THE BUSINESS OF THE GIRL CELEBRITY AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION.docx

THE BUSINESS OF THE GIRL CELEBRITY AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION

INTRODUCTION

The Professional Lifestyling of Girlhood

In season five of Netflix’s anthology series Black Mirror (2016-present), a familiar scene

in contemporary teen culture opens up: a fourteen-year-old girl eating lunch by herself in the

school cafeteria. Despite being alone, the character appears content with her earbuds in while

watching a music video on her mobile device. As pop music fills the diegetic space, the mobile

screen reveals a young woman in a white spandex costume and violet wig singing and dancing

against a backdrop of bright pinks and sparkles. “Hey, yeah, whoa-ho, I’m on a roll / Ridin’ so

high, achieving my goals / I’m stoked on ambition and verve / I’m gonna get what I deserve,” the

pop singer croons as the teen girl nods her head along to the beat.

As the episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” unfolds, audiences learn that the central

character Rachel is shy and new to town. She is also dealing with the death of her mother and is

completely obsessed with the confidence-laden language of superstar Ashley O (played by Miley

Cyrus). On her fifteenth birthday, Rachel receives an Ashley Too doll, an AI figurine

programmed to simulate Ashley O’s personality that encourages Rachel to audition for her

school’s talent show. However, when the doll malfunctions and begins to express the singer’s

“true” inner thoughts, Rachel and her sister Jack discover that Ashley O has been put into a

druginduced coma. The perpetrator: Ashley O’s manipulative aunt, a woman who has managed

the singer’s career and has forced her to present a confident and bubbly persona against her will.

After Rachel and Jack rescue Ashley O and uncover her aunt’s secret plot, Ashley O rebrands

herself as an alternative rock musician who can finally be her authentic self.

While “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” examines the dark repercussions of technology

present in other Black Mirror episodes, it also taps into some of the anxieties and hopes that have

informed twenty-first century media discourses and representations of girlhood. In particular, the

episode speaks to the complexities of girls’ professional achievements in the digital age and how

celebrity is used in the creation and management of a confident, authentic, and successful public

persona. To be successful in Ashley O’s world, girls must be ambitious, independent, feminine,

and positive; their willingness to be made visible to consumer audiences reinforces this image’s

truth, or so it seems. In Rosalind Gill’s influential article “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements

of a Sensibility,” these traits comprise the contradictory nature of postfeminism, a cultural

perception that “constructs an articulation or suture between feminist and anti-feminist ideas”

that is then “effected entirely through a grammar of individualism” (162). In short, postfeminism

presumes gender equality, freedom, and choice despite the existence of patriarchal and other

structural limitations. As Black Mirror demonstrates, Ashley O embodies young female

empowerment all the while she is imprisoned by the professional demands of her aunt. It is this

tension that continues to exist in contemporary girls’ media culture, which places high

importance on the presentation of confidence and authenticity in professional spaces even when

these two qualities often conflict.

While authenticity suggests the absence of external management and commercial

influence, its location in a surveillance media culture illustrates how it is carefully constructed

and enforced through consistent branding strategies. By surveillance media culture, I refer to

media like reality television and social network platforms that follow and track the everyday

lives of people and promote self-reflexive behavior. Moreover, surveillance media encourage and

normalize external pressures on the individual’s public/private performance. Media scholars like

Graeme Turner have observed how surveillance helps construct the artifice in reality

programming, where authenticity is “generated through the prosecution and/or resolution of a

dialogue between the constructed ‘reality’ of a programme and that of a viewer’s own life

experience” (42-43). Social media at first seems like a further breakdown of this construction,

allowing the user an unfiltered approach to convey who they “really” are to the public. Yet as P.

David Marshall asserts, celebrity culture in the convergence age “articulates a way of thinking

about individuality and producing the individual self through the public world” that relies on the

digital accoutrement of profiles, images, videos, and messages presented across social networks

(“The Promotion and Presentation of the Self” 46).

Following Marshall, I argue that the performance of girlhood in these mediated spaces

strongly relies on the language and practice of celebrity through methods of branding and

promotion that advocate independent self-expression and the professional construction of

authenticity. In doing so, girls take advantage of the “mobility, power, and privilege” Susan

Hopkins asserts that celebrity texts teach young female audiences to value (184). This practice,

which I call “the professional lifestyling of the self,” demonstrates how personal qualities like

confidence and authenticity have become markers of professional achievement, and to a greater

extent, signifiers of taste and class in the digital age. In the context of girlhood in the early

twenty-first century, this professionalization process employs confidence and authenticity to

encourage girls to continue the legacy of female empowerment through an entrepreneurial

feminist lifestyle that champions worker productivity and the reproduction of social hierarchies.

Although the desire to “do what you love” and follow “passionate work” has been more

generally applied to feminized popular culture of the twenty-first century, the appearance of this

discourse in contemporary girls’ media representation requires further exploration.1 What does it

mean when young celebrities like 21-year-old Kylie Jenner are named Forbes’ Youngest Self-

1 For more on the passionate work discourse, see McRobbie, Be Creative and Duffy, (Not) Doing What You Love.

Made Billionaire? What expectations are created about girls’ achievements when televised talent

competitions and talk shows celebrate prodigy singers, dancers, and chefs? How do girls

negotiate authenticity in the advertising of corporate brands on their personal social networks? In

what ways do girls “sell” social movements like gun control and climate change action across

mediated spaces? As tween, teen, and young adult girls become more active participants in the

maintenance of capitalist society, how their media representations promote a professional

lifestyle is important to understanding how hierarchies of class and race are reproduced through

girls in the name of female empowerment.

This dissertation explores the entanglement of confidence and authenticity in the

professional lifestyling of girlhood and how these discourses materialize in surveillance media

texts. The project focuses on four modes of cultural production that rely on celebrity as a tool in

the professionalization of the girl: lifestyle media featuring mothers managing their daughters’

entertainment careers; girl prodigies and performers competing on reality talent shows; girl

influencers building their business on YouTube and Instagram; and girl activists negotiating

humanitarian agendas in networked microcelebrity spaces. This approach allows me to examine

girlhood as a process of “becoming” where girls are conceptualized as “constantly moving rather

than as discrete, autonomous entities” (Coleman 1). From her initial appointment as daughter

carrying on the mother’s postfeminist legacy, to agent of social change navigating the pressures

of promoting her cause in a commodity culture, the girl becomes a business in early twenty-first

century media culture. The practice of branding and self-promotion that celebrity invokes

grounds this becoming in an entrepreneurial-oriented language, binding girlhood’s value to

upward social and economic mobility. By exploring the various ways girls are professionalized, I

show how girlhood is critical to the maintenance of hegemonic structures in mainstream feminist

cultural production of the digital age.

Confidence: From Gap to Cult

In Western discourses of girlhood achievement, confidence has often been perceived as

being in short supply, leading to the creation of a “gap” where girls fail to meet their fullest

potential. In a 2018 article published in The Atlantic, Claire Shipman, Katty Kay, and Jillellyn

Riley described how girls in the 2010s are becoming less confident during puberty due to parents

and teachers awarding their perfectionistic and risk-averse behavior. Conducting a broad survey

with more than 1,300 girls from the ages of 8 to 18 and their parents, Shipman, Kay, and Riley

resolved that girls need to feel more comfortable with taking risks in order to succeed as female

professionals in a changing social and technological world. To “close the confidence gap,” they

argued, is essential “because the long-term effects of these dynamics hurt not only girls, but the

women they become, many of whom, within a few years of entering the workforce, experience

another confidence drop, and a drop in aspirations.”

The article pulled research from Kay and Shipman’s 2014 New York Times bestseller The

Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know, as well as

their 2018 activity guide for girls, The Confidence Code for Girls: Taking Risks, Messing Up,

and Becoming Your Amazingly Imperfect, Totally Powerful Self. These books, like other selfhelp

texts, address the strong need for girls to realize their future potential and push past their inner

negative chatter if they want to realize their dreams. TED Talk seminars from speakers like

Caroline Paul and Reshma Saujani have also warned of the consequences that girls will face

(lack of opportunities, low quality of life) if they do not take personal risks to make these dreams

happen. Further addressing this achievement gender gap, nonprofit organizations have attempted

to involve girls more in the STEM fields and invite them to leadership camps to nurture

selfempowerment and confidence in fields typically dominated by men. As these programs and

messages convey, girls just need to resolve their insecurities about their social positioning in the

world by not being afraid to try new things and viewing failure as part of the learning process.

Often present (although not always directly stated) in the confidence rhetoric of these

motivational speakers and writers is the concern that girls’ low self-esteem will have a dramatic

impact on the social reproduction of global economic systems. Underlying their calls for

confidence, social critics and researchers have revealed that low self-confidence will not only

obstruct girls’ abilities to find happiness and self-fulfillment but also prevent them from reaching

their maximum potential as workers and leaders in an industrialized society.2 These concerns,

while emerging in twenty-first century conversations, are not new developments. In what

Rebecca Hains has called “the girl crisis” of the 1990s, the observed unequal treatment of girls in

the classroom spurred a panic among parents, academics, and cultural critics that girls were

falling behind despite the social advancements made during Women’s Liberation in the 1970s

(1). One such study in 1990 came from law professor Carol Gilligan who, along with Nona P.

Lyons and Trudy J. Hanmer, published the edited collection Making Connections: The

Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School documenting various case studies

that claimed that girls were at risk of losing their voice in society. In their findings,

Gilligan et al. asserted that “as the river of a girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she

2 Reports on female leadership, as conducted by the Center for American Progress, assessed that while 49 percent of

women comprised the U.S. college-educated workforce in 2017, women were viewed as lagging behind in leadership

positions in major companies and industries. As the study states, “Women have outnumbered men on college

campuses since 1988. They have earned at least one-third of law degrees since 1980. Yet they have not moved up to

positions of prominence and power in America at anywhere near the rate that should have followed”

(Warner and Corley 5)

is in danger of drowning or disappearing” (4). In an increasingly globalized economy, the authors

conveyed, girls would need to find their footing or risk losing power.

However, as other social commentators at the time pointed out, Gilligan did not provide

sufficient data to justify this alarming statement. Some, including controversial feminist writer

Christina Hoff Sommers, claimed that the girl crisis was overblown and that boys were the ones

being victimized as evident of their lower grades and college attendance.3 Still, the notion that

American adolescent girls were in trouble deeply resonated with women’s groups, like the

politically influential American Association of University Women (AAUW). In 1991, AAUW

published a report titled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America that revealed how

classrooms were not privileging girls’ success, thus leading to a loss of girls’ self-confidence

during adolescence and restricted aspirations for the future. In 1994, a barrage of published

works followed, including Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent

Girls, Myra and David Sadker’s Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls, and

Peggy Orenstein’s School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. These

books, and the discussions around them, became significant signposts for building the discourse

around girls’ loss of self-confidence and how adults and guardians could help them reclaim it.

As self-help literature for the girl crisis targeted concerned parents, the commercial media and

goods industries offered a more hopeful sentiment in the way of girl power products and

entertainment meant to instill girls with messages of empowerment and confidence. These two

different approaches to the girl crisis created competing cultural discourses that scholar Marnina

Gonick calls “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia,” with “the former representing the idealized

form of the self-determining individual and the latter personifying an anxiety about those who

3 See Sommers’ “The War Against Boys” article published in the May 2000 issue of The Atlantic.

are unsuccessful in producing themselves in this way” (2). While cultural institutions focused on

the girl as the promising future for a new gender equal world, concern from the self-help

marketplace maintained that the girl might not meet her fullest potential and thus disrupt the

social and economic order with her poor life choices.

Girls’ studies scholarship discussing these girl crisis discourses note how neoliberal

policies and postfeminist messaging shaped some of these pressures on girls to rediscover their

confidence and ambition. Gonick traces the development of these discourses from shifting ideas

of femininity and subjectivity in the 1950s, where cultural critics like those of the Frankfurt

School often associated mass culture and passive consumerism with girls and the feminine. This

viewpoint would continue in the following decades as economic and social transformations

began to privilege service work and consumption over manufacturing labor and production and

as women gained greater reproductive independence and access to the workforce in Westernized

societies. The introduction of neoliberal government programs in the early 1980s further

disassembled the postwar welfare state while advancing free-market economics, leading to high

levels of youth unemployment, cuts to social programs and education, and the privatization of

public services. At the same time, a more globalized society and marketplace offered the

appearance of equal opportunity and access to wealth. Surrounded by these promises, girls

encountered the neoliberal discourse of “anyone can succeed if they work hard enough” as well

as the message that women especially could now build their independence through their careers.

This message further enforced the belief that any successes or failures girls might experience

during their development would be their responsibility due to greater gender equality in the

professional world.

The suggestion that girls might be lacking the confidence needed to succeed in this new

opportunistic society opened the door for marketing and global initiatives to qualify the need for

successful girls in a consumer-dependent economy. As Gonick relays, the Girl Power and

Reviving Ophelia discourses of the 1990s helped produce the “neoliberal girl subject” that would

function as a project to be “shaped by the individual rather than within a social collectivity” in

order to fulfill the girl’s economic imperative for the twenty-first century (18). The neoliberal

girl subject would embody the rhetoric of neoliberal policies dictating that people—without the

help of government or social aid—could make their own success. This girl would also invoke a

postfeminist sensibility as the independent and “high achieving girl,” which Angela McRobbie

asserts represented the “successful outcome of feminist pedagogy” and embodied “the seeming

improvements and changes in the educational system as a whole” (“Top Girls?” 728).

By the 2000s, the neoliberal girl subject would become the focus of what Sarah Banet-

Weiser calls “girl empowerment organizations” (or GEOs) that attempted to relate girls’

selfesteem to the prosperity of global societies. According to Banet-Weiser, U.S.-based GEOs

materialized when the Nike Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations and the World

Health Organization, launched Girl Effect in 2008 to help end global poverty by promoting the

belief that girls with opportunities are able to bring economic fortune to their countries. These

initiatives furthered the notion that girls need to be successful not just for themselves but for the

good of the nation and the global community. Through a “market for self-esteem,” Banet-Weiser

contends that “GEOs and their emphasis on building individual feminine leadership skills,

selfconfidence and healthy self-esteem tap into contemporary neoliberal politics” (“Confidence

You

Can Carry!” 183). In this framework, girls’ confidence becomes a valuable entity as it is

understood through the logic of commodity culture. Rather than instilling girls with confidence

for their own sake, girls’ confidence is seen as a necessary product in the feminized service

sector that has organized global capitalist industries in the early twenty-first century.

Where the girl crisis suggested a gap in girls’ confidence, the market for self-esteem

assigned economic value to girls and their potential for success. The discourse then seemed to

relay that girls must always be in crisis (whether or not they actually are) in order to sustain the

market; in other words, the responsibility to build themselves up falls within their abilities to

consume and invest in products and messages that encourage self-empowerment. This gendered

address has informed what Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad call the “cult(ure) of confidence.”

Organized by multiple techniques, knowledges, and affective discourses, the cult of confidence

establishes “women’s lack of confidence as the fundamental obstacle to women’s success,

achievement and happiness, and in promoting the acquisition or development of self-confidence

as its ultimate solution” (“The Confidence Cult(ure)” 326). Related to the self-help movement

and happiness industry, the cult of confidence invokes therapeutic and feminist language to

beckon women and girls to makeover their lives so that they feel motivated and self-assured to

encounter personal and institutional problems. Love Your Body discourses of the beauty industry,

as well as the neoliberal culture of “lean in” and “girlboss” organizations, illustrate how

commercial industries employ positive psychology to beckon female subjects to feel better about

themselves and their capabilities in the working world.4 However, as Gill and Orgad point out,

these consumer and professional endeavors allow the confidence cult to refashion feminism “into

a neoliberal feminism that is complicit with rather than critical of patriarchal capitalism” (341).

4 Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and Sophia Amoruso’s 2014

autobiography #Girlboss are often considered influential works in young professional women’s careers. The call to

“lean in” or be your own “girlboss” refers to the leadership strategies women must adopt if they wish to rise to the

top of an organization.

According to the logic of the confidence cult, the imperative to be confident must never

be completely fulfilled in order to continue its circulation in a consumer society where girls are

seen as active participants. This in part has led to the belief that girls are perpetually in crisis, and

even more, are in crisis because they have not done enough to combat external pressures—

pressures that result from settings like family, school, and peer circles that girls are expected to

take part in for their social development. To dismantle the institutions and technologies that have

created inhospitable environments for girls would mean disrupting a neoliberal feminist culture

that commodifies individual choice and empowerment viewed as crucial not just to girls but to

reproducing the productivity of the capitalist worker.

