Tweens

This paper discusses the social construction of the concept tween and whether this concept can be useful when engaging in research with children in the ages of 8–12. The paper will start by describing social construction, from there, the paper will move on to everyday concepts, before discussing the concept tweens as a theoretical and empirical concept. A question to be asked is: is the tween an everyday concept? Who or what constructs tweens? As the concept derived from marketing efforts (Cook and Kaiser 2004; Sørenssen 2014) another question becomes: should we use it as academics and general public? And if we do use the concept, what do we gain or possibly lose when using the term? What are the possible limits or benefits tied to engaging with this concept?

My paper explores the contested and liminal cultural space of tween music by focusing on one of the genres biggest stars, Miley Cyrus. Tween music inhabits a cultural space between traditional notions of childhood and adolescence and is aggressively marketed to a core demographic of girls aged between 6 and 12. Tween has been accused not only of the up-aging of childhood, but also of the down-aging and infantilisation of adulthood. My paper attempts to explain the media's and increasingly, academia's fascination with Cyrus, and the contrasting responses to her onstage performances, recordings and promotional videos. Commentators have noted how her videos and performances either empower young women and girls by redefining the narrow and stereotypical definitions of young female sexuality policed by the media, or, they merely reinforce hetero-patriarchal constructions of gender expectations, thus reinforcing stereotypes and disempowering young women. An analysis of Cyrus' singing voice begins to explain this fascination. As an ex-child star, she is often perceived to be precociously sexualised, 'too sexy too soon'. Children, especially girls, with adult mannerisms have long aroused the interest of the record-buying and cinema-viewing public. The combination of 'grown-up' gestures with childlike attributes, contextualised by socially prescribed constructions of innocence has led to the eroticisation of child stars such as Shirley Temple, Brenda Lee, and Judy Garland. The frequent conflation of Cyrus' on-screen and on-stage personae also contribute to media responses. The paper draws on Kristeva's ideas of intertextuality to explain the largely-binary representations of Cyrus. To the media, Cyrus and other young female tween stars such as Ariana Grande are either angel or devil, innocent or knowing, virginal or slutty. Social constructions of innocence and its protection inform such responses. I present a taxonomy of vocal attributes that contribute to aural perceptions of aging. The mismatch between Cyrus' low voice and her childlike appearance contributes to the perceptions of premature sexualisation and perceived loss of innocence that are central to mainstream media narratives. Her resonant and aurally 'damaged' voice defies expectations of gender, age and perhaps, sexuality. Through textual and contextual analysis of the pitch and timbre of Cyrus' voice, combined with ideas from McClary, I propose that Cyrus is able to transgress a number of sexual personae, from the street wise young teen in Hannah Montana, to the raunchy young adult of her post-transition career. Cyrus' voice, I argue, subverts normative notions of childhood (especially female childhood) where purity of tone signifies innocence, and its absence spells knowingness, lived experience and an encroachment of adulthood into childhood. I draw on Brackett's discussions of how the person, persona and character combine, and how the voice, and the biography of the vocalist become symbiotically linked. A consideration of musical genre suggests that pop, and the obvious auto-tuning of Cyrus' voice on recordings, confines Cyrus to a particular media narrative which contrasts to other child singers such as 14 year olds Ari Up of

In this article I use four middle-grade novels to query the relationship between gendered forms of childhood and gender nonconformity in tweens. For the young characters in these novels, objects and spaces of gender enfranchise-ment—including gendered forms of childhood—are often out of reach. Using conceptual tools such as the orientation of objects, queer futures, and the trans-gender gaze, this work examines the ways in which these novels narrate their main characters' yearning for things that will make their gender identities legible, and how they, as agentic subjects, attempt to take revenge on the rules and structures of gender normativity.

For forty years the novel by Stephen King has been exploited in the cinema and on television TEN times according to my reckoning. It has become a saga, even if all episodes are not equal. It is based on Biblical allusions via the names of the characters but the metaphor it contains is at times very loose. Yet this long series of films targets teens and tweens. What on earth is the reason why they are so fascinated by this CORN, this direct reference to the Maize God of many Amerindians, a God that requires a lot of blood? Any question? I will answer if you provide me with two ounces of blood, and eventually a pound of flesh.

