Twilight Research Paper
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 24, No. 5, October 2010, 707–719
Transitional tastes: Teen girls and genre in the critical reception of Twilight
Lisa Bode*
School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Reviews of Twilight (2008), Catherine Hardwicke’s enormously popular screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire romance novel, reveal a focus on both the gender and age of the film’s audience. The teen, tween or adolescent girl, her tastes and affective response, are evoked in different ways by many reviewers to denigrate the film. However, the adolescent girl is also used in positive reviews to legitimate Twilight and its pleasures. This article asks: what can the …show more content…
In the past few years in the United Kingdom the media landscape has been preoccupied with not just laddism, and the ‘cult of masculinity’, but the perceived ‘sexualisation of culture’ (Attwood 2006), especially its impact on working-class teens. The abject figure of the sexually aggressive and loud-mouthed female chav or ‘ladette’, a masculinized woman, haunts the reality and makeover television landscape, and appears regularly as a target of disgust or hand-wringing for a British middle-class press (Ringrose and
Walkerdine 2008). Concern reached a point where, in March 2009, then British home secretary Jacqui Smith announced a fact-finding review focusing on a possible link between the ‘“sexualization” of young teenage, and even preteen, girls through clothes, videos and music lyrics [ . . . ] and sexual abuse and violence’. She claimed that ‘while some parents may see high-street chain stores selling Playboy t-shirts for 11-year old girls as a “bit of fun”, many other parents were concerned that their daughters were
Vol. 24, No. 5, October 2010, 707–719
Transitional tastes: Teen girls and genre in the critical reception of Twilight
Lisa Bode*
School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Reviews of Twilight (2008), Catherine Hardwicke’s enormously popular screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire romance novel, reveal a focus on both the gender and age of the film’s audience. The teen, tween or adolescent girl, her tastes and affective response, are evoked in different ways by many reviewers to denigrate the film. However, the adolescent girl is also used in positive reviews to legitimate Twilight and its pleasures. This article asks: what can the …show more content…
In the past few years in the United Kingdom the media landscape has been preoccupied with not just laddism, and the ‘cult of masculinity’, but the perceived ‘sexualisation of culture’ (Attwood 2006), especially its impact on working-class teens. The abject figure of the sexually aggressive and loud-mouthed female chav or ‘ladette’, a masculinized woman, haunts the reality and makeover television landscape, and appears regularly as a target of disgust or hand-wringing for a British middle-class press (Ringrose and
Walkerdine 2008). Concern reached a point where, in March 2009, then British home secretary Jacqui Smith announced a fact-finding review focusing on a possible link between the ‘“sexualization” of young teenage, and even preteen, girls through clothes, videos and music lyrics [ . . . ] and sexual abuse and violence’. She claimed that ‘while some parents may see high-street chain stores selling Playboy t-shirts for 11-year old girls as a “bit of fun”, many other parents were concerned that their daughters were