Girls, Moral Panic and News Media

Sharon R. Mazzarella (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Professor of Communication Studies at James Madison University. Her research focuses on youth culture and mass media, specifically in the field of Girls’ Studies. She is editor or co-editor of seven academic collections, and her published articles have appeared in a range of communication, gender, and popular culture journals.

• IntroductionChapter One: Constructing "Ophelias": Time Magazine, Neoliberalism, and the Next Female GenerationChapter Two: "Precious Years . . . Lost": Early Puberty and the Discourse of Sexualization Chapter Three: "The Perfect Storm": Constructing the Gloucester High School Pregnancy PactChapter Four: American Girls & Sex: Manufacturing a Crisis around Girls and Social MediaChapter Five: "The Media Loves Emma González": Activism, Celebrification, and Intersecting Conclusion: Making Sense of "The Grand Narrative"

Through a transnational, intersectional and transmedia tour de force, Sharon Mazzarella provides us with an accessible yet thoroughly sophisticated engagement with girls and the media. The prism of moral panics provides an ideal conceptual tool with which to explore issues of neoliberalism, social media, sexualization, teen pregnancy pacts, and the celebrification of Emma Gonzalez. I will assign this book as soon as it is in print and recommend that anyone teaching Media Studies, popular culture, gender and media, and/or girls studies do so as well. Angharad N. Valdivia, Research Professor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Editor, The International Encyclopedia of Media StudiesTroublesome Bodies makes a significant and important contribution to the field of girls’ studies by contextualizing the journalistic practice of framing girls as troublesome within a broad array of scholarship on girls. She skillfully draws upon the scholarship in the history of girls in her analysis of a series of five contemporary case studies of media constructions of girls, and girls’ bodies as troublesome. Troublesome Bodies is lively, insightful, and full of rich details on the mainstream news’s fascination and obsession with girls; or as Mazzeralla rightly points out, with only some girls. Mazzarella’s writing is engaging and a joy to read as she brilliantly dissects the implications of girls’ narrow representations in the mainstream press. The book is an illuminating study of the expectations, implications and provocations of contemporary girlhood. Natalie Coulter, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, York University; author of Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market