In the early twenty-first century, female pre-teen consumers in the Western world, in other words those aged eight to eleven years old, make up a notable proportion of the 'pop' market. Recent research has suggested that girls both voice 'specific preferences for popular music and listen to popular music in significantly larger numbers than do boys' (Einerson 1998: 244). This paper is an exploration of this phenomenon. Drawing upon my ethnographic research with seven girls aged eight to eleven years old, I am exploring exactly how these pre-teen girls use popular music to construct cultural identities. By examining the ways in which popular music was consumed and produced by a number of these girls, I argue that music is a key vehicle for the expression and contestation of cultural identities at both a collective and personal level.

Il target tween è estremamente affascinante per il suo stretto legame col marketing: gli studiosi di teoria del consumo ritengono che gli operatori di marketing abbiano contribuito in maniera sostanziale, insieme ad altri fattori di natura demografica e sociale, alla creazione del target tween. Nel momento in cui i preadolescenti sono stati riconosciuti come un target a sé stante e con potere economico, sono diventati un mercato a cui sono stati indirizzati prodotti e contenuti specifici.
Cosa guardano i preadolescenti di oggi? Qual è l’offerta mediale che viene loro riservata? Quali sono le caratteristiche di questo target che influenzano la creazione e la promozione dei prodotti? Si può parlare di tween movie come un genere cinematografico dotato di autonomia? In che modo la partecipazione dei preadolescenti all’interno dei fandom influenza le strategie di comunicazione delle media conglomerates? All’interno dell’elaborato si cerca di dare risposta a tali domande avvalendosi di contributi provenienti da diversi settori disciplinari, quali la sociologia dell’infanzia e della famiglia, la storia e l’economia dei media e gli studi sulla teoria dei consumi e sul marketing per il prodotto audiovisivo.

Prior studies have shown how knowledge diffusion occurs in classrooms and structured small groups around assigned tasks yet have not begun to account for widespread knowledge sharing in more native, unstructured group settings found in online games and virtual worlds. In this paper, we describe and analyze how an insider gaming practice spread across a group of tween players ages 9–12 years in an after-school gaming club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world called Whyville.net. In order to understand how this practice proliferated, we followed the club members as they interacted with each other and members of the virtual world at large. Employing connective ethnography to trace the movements in learning and teaching this practice, we coordinated data records from videos, tracking data, field notes, and interviews. We found that club members took advantage of the different spaces, people, and times available to them across Whyville, the club, and even home and classroom spaces. By using an insider gaming practice, namely teleporting, rather than the more traditional individual person as our analytical lens, we were able to examine knowledge sharing and diffusion across the gaming spaces, including events in local small groups as well as encounters in the virtual world. In the discussion, we address methodological issues and design implications of our findings.

The dynamic nature of contemporary society has revealed the emergence of groups that need to be considered from a perspective that transcends evolutionary, formative or folkloric analysis. Today, thanks
to the combination of a broad ethnomusical perspective and new observational perspectives on minors deriving from gender studies, we are able to observe the shades of complexity within children as a group. But who are tween girls and boys? What kind of music products do they consume? Aged between 9 and 13, tween girls and boys possess specific evolutionary and psychological characteristics that predispose them to specific habits of music consumption that differ from those of other digital natives. From our perspective, these habits have a close relationship with the characteristics of the sound, production and distribution of the items consumed and whose useful life span is limited by their functionality. This article puts forward an initial analysis of the
characteristics of some music products designed for tween girls and boys as part of a project looking at consumer habits of this group in the Barcelona metropolitan area. In doing so, it seeks to complement Tyler
Bickford’s research (2008, 2012 and 2014) on identity and music listening habits of tween girls and boys from a new angle that examines both the sound itself and the new context of Web 3.0.

During the first decade of this century, various discourses within the Brazilian context, celebrated the image of savvy children consuming “like adults” and providing adults with technological know-how. This is the starting point to investigate the recent creation of tweens, boys and girls between childhood and adolescence, by undermining this supposed phase of life and having a genesis of this subject pre-teen, stemming from the possible conditions of its emergence, all within a youth culture. Based on Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity, the article underlines arguments linking the changes in the conception of the modern individual to the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity in contemporary societies, articulating them to media discourses constituting tweens. Such communication processes give voice to children, contributing thus to the social construction of their autonomy.