Developing the Girl Worker

Between the confidence gap and the confidence cult, the professional lifestyling of

girlhood emerges. In these discourses, confidence is perceived as an authentic identity for girls

and women to reclaim, even if it does not accurately represent who they are. Confidence is a key

signifier of the girl’s potential success. Growing this attribute through professional development

and performative modes of identity-making in media spaces conveys status and importance to

public audiences. As these confidence discourses have persisted, their representation in early

twenty-first century media culture provide girls with examples of how to attain success through

self-promotion and regulation. These examples rely on celebrity as a “pedagogical tool and aid”

in the “discourse of the self” in what Marshall calls the “era of presentational culture,” where

individuals online emulate the performative and promotional strategies observed in celebrity

culture (“The Promotion and Presentation of the Self” 36). Girls respond to these strategies, Kim

Allen reveals, when the “celebrity entrepreneur” becomes an influential neoliberal construction

for working class girls seeking upward social mobility when more traditional paths seem

impossible (160). Celebrity then, serves as a useful place to conceive how media technologies

“professionalize” girls and assign value to their aspirations and achievements.

The pressure placed on girls to work hard and succeed has been widely covered in

histories and analyses of girl culture. Anita Harris and Michele Paule provide important

frameworks from which the professional lifestyling of girlhood emerges. In her 2003 book

Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century, Harris argued that the flexibility and

self-invention characteristics made possible through neoliberal policies and feminist strides have

positioned girls as the ideal subjects/images to look up to in risky economic times. The cultural

invocation imposed on girls to express and even embody confidence and ambition has formed

what Harris has called the “can-do girl.” The can-do girl is defined as a symbolic figure who

delays motherhood until she establishes her career and then treats “it as both an essentially

feminine moment of fulfillment and a consumer lifestyle experience that enhances an image of

success” (25). While these expectations have been fundamental to the regulation of twenty-first

century femininity, Harris asserted that young girls are more managed by the “potential for

failure” that could disrupt the expected trajectory of not only their personal future as adults but

the future of a capitalist society (34). The “at-risk girl,” as a result, illustrates what happens when

girls are “rendered vulnerable by their circumstances,” such as “living in poverty, in unstable

homes, in communities known for violence, drugs, and crime,” and thus contribute to the social

and economic ruin of a nation (25). Under the scrutiny of celebrity culture, Sarah Projansky

asserts that can-do girls are made “fabulous” through their “achievements, athletic abilities,

intelligence, and self-confidence” while at-risk girls are turned into “scandals” that are carefully

followed by the paparazzi (5-6). How public girlhoods then navigate the spotlight, whether as

high-profile celebrities or internet users engaged in mediated conversations, suggests a

coordination of professional attributes and connections that make the girl’s visibility to the public

appealing and consumer friendly.

Michele Paule builds on this can-do/at-risk dichotomy approximately fifteen years later

by examining gendered discourses of girlhood achievement and their deployment in media texts.

In what Paule calls the “hard-working girl discourse,” contemporary media “[p]roduce

compliance and reinforce gendered and classed school behaviours, but also carry associated risks

of loss of femininity and social prestige” (98). In this discourse, the girl makes her success, as

opposed to having it come naturally to her, and she demonstrates the ability to obey social codes

and institutions. Yet in doing so, this narrative “normalises middle-class identities, practices and

values” where “some girls claim to work harder than they do in order to manage the competing

pressures of gendered and achieving identities” (134). On the other end, the “girls hang back”

discourse illustrates how girls who feel unprepared to make serious decisions about their future

circumvent these pressures by relunctantly engaging “in processes of choosing” or refusing

“aspirational subjectivities” (137). These girls are seen to depend on authoritative institutions to

support and guide them in their life choices, allowing their identities as successful girls to be

determined by their compliance and cooperation. At the same time, they are expected to impress

their superiors with their individuality. The tension between achievement and authenticity in

these discourses thus reveals the importance of class in creating the illusion of success. To appear

confident and authentic not only aligns the girl with an achieving subjectivity but also affiliates

her with a professionalized social status in her future role.

Professionalization is understood by the way it adheres to neoliberal constructions of

work that in turn reinforce racial and social class hierarchies. In digital spaces, this process

negotiates the private self in the public performance through self-promotion and audience

engagement, creating the illusion of independent choice and upward mobility despite the

obstacles this context still imposes. According to Melissa Gregg, professionalism as an online

performance “generates forms of pleasure and accomplishment” in its productivity and rewards

that then create further justification for conducting this labor at any hour of the day (5-6). Even

more, performing the professional allows individuals to connect themselves to an aspirational

class identity without fully experiencing the benefits these power structures provide. As Nicholas

Blomley articulates, professionalization indicates “a formal, recognized status” along with a

“middle-class standing” that “relies upon and presupposes distinction” (224). Not only is

distinction internalized and responsible for organizing the performance of the self, it also

requires recognition and respect from others. The professionalization of girlhood, I assert, is how

media recognize certain girls as reputable based on their ability to appeal to hegemonic race and

class politics. Moreover, girls who can leverage their image in a surveillance media environment,

organized by the logics of branding and fame, showcase their value to an entrepreneurialoriented

economy that typically focuses on adults.

The appearance and behavior of professionalism as it pertains to girlhood relies heavily

on the enforcement of racial and class codes that operate via processes of individualization. As

the professionalized girl identity is represented across surveillance media cultures, professional

codes of conduct reinforce what Jessica Ringrose calls the “successful girls discourse.” In this

discourse, girls who attain educational success go on to find success at university as well as in

their careers, thus signifying equality and progress for a prospering nation (472). The

professionalism of the girl is determined by this connective framework, where the good work she

performs at a young age will seemingly predict the good work she will achieve later in life. Yet

what this narrative leaves out is how this succession is determined by race and class, excluding

girls who do not and cannot conform to hegemonic expectations of professionalism. As Shauna

Pomerantz shows in her ethnography of a Canadian high school in the 2000s, the symbolic value

of how girls dress did not matter in comparison to “how one was positioned by others as a certain

‘kind’ of (raced, classed, schooled) girl” (154). Simply dressing the part of a respectable,

highachieving girl would not take a girl very far if social limitations and a lack of access to

resources and knowledge were also a part of her experience. Despite this evidence, the discourse

of girls’ achievement is deeply embedded in neoliberal logics that expects professional behavior

and appearance to be a task that the individual can remedy on their own.

Prior to her appearance in contemporary media culture, the professionalized girl was

organized through public services and programs intended to help girls safely bridge the private

home and the public sphere from which they were previously excluded. As Jessica Taft relays,

organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and Girls Incorporated

worked with girls and young women as early as the 1860s to protect them from the “perils of the

street” when recreational practices and employment in factories raised concerns of sexual

encounters and other public dangers (14). Maintaining a code of respectability in public life

influenced girl guides and citizenship-training organizations like the Girl Scouts of America in

the early 1900s, where “self-sufficiency and achievement” were taught alongside “traditional

femininity” (15). Often, these professional tenets meant conforming to a Westernized view of

girlhood and nation. As Jennifer Helgrin discusses in American Girls and Global Responsibility,

guide texts were used to reinforce white imperialist standards of discipline and hygiene for

Indian girls in an attempt to “emancipate them from the supposed backward customs of their own

cultures” (8). When the commercial marketplace expanded during the Cold War, girl guides took

the form of magazines providing lessons to teen girls for how to be good citizens and

international diplomats while also responding to fashion and beauty advice. While boys were

encouraged to privilege toughness and self-reliance in the post-war period, girls were tasked with

being ambassadors of peace and guardians of traditional feminine values in this changing world.

These gendered roles began to shift with Women’s Liberation in the 1960s and 70s as

social discourse addressed girls as future professionals in a more gender progressive and

competitive society. Self-help books for parents like Rita Stafford Dunn and Kenneth Dunn’s

1977 How to Raise Independent and Professionally Successful Daughters emphasized the impact

girls would have in the new labor economy of the late twentieth century as career opportunities

became more available to them. In school environments, girls and their families took advantage

of extracurricular activities and sports programs as both parents now worked outside the home

and college admissions processes became more selective. Hilary Friedman explains how the

“professionalization of child participation” accelerated in the 1980s, leading to a “growth of

hypercompetition” over the following three decades (26). Furthermore, competition was

motivated by “parents’ demand for credentials for their children, which they [saw] as a necessary

and often sufficient condition for entry into the upper-middle class and the ‘good life’ that

accompanies it” (3). While social mobility was a desirable factor for girls’ participation in

competitive activities, families of mostly white girls already in the upper-middle-class

strategically ensured that their daughters participated in certain after-school programs. These

programs would supposedly give them a leg up in college admissions and “help maintain their

family’s class position by entering what are traditionally hegemonically male worlds” (122).

While discourses of professionalization and female empowerment encouraged young girls to

attain success, these programs mostly served to protect already attained social class status and

distinction.

Technologies of Professionalization

The urgency in which families and social institutions have pressed girls to participate in

professional development groups and activities provides the backdrop for the girl crisis and

confidence discourses that have controlled public perceptions of girlhood achievement into the

twenty-first century. It is here where I extend this conversation to consider the influence

surveillance media cultures have had on discourses of girlhood professionalization, and in turn,

how specific media operate as “technologies of professionalization” in the presentation of the

achieving girl. Following Teresa De Lauretis’ “technologies of gender,” where “the construction

of gender is the product and the process of both representation and self-representation,” I look at

reality TV and digital media as technologies of professionalization that invoke the practice of

celebrity and branding to construct girlhood as a professional identity (9). As they simulate

selfgoverning practices and participation, reality TV and digital media produce an achieving

girlhood that responds to the anxieties and hopes of the confidence gap. In doing so, these

mediums contribute to a successful girl discourse that aligns hard work with authenticity,

creating a culture of productivity that champions young female empowerment as it also

maintains racial and classed barriers to professional achievement.

Reality TV’s relationship to professionalization is based in its function as a tool of

citizenship instruction. According to Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, reality TV operates as a

“cultural technology” designed through “regulation, policy, and programs” that “nurture

citizenship and civil society” as “an instrument for education, improving, and shaping subjects”

(14). While reality TV does not accurately reflect real life back to audiences, it does present a

constructed reality where viewers live vicariously through manufactured obstacles and

challenges participants undergo. Ouellette and Hays employ Foucault’s concept of

governmentality to explain how the production of reality TV enforces methods of self-help and

self-actualization, in turn “[s]howing us how to conduct and ‘empower’ ourselves as enterprising

citizens” (2). Participants are portrayed as taking responsibility for their problems through

specific steps that will supposedly lead to a more prosperous life. This process persists in other

formats like reality competition shows, where contenders are either awarded or eliminated if they

do not abide by the rules of the program, reinforcing a code of conduct that people who want to

be successful should follow. While girls in reality TV programming have been used as cautionary

tales (MTV’s 16 and Pregnant [2009-2014]) and exploited for their sexualized charm

(TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras [2009-2016]), they have also demonstrated an aptitude for entertaining

audiences with a range of talents and performances on shows like NBC’s Little Big

Shots (2016-present). Instead of just being nail-biting train wrecks for audiences to watch, reality

TV has also framed girls as inspiring subjects whose authenticity comes as naturally to them as

does their exceptional abilities. Girlhood on reality TV not only teaches audiences what girls

should not do but also instills the idea that girls have equal access to the tools and instincts to

make their professional dreams a reality.

As reality TV engages with the presentation of citizenship and professionalization, its

convergence with social media has produced strategic guides for creating and managing a public

persona. Mark Andrejevic argues that because audience members are active participants in

shaping the structure and outcome of reality programming, they “focus attention on the apparatus

of celebrity production rather than the intrinsic qualities of the star” (5). As social media became

more refined in the 2010s, viewers could closely observe the various social network accounts of

reality stars and witness the practices of promotion and branding that go into producing an

authentic-looking image and lifestyle. Jane O’Connor and John Mercer explain that the rise of

reality TV and social media have inundated twenty-first century youth with the idea that they do

not have to just watch celebrities but can actually become them “via self-promotion and fan

basebuilding” (12). Because these practices have also been folded into modern day job seeking

and professional development on social network sites like LinkedIn and Twitter, girls who

engage in celebrity strategies online ally themselves with a professional lifestyle. At the same

time, as Heather Mendick et al. argue, the focus on building a personal brand that expresses the

authentic self “can conflict with the neoliberal imperative to demonstrate one’s flexibility and

adaptability to the needs of different employers and working environments (especially within a

highly precarious and competitive labour market” (155). This tension is exemplified in the way

contemporary girls’ media respond to the confidence gap discourse that beckons girls to embrace

their true selves while emphasizing the imperative to take risks and be ambitious in their goals.

Girls’ professionalization depends on their achievements, but it also depends on how they

express authenticity in a surveillance media culture that is organized around their entrepreneurial

endeavors.

The services, activities, and media that instill ideas of confidence, ambition, and

responsible work ethics in young girls have largely functioned to protect a capitalist society that

preserves industrialized work practices and the white upper-class family. As Morgan Genevieve

Blue shows in her analysis of Disney Channel girl celebrities, “girls’ participation in business as

investors, as media producers, and as paid consultants and spokespeople may have perpetuated

individualist, patriarchal, capitalist systems and discourse” (Girlhood on Disney Channel 162).

Identifying the confidence gap as a potential obstruction to these systems while couching it as a

problem for feminism to address works to justify the necessity of professionalized girlhood for

future gender equality. The professional identity prescribed for young girls in past pedagogical

texts is further reproduced in the surveillance culture of early twenty-first century media, where

the individual is shown to employ neoliberal strategies of self-branding that commodify private

life. The construction of authentic expression in these representations is often framed as

meritocratic and egalitarian, suggesting that people in the digital age have greater access to the

means and resources to produce their own success. Yet as past media scholars have pointed out,

digital media production tends to mask the privileges and inequalities that limit idealized

aspirations of achievement. The promise of dream fulfillment feeds into what Richard Dyer calls

the “success myth” of the star system, which values ordinariness, rewards talent and specialness,

ensures democratic access to fame, and affirms hard work and professionalism for stardom

(Stars, 156). This becomes a significant issue to consider as representations of successful girls in

reality programming and digital media production promote professionalism as the way to attain

self-worth, social respect, and economic independence. How then does the confidence gap

become a success myth for girls in the early twenty-first century?

Organization of Chapters

This dissertation investigates the above question through four chapters organized

according to different developmental stages of the girl that reflect how her professionalization in

media culture transforms her into a symbolic business for the early millennium. The first two

chapters focus on girlhood in reality and lifestyle television programming in order to establish

how girls are managed and made to perform as confident, authentic, and entrepreneurial subjects

that further a feminist legacy of young female achievement. The final two chapters center on

social media and commercial media production, exploring how girls become business

decisionmakers and activists that negotiate confidence and authenticity in an increasingly

digitized global society. The project ultimately investigates how the professional lifestyling of

girlhood relies on celebrity as an aid in the public performance of the self, framing confidence

and authenticity as tools in the creation of a successful achieving girl in the digital age.

The first chapter, “Mother Knows Best: Managing the Future Girl in Lifestyle Media,”

turns to the figure that is arguably most influential in the creation and construction of the girl in

her initial years: the mother. I begin with the 2019 Varsity Blues college admissions scandal to

show how celebrity culture and its fixation on the celebrity mother manager is useful in

conceptualizing the class anxieties that have fueled public concerns over girls’ future

professional achievements. In addition to investigating Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, the

celebrity mothers at the center of the scandal, I also analyze the business and media productions

of Kris Jenner and Yolanda Hadid. As the “momager” figure sells a management lifestyle to

mothers seeking ways to train and empower their daughters in the entertainment industry,

girlhood becomes a capitalist project that promises social mobility for women. How girls begin

to perform achievement and authenticity takes center stage in the second chapter, “Girls’ Got

Talent: Achievement and Authenticity in the Reality Talent Show.” In particular, I look at

MasterChef Junior (2013-present), America’s Got Talent (2006-present), and Little Big Shots to

explore how cultural anxieties of girlhood are taken into account and framed as narrative tension

in the celebrity journeys of talented girls on reality programming. Significantly, reality TV

frames the insecurities seen in girls’ performances as authentic professional development that

will lead to confident and accomplished young women who are also celebrity commodities.

The third chapter, “The Digital Girl Economy: Influencers, Slackers, and the Branding of

Relatability,” considers the role of the digital gig economy (popularized by companies like Uber

and Airbnb) in teen girls’ entrepreneurial endeavors on social media, focusing on influencer

culture on Instagram and YouTube. As girls negotiate with brands in the promotion of sponsored

content on their profiles, they also navigate the expectations of perfection and professionalism

through the adoption of a “slacker” persona their audiences find relatable. This slacker persona

downplays hard work and rewards the appearance of laziness. Yet in doing so, it reinscribes

whiteness as the ideal identity for this unpolished presentation. The fourth and final chapter,

“Girls for Future: Networked Celebrity Activism and the Politics of Empowerment,” investigates

several girl activists who have achieved fame in the 2010s, including Greta Thunberg, Malala

Yousafzai, Jazz Jennings, Emma González, and Marley Dias. In their various media

presentations, celebrity becomes a professionalizing tool that makes girl activists and the social

causes they represent seem more respectable, distinguished, and commodifiable. At the same

time, media coverage of these girl activists relies on comforting images and words to manage

radical ideas for mainstream audiences. However, as some girl activists demonstrate, the

mobilization of anger in affective digital expressions has potential to shift ideas around the

impact girls and their causes stimulate. The professionalization of girlhood, as framed by

celebrity culture and political and capitalist interests, both contributes to the maintenance of

exploitative systems of labor and sheds light on changing definitions of girlhood achievement as

the century progresses.

