Abstract
It is difficult to avoid the turn of phrase—Spectacular Girls is a spectacular book, yet Sarah Projansky’s thesis is so deftly and convincingly argued that I cannot resist. This new contribution to the emerging field of girls studies is spectacular not in the way Projansky uses the term—as an indication of racialized, often fraught, and frequently sensationalized forms of visibility—but for its careful argumentation, its movement across multiple areas of inquiry, its engagement with several bodies of theory (including celebrity studies, film studies, and feminist studies), and its use of multiple methodologies. Projansky’s ambitious book engages with the concept of the girl as a major, and often underanalyzed, media figure that serves as a touchstone for contemporary anxieties about identity, agency, race, and sexuality. Noting that the concept of the girl has varying meanings dependent on context and historical specificity, she demarcates a zone of girls primarily marked by age.
Projansky argues that the collective conversation that emerges around the figure of the girl is often rife with tensions between adoration and abhorrence, cohering to create a field of ambivalent representations that give voice to both fetishistic desire and phobic derision. In her words, “Media contribute to the creation of the at-risk narrative, produce a moral panic about the girl figure at the center of that narrative, and then—through the process of worrying—perpetuate the very depictions of girls about which they worry.” In the context of this tendency to spectacularize girls, and thus keep them at the center of a cultural gaze, Projansky is especially concerned about those girls who do not exist in media culture, appear only as sidekicks or other peripheral characters, or serve as cautionary tales of unacceptable girlhood.
Projansky opens the book with a very helpful overview of the way that girls studies, media culture, and celebrity studies speak to one another in critical ways. She is particularly persuasive in her argument that celebrity studies can no longer afford to overlook the category of the girl in its study of either female stars or fan cultures. Using Tatum O’Neal as her major case study of the chapter, Projansky deftly demonstrates how the youngest winner of the Academy Award was often portrayed as existing in a set of ironic binaries: child/adult and masculine/feminine. Press accounts depicted O’Neal as both eroticized and in danger due to that sexuality, and these competing associations inserted O’Neal into a metonym for whiteness and girlhood more broadly, in that she herself became the very evidence for why precocious white girlhood requires perpetual surveillance and protective governance.
Chapter two offers a very helpful content analysis of girls who appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and People between 1990 and 2012. Projansky identifies three emergent typologies of these covers: (1) athletes, teen celebrities, and children of political figures (can-do girls); (2) dead, kidnapped, and rescued girls (girls as victims); and (3) symbolic girls who represent some social ill or good (nameless girls). Chapter three gives readers a reading of several twenty-first-century films with girls at their center, examining not so much the major films but from her perspective, the most telling ones. Indeed, Projansky is clear throughout her study that the selection of case study materials for greater analysis and elaboration is often based on their peripheral relation to popularity, since it is through these outlying cases, what Projansky calls the “contentious or alternative moments,” that the dynamics adhering to race, sexuality, and gender can more accurately be traced and gleaned. Chapter four turns to the girl sports star, taking Venus Williams as a rich model for the negotiations over athleticized girlhood and racialized celebrity. Since “race” seemingly has nothing to do with Williams’ extraordinary tennis playing abilities, argues Projansky, viewers are free to revel in her body as something seemingly detached from social, cultural, and historical contexts.
Chapters five and six turn from media culture to social events and phenomena. Projansky takes up the violent death of Sakia Gunn, a lesbian teenager who was killed in a 2003 attack in Newark, New Jersey. She argues that Gunn’s murder was unevenly mediated, with great local interest and relatively little national attention, a fact that makes her and her case simultaneously visible and invisible. In chapter six, Projansky turns to an actual third-grade class, offering an on-the-ground media ethnography that examines how girls interact with and make sense of media representations of girlhood.
Overall, the book is rich and provocative, and I read it with much interest. If at times I wished the chapters talked to one another a bit more, I left the book grateful for its diverse methodologies and examples and for the rich discussion on race, girlhood, and media culture that Projansky offers with clarity and persuasive verve.