Keywords: Tweens. Pre-Adolescents. Autonomy. Modernity

Characterised as immature, hysterical, and obsessive, fangirls are routinely dismissed in mainstream media coverage (Click 2010; Nash and Lahti 1999) and by fans themselves (Bury 2005; Healey 2009). This paper forms a case study of an iCarly LiveJournal community, exploring the various ways in which young female fans discordantly negotiate, defend, and legitimise their fangirl culture and performance in light of negative cultural constructions of the fangirl.

Initially, fangirling was expressly welcomed, predicated on an assumed, communal understanding to what claiming the term for themselves, and labeling their performance as such, indicated within this space. Fangirling then became a potential source of fan shame, or at least a riskier pleasure, when Schneider, the tween sitcom’s creator/producer, later joined the community. While inter-fandom usually refers to disparate fan groups (Busse 2013; Hills 2012; Williams 2013), here I consider an inter-fandom dynamic in terms of fans of the same fan object but in different fan spaces. In the context of Schneider’s arrival, I explore the ways in which fans aligned themselves with, invoked, and repurposed fangirl stereotypes as a defence strategy to protect themselves from outside judgement and, as a bid for status, to elevate or distinguish their iCarly community from those outside LiveJournal. With a surge of new members following the producer’s entrance, this position was then reversed; new internal hierarchies were formed and intra-fandom (Stanfill 2013) distinctions made by existing members seeking to distance themselves from “entitled”, unsocialised fangirls, whose performances were left unmarked and were thus at risk of disparagement.

I argue that when claimed for the self, “fangirl” functioned to demonstrate one’s belonging and value or status in the community, yet when applied to Others, and invoked in its most derogatory sense, worked as a means to discredit and exclude.

Purpose
To inform policy, curricula, and future research on cyberbullying through an exploration of the moral reasoning of digitally active 10–14-year olds (tweens) when witnesses to digital abuse.

Methodology/approach
Conducted interviews with 41 tweens, asking participants to react as witnesses to two hypothetical scenarios of digital abuse. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, I developed and applied a new typology for classifying “upstanders” and “bystanders” to cyberbullying.

Findings
Identified three types of upstander and five types of bystander, along with five thinking processes that led participants to react in those different ways. Upstanders were more likely than bystanders to think through a scenario using high-order moral reasoning processes like disinterested perspective-taking. Moral reasoning, emotions, and contextual factors, as well as participant gender and home school district, all appeared to play a role in determining how participants responded to cyberbullying scenarios.

Research limitations/implications
Hypothetical scenarios posed in interviews cannot substitute for case studies of real events, but this qualitative analysis has produced a framework for classifying upstanding and bystanding behavior that can inform future studies and approaches to digital ethics education.

Originality
This study contributes to the literature on cyberbullying and moral reasoning through in-depth interviews with tweens that record the complexity and context-dependency of thinking processes like perspective-taking among an understudied but critical age group.

Il lavoro che qui si presenta prende le mosse dalla considerazione dell’importanza della condivisione di immagini di consumo per la costruzione dell’identità dei tweens all’interno di quella che è possibile definire come una comunità interpretativa (Boccia Artieri, 2012). Così l’identità dei tweens, ovvero bambini tra gli 8 e i 12 anni (La Rocca, 2012), si costruisce anche attraverso un luogo di esperienze condiviso in cui si narra se stessi e i propri interessi attraverso le modalità proprio della Rete.

In linea con tali ricerche l’obiettivo è quello di analizzare tale processo attraverso uno specifico  contesto dell’abitare quotidiano. Il luogo dell’esperienza, il territorio che conduce alla produzione di senso condiviso è rappresentato qui dalla comunità presente su Facebook “S-Tweens”. La pagina nasce il 26 settembre 2012. L’osservazione di questa pagina e soprattutto delle notizie, delle immagini, commenti, “mi piace” e condivisioni in essa postate rappresenta lo studio di una comunità interpretativa poiché essa racconta i consumi mediali di uno specifico target, consumi che danno significato alla loro identità proprio a partire dalle scelte fatte (Pasquali & Sorice, 2005).