Girls in twenty-first century media offer important opportunities to learn about how

femininity and youth, as signifiers of confidence and ambition in a popular feminist landscape,

have become valuable assets in a society increasingly organized around the branding of

authenticity and achievement. Because girls are not as weighed down by financial

responsibilities and precarious labor environments as their adult counterparts, they retain the

hope that a globalized society requires to move forward. At the same time, girls become

harbingers of anxiety when they are perceived as not achieving enough or struggling to find their

self-confidence. The confidence gap discourse is more pertinent in the digital age as it converges

with the twenty-first century’s social ills, from the 2008 recession and right-wing political

regimes, to the mobilization of activist movements online responding to gender, race, and class

injustices. Girls certainly need confidence as they grow and mature during risky times, yet what

happens when that confidence is professionalized and commodified and so excludes the varied

experiences of girls that might make a confident subjectivity necessarily complicated? If the girl

is a business, her confidence is the stock that needs further attention if society wants to see a

return on its investment.

CHAPTER ONE

Mother Knows Best: Managing the Future Girl in Lifestyle Media

On March 12, 2019, news broke that federal prosecutors were charging dozens of

highprofile parents for allegedly conspiring to use bribery and other forms of fraud to sway

college admissions officers into accepting their children into elite universities across the United

States.

Among the long list of parents accused in what has been called “Operation Varsity Blues,” two

celebrity mothers received top bill in the headlines: Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Being

two of the more famous names tied to the scandal, Huffman and Loughlin also seemed singled

out for their public image as popular maternal figures on Desperate Housewives and Full House,

respectively, as well as for how their crimes might affect their young daughters who would be

following in their celebrity footsteps. According to a Variety report, Loughlin’s 19-year-old

daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli lost brand deals with Lulus and Sephora on her Instagram account

after it was revealed that her mother paid a $500,000 bribe to have Olivia Jade admitted to the

University of Southern California (Spangler). Public discourse attempted to make sense of why

these celebrity moms, more so than the other parents accused, would take such risks. Leftleaning

U.S. politicians like Elizabeth Warren looked to the scandal as “just one more example of how

the rich and powerful know how to take care of their own” (Katersky et al.). While collegiate

nepotism seemed the obvious, if not dispiriting, fact of the case, cultural critics pointed to the

extreme pressures placed on mothers, especially those in the media spotlight, to maintain an

image of success replicated through the high achievements of their offspring.

Feminist scholars, such as Andrea O’Reilly and Adrienne Rich, have long examined the

formation and experiences of motherhood under Western socioeconomic institutions that set high

expectations for how to be a mother in contemporary society. In critical studies of popular

culture, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels highlight how these expectations have converged

with notions of postfeminism in the 2000s and 2010s to illustrate what they call “new momism,”

that is, “a set of ideals, norms, and practices, most frequently and powerfully represented in the

media, that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate

standards of perfection that are beyond your reach” (4-5). Since the advent of social media and

community digital platforms, twenty-first century mothers have shared the anxieties of not

always living up to the ideals espoused in their media portrayals. Celebrity moms have also

contributed to these discussions of not-so-perfect motherhood as part of their authentic lifestyle

brands. Felicity Huffman, as a New York Times article indicated, managed a “mommy blog” (that

has since been taken down) detailing “the importance of honesty, confronting fears and reading

books like The Blessing of a B Minus, which cautions against micromanaging the lives of

children” (Buckley and Popescu). Yet as Huffman, Loughlin, and the other parents embroiled in

the college admissions scandal demonstrate, the pressure to maintain their public legacies and

ruling class image through their children overrode their alleged commitment to social integrity.

Especially for the mothers and their daughters, this cultural anxiety harbors a distinct gendered,

racialized, and classed angle, one that draws on popular postfeminist narratives of empowerment,

achievement, and survival in a patriarchal capitalist society.

The relationship between mother and daughter is significant for the ways heteronormative

femininity is discursively maintained across generational lines, but it is also noteworthy for how

conceptualizations of professionalized female achievement are privileged in these cultural

discourses. In her book Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects, Stephanie Lawler

describes how mothers pass on practices of managing the successful feminine self to their

daughters. She explains that the mother’s “obligation to nurture an autonomous self within the

daughter places them under an obligation to ensure their daughter’s ‘achievement’ in the face of

social inequalities. As a result, the daughter’s failure to ‘achieve’ can be blamed, not on a social

system which militates against her ‘achievement,’ but on her mother” (99). While it comes as no

surprise that mothers are often blamed for the shortcomings of their children, the mother’s

responsibility for the daughter’s success is particularly rife with tension in a postfeminist context,

where systemic gendered inequalities that might hold girls back are presumed to be resolved. As

Anita Harris argues, the achievements of twenty-first century

“future girls” have been made possible by past, as well as present, victories progressing women’s

rights in the public sphere. As a result of “the feminist push to dismantle the barriers keeping

women out of education and employment,” Harris asserts that there is now “a broader

socioeconomic need for young women to take up places in the new economy” (Future Girl 7).

The next generation of women seemingly have more choices and more materials in which to

develop and maintain an independent and empowered self in a neoliberal capitalist society that

values self-responsibility and entrepreneurialism. With the multitude of opportunities available to

young women to succeed, the possibility of failure on any account could signal a deeply

troubling problem with the individual and her upbringing. It could also signal a profound

inadequacy on the part of the mother and her (in)ability to maintain continuity across elite

familial and feminist lines.

The mother’s concern over the daughter’s potential failure, however, holds different

meanings for women of diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. While Huffman’s and

Loughlin’s crimes contribute to a discursive anxiety over the loss of social prestige (or at least

the desire to maintain or gain more), low-income mothers who falsified their children’s home

address so that they could attend better school districts highlight another side to this discourse,

that of living within oppressive institutions and racist zoning laws. For instance, Kelley

Williams-Bolar, a 48-year-old single African American mother and high school teacher’s aide,

was indicted and sentenced in 2011 to ten days in jail and three years of probation. She was also

given a $70,000 fine for using her father’s home address so that her daughters could attend

school in an affluent and mostly white school district (Pflum). In an interview with The Today

Show shortly after the college admissions scandal broke, Williams-Bolar explained that her

illegal actions had good intentions: “I wanted them to have a good start in life. I wanted to send

them to one of the best schools.” Such conversations happening around Operation Varsity Blues

attempt to rationalize its reckoning through a discourse that purports mothers just want a “better”

life for their daughters. Yet what stories like Williams-Bolar’s highlight is how “better” is often

constructed as white and economically privileged. While this media discourse attempts to frame

Huffman’s and Loughlin’s bad deeds as well-intentioned, it also reveals the social significance

elite whiteness has in securing advantageous futures for one’s female offspring.

The inclusion of Williams-Bolar in the discussion creates an important distinction for

how the actions of ordinary mothers are valued and judged differently than the actions of their

celebrity counterparts. Yet it also reveals how intrinsic girlhood achievement is to perceptions of

female social mobility, where recognition of a high-status education and access to a

professionally beneficial network can mean further attainment of wealth, independence, and a

reputable social positioning for both mother and daughter. These perceptions, as researchers Kim

Allen at al. discover, are strongly replicated in mediated narratives of celebrity mothers as they

engage with struggles related to austerity, maternity, family, and femininity. Using Angela

McRobbie’s notion of “visual media governmentality,” Allen at al. argue that representations of

celebrity mothers played out in popular culture “[p]rop up ideas about which ways of doing

motherhood are valued (or not) within the current conjecture” (3). In other words, mediated

celebrity enables “the collective consumption and surveillance of the maternal body” (5). What

this process means for the professional lifestyling of girlhood, and how mediated motherhood

attempts to manage this endeavor, is something that this chapter seeks to examine.

In the following sections, I analyze how mediated representations of celebrity mothers

inform the cultural discourse of anxiety that engages and invites twenty-first century girls to

succeed and reinforce the ruling class and perceptions of professional achievement under

capitalist systems. While other social and political institutions expect girls to flourish in their

future personal and professional lives, the figure of the celebrity mother more acutely observes

and manages how the girl navigates social pressures and business opportunities across shifting

media platforms. Not only does this management consider the impacts on the family unit but also

the advances the mother has made as a postfeminist figure who independently resolves her

daughters’ educational and professional futures.

In this way, the role of the mother functions as a mode of surveillance that is deeply

connected to where the professionalized girl comes from. Working with Rachel E. Dubrofsky’s

formulation of surveillance as a culture, I consider how lifestyle media branding in places like

reality TV and social media authenticate the necessity of the mother in the construction of

successful girlhood as a valuable gendered, racialized, and classed commodity. Focusing on what

I call the “momager living brand,” I assert that celebrity culture and its fixation on the celebrity

mother manager is useful in conceptualizing the class anxieties inherent in the valorization of

girlhood achievement as directed by postfeminist neoliberal initiatives. By exploring the

discursive functions of certain celebrity mothers, who seem willing to do anything to see their

daughters succeed, girlhood becomes both a hopeful feminist project and an anxious capitalist

pawn that can lead to either prosperity or insecurity in a white patriarchal economy.

Raising the Girl Under Neoliberal Capitalism

The pressures placed on mothers to see their daughters preserve or elevate their social

status through personal and professional achievements has roots in the capitalist formation of the

Western family. In her influential genealogy of girlhood, Catherine Driscoll claims that

daughterhood situates the girl in a future role that focuses on what the girl will one day do as a

woman. This framing, she claims, is a function of patriarchal capitalism that depends on the

heteronormative family to produce and maintain the cycle of reproductive and domestic labor.

Drawing on Marxist theory, Driscoll asserts that “in relation to the Mother as a necessary

component of capitalism, and necessary asset of the patriarchal capitalist family unit, girls may

be seen to represent the exchange, flow and movement of property” (108). This idea manifests in

the ways girls have been associated with consumption and commodification, acts that groom

them to desire and accept their place as women.

Gayle Rubin, writing in her landmark “The Traffic in Women” essay, reinforces this

observation, arguing that women are a crucial “reserve labor force for capitalism” and that they

“serve the ends of capitalist consumerism in their roles as administrators of family consumption

and so forth” (160). The reproduction of labor in a capitalist economy depends on women’s

ability to perform housework, conceive and raise children, and make purchasing decisions that

will sustain the (mostly) male workforce. However, according to Rubin, women are not granted

access to this capital they help generate. Instead, they are expected to maintain the sex/gender

system by instilling their daughters with the same sense of compliancy and responsibility to the

nuclear family by way of consumerism and self-management. While feminist scholars like Mary

Celeste Kearney have challenged girlhood’s alleged passivity in consumption habits, the

marketplace’s identification of mothers making purchasing decisions for the family household

crystallizes the future consumer role girls are expected to inherit (Girls Make Media 4). In this

way, the mother becomes a necessary first step in the construction of the girl in a capitalist

system.

Considered the primary female role model in a girl’s life, the mother provides the

template for how the girl should act and behave in the formation of a feminine self-image

managed through the demands of a patriarchal capitalist society. Much of this practice, while

enforced by heteronormative cultural codes, relies on the mother’s own initiative to guide and

advise her daughter while encouraging her to act independently (Lawler 99).The global reception

of neoliberal politics in the late twentieth century brought this renewed focus and responsibility

to the individual in the private sector, allowing what Rosalind Gill has identified as a

“postfeminist sensibility” to take hold in contemporary feminine media culture through an

emphasis on choice, empowerment, sexuality, and consumerism (149). Feminism’s public

entanglement with neoliberal capitalism, as Nancy Fraser and Catherine Rottenberg describe,

opened the doors for second-wave feminism to engage marketplace logics and more actively

enter mainstream politics. However, in doing so, popular modes of feminism became “framed in

extremely individualistic terms” and downplayed the actions of “social and collective justice”

(Rottenberg 419). This turn towards a postfeminist rationality, whereby the social and economic

inequalities of all women seemed readily resolved by the empowerment of mostly white

middleclass women, assigned more responsibility to the mother training her daughter. As Angela

McRobbie points out, the “new maternal-familialism” that emerged from postfeminist discourse

became the cultural dispositif instructing mothers to manage the family’s finances and maintain

unity and harmony among its members (“The New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism” 142). Mothers were

thus expected to shoulder the heavy responsibility of ensuring the family’s happiness and

functioning in society, particularly as it would reflect on their own value in maintaining the

family’s class status.

When social discourse began to examine the deleterious effects of girls’ low self-esteem

on their future happiness and careers in the girl crisis of the 1990s, mothers were framed as both

scapegoats and much needed guides. Self-help literature marketed to mothers relied on what

Berit Åström calls “a narrative of fear” to jolt mothers into devoting all their time and attention

to the care of their daughters (119). At the same time that middle-class white mothers were called

on to help in this crisis, teen mothers and mothers of color were blamed by politicians for the

social and economic problems plaguing Western nations (Zaslow 25). As such, the girl crisis can

be viewed as a social panic resulting from racist and classist ideas of what girlhood achievement

should look like and how it should be valued.

This tasking of mothers to uplift young girls coincided with a number of important

discourses at the turn of the twenty-first century. First, girl power emerged as a popular culture

phenomenon in the late 1990s, forming its own media consumer market that spoke to both

mothers and daughters. While girlhood scholars like Rebecca Hains and Emilie Zaslow identify

the riot grrrl punk movement in the early 90s as sowing the seeds for a powerful feminist

subculture, the aggressiveness of its message and political scene was feared to not be palatable to

parents of young girls. The arrival of British pop group the Spice Girls instead solidified girl

power for a mainstream audience, making this movement comfortably feminine and inviting to

not only girls but their mothers as well. By framing girl power as “encompassing both strength

and independence and normative femininity,” the marketplace appealed to mothers seeking ways

to bolster their daughters’ confidence (Hains 48). Furthermore, Zaslow adds, guilt-marketing

experts in the toy industry relied on the girl crisis to sell their consumer products. Nonsexist toys

marketed under the banner of girl power “were said to empower girls to break out of traditional

positions and ‘save them’ from becoming victims of the crisis” (Zaslow 23). Consumer language

appealing to mothers’ fears for their daughters allowed the girl crisis to move from social

conversation to profitable commodity.

The second discourse to converge with the girl crisis appeared in the cultural obsession

with motherhood that played out in early 2000s media culture. Referred to as new momism,

advertising and media programming asked mothers to engage with feminist notions of choosing

to become a mother as well as antifeminist stances dictating selflessness and obsessive

dedication to the child-rearing process. Bringing the same gusto to motherhood as to her career,

new momism required the mother to apply a heightened level of attention to the project of

childhood to demonstrate her abilities as a woman and enforcer of the middle-class nuclear

family.

Intrinsic to this mediated motherhood lifestyle was the encouragement of surveillant

behaviors the mother would enact for herself and for the network of mothers in which she

belonged. Douglas and Michaels pointedly emphasize that new momism fostered an environment

in which “everyone watches us, we watch ourselves and other mothers, and we watch ourselves

watching ourselves” (6). Angela C. Henderson et al. elaborate on this surveillance of modern

motherhood by invoking Michel Foucault’s theory of twentieth century punishment that

diminished the need for social institutions to enforce control over human behavior. Henderson et

al. indicate that mothers similarly do not need an active and present force to monitor their

actions; rather, “mothers surveil one another through interpersonal communication and

observation, ranging anywhere from conversations about children’s appropriate developmental

milestone to a covert, silent monitoring of other moms’ disciplining behavior in public places”

(231). This almost passive form of community and self-surveillance contributes to the ambiguity

of new momism’s burdensome forces in that the act of surveillance is ever-present and

continuous without accentuating the damaging effects it can have. Rather than identifying

surveillance as a specific tool, like a camera phone or nanny cam that physically calls attention to

its recording capabilities, modern motherhood conjures up a surveillance culture in which

women and other mothers elusively and seamlessly normalize and enforce the acts of judgments

that keep them striving to perfect an impossible-to-perfect social role.

As motherhood continues to be a lifestyle project constantly in need of managing and

improving, girlhood remains in a stage of danger that requires attention from the political status

quo. Following the self-help trend of the 1990s, literature of the early twenty-first century

continued to target how mothers could manage the stress crushing their daughters. Such books,

like Lisa Damour’s Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into

Adulthood (2016) and Rachel Simmons’ Enough As She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond

Impossible Standards of Success to Live Happy, Healthy, and Fulfilling Lives (2018), focused

particularly on how mothers could help their daughters navigate intensified educational and

social pressures in an increasingly digitized environment fixated on the illusion of perfection.

