weiser 2007, 91). As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, in much of Nickelodeon’s programming young people are active audiences, separate from adults. Nickelodeon’s success was built on a branded rhetoric of an empowered child audience that pushes back against adults who just “don’t get it” with their rigid rules and patronizing ways of talking to kids. Nickelodeon “promotes and sells the generational divide as the most important power struggle in a child’s life” and suggests that the salve to this divide is for children to watch Nickelodeon’s brand of kids’ empowerment (p. 86). Such brand of empowerment fits the corporate logic of media-savvy kids who do not need supervision and guidance in their media consumption. Kids know more about what to consume, and Nickelodeon talks to them directly, giving them what they want in a way that appeals to their unique sense of humor and desires (Banet-Weiser 2007). This successful approach was later adapted by the Disney Channel franchises that cater to tween audiences (Blue 2017).
The rhetoric of a “savvy” child consumer is leveraged by media companies to justify their incursions into children’s worlds. The savvy child’s specific needs and desires are distinct from adults and can only be met by a company like Nickelodeon or Disney that “gets” the child consumer. The partnership between child and company allows the child to appreciate their unique subjectivity, separate from adulthood (Banet-Weiser 2007; Cook 2011). This framing also legitimates the expansion of children’s marketing and media in children’s media consumption (Cook 2011). The idea that children are unique citizens justifies the need for entire TV stations to cater to their specific subjectivities and distinct desires.
This idea extends beyond the underlying branded logic of the stations to the content of the shows where the digital space provides respite from the controlling regulations of the largely incompetent adult world. For example, on iCarly (S1 E1), the web series is created accidentally after a vindictive secretary, Ms. Briggs, forces Carly and Sam to videotape the auditions for the school talent show. Instead, the girls’ friend Freddy accidently uploads their insults about Ms. Briggs, which go viral. Carly realizes the opportunity and suggests an online weekly web show to Sam because, as she explains, “it can be whatever we want it to be! No adults to say you can’t do this, you can’t do that! We can do whatever we want! Say whatever we want!”. On Bizaardvark, Liam is the of owner of Vuuugle but only appears as a head on a tablet screen attached to a robot. Like Ms. Briggs, Liam is inefficient and inept, and his terrible ideas for improving Bizaardvark are easily thwarted by Frankie and Paige. The only positive central adult figure on the three shows is Jenna Wrather, the well-meaning widowed mother from Coop and Cami Ask the World. While she is not bumbling like the other shows’ adults, she is often helpful in solving the central episode problem, even if she does not really understand the digital space and operations of the Wrather’s livestream and leaves the siblings alone to manage the show.
The core narrative of each show is that the digital provides a respite from the adult world of expectations, where kids can “do whatever they want,” to quote Carly. The digital is a space of one’s own, providing the tweens with a twenty-first-century twist on Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own”; a space that “inspires independence, freedom of thought, and ownership over one’s body and thoughts” outside of the adult world (Banet-Weiser 2007, 7). The digital spaces on the shows are framed as spaces of personal autonomy isolated from the tensions and regulations imposed by adults. The digital functions as a place for kids to confuse the adult order; children are the authority, and they can evade the limits and expectations imposed on them by adult society (James 1998). For example, iCarly’s web show is popular because they posted all the videos rejected by Ms. Briggs, such as the “kid who can squirt milk out of his eye” or the video of a kid playing a trumpet while jumping on a pogo stick. On Bizaardvark, the point of the channel is to make absurd music videos such as “Oops Wrong Emoji” (S1 E13), “Worst Lullaby Ever” (S2 E6) and “Interrupted Rap” (S2 E19). On Coop & Cami Ask the World, the characters perform stunts such as being a human toothbrush (S1 E4) and/or bathing in a kitchen sink full of leftovers (S1 E3).
As cultural intermediaries of children’s culture, Nickelodeon and Disney must do the work of justifying the child as an agentive being and savvy consumer, deserving a separate market uniquely distinct from adult spheres (Cook 2011). The narrative that kids need a “room of their own” justifies the incursion of the commercial media companies such as Disney and Nickelodeon into children’s worlds as they provide young people with their own spaces that are tailored to their own needs, as consumers, not as political actors. The child’s “room of their own” is not a space of political agency and action, but a space of provided by the market to meet kids’ needs as consumers. The agentive actor being catered to is a savvy consumer not an astute political actor (Banet-Weiser 2007, 76).
This separation of the child from the adult further legitimates the neoliberal tension of obscuring the financial and labor components of content creation as part of the rigid confines of adult rules and structures, which are inane and illogical according to the network’s narratives (Banet-Weiser 2007). While at the same time, the separation solidifies market incursions into to these worlds. Nickelodeon and Disney define what is meant by empowerment and agency for young people while the digital platforms are all created and shaped by adults. The narrative of the shows reveals the neoliberal tensions of the digital as both a site of freedom and autonomy away from controlling gaze of adults, while simultaneously legitimizing corporate media’s encroachment into children’s cultures.
Conclusion
While the theme songs of three tween-coms are catchy and upbeat, the storylines of the shows draw on the narrative resources of late-stage capitalism—technology, social media, individual “choice”—to illustrate the utopias of aspirational labor in ways that normalize the precarious states of work and play (Duffy 2016). iCarly, Bizaardvaark, and Coop & Cami Ask the World are part of a post-feminist digital media culture that reifies a utopian vision the platform economy as a playful digital space separate from corporate interests and devoid of the oppressive forces of misogyny, racism, and transphobia. The girls’ content creation is never acknowledged as labor, nor are the girls ever positioned as laborers.
From the opening credits we are drawn into the girls’ worlds, championing the character’s journey to create digital girls’ communities. Yet, once we begin to pull back and look closer, these shows reinforce, reiterate, and re-write the digital girl within the post-feminist neoliberal logics of digital capitalism that obscure one side of digital girlhood (labor, misogyny, and adult control) while rendering another side hyper-visible (play, fun, and kids only). This is refracted in the theme songs: iCarly calls out “so wake up the members of my nation, it’s your time to be”; Paige and Frankie invite us to “go make some videos”; and Coop and Cami claim, “Don’t matter what we do, we’re doing it with you.” Each song implies that the digital is a collective, safe, accessible, and enjoyable space for everyone, as long as the kids are doing it together. The songs suggest they are kid spaces, a space of one’s own, while justifying corporate incursions into these spaces by reflecting and refracting Disney’s and Nickelodeon’s corporate interests. The shows are a perfect distillation of the neoliberal, post-feminist ideologies that define late-stage capitalism. By showing the discursive constructs of digital girls, we hope to open wider questions on tween girls’ digital rights as content creators and content workers. While iCarly, Bizaardvark and Would You Wrather are all fictional content sites created by fictional digital girls, there needs to be more scholarship on the ways that such popular discourses shape narratives about what it means to be a girl online.
This project could not have been completed without the insightful research from our co-researchers, Cambie Hammond and Kaia Parekh. Their work pushed our arguments further and they were integral to the project. Thank you both and we wish you could have been listed as contributing authors.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430-2019-00687).