The work presented here starts from the consideration of the importance of sharing images of consumption for the construction of the identity of tweens within what can be defined as an interpretive community (Boccia Artieri, 2012). So the identity of tweens, children between 8 and 12 years (La Rocca, 2012), is also built through a place of shared experiences, which tells themselves and their own interests through the procedures of the Net.

The goal is to analyze this process through a specific context of everyday life. The place of experience, the territory that leads to the production of shared meaning is represented here by this community on Facebook “S-Tweens”. The page was born September 26, 2012. The observation of this page and especially of news, pictures, comments, “likes” and shares in it posted is the study of an interpretive community as it tells the media consumption of a specific target, consumption that give meaning to their identity just from the choices made (Pasquali & Sorice, 2005).

Objective(s): The aim of this study was to prepare a nanosuspension formulation as a new vehicle for the improvement of the ocular delivery of vitamin A.
Material and Methods: Formulations were designed based on full factorial design. A high pressure homogenization technique was used to produce nanosuspensions. Fifteen formulations were prepared by the use of different combinations of surfactants Tween 80, benzalkonium chloride and Pluronic and evaluated for pH, particle size, entrapment efficiency, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), stability and drug release.  Also, Draize test was used to evaluate the irritation of rabbit eye by formulations.
Results: All formulations showed a small mean size that is well suited for ocular application. Also it was observed that the particle size decreased with increase in the amount of surfactant. Drug entrapment increased with increasing amount of surfactant. It was shown that initial and final drug release can be controlled by the ratio and the total amount of surfactants, respectively.
Conclusion: It was concluded that the use of Tween 80 and Pluronic in the formualtions with a proper ratio does not show eye irritation and could be useful to achieve a suitable nanosuspension of vitamin A as a novel ocular delivery system.

Ataerkil ideolojinin kadınlara dayattığı dış görünüşe bağımlılık, gösteriş, özseverlik ve rekabetçilik gibi yıkıcı duyguların kız çocuklarını da esir alması, yasal olmamasına rağmen 13 yaşın altındaki çocukların Instagram’da, şimdilik 2 milyon “tween/eşikergen” etiketi altında yetişkin görünümlü paylaşımlarda bulunması, güzellik siber zorbalığının artışı ve sosyal medyada kullanılan kelime ve söz öbeklerinin konuşma diliyle etkileşime geçmesi eşikergen sorunlarının başında gelmektedir. Bir nitel araştırma yöntemi olarak gömülü teori ve derinlemesine görüşmelerin kullanıldığı bu çalışmada, güzellik zorbalığı, Mean Girls filmiyle tanımlanmakta, sosyal medyada açıkça görülebilen “eşikergen jargonu” konuşma diline yansımaktadır. Örneğin çocukların çevrimiçi alanlarda kullandıkları “taglemek”, “beğeni yağdırmak”, “ss/dm atmak”, “karşim”, “feno”, “efso”, gibi sözcükler ve kısaltmalar günlük dilde de kullanılmaktadır. Sonuç olarak eşikergen jargonunun çocukların yaşam biçimiyle ifade bulması, güzellik siber zorbalığının, rekabetin ve yarışın artmasıyla birlikte bu yeni kız çocuğu kültürünün dil yozlaşmasını da görünür kıldığı tespit edilmiştir. Ayrıca çalışmanın sadece dil yozlaşmasını değil, çocukluğun yozlaştığını göstermesi bakımından da alanyazına katkı sağlayacağı öngörülmektedir.

The aim of this article is to analyse how tween girls in Estonia and in Sweden describe and discover their
gender identities when selecting profi le images for social networking sites (SNSs). To this end, interviews
with tweens in Estonia (N=21) and in Sweden (N=31) were carried out. As SNSs largely exist without the
recognisable surveillance of adults, children can explore the social matrix of relating to others, and they
also feel safe to try out and display diff erent constructions and reconstructions of their identity. At the
same time, in communicating online, impression management is formulated with constant worry about
how to construct one’s virtual identity so that it will be appreciated and accepted by one’s peer group. In
this article, our analysis focuses on the most popular posing strategies used by tween girls, which, it turns
out, are often marked by reproduction of the dominant heterosexual cultural norms and values.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a study that compares ownership and usage of new media among young “tween” consumers in Denmark and Hong Kong. Further, it shows the ways of finding new interesting web sites.