While these guides are also preoccupied with closing the “confidence gap” supposedly keeping

girls down, they deviate slightly in their approach by promoting authenticity and acceptance of

girls’ imperfections. This angle on the girl crisis at first seems refreshing and different; however,

as corporate culture has coopted this language, these therapeutic methods get reconceptualized as

necessary for productivity rather than for self-preservation. This discursive shift from

empowerment via confidence-building to empowerment via self-acceptance have the same goals

in mind: help mothers help daughters become active functioning participants in a cycle of work

founded on capitalist exploitation of human resources. As the next section explores, mediated

representations of motherhood play a strong role in making the professionalization of the

daughter seem empowering, progressive, and crucial to her success. In doing so, motherhood

helps shape girlhood achievement in a way that is conducive to the functions of neoliberal

capitalism and maintains hierarchical class systems.

Mother and Daughter, Inc.

In the first season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2007, the role of the mother

manager is introduced to audiences as a special asset to the entrepreneurial young woman in the

second episode “Managing Mom.” The matriarch of the family, Kris Jenner, arranges for oldest

daughter Kim to participate in a celebrity cat walk fashion show in downtown Hollywood.5 As

the family arrives at the venue, Kim begins to question the organization of the event when it

appears that the planners have no sense of direction for its participants or who they allowed in as

celebrities. “I can’t believe my mom booked me for this. This is the worst show ever,” Kim says

as plus-size models and women wearing thongs strut the stage. The Kardashian family manage to

sneak away before the show ends, but not before calling out Kris for booking the gig. Feeling

distrustful of her mom, Kim begins shopping around for a “real” manager who can handle the

stressful demands of her growing career. However, when Kris finds out that Kim is threatening to

replace her, she records Kim’s phone number on her answering machine message and checks

5Because several of the celebrity families I discuss in this chapter share the same last name, I will refer to

them by their first names.

out at a spa for the afternoon. Bombarded with phone calls and not able to reach her mom, Kim

comes around and apologizes to a tearful Kris. “It’s very serious to me, how I handle your

business and how I handle the business of the whole family,” Kris says. “All I need you to realize

is that I do have your best interests at heart.”

The professionalization of the mother-daughter relationship, while not new, rose in

popularity when Kris Jenner and many more celebrity mothers began sharing the ways they

manage their children’s careers in entertainment with the public. Often referred to by the

portmanteau “momager,” these professional mother managers attempt to consolidate new

momism’s call to have both a family and a career into a single branded lifestyle identity. Drawing

on the popular imaginary of the working-class stage mother (an archetype often viewed

negatively for using children to escape economic insecurity and to bolster one’s own career), the

momager utilizes professional networks and her own business savvy to maintain and promote her

child’s brand to industry producers hiring in the creative sectors.6 While the momager does not

always escape critique for “[g]aining new wealth and celebrity status ‘off of their daughters’

backs,’” as Shelley Cobb raises, she does resonate powerfully for ordinary mothers eager to

equate the hard work of parenting to the hard work of being a professional (4). In this way, the

momager functions as a “rebranding” of the overbearing stereotype, turning the mother instead

into someone who is successful and at times admirable, despite her demanding nature.

Popular writing on the momager from cultural critics has observed the complex double

nature of this figure who “embodies cultural trends toward personal branding and hyper-involved

parenting so neatly that it can be hard to see it for what it is” (Romanoff). Such characterizations

highlight how the professionalization of motherhood, and therefore the professionalization of the

6The stage mother has often been memorialized in the stage and film musical Gypsy, where Rose Hovick

relies on her daughter Gypsy Rose Lee’s sexuality for upward class mobility.

child, have become so commonplace that the precarity and anxieties of self-branding are

crystallized as natural parts of the job. Similarly, I claim that the professionalization of

motherhood blurs the boundaries between the mother’s role as parent and manager of her child.

While this process can take place online, where the mother is seen managing her offspring’s

social media presence for parental protection as well as for branding purposes, it also functions

across media platforms and industries that instill in mothers the idea that they must be doing

more than they already are to help their children succeed.

Looking to lifestyle media representations of motherhood, moms are presented with a

plethora of choices and products to use as they guide and manage their children’s careers.

Maureen Ryan defines lifestyle media as books, television, magazines, and websites that “frame

tasks that have historically fallen to women—housekeeping, home design, entertaining, beauty,

child care, and food preparation, among other repetitive practices of personal and domestic

betterment—as richly rewarding pursuits and sites of inspiration on aesthetic and emotional

levels” (2-3). The individuals facilitating the promotion of specific lifestyles meant to enrich the

person are what Celia Lury calls “living brands” (77). Laurie Ouellette expands on this concept

in looking at reality TV, explaining living brands as “the branding of all dimensions of social life,

from institutions to expertise to education to relationships” that offer guidance and advice for

“everyday living, shopping and self-fashioning” through the “intimacy of television” (42-43).

Following this logic, I propose the momager as a type of living brand featured prominently on

reality TV that promotes and commodifies an entrepreneurial lifestyle for mothers seeking to

manage their children’s careers, often in entertainment. In particular, the momager holds

significant implications for the study of girlhood achievement as it beckons audiences to view

motherhood as crucial to the betterment of future girls in a capitalist society. Through the

professionalization of motherhood as managers in a media landscape, girls are professionalized

as commodities whose worth is measured by how well they achieve reputable roles and financial

wealth in the public sphere.

Arguably the face of the momager living brand, Kris Jenner embodies the drive and

opportunism that have established what a successful momager should look like. In her 2011

autobiography Kris Jenner…And All Things Kardashian, the momager relays how she was left

completely broke after her divorce from first husband Robert Kardashian (93). Vowing to never

be in that position again, Kris began managing the individual careers of her children and second

spouse and former Olympic decathlete, Caitlyn Jenner, before launching the family’s own reality

TV show in 2007. Earning the title “momager,” Kris attempted to trademark the term in 2015 so

she could use it to promote consumer products related to the Kardashian brand (Bowerman). In

creating a market for momager-related products, Kris Jenner sells a particular elite identity and

lifestyle to the momager-wannabe. For instance, on Mother’s Day 2018 and 2019, youngest

daughter Kylie Jenner introduced special kits of her mother’s “momager-inspired” beauty

collection for her makeup company, Kylie Cosmetics (Figure 1). Priced at $49 USD through

Figure 1: Kylie Cosmetics’ Momager Kit Palette Sold at Ulta.com

Ulta Beauty’s online store, the Momager Kit includes a Todd Kraines Velvet Liquid Lipstick and

the limited-edition Kris Kollection Pressed Powder Eyeshadow Palette. Gracing the packaging is

Kris Jenner in black sunglasses and the phrase “You’re doing amazing sweetie!!” in reference to

a KUWTK episode where Kris “managed” daughter Kim during a photoshoot. Printed on each

lens of Kris’ sunglasses is “10%,” alluding to the fee she takes from her children’s business

pursuits. The promotional packaging of the momager makeup kit, while aimed at fans of the

show who will recognize these references and key details, presents a hyper-feminine, upperclass,

business savvy picture of what a momager is. Understanding KUWTK as a cultural landmark,

women who do not fit this idea are beckoned to measure their aspirations against this image of

glossy success.

The lifestyling of motherhood through celebrity women and the tips and merchandise

they sell has been particularly influential in the normalization of feminine class aspirations. As

Jorie Lagerwey notes in her work on celebrity motherhood, “performances of motherhood that

can cultivate fans or followers across media platforms and transform those fans into active

consumers not just of media…but also of branded consumer products, are the most visible and

celebrated forms of maternity” (8). At the same time, these most privileged representations do

not fully explore the social precarity of women’s work and the cultural anxieties of transcending

class barriers. In particular, the income gap between women and men, as well as the housework

gender gap requiring career women to shoulder most of the domestic labor, produces insecure

living conditions for mothers seeking a steady income. Being able to assemble a paying career

out of motherhood, as Kris Jenner did, makes sense when other job prospects seem unstable,

unavailable, or just impossible to balance with the all-consuming demands of housework.

Even as the mother resorts to being backstage manager for her child, there exists public

disdain for women who seem to be using their children to further their own careers and acquire

wealth and status. Shelley Cobb asserts that momagers like Dina Lohan and Lynn Spears, framed

in media discourse as lacking middle-class decorum, tend to “invoke cultural anxieties about the

superficial link between capitalist individualism and ‘family values,’ as well as troubling the

cultural assumption that the privilege of whiteness necessitates success at both” (10). By “family

values,” Cobb not only refers to the normative nuclear family but the racial and class legacies

that have solidified, protected, and privileged certain kinships. Prominent families like the

Kennedys or the Hiltons have secured political or social prestige through the reinforcement of

inherited wealth and the maintenance of an influential public image. This protection of status and

labor translates to media discourse, as Alison Harvey uncovers in her analysis of the mobile

celebrity game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. However, as Harvey shows, the economics and

ludic features of interactive media make “visible the labor underlying celebrity and its spreading

practices of self-branding, intimacy work, and hypervisibility in the attentional economy, making

it impossible to ignore the intensity of women’s work therein” (654). Similarly, the marketing of

the momager as a postfeminist living brand who has built her success through personal grit and

entrepreneurial strategies highlights how other women could engage this labor without the

required social pedigree. As the momager enacts an individualist and public-facing approach to

managing her children and building the family business, she threatens traditional modes of

acquiring status. Even more, the visibility of her labor troubles the boundaries of the white ruling

class that obscure pathways for social mobility.

For example, the media attention surrounding June Shannon, also known as Mama June,

and her daughter, reality pageant show star Honey Boo Boo, illustrate some of the class anxieties

inherent in the momager living brand. Shannon came to prominence when she brought her

sixyear-old daughter Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson onto TLC’s reality junior pageant show

Toddlers & Tiaras in 2011. Emerging from a white working-class background, media sites

branded June and Alana as “white trash” looking to extend their 15-minutes of fame. At the same

time, audience fascination with the mother and daughter led to the creation of their own TLC

series, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which ran from 2012 to 2014. The show followed the antics

of Shannon, Thompson, and the rest of their family in Georgia in what critics called a “green

light to laugh at rednecks and fat people” (Goodman). Concerns were also raised that TLC was

exploiting Thompson and that Shannon was simply living off of her daughter’s newfound fame

and fortune. In 2014, the network canceled the show after discovering Shannon’s then boyfriend

was convicted of sexually abusing one of her underage daughters.

While Thompson’s fame dimmed (with the exception of an appearance on Dancing with

the Stars: Juniors in 2018), Shannon’s grew brighter when the network We TV launched her

reality show Mama June: From Not to Hot in February 2017. As the focus shifted to Shannon

and her 300-pound weight loss journey, questions emerged about the momager clinging to the

spotlight not just for attention but for the new wealth and class position she now had thanks to

her daughter. However, as cultural critic Joanna Arcieri argues, Shannon never abandoned her

redneck identity and that the purpose of From Not to Hot was to give “audiences permission to

ignore June’s failings as a woman and parent, for the sake of entertainment.” Even so, Shannon

made a point in interviews to show that she was being a good mom by encouraging her daughters

to eat healthier and not dissuading them from plastic surgery “if it would make them confident”

(King). The rebranding of Mama June thus reveals how good parenting and the promise that the

momager’s work still benefits the child is vital to the public image, even as it troubles popular

perceptions of race and class.

Living brands like Mama June and Kris Jenner feed into a larger matrix of motherhood

and parenting media that attempt to commodify and sell this entrepreneurial-ized lifestyle and its

values to ordinary mothers from a variety of backgrounds. In fact, while researching and writing

this chapter, I received several pamphlets in the mail for online support systems for new mothers

and savings codes for baby products—despite not being a mother or planning to become one

anytime soon. Apart from the uncomfortable data mining that can take place, motherhood media

provide mothers with ways to make achievement a normal part of their children’s vocabulary.

Mommy blogs and momager support websites, like The Momager Lifestyle, provide tips,

resources, and community forums where moms can learn and strategize how to get their kids into

the best dance studios or casting calls. Independent businesses on Etsy.com also draw mothers in

with momager merchandise that include wine glasses, baby hoodies, Mother’s Day cards,

baseball hats, and coffee mugs embossed with phrases like “Momager of the Year,” “Domestic

CEO,” and “Call My Momager.”

Reality television programs, for better or worse, provide aspirational examples for

mothers of talented kids. Lifetime’s Dance Moms (2011-Present), a series following Abby Lee

Miller’s dance studio for young girls, illustrates how some momagers were able to find career

success for their daughters, like professional dancer Maddie Ziegler and teen pop star JoJo Siwa.

The same network also released The Mother/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition in 2015, a

limited reality series featuring celebrity therapist Dr. Debbie Magids helping former reality stars

reconcile broken relationships with their controlling momagers. The resources, merchandise, and

entertainment programs that contribute to the momager being a living brand reinforce and

normalize the professionalization process for mothers. Yet it also positions motherhood as

personally responsible for the development and success of young people, feeding into the

cultural imperative to create a “better life” for one’s offspring through social mobility. The

momager becomes a tangible role women can adopt through the consumption and curation of

mediatized content; however, in doing so, child-rearing becomes a capitalist project measured by

the labor the mother invests in the family’s economic output.

In the following sections, I examine how the use of surveillance in reality TV

authenticates the necessity of the mother in the professional lifestyling of the girl as a valuable

commodity. I focus on the celebrity media reporting of several mother-daughter relationships as

well as the reality TV programs in which they appear: Kylie and Kris Jenner in E!’s Life of Kylie

(2017), an extension of the Kardashian reality franchise, and Yolanda Hadid and her modeling

competition Making a Model (2018) for teen girls and their mothers on Lifetime. While both of

these programs are marginal texts with only one season so far, I assert that they offer useful

insight to the construction and management of the professionalized girl under media surveillance.

In foregrounding the mother as manager of girlhood, I argue that these reality TV programs

illuminate a dominant discourse that valorizes girls’ achievements based on their ability to

preserve the financial and social capital of the normative and often white patriarchal family.

“My Little CEO”: Kris Jenner and Life of Kylie

In June 2017, a promo video for then 19-year-old Kylie Jenner’s reality docu-series, Life

of Kylie, was released on YouTube. The teaser documented Kylie’s daily life performing for

paparazzi, fashion photographers, and social media followers as her voiceover conceded that she

feels constant pressure to present as a celebrity even though this identity does not capture her

true self. Scenes of Kylie as a smiling tween girl are juxtaposed with updated images of the teen

star in full contoured makeup having fun with friends at photoshoots, racing around in expensive

cars and private jets, and staring pensively at her phone screen as she snaps a selfie. Set to an

electronic pop soundtrack, Life of Kylie asserted that fans will get to know the “real Kylie”

through her friendships, charity, and desire to be a “normal teen girl.”

Viewers familiar with KUWTK and its extensive media presence across television, the

news, and social media will recognize Kylie as the youngest daughter of the famous blended

family. Born in 1997 to Kris and Caitlyn Jenner, Kylie has spent most of her young life in front

of reality TV cameras. Obtaining her own spin-off show somewhat removed from the shadow of

her family, Kylie’s reality persona promised to shed the Snapchat filters and share the raw,

insecure side to growing up famous. It is Kylie’s anxiety that is of most interest to this chapter,

particularly as it squirms under the surveillance of reality TV, digital celebrity, and her

momager’s supervision. As Kylie has grown her multi-million dollar cosmetics company, a

career passion she claims in Life of Kylie as the only reason she “keeps up” with the celebrity

lifestyle, she must navigate what it means to achieve on behalf of herself as well as her family.

Kris Jenner, who serves as chief financial officer for Kylie Cosmetics, is represented as an

everpresent force in Kylie’s life who contributes to some of her achievement anxiety. Yet instead

of framing Kris as the “bad momager” pressuring her daughter into a life she does not want, Life

of Kylie explores their relationship as a site of struggle where girlhood achievement is made

possible by negotiating business and pleasure under the surveillant forces of new momism.

Leading up to the premiere of her show, Kylie Jenner’s anxiety was a well-discussed

topic in public displays of the young star. In an interview with Complex magazine in 2016, Kylie

confessed that she felt overwhelmed by her family’s fame and the attention she garnered going

out in public. “If I tried to go to the movies or something, I would stop breathing in the middle

and just cry,” she said. “I’m surprised there aren’t videos of me out there. I felt super trapped,

like everybody was watching me” (Sanchez). In the same year, an episode of KUWTK showed

Kylie venting her exhaustion with the celebrity life. Speaking with her sisters and mom, Kylie

explains, “I just feel like I’ve been dealing with anxiety for so long. Some people are born for

this life and some people aren’t. I just know I’m not supposed to be famous.” When Life of Kylie

debuted on E! a year later, scenes of the star going to therapy for the first time allowed audiences

to see Kylie try to make sense of her life growing up on reality TV and the self-image anxiety

she experienced that ultimately led to her getting lip fillers. At the same time, reviews of the

show derided its lack of self-reflexivity, with headlines claiming that the Life of Kylie instead

provided a look “inside the charmed life of an anxious, paranoid rich girl” (Zimmerman). Other

sites questioned the authenticity of Kylie’s anxiety, wondering, as Vanity Fair did, if Kris Jenner

“held an emergency session earlier this year to brainstorm ways to amp up the ‘relatability’ of the

Kylie brand” (Duboff).

