Older teen girls and films

Abstract

This project explores 16 to18-year-old girls’ selection, navigation and interaction with mainstream films. It seeks to understand where, how, what, why and with whom they view films. The study further investigates how older teen girls relate to, negotiate and articulate the representations of girls and women in the films with which they engage, exploring the relationship to girl power, autonomy and empowerment as well as postfeminist and neoliberal values. Earlier research on girl film audiences has focused on broader age ranges: with viewing habits and involuntary impacts presented as homogenous across all ages of teen girls. By contrast, this study looks at the experiences of girls in a discrete age range to provide a more granular analysis of an important period in the development of girls’ sense of self. The research centres participants’ perspectives and experiences to challenge some of the findings from previous studies of the teen girl audience. Drawing on and incorporating uses and gratifications, the Media Practice Model, Hall’s encoding/decoding model and Gidden’s concept of self-projects, the research provides a more nuanced and focused understanding of older teen girls as an active and discerning film audience The research contributes to the existing field of literature on teen girls’ film viewing practices, drawing on survey responses from 119 respondents and interview data derived from focus group interviews with 38 girls from two schools in the rural North East of England. Thematic analysis allows girls to speak of their own experiences as experts on their own lives. Key findings show that older teen girls are significantly less influenced by film characters and plotlines than much of the extant literature suggests. Instead, they are active viewers, proficient in demassification, and demonstrate considerable media literacy skills in the ways in which they decode, negotiate and contest film content. The themes of career, motherhood, romance and femininity, plus perspectives on two popular teen girl characters, are explored within an analysis of findings that challenge the notion of teen girls as a singular and coherent audience group. Rather, participants’ interactions with film are shown to relate to, and be influenced by, their own lived realities and future plans