Design/methodology/approach – In 2004-2005 a survey was conducted in Denmark and Hong Kong of 434 fourth, fifth and sixth class students. Questionnaires were distributed in six elementary schools. Hypotheses about new media ownership and usage in the two societies are formulated based on the economic development and individualistic/collective cultural dimensions of the societies.

Findings – Household ownership of new media, ownership of mobile phone and heavy use of the internet were found to be more prevalent among Danish tweens than among Hong Kong tweens. Danish tweens were more likely to use mobile phones and the internet for interpersonal communication and for enjoyment than Hong Kong tweens. Hong Kong tweens used the internet more for educational purposes than Danish tweens. The results seem to support that adoption and consumption of new media are motivated differently in cultures of individualism and collectivism, and consequently that the tween consumer segment is not as globally homogeneous as it is claimed to be.

The ‘tween’ segment has matured into an important market making it the focus of attention from
both advertisers and consumer rights activists. The present qualitative study of Danish children in
the tween segment (10-12 years) shows that the children are very sceptic, mostly disinterested and
highly selective when appreciating TV-advertising. Almost all the children in the study showed
very good understanding of the advertisers’ persuasive strategies, and some revealed impressive
knowledge of the conventions of TV-advertising. But the ‘tween’ conception of ‘good’ advertising
is less sophisticated: straightforward selling points and slapstick comedy.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a vast expansion of media aimed at the pre-adolescent female consumer demographic. Through an analysis of Hannah Montana, and in particular its lead character Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana and star Miley Cyrus, this article argues that tween popular culture uses celebrity as an allegory for growing up female. Drawing upon the concept from within girlhood studies, it demonstrates that the girl ‘becoming’ a woman is paralleled with the girl ‘becoming’ a celebrity. Both are highly invested in formulations of the real and authentic, and Hannah Montana highlights this significance of the notion of staying true to yourself through celebrity, as a way of making sense of the tween’s growing up female. Fitting in with the broader contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal cultural context, Hannah Montana employs the narrative of a perpetual makeover, addressing the tween as a self-surveilling subject who must continually work to retain an ‘authentic’ self as she progresses towards womanhood. Both the onscreen girl and celebrity, Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana, and the franchise’s star, Miley Cyrus, are constructed as simultaneously becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity, and the three personae become more enmeshed as the series nears its end; the franchise draws upon the off-screen persona of Miley Cyrus to further parallel becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity and to emphasise the investment in the real. This article demonstrates that tween popular culture addresses the young, female viewer in terms of her becoming woman by teaching the importance of investing in celebrity, and effectively preparing her for the consumption of adult female films and television programmes.

The ubiquity of media in our society and the use of the Internet and in particular the World Wide Web as a convergent medium for a huge diversity of content and formats (movies in cinema and in YouTube, radio and cartoons on the Web and TV, social networks) has been a concern of academics, educators and governments. In what concerns to children audiences, the focus has been on safety and security of children and the correspondent online data protection.
Questions of the impact of subliminal forms of marketing communication target to children start to emerge in a world where marketing strategies and entertainment are more and more connected.
The main goal of this study is to explore what children aged from 8-10 years old think of brands, ads and their purpose. Can they understand the difference between a brand and an advertisement? Do they like/dislike ads? From which place/media/person they recognize brands and ads (even if they don’t use or know the product)?
We are interested in questions such us: if children socialize more and more with media, what are the risks and the opportunities? Do they need a media literacy program or do they learn by themselves to distinguish informational and persuasive media?
To answer these questions we have been working with an elementary school community (class) since March 2009. We have been using an ethnographic approach and our conceptual framework is based on the Activity Theory. The activities developed with children (community) are about old and new media learning, supported by the usage of a private Web Site (tool) (http://amigos.realcolegio.pt) and moderated by the researcher.
The question of the engagement with new media and how to design and use such IT platforms at school is also discussed. The relationship of these children with media as “users”, as “spectators” and as “creators” has been observed and the results will be presented1.