Whether or not Kylie’s anxiety is as extreme as her celebrity presentation claims, its

association with her momager reveals how much of the decision-making behind Kylie’s

representation and career is intertwined with the Kardashian family. Since 2007, the Kardashian

family has constructed a commercial media conglomerate extending to multiple areas of

entertainment and consumerism, including television, fashion, cosmetics, music, digital gaming

apps, diet products, perfume, and jewelry, to name a few. Accompanying these business ventures

is the emotionality tied to the family’s celebrity presentation on their reality show and various

spin-offs. Instead of assuming the faceless authority often attributed to CEOs of major

companies, the Kardashians appear personable to the public as well as to each other, despite the

multiple conflicts that frequently arise between family members, friends, and associates on the

show and on the covers of celebrity gossip magazines. In their analysis of the Kardashian family

business, Maria Pramaggiore and Diane Negra draw on Arlie Hochschild’s social theories of

emotional labor and capitalism to illustrate how the Kardashians rely on a “vision of corporate

belonging” through their communal family (89). By appearing like any other American family

with ups and downs, the Kardashians are able to market authenticity and togetherness to

audiences despite their bourgeois capitalist existence. Pramaggiore and Negra assert that

KUWTK “has helped to brand the blended Kardashian family as a productive neoliberal

economic unit, a hardworking yet ‘royal’ family of Reality TV that emblematizes nepotistic and

oligarchic industry structures consistent with those developing more generally across the

economy” (91). Even so, no matter how much audiences might view the Kardashians as

contributing to one another’s wealth, the family always asserts that they individually found

success without the help of any famous relative.

Downplaying the nepotism of celebrity family life thus becomes essential to the

sustainability of Kylie’s brand of professionalized girlhood. For instance, in early 2019,

American business magazine Forbes granted Kylie the distinction of “world’s youngest selfmade

billionaire” when her cosmetics company reached a $1 billion estimate. This headline instantly

drew ire from critics who pointed out that the success of Kylie Cosmetics was thanks to her

influential celebrity family. In an interview with Forbes, Kylie reasoned that it was social media

and hard work that got her to where she is. “It’s the power of social media,” she said. “I had such

a strong reach before I was able to start anything” (Robehmed). The term “self-made” is

important to highlight when discussing how class, race, and ability intersect with notions of

girlhood achievement. Self-made connotes personal responsibility, success without the aid of

people, resources, or institutions. In short, self-made forms one of the core tenets of

neoliberalism, and by extension, postfeminist culture. With all the pride and merit that comes

with being self-made, the term works to diminish and exclude other avenues towards

achievement that might need to rely on the protections of the welfare state for a more equitable

chance at success. For young women, self-made can be a particularly empowering term to adopt

as it suggests independence and free will from the patriarchy, qualities that elicit respect in the

entrepreneurial arena of late capitalism. Kylie Jenner’s embrace of being the youngest self-made

billionaire aligns perfectly with her postfeminist brand of achievement, yet it does so in a way

that strives to distance herself from her family. Despite critics pointing out that the Kardashians

played a large part in her billionaire status, Kylie has attempted to dismiss this notion, instead

relying on the narrative that it was her social media and marketing expertise, not nepotism, that

amplified her economic value.

Kylie’s attempt to pursue her achievements without pressure from her family or the

celebrity world gets negotiated in different ways on Life of Kylie. Although Kylie claims she

desires greater privacy, citing the experience of growing up on camera since she was nine, the

show refutes this possibility as it subjects her to the same level of surveillance as her celebrity

family. It is under this heightened media surveillance that Kylie and her achievements are most

visibly tethered to her family, particularly as her momager appears frequently to monitor Kylie’s

entourage and her business operations. For Kylie to be visible, there needs to be recognition of

how her story fits in with her other famous family members. However, it is by association with

her family that Kylie’s media representation seems to conjure up the most anxiety.

Part of the visibility and surveillance of Kylie Jenner is wrapped up in the reality show’s

reliance on a social media aesthetic in its production and design. Social media, supposedly, is

where Kylie can best control her image and privacy, and the show’s incorporation of these

elements works to send the message that Kylie is able to be her true self on her own reality TV

program. In the first episode, “Nineteen Pt. 1,” Kylie emphasizes that “in order to stay relevant

for the public, I have to be on Instagram, and I have to be on Snapchat, just keeping people

entertained.” Short videos of Kylie posing with friends in a car, playing with her dog, and

popping bubbles in a Snapchat filter fill the transitionary space between scenes in the show. As

these videos capture seemingly insignificant moments of Kylie’s daily life, they relay the

subtleties of emotional labor the young star claims she must perform. A Snapchat of Kylie using

a filter that distorts her face into a frown shows her saying “I’m sad” before cutting to a scene of

her dancing with friend Jordyn Woods at a photoshoot (Figure 2). The juxtaposition of these

Snapchat sequences with Kylie’s personal monologues on the reality show create a narrative

around the use of artifice and how certain modes of media production work to mask Kylie’s

Figure 2: Snapchat Filter Aesthetic in Life of Kylie Transitions

authentic self. While digital media scholars like Alice Marwick and danah boyd demonstrate how

the age of celebrity production on social media claims to offer a more intimate and more truthful

look at the life of celebrity, Life of Kylie frames social media as a façade to Kylie’s real self

(140). This becomes the ironic conceit of Kylie’s show: by declaring social media as the false

project of who Kylie is, Life of Kylie is able to privilege the constructed framework of reality TV

as the more authentic illustration of its young star.

Kylie’s discomfort with the surveillance of social media and celebrity life opens the door

to other ways the reality show represents her anxiety. Significantly, her momager Kris Jenner

brings a foreboding presence whenever the show directs attention to Kylie’s company or focuses

on the various members of her entourage who find Kris intimidating. When asked by a producer

off-screen what it is like to have Kris around, Kylie’s executive assistant Victoria mimes zipping

her mouth, implying that everyone must be on their best behavior when the momager is on set.

Yet Life of Kylie does not need to solely rely on its cast’s frozen terror of Kris to convey how

influential she is to Kylie’s celebrity operation. Rather, the show captures how Kris permeates

the technological space that Kylie already finds so demanding. On a number of occasions, Kylie

has conversations with her mom over FaceTime or speaker phone in the car, allowing Kris to

take up visible if not audible space whenever Kylie is trying to make decisions about travel or

the state of her business. At another point, Kylie layers a Snapchat filter onto a video of Kris,

transforming her face into a glamorous witch with a spider crawling on her cheek. The

surveillance presence of Kris Jenner throughout Kylie’s various digital channels speaks to the

process of normalization Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill describe when looking at

selfmonitoring beauty apps that provide self-enhancing filters, virtual makeovers, and digital

beauty advisors through a person’s mobile device. They argue that these apps can contribute to

the “intimatization” of images and practices of feminine upkeep, taking beauty practices and

making them familiar and everyday through a smartphone that can be taken anywhere (25).

Similarly,

Kris’ access to Kylie anytime and anywhere works to imbue her maternal surveillance into the

ordinary fabric of Kylie’s life. In doing so, Life of Kylie asserts that Kris’ watchful presence is a

regular and instrumental part of Kylie’s personal world and career.

Plot points focusing on the management of Kylie Cosmetics provide a closer look into

how Kylie negotiates her momager’s surveillance and her anxiety to achieve in a way that

maintains the family’s celebrity brand. The third episode, “Boss,” introduces viewers to Kylie’s

life as the CEO of her own company, a role she claims has given her confidence despite her usual

anxious state of mind. Yet as the episode unfolds, Life of Kylie illustrates how its star still

struggles to hold on to that confidence when external doubt and conflict threaten to unravel her

self-esteem. Unsurprisingly, Kris Jenner presents one of the more complicated forces Kylie must

deal with as her momager strives to both empower and restrain her daughter. As Kris spends time

around Kylie’s home, she notices that Kylie does not have a professional hold over her entourage

of assistants. At one point, Kris pulls Kylie aside to warn her that there are people who will want

to take advantage of her celebrity and that she needs to set boundaries. Kylie initially dismisses

her mother, telling viewers, “My mom has been worried about who I surround myself with my

entire life.” When the scene returns to mother and daughter, Kris justifies her concern:

“I worry because you’re so young….Remember, you are a CEO, Kylie. You are in charge.”

Despite attempting to control her own privacy, Kylie is seen as unable to control the surveillance

of others who might try to use and abuse her fame because of the naivete her young age suggests.

At times, her mother might seem unnecessarily overprotective. But when framed as a business

concern as opposed to a personal one, Kris’ advice to Kylie appears rational and proactive in this

entrepreneurial space.

The generational conflict that persists between Kylie and Kris not only serves reality

TV’s desires for manufactured drama; it works to establish Kylie’s brand as a self-made

entrepreneur who makes her own choices and rebels against her celebrity roots. During a

conversation with her best friend Jordyn in “Nineteen Pt. 2,” Kylie laments that she does not like

being famous. “I just don’t know who I’m doing it for,” Kylie says. “I see Kendall [Jenner] and

Bella [Hadid] and Hailey [Baldwin], and they just put their outfits together. They’re made for

this…that’s not me. I don’t want my picture taken.” Kylie’s confession that she isn’t “made” for

celebrity life, unlike her sisters and peers, and that she enjoys the moments where she feels like a

teen girl, intensifies the invocation to achieve on behalf of others. While this refusal does not

necessarily mean Kylie resists other outlets for personal and professional achievement, it does

reveal the show’s attempt to market Kylie in a different light than her other family members who

seemingly crave the spotlight. Kylie is presented as wanting to be able to achieve her dreams on

her own terms—not because her family or the media expect her to.

Despite the show’s effort to capture Kylie as a renegade Kardashian, the fact that Kris

Jenner accompanies Kylie to business meetings and trips suggests that the momager is still seen

as an intrinsic piece to her youngest daughter’s success. Kylie as the future of the Kardashian

brand stands out the most during conversations with her mother. On a trip to Peru to visit a

charity in “Peru Pt. 1,” Kris expresses worries that her daughter is moving at a fast pace. Kylie

explains that she has so much responsibility and that she is often overwhelmed by her desire to

be both a teenager and a CEO. As Kris asserts that Kylie must feel like she has everything

figured out, Kylie interjects, saying that she “wants to make mistakes” so she can learn and grow

from them. As mother and daughter observe each other, Kris finally collects her thoughts and

says, “You are the perfect spokesperson for your generation because you are such a great role

model.” While Kylie’s statement could signal danger for the Kardashian brand, Kris is shown not

only accepting Kylie’s outlook on life but formulating it as potential material that can extend the

Kardashian influence to a younger generation—one that increasingly seems to value authenticity

and self-acceptance. As Kris says at one point in the show, “I’m so proud of you, my little CEO.”

Despite Kylie’s so-called self-made billionaire status, her work still belongs within the

perimeters of her momager’s control. In order to keep up with the wildcard that is Kylie, Kris

must be able to spin her mistakes in such a way that protects and preserves the family’s social

capital.

As Life of Kylie demonstrates, the momager is a vital piece to the daughter’s professional

lifestyling as an entrepreneurial, postfeminist agent, even as the daughter attempts to divorce her

brand from her mother’s influence and expectations. Particularly in a culture where being

selfmade is an empowering label to possess, it is advantageous for the privileged celebrity girl to

appear that she has found success without the aid of connections and resources her family may

have. While surveillance media can provide testimony to the girl’s authentic journey towards

achievement, it also further tethers the girl to her affluent family, making it difficult for audiences

to accept the girl’s self-made narrative. As the girl’s relationship to her family becomes a part of

her brand, the mother also benefits from the visibility and attention the girl invites.

This process has become a cycle for the Kardashian daughters as they now have children

of their own. Around the time Life of Kylie premiered, rumors circulated that Kylie Jenner was

pregnant with rapper boyfriend Travis Scott’s child. The news remained just that—rumors—for

months as Kylie disappeared from social media, leaving her family to awkwardly dance around

the topic when asked about the youngest Kardashian on talk shows. Finally, in early 2018, Kylie

posted a video to YouTube titled “To Our Daughter” announcing the birth of Stormi Webster.

According to YouTube, the video collected 80 million views and became the biggest trending

YouTube video of 2018 (Alexander). As Kylie was able to maintain her “anti-celebrity” brand in

refusing to document her pregnancy on social media, the decision to publish her daughter’s first

moments in a public video speak to the importance of the girl for the mother’s career under new

momism. Although it might be premature to label Kylie a momager, press reports declaring that

the young mother has trademarked her daughter’s name to use for future commercial projects

suggests Kylie is already following in her mother’s business-minded footsteps (Gardner). As the

momager becomes an important, and necessary, lifestyle identity in the formation and

maintenance of girlhood achievement in the early twenty-first century, the act of raising a

daughter turns into a potentially lucrative trade in need of regulation.

Momager-in-Training: Yolanda Hadid and Making a Model

If Kris Jenner pioneered the acceptance of the momager in the contemporary media

lexicon, former Dutch model Yolanda Hadid helped fine-tune the practice into something that

requires careful training and monitoring. In early 2018, Lifetime released an eight-part reality TV

series, Making a Model with Yolanda Hadid, featuring six teenage girls and their mothers

competing for a modeling contract with Hadid and international modeling agency IMG Models.

As a mother to three young, successful models (Gigi, Bella, and Anwar Hadid), the program gave

Hadid the chance to espouse some of her parenting advice to would-be momagers trying to

wrestle their daughters into the industry.

In an interview with W Magazine, Hadid explains the inspiration behind Making a Model

and the importance of the mother-daughter relationship:

[…] I was asked to come in for a meeting with Lifetime, and they pitched me this

idea of a modeling show. I just loved the women in the boardroom, because they

were really open to making it more about the mother-daughter relationship. It was

really important to me to make it about one of the real important things in life

because obviously, you know, Tyra Banks kind of owns the modeling show, and I

didn’t feel that I wanted to or could compete with that. So it all evolved from

there, and ended up being perfect timing for me, because it made me move to

New York and be closer to my girls. (Eckardt)

Central to the premise of the reality show is the framing of Hadid as a caring, protective, and

knowledgeable mother who knows how to navigate the fashion world with the daughters’ best

interests in mind. Different from Tyra Banks, who launched the long-time successful America’s

Next Top Model franchise in the 2000s, Hadid seeks to bring her motherhood experience into the

professional realm. In a way, Making a Model becomes an extension of the modeling momager

brand Hadid has been developing as her daughters have taken the spotlight. In doing so, the show

creates the feeling of an authentic coaching template that aspirational mothers might refer to

when managing the careers of their own children. However, as I argue, the reality competition

format of the program, along with its weekly challenges and cash rewards, measures the outcome

and success of momager training by how much profit and prestige is generated. In other words,

mothers will know they are good mothers if their daughters are able to attain professional

success by winning the competition.

Prior to Making a Model, Yolanda Hadid’s appearances on seasons three through six of

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2010-Present) introduced viewers to the parenting

priorities that would become the cornerstone of her image as a supermodel momager. On a

number of occasions, Gigi, Bella, and Anwar, the children Hadid has with ex-husband and real

estate developer Mohamed Hadid, would show up at the oceanside estate their mother shared

with then husband David Foster. While the other celebrity housewives also had families and

young children to raise, RHoBH often presented Hadid as the more rational, level-headed mother

who preferred to avoid the drama that frequently took over the lives of the other women. Scenes

depicting Hadid cooking meals for her children further set her apart as a mother who did not

need to rely on the help of kitchen staff to feed her family. “I feel that, if you’re not raising your

kids, you shouldn’t have any kids,” Hadid says at one point. The practicality of Hadid’s

parenting approach also extends to the way she provides advice to her children’s emerging

careers. While cooking dinner, a teenage Gigi laments how much she misses playing volleyball.

Hadid reminds her daughter that volleyball is a “masculine sport” that builds muscle, unlike

modeling, and that if she wishes to pursue modeling as a career, she needs to maintain a lithe

feminine figure. “She’s got to start building her career,” Hadid says. “And sometimes that means

giving up things that we love to do.”