Keywords: children studies, media literacy, participative web design, marketing to children, online communities, activity theory.

Parent–child relationships are rede ned during early adolescence, as tweens become increasingly independent and begin to assert their autonomy. Because today’s youth are growing up in a digitally saturated world, investigating the technology use of tweens is key to understanding the changing dynamics in parent–child relationships in early adolescence. Through surveys (N = 79) and follow-up focus groups (N = 30) with middle school students, we investigated how tweens described and made sense of their technology use, how they responded to their parents’ rules about technology, and how they navigated technology-related con icts at home. Tweens perceived a misalignment between their parents’ technology-related rules and their own purposes for using digital media, which they said created a tension between them and their parents. This exploratory study contributes new insight into how tweens relate their technology use to their interpretations of their parents’ rules and messages around technology.

Na primeira década deste século, uma profusão de discursos midiáticos, no contexto brasileiro, celebrava a imagem de crianças sabidas que consomem “feito gente grande” e  bastecem os adultos de conhecimento tecnológico. Este é o ponto de partida para investigar a criação recente dos tweens, meninos e meninas entre a infância e a adolescência,  desnaturalizando essa suposta fase da vida e apresentando uma gênese desse sujeito pré-adolescente, a partir das condições de possibilidade de sua emergência, no âmbito de uma cultura juvenilizada. Com base em pesquisa bibliográfica e a partir da compreensão foucaultiana de subjetividade, o artigo sublinha argumentos que vinculam as transformações na concepção do indivíduo moderno ao surgimento de novas tecnologias de subjetivação na contemporaneidade, articulando-as aos discursos midiáticos constituintes dos tweens. Tais processos comunicacionais conferem voz às crianças, colaborando, assim, para a construção social de sua autonomia.

Este trabalho procura apresentar recursos ofertados pela cultura contemporânea que permitem às tweens ou pré-adolescentes operacionalizarem uma passagem da infância para a adolescência por meio de práticas sociais que resultarão na construção de identidades desejáveis e, consequentemente, na construção de corpos adequados às demandas socioculturais. Para tanto, o presente artigo fará uma análise a partir da revista Atrevidinha, autointitulada “a revista da pré-adolescente”, recorrendo a aportes teóricos que contemplam as tecnologias de subjetivação.

This article proposes to study a specific target in
marketing: the Tweens. Regarded as children aged
between 8 and 12 years old, they develop specific
behaviors. Due to ethical considerations,
marketing dedicated to children are quite difficult
to implement. If previous studies focused on
general browsing habits, this research proposes to
determine if Internet has a specific impact in
terms of information process when it regards a
cultural experience: cinema movies.
To propose answers a quantitative study was
conducted with 265 Tweens. Each respondent was
asked to answer questions regarding its browsing
habits, favorite medias and the nature of the
source of information about new movies.
Following the analysis of the results, it appears
that Tweens have not to be regarded as a
homogeneous target since digital practice appears
to split them over two groups. Then the results
underline the importance of family and peers to
know new movies when digital tools are the third
way of getting information.

The purpose of this paper is to show how actor-network theory (ANT) can be useful in exploring tweens consumption of the Disney franchises of High School Musical (HSM) and Hannah Montana (HM). Through the lens of the ANT and the concept of situated consumption, the aim of the paper is to elucidate how both tween girls and the Disney merchandise and media content are mutually enacted through practice.,The paper draws on material from in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine girls, seven who were followed during a two-year period in an after-school program at two different schools in a midsize town in Norway and who were visited twice in their home. Two of the girls were recruited from a Disney HSM fan site online. The interviews explored the use of HM and HSM as part of their everyday practices.,A main finding was how tween girls and their relation to the Disney HSM and HM came to be and mean different things in different settings. Media texts and tied in merchandise functioned as social tools and sign vehicles to manage part of belonging to a peer group and also to distinguish themselves from others. Also, focus is on the social norms surrounding how one can display and not one’s devotion to Disney tween franchises in a socially accept form.,The paper draws on ANT to expand on studies of consumption building on Bajde’s (2013) proposal to include ANT within consumer studies. By drawing on the ANT with a socio-material perspective, this study contributes to gain insight into how popular cultural items take part in the co-construction and performance of both consumers and commodities attempting to move beyond an ontological divide between human and non-human entities. Thus, this paper explores how Disney media texts and merchandise and the girls were enacted in different assemblages.