Hadid’s vision for Gigi’s success carries across several more RHoBH episodes as she

accompanies her daughter on magazine photoshoots. Hadid is often shown praising Gigi’s

natural talent (“She was bred for this!”) and reminding her daughter that she can have a “cheat

day” after dieting for a grueling photoshoot. The fact that Gigi attains success by booking gigs

with top modeling agencies and brands further confirms Hadid’s effective parenting. The show

also manages to balance Hadid’s “tough love” approach through the ex-supermodel’s personal

health struggles. In 2012, Hadid was diagnosed with Lyme disease, and RHoBH documented her

visits to doctors as well as surgical procedures that incapacitated the star. Following these scenes,

Hadid’s desire to see her children succeed in their careers seems to come from wanting the best

and healthiest lives for them, rather than ensuring that her modeling legacy will continue. This

framing is particularly important to consider when looking at celebrity women who try to

downplay their affluence and power in order to seem ordinary and authentic. As Erin Meyers in

her analysis of authenticity and celebrity notes, “the blurring of the private/public distinction that

occurs in celebrity media is essential for the maintenance of their star power” (892). The fact that

Yolanda Hadid has an Instagram account for her home refrigerator is telling of the star’s attempts

to seem open and personable, despite the obvious display of wealth through organic produce and

rows of Fiji water that fill her high-end glass fridge. The more Hadid’s celebrity image blends

her private life with her public one, the more her role as momager expert seems accessible in the

self-help media market.

In interviews and television appearances leading up to Making a Model’s debut, Yolanda

Hadid is characterized as a “supermodel mama bear” who has succeeded in protecting her

children from the harsh realities of the industry while giving them room to grow as mature

individuals (Eckardt). At the Front Row Fashion Awards in 2017, Hadid received the “Mother of

the Year” award and talked about how she decided to not let her children model before they

turned 18. “I didn’t want anybody judging them on what they looked like,” she explained in an

interview with Elle. “I wanted them to feel and be the authentic human beings that they are, and I

think that created a lot of strength for them” (Blyth). Hadid’s awareness of the fashion industry’s

toxic image-obsessed culture, and her efforts to shield her children from it until they reached

adulthood, interestingly afford her respect in the surveillance culture of new momism. The star

manages to strike what seems the perfect balance of strict and aloof in her momager style: she is

active in her children’s careers and only sets boundaries or rules when she feels they may benefit

them. On raising two daughters, Hadid specifies that she wanted Gigi and Bella to focus on

developing a strong sense of self rather than perfecting their external beauty: “I always said to

them, listen, there are thousands of girls that are much more beautiful than you girls, but you

have an extraordinary character, and you’re going to have to set yourself apart by being a role

model…” (Blyth). In giving such advice, Hadid frames self-awareness and authenticity as not

only a valuable virtue but a career advantage, something that emerges prominently in Making a

Model.

Throughout the reality competition’s eight weeks, Hadid imparts her wisdom to the

mothers on how best to guide their daughters through social media branding, catwalks, industry

interviews and parties, photoshoots, and television commercial productions. At the heart of

Making a Model is Hadid’s philosophy that mothers are intrinsic to the success of the girl. In the

first episode, “Meet the Models and Moms,” Hadid is shown browsing the modeling profiles of

the teen girls with her creative staff in a New York City studio. The competition, she describes, is

a “boot camp” that will give the girls the “tools to survive” in the modeling industry. When

Hadid’s creative director commends her for bringing the mothers into the competition, she

reasons that because the girls are so young, they will not be living in a normal “model house,” as

viewers might have seen on America’s Next Top Model. “At the end of the day, the mother is the

foundation of the well-being of the child,” Hadid states. “And it is our duty as a mom to take

them, guide them, and allow them to fly on their own.” Because the “mother element” might

seem unusual to viewers of reality competition shows, Making a Model justifies this dynamic as

necessary to protecting the teen girls while crystallizing Hadid’s role as a caring expert who

understands how important supportive motherhood is to their daughters’ success. At the same

time, Hadid’s presence on the show—and, arguably, her reputation outside of it—suggests that

the surveillance and celebrity cultivated in reality TV offers an advantage (or at least an

opportunity) for getting ahead in one’s career. By coming onto Making a Model, the mothers of

the competing teen girls are therefore taking the proper steps to ensure that their daughters can

gain an upper edge in the modeling world.

As the show introduces the teen girls and their mothers, Hadid immediately documents

the challenges certain momagers might pose to their young daughters. In doing so, Making a

Model establishes its host as the dominant force of surveillance who observes how the other

mothers may hold back their daughters, as well as how the girls will need to power through

potential setbacks in order to succeed. The first mother-daughter team is Lilyan (age 15) and her

mom, Kat, two blonde Oklahoma residents who see Lilyan’s confident “badass” attitude as

leading the competition. At one point, Kat mentions, “I’m a good person, but I’m also a mama

Figure 3: A Promo Image for Making a Model with Yolanda Hadid

bear. Mess with my kid and you’re gonna get it.” The second competitor is Athena (age 13), a

mixed-race teen girl from Portland, Oregon following in her mother Diana’s modeling footsteps.

While Hadid commends Athena for her versatility in print and commercial modeling, she notes

that Diana seems to be controlling every aspect of Athena’s career. Next is Breanna (age 13), a

Filipina American girl from Los Angeles, and her overeager mother, Jessica, who Yolanda

believes needs to step back from the spotlight and let Breanna shine. Mikayla (age 16), an

African American girl from Chicago, and her mother, Karen, are the most inexperienced of the

competitors; however, Hadid observes that Mikayla and Karen are the most in sync with each

other’s personalities and goals. Last is Makenzie (age 14), a brown-haired white teen with social

anxiety from Indiana, and her mom, Teresa, who Hadid views as overprotective and prone to

pampering Makenzie. Later in episode four, Making a Model brings in a sixth girl, Carrington

(age 16), and mother, Lisa, from Tennessee to shake up the already competitive playing field.

The structure of Making a Model sees the girls competing in different challenges each

week—from working the catwalk to taking fashion quizzes to interviewing at top fashion

companies—and being awarded with cash prizes. As the show challenges each girl to become a

well-rounded modeling candidate, it invokes what Elizabeth Wissinger refers to as “glamour

labor.” Wissinger defines glamour labor as “the work to achieve the overall image touted by

fashion modeling as a means to the good life” (3). As Hadid calls on the girls to perfect their

poses and strengthen their knowledge of the industry, she also invites the mothers to accept their

daughters’ imperfections and failures. “None of our daughters are perfect, so early on start

embracing their imperfections,” Hadid says in the first episode before adding, “Your girl could

be a Gigi or a Bella.” What seems like contrasting advice is actually the program’s attempt to

negotiate popular discourses of girlhood anxiety and stress within the bloodthirsty terrain of the

reality competition show. To accommodate the potential insecurities of the girl competitors,

Hadid expects the mothers to create the nurturing and accepting environment that can reinforce

the girl’s confidence. Yet the show’s incentive is not so much that the mothers can learn how to

be better supportive moms, but how they can transform their daughters into celebrity

superpowers like the Hadid family.

Finding success in this process, like most reality television programs, relies on authentic

performances of the self. Often, the privilege of authenticity is granted to mostly white

participants. On Making a Model, this construction gets challenged in a few different ways, most

notably by the valuing and commodification of racial and ethnic difference. In the episode “Hair

Today, Gone Tomorrow,” the show reveals that Lilyan is part Native American on her father’s

side, prompting Hadid to encourage the teen to get rid of her dyed blonde hair and light color

contact lenses. “That’s not how God intended you to be,” Hadid says to Lilyan. In order to help

Lilyan embrace a more authentic self-image, Hadid has the girls go to a salon to update their

looks. However, Lilyan loathes the idea of dying her hair back to her natural brown roots, and as

a result, her confidence and winning streak begin to unravel. Eventually, Lilyan decides that she

“isn’t going to change herself for $5,000,” and she and her mom get a lightening shampoo to fix

her hair. Despite “taking back control” of her appearance, Lilyan continues to struggle in the

competition. Hadid pointedly notes, “By stripping away her walls, I’m starting to see her

insecurities.” By choosing to not play by Hadid’s rules, Lilyan appears to create further obstacles

towards winning the one thing she claims she wants. This plot point is further reinforced by her

mom Kat’s attempts to make Lilyan proud of her Native American heritage and to “shake it off

sister” so she can continue to compete. In order for Lilyan to achieve a modeling contract, and

acquire more wealth and status, she must embrace an ethnic identity being valued for its

authentic expression of cultural difference in a fashion industry attempting to appear more

inclusive.

In an adjacent plot, the consistent success of Mikayla and her mom Karen triggers

suspicion among the other mothers and daughters who believe Hadid has favorites to win the

competition. As Lilyan complains at one point, “Athena and Mikayla…they don’t work as hard

as I do.” As two of the only dark-skinned girls on the show, Athena’s and Mikayla’s

achievements are perceived as both authentic and contrived. While the show insists that the two

girls continuously win because of their talent and grit, the other mothers as well as some of the

teen contestants raise the possibility that Yolanda may have a certain girl in mind when she

thinks about who is deserving to win. Though the show never explicitly entertains the

conversation that Athena and Mikayla have been singled out for their racial and ethnic

differences, the suspicion of favoritism evokes negative discourses of affirmative action.

Because of the lack of racial representation in the commercial fashion industries, girls like

Athena and Mikayla provide cultural flavoring to an otherwise bland line-up of models. The fact

that these two girls continue to win even after the moms bring their concerns to Hadid creates

further distrust in the “system” of Making a Model. Lamenting how her daughter Lilyan works

hard and sees no results, Kat states, “I’m tired of being in the Karen and Mikayla show. You pull

the boot straps up, you pull the boot straps up, you pull the boot straps up…I mean, I feel like

they’re up to her freakin’ head at this point.” Brought up in a culture that dictates success by how

hard one works, Making a Model reinforces this discourse while also revealing the uncertainty of

its truth. Certainly, some girls who work hard will see their efforts rewarded, but not all girls who

work hard will. Still, the show leans heavily into the bootstrap myth, in turn creating an anxious

environment in which girls must work harder to increase their chances of winning.

Managing anxiety in the girl thus becomes another aspect for momagers to monitor in

order to help their girls overcome personal obstacles to achieve. Making a Model best explores

this through Makenzie, who reveals early on that she has social anxiety and dyslexia, the former

of which seems to contribute to the teen’s reticence in modeling in front of an audience and

interacting with the other girls in the house. Hadid picks up on this and suspects it may be a

detriment to the teen’s flourishing, so she invites daughter Bella to talk to Makenzie about

anxiety. Makenzie’s conversation with Bella seems to put her at ease, making her feel that if a

famous model like Bella can work through her nerves to walk the runway, then so can she. This

effort to temper Makenzie’s social anxiety speaks to a culture in which efficient self-care is

desired and, in many ways, expected of young people living in a competitive professional

environment. Making a Model assumes this position, not just in Hadid’s attempt to “solve” the

problem of Makenzie’s self-confidence, but also in how the other competitors treat Makenzie.

For instance, Lilyan often refers to Makenzie as a “victim” who “claims to have a disability” for

attention. The show thus frames Makenzie’s social anxiety as a problem—but a problem that can

be overcome with the right resources and support. Accepting that Makenzie’s social anxiety

might make her unfit for the modeling world is not an answer the show immediately accepts,

despite pushing the narrative that the girls must be comfortable with their imperfections.

This discourse continues in the episode “And Action!” during a Charlotte Tilbury makeup

commercial shoot when Makenzie struggles to recite her lines. As her mom Teresa tries to

reassure her daughter that she will be fine, footage of Hadid interrupts the scene to explain that

Teresa’s coddling is not helping Makenzie grow into a professional. Indeed, Makenzie continues

to botch her lines to the point that Hadid needs to step in to give her a pep talk. Hadid’s insertion

into the space of the scene, as well as through adjacent personal interviews, allow her to control

the narrative of the “problem girl.” Hadid observes that “as a mom” she has empathy but as a

“business woman” she wants Makenzie to push through her anxiety because she’s selling a

lipstick product that is “all about confidence.” Makenzie’s anxiety and insecurity become things

that need management, not just for her, but for the fashion industry she supposedly represents.

Hadid’s efforts to instill Makenzie with confidence to finish the job operates as an example of the

“good momager” as opposed to the pampering “bad momager” Teresa represents. Yet when

Makenzie insists that it’s not insecurity but her disability that holds her back, Hadid remarks,

“You have issues, but you can push through it.” Instead of the industry bending to accommodate

Makenzie, the young teen is asked to bend to accommodate the demands of fashion if she wants

to win.

The mama bear brand, as Making a Model explicates, relies on the postfeminist and

neoliberal logics of new momism. In other words, it presumes that the social anxieties that afflict

girls can easily be resolved through a mother’s “professional-level skills” that position her as

therapist, teacher, mentor, and business manager (Douglas and Michaels 6). Furthermore, the

mother must be intimately attendant to her child’s needs without veering into the admonished

territory of the helicopter parent. What makes the mama bear brand distinct, though, is how it

justifies the surveillance of protective parenting practices through an aggressive yet comforting

image of motherhood. The mama bear identifies the child’s vulnerabilities before fearlessly

defending them against the opposition. Yet in doing so, this living brand suggests that mothers

are primarily responsible for their daughters’ success as they seek to advocate for their skills and

knowledge in a professional environment. The momager promotes an intensive form of

mothering, yet it also relies on the daughter’s continued dependence in order to make visible the

labor of the mother. The professionalization of this relationship ensures that one cannot succeed

without the other. Particularly in celebrity media culture, Making a Model and similar momager

content demonstrate the codependent bond that must exist if both the mother and the daughter

intend to thrive in an attention economy.

Conclusion: Girls as Generational Torchbearers

In the aftermath of the college admissions scandal, headlines fixated on the effects of the

case on some of the children involved. Lori Loughlin’s daughter and beauty vlogger, Olivia Jade,

arguably received the most attention, with one Vanity Fair headline calling her “The Perfect

Face of the College Admissions Scandal.” The teen internet star, who reportedly has 2 million

YouTube followers and 1.4 million Instagram followers, has been described as “a shiny

gemstone of a person who seems to, without having to exert any effort, get everything one could

want” (Duboff). In her makeup and fashion tutorial videos, Olivia Jade blends relatability with

aspiration, speaking casually about her “getting ready” routine as she uses expensive brands like

Glossier and Urban Outfitters while eating pizza or hanging out with friends. Sometimes, her

mom appears to try out a new styling tool or say hello to her daughter’s viewers. Although Olivia

Jade has muted the comments on her videos and content as her parents go to trial, increased

public interest in who the teen is has accumulated more views, and likely more ad revenue, to her

accounts. According to a source for Us Weekly, Olivia Jade is hiding from the spotlight and

“focusing on how to turn this around so she can be famous for the right reasons again” (Hearon).

While the extent to which Olivia Jade’s reputation has been ruined by her parents’ wrongdoings

is difficult to measure in the moment, attempts to rebrand the young star as innocent (she

allegedly did not know her parents paid a bribe to get her into USC) and resituate her fame back

on her influencer work, rather than on her infamous mother, shows that Olivia Jade’s managers

still see promise in her. Lori Loughlin’s status might be irreversibly damaged, but her young

daughter might still be able to resurface from the mess and bring respect back to the family.

As this chapter highlights, the professional lifestyling of girlhood is crucial to the

continuation of the mother’s work in elevating and maintaining the class status of the family.

Particularly in celebrity culture, this work is reproduced and promoted across a variety of

lifestyle media texts and products that attempt to sell the idea that motherhood can be a

professional venture that will improve the lives of its family members. The call for women to

mediate all aspects of their well-being aligns with the achievement rhetoric that girls of today

hear growing up. While the management of emotions, healthy living, and lifestyle choices

promises security for the future, it mostly ensures that the white patriarchal family will thrive as

it continues to reinforce capitalist practices. As living brands like Kris Jenner and Yolanda Hadid

show, the push for girls to achieve also becomes the push to participate in the postfeminist

selfmanagement and consumerism of contemporary feminine culture.

While mainstream representations of feminism situate girls as generational torchbearers

to continue their foremothers’ fight for gender equality and empowerment, the push for girls to

achieve in the “right ways” tends to get shrouded in hegemonic frameworks of race, class, and

ability. Many of the examples explored in this chapter focus on affluent white and able-bodied

celebrities for a reason, since it is this particular group that frequently stand out as examples of

professionalism and excellence in parenting. Even when momagers like Kris Jenner receive

public hate for their over-involvement in their children’s careers, they still manage to turn a profit

and garner respect for the way their kids thrive in the spotlight. As such, the achievements of

white upper-class children, especially daughters, elicit the most respect as they reinforce the

appropriate attitudes and behaviors expected in a capitalist consumer society that demands and

values hard work. At the same time, cultural anxieties over girls not achieving enough, or not

achieving in ways that support this system, motivate how various commercial institutions and

media platforms must adjust and respond to the confidence gap supposedly plaguing the lives of

girls in Western society.

CHAPTER TWO

Girl’s Got Talent: Achievement and Authenticity in the Reality Talent Show

During the 12th season finale of NBC’s America’s Got Talent (2006-present), 10-year-old

Angelica Hale expressed her excitement about becoming a big sister while performing as a

finalist on the reality talent program. In the short sequence before her performance, Hale sits

cross-legged on her bed and writes a letter to her baby sister about her experience on AGT. “Dear

baby Abigail, I am so excited that you’re finally here,” she says in voiceover as the camera

moves towards a picture frame of Hale holding her newborn sister. “I’ve been through some real

ups and downs in my life,” she continues, “but one of my most magical experiences ever has

been my time on America’s Got Talent.” From Hale’s open window, an AGT audition sticker

floats whimsically into her bedroom. She turns to the stuffed animals on her bed, who echo the

judges’ praises with animated mouths. As Hale recounts the moment she received the “golden

buzzer” (a special distinction each judge gives to one contestant), the music swells and gold

confetti falls from the ceiling onto her beaming face. “AGT is like every girl’s dream,” she

emphasizes. “I get hair and makeup and some of the best clothes ever.” As she looks over her

bed, special effects create a shimmering sparkle on her purple sequined sneakers. “It’s like being

a princess,” Hale giggles before she ends the letter and steps onto the brightly lit stage to sing.

The reality talent show, one of many subgenres of reality television, is a popular media platform

for ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds to showcase unique abilities, sometimes

competitively, for a shot at fame and fortune. It is regularly on these programs where ideas and

expectations of girlhood achievement and the kinds of accomplishments that are valued take

shape in a surveillance media culture. From wunderkind profiles on daytime talk shows to high-

stakes performances on reality competition programs, girls like Angelica Hale are reminded that

“the image of successful, individualized girlhood itself is one of the most profitable products

being sold to them and others” (Harris, Future Girl 20). Girls’ achievements and talents, when

put on display for entertainment purposes, operate as key visual signifiers in the cultural

reproduction of professionalized girlhood. As Michele Paule raises, girlhood achievement

emerges from and is shaped by discourses of self-improvement and authenticity beckoning the

girl to both change and be her true self on the road to success (134). These conflicting social

scripts make girlhood a site of tension, highlighting how young feminine success must twist and

bend to the needs of neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities. As media profiles and televised

competitions reward these successes with monetary prizes and professional opportunities, the

project of girlhood achievement relies on celebrity to validate selfimprovement as an authentic

part of the girl’s professionalization.

While these discourses of achievement and authenticity are intrinsic to studies of girl

culture, they are also highly active in the makeup of reality talent and competition television

shows. Guy Redden, writing prolifically on the reality talent show, observes how the program

format evolved from “moments of performance and their assessment by judges” in the 1950s and

60s to “higher stakes, real job prizes” and “the guarantee of a new life for the single winner” in

the 2000s (“Making Over the Talent Show” 135). While talent shows, both on and off television,

have always presented awards to its winning contestants, Redden argues that performances in the

early twenty-first century “have become embedded in an ever-increasing focus on the

contestants’ background, dreams, experiences, efforts, and their responses to their unfolding fates

in light of their bids to transform themselves” (135). As reality programming and social media

have attempted to document the minutia of everyday life, the transformation of the reality show

contestant has been expected for the show to seem authentic. At the same time, audiences have

noticed that embracing people’s flaws has turned into a highly privileged and valuable part in the

entertainment quality of these programs. As Alessandra Stanley observes in an article for

The New York Times, early seasons of America’s Got Talent did not always elicit change from its

participants, and in fact, supported people and their imperfect acts. Moreover, competition

programs like NBC’s The Voice (2011-present) and Channel 4’s The Great British Baking Show

(2010-present) have ushered in what critics are calling “an era of empathy TV” that opts for

encouragement rather than disparagement of contestants when they fail (Garber). While reality

talent shows still rely on a transformative narrative arc for its contestants, they also welcome

imperfection (that is, under controllable conditions) as a way to engineer authenticity and

relatability into the show’s competitive makeup.

Situating girls in this reality TV context, the pull to “change yourself” and “be yourself”

in a televised competition show similarly aligns with the sentiments of self-improvement and

authenticity already invoked in discourses of girlhood achievement. As Sarah Banet-Weiser

suggests, authenticity is a cultural brand that adheres to the emotions and anticipations of the

consumer (AuthenticTM 4). Even more, the promise of fame and celebrity these programs

summon adds an important dimension to the professionalization of the young girl. Particularly

for young women who have been traditionally excluded from certain professions and industries

because of their race, class, sexual orientation, or disability, the upward mobility that comes with

celebrity can reinforce audience perception of the reality talent show as an opportunistic place

for young female success. More importantly, though, the celebrification of girlhood achievement

privileges the escape from anonymity and middle-class life that reality programming dictates as

necessary for improving one’s status quo. It is not enough for audiences to watch the girl

achieve; there is also expectation that the girl will leave her unremarkable life behind for a better

and brighter future. As Redden notes, the talent show promotes “discourses of success” that

“may be seen to advance a chronic anxiety about remaining ordinary” (“Making Over the Talent

Show” 139). Yet even on this path to escape ordinariness, these shows still value “authentic”

representations of contestants whose talents and achievements stand in as “a site of optimism, as

a source of personal fulfillment” that can be retained in their celebrity profile (Mendick et al. 59).

With this in mind, I argue that reality talent and competition programs engage the professional

lifestyling of girlhood by framing girls’ insecurities, flaws, and disadvantaged backgrounds as

authentic professional development on their way to becoming successful. In doing so, reality

programming reinforces narratives of upward mobility via celebrity and fame in public

expectations of girlhood achievement.

In this chapter, I begin by contextualizing mediated displays of girls’ talents and

achievements on variety and reality television programs to show how girls are evaluated, praised,

and commodified through the lens of celebrity and fame. Specifically, I delineate discourses of

confidence and anxiety that frame girlhood achievement in the public sphere and discuss how

reality TV’s emphasis on authenticity and self-improvement becomes crucial to the lifestyle

branding of the professionalized girl. Next, I analyze this framework through young female

contestants in three contemporary American talent-based shows: MasterChef Junior (Fox,

2013present), a competitive kid cooking show responding to the anxieties of gender bias and a

sexist food industry with celebrity girl power narratives; America’s Got Talent, an all-talent

program where girlhood achievement and fame are fortified through the insecurities,

awkwardness—as well as confidence—of its girl competitors; and Little Big Shots (NBC, 2016-

present), a pintsized variety show that rejects the anxieties of competition and instead takes

pleasure in popular images of talented, fun, and normative femininity. Across these three very

different programs, I seek to make sense of the ways reality talent shows engage public ideas of

what girlhood achievement should look like, how it should be performed, and what this says

about the professionalization of girlhood in the early twenty-first century. From the politics of

the show’s production methods, to the selection/elimination process of certain talent acts, and

finally, to the curation and celebrification of televised performances, achievement and

authenticity become commodifiable endeavors girls are expected to pursue.

Contextualizing the Girl Wonder

On May 12, 2008, Filipino singer Jake Zyrus7 performed Whitney Houston’s “I Have

Nothing” on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986-2011) in an episode titled “World’s Smartest Kids.”

Winfrey, who discovered 16-year-old Zyrus after his YouTube videos attracted 13 million

viewers, was impressed by the teen’s story of singing in talent show competitions in the

Philippines in order to support his family. “One of the things I love most about Charice is that no

matter what obstacles she’s faced in her life, she’s never given up on her dream of something

better,” Winfrey commented (“Teen Singing Sensation”). After being dubbed “the most talented

girl in the world” on Winfrey’s show, Zyrus remained in Hollywood and found success

performing for prominent music producer David Foster as well as starring as Sunshine Corazon

in the popular television series Glee (2009-2015). Despite the young star’s major career

accomplishments, Zyrus noted in interviews that he struggled to maintain an authentic identity

while pleasing fans (Bote). In 2013 he came out as lesbian, and in 2017 the singer announced on

Instagram and Twitter that he was a transgender man. Adopting the name Jake Zyrus, the singer

7 Following the GLAAD Media Reference Guide when writing about the transgender community, I use FTM

transgender star Jake Zyrus’s self-given name. Past media reports refer to him as Charice Pempengco and with

female pronouns.

reportedly lost some fans while gaining others in an attempt to rebuild his career around his new

public identity (Runchen). As Zyrus has continued to record music and perform, his

accomplishments remain in tension between audiences who support him living and working as

his authentic self and public discourse lamenting the loss of “the most talented girl in the world.”

The mixed reception of Jake Zyrus’ story speaks to some of the broader concerns that

inform girlhood achievement in the public sphere. As a child performer, audiences strongly

identified Zyrus’ voice with the powerful feminine vocals of Celine Dion and Gloria Gaynor, and

his long, straight hair became as much a signifier of his femininity as it was his supposed

heterosexuality. When Zyrus debuted a shorter haircut and more masculine style of clothing

around 2014, fans either accepted his new look or rejected it for the way it did not conform to

earlier public memories of Zyrus’ traditionally feminine girlhood. Finally, as Zyrus’ soprano

voice deepened as a result of testosterone treatment, the solo diva career early audiences

predicted for the singer drastically changed. Although Zyrus had achieved as a singer and

performer, the shifting state of his celebrity girlhood, the conflicted nature of his public

reception, and the universal discrimination of LGBTQ identities threatened to erase his talented

status. However, celebrity reports describing Zyrus’ journey, as well as the release of his memoir

I Am Jake in early 2019, allowed him to adopt the same sense of authenticity bestowed upon

other transgender stars like Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, and Jazz Jennings. In interviews, Zyrus

claimed, “It has really been a journey to get here. Charice was a little girl, a pop star. I feel much

better about myself now. I am much more confident” (Runchen). By framing his past girlhood

talents and fame as an immature stage on his journey to achievement, Zyrus’ celebrity media

narrative negotiates his audience’s anxieties and hopes around his transgender identity through

the politics of authenticity and confidence that make him a more universally accepted star.

While Zyrus presents a very specific and unique tale of girlhood achievement, the

televised representations of many talent show girls demonstrate the complex mediation of

gender, anxiety, and hope in the development of an achieving celebrity persona. As these girls

either perform on talk shows and news reports or audition for reality talent competitions, their

skills and achievements are at risk of confirming or failing expectations centered on popular

narratives of successful girls. Often, these narratives get negotiated between the discourses of

can-do and at-risk that Sarah Projansky argues “produce a moral panic about the girl figure” and

“perpetuate the very depictions of girls about which they [audiences] worry” (5). Projansky best

illustrates this tension through her study of Venus Williams’ teen years playing professional

tennis. Media coverage in the late 1990s celebrated the young athlete’s racial difference in a

predominantly white sport, but it also tended to assign blame to Williams for her “distracting”

beaded hairstyle. Although Williams proved to be a very accomplished young tennis player, who

developed into an even more successful adult athlete, her perceived aggression in refusing to

change her hair proved that her racial difference would only be valued when it conformed to the

regulations and decorum of the sport. When the girl is not white, normatively feminine, and

upholding hegemonic class standards, her achievement is subject to greater scrutiny over

whether or not she is deserving of fame and attention. Thus, while celebrity profiling plays a

crucial part in the acceptance and authentication of the achieving girl for mass audiences, it must

also adhere to and support the white patriarchal capitalist order.

To further contextualize the celebrification and racialization of girlhood achievement in

media culture, I turn to one of the earliest talent competition programs in television: The Original

Amateur Hour. Hosted by Ted Mack, The Original Amateur Hour first ran as an American radio

program from 1934 to 1945 before airing on the DuMont Television Network between 1948 and

1954. In addition to its adult performers, some of the contestants were young girls who achieved

renown in later years, like actress Ann-Margret, pop singer-songwriter Irene Cara, and soprano

Maria Callas. One of the most famous names to emerge from this talent search was R&B artist

Gladys Knight, who at age seven won the show contest in 1952. Knight’s accomplishment on the

show, however, was reportedly a controversial choice. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey’s

Master Class series in 2017, Knight recalled needing to pose for her winning photo and having

trouble holding the large trophy (“Gladys Knight”). When producers asked some of the young

contestants to assist, their parents, all of whom were white, refused to give permission. Ted Mack

was then compelled to step in and help Knight, leading to a famous photo of the smiling white

male host balancing the trophy alongside a pint-sized Black girl sitting on an instrument case

(Figure 4). As allegorized in media reports thereafter, the photo came to represent the gradual

dissolution of racial segregation and the hope for equality as signified through the

Figure 4: Ted Mack awarding the Original Amateur Hour trophy to Gladys Knight

auspicious talents of a young girl. At the same time, backlash over Knight’s win worked to shed

light on audience’s racial anxieties regarding what girlhood achievement could promise.

In the decades that followed, the racial and ethnic profiling of talent show girl stars in

television revealed how important identity was to the professionalization and star potential of the

girl. What the girl looked like and what she represented would have implications for the ways

hope and anxiety would be discursively constructed around girlhood achievement. For example,

eight-year-old Latin-American Irene Cara, who sang a song entirely in Spanish on The Original

Amateur Hour in 1967, had already established an audience from appearances on

Spanishlanguage television before auditioning for the American talent show. Her young

transcultural career thus demonstrated hope for her success as a versatile female celebrity and

performer in the U.S. On the other hand, twelve-year-old Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero was

asked to mask her cultural identity in changing her name to Connie Francis. In her

autobiography, Francis explains how producers of CBS’ Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (1946-

1958) beckoned her to adopt a stage name to allow for easier pronunciation for American

audiences.

Particularly for these early talent competitions, race and ethnicity became character

features that could either be emphasized or manipulated depending on the star persona and

professional promises for future success in the industry. As Kristen Warner observes in her study

of industry casting practices, “assumptions and hiring decisions revolving around the best

portrayal of these identities are tied up in cultural understandings of what the identities look like

and, more important, how the identities can best be represented” (32). As talent show girls came

to represent the future professionalization of women’s labor (at least in the entertainment

industry), their racial and cultural identities were central to the construction of hope and equality

embedded in public expectations of girlhood achievement. Even more, the media visibility of the

girl—as well as her absence from the spotlight—would work to reinforce beliefs around the

kinds of achievements girls from diverse backgrounds could possibly attain.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, CBS’s popular talent show Star Search (1984-

1995) demonstrated a more multicultural casting process as a number of girls of color, like

Shanice, Tracie Spencer, and Countess Vaughn, performed and even went on to win the

program’s junior vocalist division. While most talent shows up to this time provided some kind

of character profile of their contestants for the audience, it was on Star Search where celebrity

and achievement started to become normalized in the talent girl identity. In an April 1987

broadcast, host Ed McMahon explained how five-year-old semifinalist Alisan Porter supposedly

“asked” one of the producers if she could do a personality profile like the “big people.”

Entertaining this request, the show cut to footage of Porter sitting on the Star Search stage with a

mic in her hand. “Now that I’m in the semifinals, you want to hear more about me,” she

announced before stating her birthdate and eagerness to win the competition to chuckling

audience members. After facing off with 11-year-old challenger Tracie Spencer, Porter joined

McMahon, who then interviewed both girls about their favorite TV show and family life.

As the title of the program suggests, Star Search emphasized Hollywood fame as the

objective for its talented contestants. The decision to profile Alisan Porter, an occurrence

McMahon describes as having never been done, would place junior participants in a professional

context geared towards the creation of their celebrity—and with the same sense of respect and

earnestness as the adults. Considering that superstar artists like Britney Spears, Christina

Aguilera, Beyoncé, Alanis Morissette, and LeAnn Rimes would become some of the most

recognizable female talent to get their start on Star Search, the celebrification of gifted children

predicted the hopeful future success of the girl.

When reality television programming grew at the end of the 1990s, children still did not

have a dominant presence in the line-up of people auditioning for talent and competition-based

shows. While NBC’s short-lived American Juniors in 2003 attempted to ride the wave of

American Idol’s success, it would not be until the 2010s that the junior reality talent show hit its

stride. According to Kate Stanhope of The Hollywood Reporter, reality competition programs

featuring children have become immensely successful, with highly rated American shows like

Fox’s MasterChef Junior and NBC’s Little Big Shots reaching over 5 and 12 million viewers,

respectively, in their first seasons. Other programs have included Lifetime’s Project Runway:

Junior (2015-present), Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance: Next Generation (2016), Food

Network’s Chopped Junior (2016-present), Lifetime’s Child Genius (2015-2016), and ABC’s

Dancing with the Stars: Juniors (2018-present). Typically, these junior reality talent competitions

are more uplifting than their adult counterparts, relying on softer methods of evaluation and

elimination to avoid hurt feelings for its young competitors. While talent is still valued, these

shows have become increasingly organized around modes of individuality and authenticity. This

may be due to the fact that social media platforms like YouTube give children more opportunities

to practice celebrity and share their unique talents with a networked audience. The process of

self-branding emerges in these online and reality TV show contexts, determining children’s

success not only by their achievements but also their ability to captivate audiences with their

personality. However, the type of kids who find success in this arena are often the ones who can

access the appropriate digital tools, parental support, and industry connections, further skewing

the image of young achievement to primarily middle to upper-middle-class children.