This article draws attention to the expansion of tween popular culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in particular tween fairy tale films. It has two aims: first, to demonstrate how tween popular culture mediates feminism’s history; and second, to highlight the continued relevance of the terms “post-feminism” and “neoliberalism” at a time when confidence in their use is waning in feminist media studies. Importantly, it looks carefully at the relationship between these two discourses, and reveals that the figure of the tween princess emerges at the intersections of the two. By interrogating the dialogue between the onscreen maternal generations of feminism, represented in the female characters of teen princess, mother, step-mother, and grandmother/fairy godmother, this article reveals that the fairy tale narrative and the figure of the princess are employed to straightforwardly present feminism’s complicated history, and to put forward a post-feminist identity as the only “authentic” choice in this reflexive construction of a feminine self. The princesses are presented as neoliberal icons of post-feminist culture, representing the self as project.

In this paper, I examine the changing mediascapes of tween girls’ lives in Singapore. From focus groups discussions with 29 Singaporean girls aged 8 to 12, I observed that this group of girls no longer actively seek to engage with television or magazines. The diminishing popularity of 'traditional’ popular culture sources amongst Singaporean tween girls’ lives is crucial, because it poses some challenges to the arguments within the discourse of sexualisation. As I show, where Western popular culture (on traditional popular media) has been framed as one of the crucial reasons that contributes to and catalyses the desire of tween girls to fashion themselves after adults, there are some flaws to and of this line of argument in a Singaporean context.

In further investigating the shifting boundaries of tween girls’ popular culture consumption, this paper underscores how YouTube has become an emergent and prominent popular media source in their daily lives. Through a brief visual and content analysis of some of the YouTube channels/YouTubers that the tween girls in my study frequently accessed, this paper illuminates why YouTube should be implicated as a crucial component that intertwines with the adultification of tween girls’ dressing in Singapore. It further unpacks why academic discourse concerned with the adultification of tween girls’ dressing should not be dismissing this community of YouTubers whom tween girls are familiar with as part of a teenage fad.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to show how actor-network theory (ANT) can be useful in exploring tweens consumption of the Disney franchises of High School Musical (HSM) and Hannah Montana (HM). Through the lens of the ANT and the concept of situated consumption, the aim of the paper is to elucidate how both tween girls and the Disney merchandise and media content are mutually enacted through practice.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on material from in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine girls, seven who were followed during a two-year period in an after-school program at two different schools in a midsize town in Norway and who were visited twice in their home. Two of the girls were recruited from a Disney HSM fan site online. The interviews explored the use of HM and HSM as part of their everyday practices.

Findings
A main finding was how tween girls and their relation to the Disney HSM and HM came to be and mean different things in different settings. Media texts and tied in merchandise functioned as social tools and sign vehicles to manage part of belonging to a peer group and also to distinguish themselves from others. Also, focus is on the social norms surrounding how one can display and not one’s devotion to Disney tween franchises in a socially accept form.

Originality/value
The paper draws on ANT to expand on studies of consumption building on Bajde’s (2013) proposal to include ANT within consumer studies. By drawing on the ANT with a socio-material perspective, this study contributes to gain insight into how popular cultural items take part in the co-construction and performance of both consumers and commodities attempting to move beyond an ontological divide between human and non-human entities. Thus, this paper explores how Disney media texts and merchandise and the girls were enacted in different assemblages.

Este artigo se origina de pesquisa que investigou possíveis modos por meio dos quais a cultura contemporânea permite a passagem da infância para a adolescência, no contexto brasileiro da primeira década do século XXI. O objetivo foi mostrar como a cultura midiática interpela crianças a partir de imperativos de crescimento e, assim, produz novas formas de subjetivação. A partir de um estudo de caso de Atrevidinha, autointitulada " a revista da pré-adolescente " , foi possível elencar eixos temáticos através dos quais a publicação roteiriza a tarefa de crescer. Este artigo destaca um deles: a vida das celebridades teen não apenas como ídolos de sucesso, mas também como figuras modelares de adolescentes que cresceram de forma bem-sucedida.