This level of exclusion is crucial to keep in mind when looking at girls on reality talent

shows in the early twenty-first century, especially when reality TV claims to be democratic and

representative of diverse populations. The authenticity emphasis that is a core part of the

competitive style of reality programming notably reinforces the narrative that average everyday

girls who “stay true to who they are” will have their talents recognized and validated through the

promise of fame. At the same time, the visibility that fame provides requires these images of

talent show girls to conform to the hopes and anxieties audiences have when watching them

perform. The authenticity and achievements of talent show girls are then measured by their brand

potential and how they conform to audience expectations and desires. This professionalization of

young girls in media culture works to frame talent as a function of the junior reality star matrix,

where celebrity takes on a more skilled quality and removes it from the whimsical impermanence

of daydreaming. These reality talent shows, as the next few sections illustrate, not only represent

girls who sing and dance (although there are plenty of those acts too); they also include girls who

cook meals, design clothing, and program computers. Through these various presentations of

girlhood achievement, the talent show makes the pursuit of fame seem like a natural, and even

necessary, career move to secure future success.

Competition and the Girl Power Brand in MasterChef Junior

In an interview with American teen magazine Girls’ Life in 2016, teen chef Dara Yu

discussed her experience on the cooking competition MasterChef Junior, plans for her own a

cooking show, and the significance of the red bow that earned her the nickname “Dara the Bow

Girl” on her YouTube channel. “I got the bow at a birthday party for Hello Kitty at this little

Japanese café,” the then 15-year-old explained. “When I was trying out for the show. I thought it

would help me stand out so people could get to know me. It’s a little crazy, but it’s so awesome

and it really reflects my out-there personality” (Duff). Yu’s bow, a comically large shiny red

ornament that sits atop her head, has become her signature look since she earned the runner-up

title on season one of MasterChef Junior in 2013. Since then, Yu has gone on to create a cooking

web series on YouTube with her step-dad as well as a 14-episode digital show called In the

Kitchen with Dara the Bow Girl (2018) on the Go90 app produced by DreamWorksTV. When

asked about her aspirations for starting her own restaurant, Yu expressed big dreams of

developing an Asian fusion coffee shop and lunch spot café. However, she also acknowledged

that her plans would have to navigate the inherent gender bias of the professional cooking world.

“It’s a very male dominated industry,” she said, “and I think it’s time for girls and women to have

a bigger role in the restaurant world. We need some women there to make it a little more fun”

(Duff).

Yu’s press interview accomplishes a number of key functions that make up the ways

professionalized girlhood is understood as an ongoing feminist project with neoliberal aims.

First, Yu’s interview emphasizes her celebrity brand, a quirky persona that emerged on

MasterChef Junior that has continued to make her a recognizable face in other media spaces.

Second, the interview offers details about Yu’s achievements after the show that reveal how her

cooking skills and industry connections have helped her solidify her celebrity brand in the world

of culinary entertainment. Lastly, readers are informed of Yu’s aspirations for her own shop as

well as the social challenges she will need to navigate and overcome. As this tension highlights a

very real problem in the professional culinary industry, it also positions Yu as a capable and

confident young female chef who will break down these obstructive gender barriers and make

cooking “fun.”8 This perception of confidence in girls and women becomes an important

8 In the 2010 essay “Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?,” Charlotte Druckman describes how gender bias in

workplace culture has contributed to a low number of women cooks and chefs in the culinary industry, leading to a

kitchen workplace more conducive to male achievement.

marketing tool to combat the anxieties of sexism in the food industry, something of which

manifests more broadly in the many competition cooking programs on Food Network, Cooking

Channel, and Bravo. Press reports and scholarship have widely covered the gender, racial, and

class biases of adult-oriented programming like Top Chef and Chopped that hold women,

particularly women from marginalized backgrounds, to higher standards when evaluating their

work (Harris and Giuffre 18). As more children enter junior versions of these programs, girls are

propped up as hopeful champions who must engage this gendered discourse as part of the

competition narrative, where the attainment of fame at the end of the journey is proof that girls

are succeeding despite ongoing gender, racial, and class discrimination.

The junior cooking competition show has been one of the most popular types of talent

searches in the early twenty-first century. This might come as no surprise as marketers have

begun to heavily target the Generation Z crowd (roughly born between 1998 and 2008) with

kidcentered cuisine magazines, cooking camps, and professional culinary classes (Bulick). On

the reality talent show front, kids have had a multitude of opportunities to showcase their

prodigious skills in the kitchen in front of a global audience on shows like Rachael vs. Guy: Kids

Cook-Off (Food Network, 2013), Kids Baking Championship (Food Network, 2015), Chopped

Junior

(Food Network, 2015-present), Man vs. Child: Chef Showdown (FYI, 2015-2016), Food Network

Star Kids (Food Network, 2016), and Kids BBQ Championship (Food Network, 2016-2017). Yet

the one show that has arguably had the most cultural influence has been Fox’s MasterChef

Junior. Part of the larger MasterChef franchise, MasterChef Junior is a cooking competition

show on American television where children ages 8-13 compete for $100,000. Each season, an

equal number of girl and boy competitors enter the kitchen and are given solo and group

challenges to prove their skills and avoid elimination. The show has aired on Fox since

September 27, 2013 and features British restaurateur Gordon Ramsay and two interchanging

professional chefs as judges. Ratings during its tenure reveal that MasterChef Junior has been an

especially lucrative hit for the network’s weekday schedule, drawing in more viewers than the

original series (Lynch).

While MasterChef Junior does not overtly hail one gender over another through its

marketing and branding, it does reside in a public food culture that communication food scholar

Rebecca Swenson says privileges white masculinity in positions of power and authority in the

professional kitchen (40). As such, the gendering of the culinary arts profession draws attention

to the ways reality television programs might privilege aspiring male kid chefs over young

female chefs. In fact, critics have noticed the subtleties of MasterChef Junior’s gender bias,

particularly in the first three seasons where white boys were crowned champions and the three

core judges were white men. In 2015, Caroline Framke of The Atlantic discerned how the male

judges, despite encouraging all the children to do well, tended to praise white boys for “looking

the part” or offer sentiments like “I see a lot of myself in you.” Echoing Framke’s concerns,

Vulture writer Libby Hill noticed this subconscious bias in the way that MasterChef Junior

differs from its parent show, focusing less on the transformation of home cooks into star chefs

and more on the exceptionalism of (mostly male) child prodigies. Whether or not these boy

contestants deserved to win, the fact that male professional chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Joe

Bastianich assess and critique these talents reinforces the patriarchal barriers limiting how far

girls and women can go, or even be celebrated, in the culinary world.

It was not until season four that MasterChef Junior added a female judge to the panel:

Momofuko Milk Bar founder and dessert chef Christina Tosi. The inclusion of Tosi, however,

seemed less to do with creating gender diversity on the program and more to do with her

experience as a judge on the flagship MasterChef show for three seasons. Still, bringing Tosi

onto the amateur cooking show added feminine flair to the production that had been missing.

Putting her in modest A-line dresses, MasterChef Junior positioned Tosi as a normatively

professional female role model well-known for her successful restaurant business showcasing

pastry and confectionary treats with names like Crack Pie and Cereal Milk (Figure 5). With

Gordan Ramsay in the definitive patriarchal showrunner role and Mexican chef Aarón Sánchez

as the loveable uncle, Christina Tosi fit comfortably as the mother/sister figure who wavered

between nurturing and critical in her evaluation of each kid’s dish.

Prior to her debut on MasterChef Junior, Tosi became a feminist icon of sorts for

audiences who had tired of the “boys club” atmosphere on the show. In an interview with the

New York Post, Tosi described not realizing the historical significance of being the first female

judge on MasterChef Junior:

Figure 5: Tosi with contestant Kya Dawn Lau in MasterChef Junior Season 4

In the professional space I’m so headstrong that I don’t ever really think of myself

as being a female…in a kitchen of males or females. After day one or day two,

seeing the females in the competition respond to that sentiment of girl power was

really endearing. It’s cool to know that just the presence of being a female in that

capacity is motivation enough for some people. (Morabito)

Tosi’s appeal to audiences suggested that MasterChef Junior was making a progressive and

restorative choice, supposedly in response to gender bias claims. As well, Tosi’s visibility, along

with the growing presence of female chefs on other cooking programs in the early 2010s, seemed

to satisfyingly disrupt the male-dominated landscape of the food industry that critics had long

been lamenting. Yet this characterization of Tosi as a feminist trailblazer would also need to

negotiate her maternal portrayal on the kid-centric cooking show, where cooking becomes “a

means of performing motherhood by both feeding children and socializing them into culinary

competence” (Hollows 186). As the sole female judge, Tosi operates as a professional role model

for young girls, giving them the expertise and encouragement needed to enter this

maledominated field. Despite MasterChef Junior engaging with narratives of female

empowerment, it primarily reinforces professionalized girlhood within the confines of normative

femininity.

The professional lifestyling of girlhood during Tosi’s first appearance as judge focused on

the ways (female) mentorship can embolden the girl contestants to beat the boys. In season four,

MasterChef Junior featured a strong cast of 12 girls and 12 boys that eventually ended with two

nine-year-old white girls competing for first place: Addison Osta Smith from River Forest,

Illinois and Avery Kyle from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Throughout the season the judges

challenged both girls not just on their culinary expertise and leadership around the kitchen but on

their grit and determination to be the first female MasterChef Junior winner. At one point, Tosi is

shown approaching Kyle’s cooking station, asking her “Is a girl going to win this year’s

MasterChef Junior?” As Kyle confirms that there will be a girl winner, Tosi follows up with,

“Which girl?” Without hesitation, Kyle replies “Me!” before high-fiving Tosi. In another

episode, the judges select Osta Smith to compete against two of her male co-competitors in a

cupcake frosting challenge: each competitor represents one of three judges, who, with giant

piping bags over their heads, will be doused in frosting if their kid representative loses. Gordon

Ramsay, Osta Smith’s judge, asks her, “Please tell me you can beat these two boys.” Flicking her

hand like the challenge is no problem, Osta Smith replies, “I can beat them.” On the sidelines

with the other kids, 10-year-old Amaya Baéz shouts, “Girl power!” before the challenge begins.

The portrayal of Osta Smith and Kyle as plucky young girls competing not only to be

MasterChef Junior champion but to be one of the first girls to win is a pivotal girl power

branding moment for the show. As Osta Smith announces in the finale, “This is the battle of the

A’s…this is the battle of the nine-year-olds…this is the battle of the girls.” The sequence shown

before each girl’s final cook frames them as “fierce competitors” and “big personalities that can

only be matched by big flavors.” Footage of Osta Smith, who has been “on the leader board since

day one,” captures her chopping basil, grilling porkchops, and whisking batter as Ramsay warns

Tosi that the young girl may be “after her job.” Meanwhile, the show paints challenger Kyle as a

sassy, pint-sized adversary with Southern charm, cart-wheeling across the grass in between pan-

frying chicken and deboning a large fish. Compared to Chicago-area Osta Smith, who has made

her backwards baseball cap her signature look, Kyle stands out as the more traditional choice in

feminine pigtails, telling the camera, “Smells like church!” and explaining to Ramsay that her

choice of halibut was because her “daddy likes it.”

The final challenge, where the girls must cook a three-course meal while family and

friends cheer them on in the stands above, further distinguishes their personal cooking styles and

brands, yet it also conveys the importance of the achieving girl to the MasterChef Junior

franchise. Osta Smith, who has established herself in the unique niche of baking high-quality

Midwest dishes with Asian influences, ends up winning against Kyle’s homegrown bayou flair.

While the judges assessed the girls’ overall cooking accomplishments, part of the goals of

MasterChef Junior is to recognize the future of the food industry and consider the purpose of

each contestant competing on the show. In the application for MasterChef Junior, families are

asked to describe how winning would impact their child’s future dreams, such as becoming a

chef, creating a gourmet food truck, or becoming a food writer. Osta Smith’s aspirations for

owning her own restaurant further demonstrated that awarding her with $100,000 would be a

profitable investment in the show’s embrace of a girl power sensibility.

Since winning MasterChef Junior, the celebrity media profiling of Osta Smith as a

hopeful girl power ambassador has further legitimated her professional achievement on the show.

In an interview with People magazine in 2017, Osta Smith described the impact of being the first

female winner:

All the past winners have been guys. Especially in today’s time, when there’s a lot

of different battles going on for women’s rights, I think it’s super important to

have female role models, and there’s so many strong women to look up to in the

cooking world. Just because you’re a different sex, you can do the same things”

(Pearl).

While Osta Smith’s comments point to a real structural problem in the cooking profession, it also

emphasizes the importance of winning these “different battles going on for women’s rights”

through the competitive format of cooking. Winning a competition, as opposed to the more

instructional formats of cooking TV shows, privileges the achievement identity that girl power

media embrace. As Tasha Oren delineates, the cooking competition format moves towards a

narrative of “suspense, conflict, humiliation and failure” and focuses on “displacement, confusion

and discomfort as important pre-conditions to productivity” (30). Thus, the girl’s journey on the

talent competition depends on these various emotional rhythms for dramatic conflict, albeit to a

less intense degree than adult programming.

Still, girlhood achievement on the talent search engages with the social and cultural

discourses outside the show through the girl’s celebrity media profile. While MasterChef Junior

might not directly discuss sexism and discrimination on set, it allows its participants to field

questions from the media that seek to make sense of the program’s place in the larger context of

female empowerment. In this way, MasterChef Junior manages to be a show about young female

achievement and girls who get opportunities to move up the professional culinary ladder without

the program doing the ground-level work of making the workplace and industry more equitable

for women and girls.

At first glance, Osta Smith’s win seems to disquiet the anxieties of MasterChef Junior’s “boy

problem,” considering that two more girls would go on to win the following two seasons. Yet as

her celebrification in other televisual contexts reveal, her achievement operates most powerfully

as the promise of girl power and professionalized girlhood rather than as a force for actionable

change. Since winning MasterChef Junior, Osta Smith has filmed the ABC pilot Dream Team

with actor Justin Long, appeared on Steve Harvey’s daytime talk show and The Late Late Show

with James Corden, and participated in ABC’s spin-off Dancing with the Stars: Juniors in

October 2018. The latter program, which pulls together child stars from acting, reality TV, and

sports in a couples dance competition, presented 13-year-old Osta Smith in a frilly red apron

dress and toque blanche performing the cha-cha with partner Lev Cameron in a white

doublebreasted chef’s jacket (Figure 6). The gendering of the DWtSJ costumes—considering that

Osta Smith is the professional chef and Cameron is not—further highlighted how talent girls’

successes are still positioned in a traditionally feminine space. In doing so, the representation of

MasterChef Junior’s first girl winner becomes a safe girl power commodity that can be invoked

in different media contexts without disrupting hegemonic gender roles. As Banet-Weiser

maintains, “empowerment may be realized, but it is realized within the context of brand culture”

(AuthenticTM 70). The work that young female chefs achieve in a sexist food landscape

accomplishes its goals by providing visibility to women’s underrepresentation in the celebrity

culinary world. At the same time, the fight for girl power is only concerned with the image of the

successful girl and not the institutional actions that need to occur to achieve gender parity in the

food industry.

Figure 6: Addison Osta Smith and Lev Cameron in Dancing with the Stars: Juniors

Following Osta Smith, 11-year-old Jasmine Stewart and nine-year-old Beni Cwiakala became

the next two girls to win MasterChef Junior seasons five and six, respectively. In addition to

continuing the girl power trend on the program, Stewart and Cwiakala demonstrated the ability

to pursue female empowerment initiatives in their respective cooking worlds outside the show.

Stewart, an African-American girl from Milton, Georgia, has used her MasterChef Junior

platform to promote nonprofit foundations she works for like Saving Our Daughters and the

Boys and Girls Club. She has also developed a girl power self-brand through the hashtag

#LetYourInnerGirlSlay. In an interview with Food & Wine, Stewart explained, “What I’m trying

to do is inspire girls that whoever they are on the inside and whatever their aspirations are, to

truly let that out, truly embody it, and slay” (Campbell-Schmitt). In season six, Cwiakala, who

became known as the “punky Chicago girl” with short hair, leading viewers to wonder about her

gender identity, cited Osta Smith as a major inspiration for entering the MasterChef Junior

competition. Since winning in 2018, Cwiakala’s Instagram has shown her appearing in the

magazine Cooking with Kids, volunteering for charities and food drives around Chicago, and

cooking with notable local female chefs like Mindy Segal.

The professional lifestyles these girls project illustrate an image of successful, can-do

femininity, but they also convey a girl power that seems easily achieved and managed. For

instance, Stewart launched a kid-friendly dessert class called “Jasmine’s Delightful Desserts” in

2018, the first of a series of online courses from Cooking with MasterChef. Through a paid

subscription to the digital platform Craftsy, aspiring chefs can learn to bake her famous pineapple

upside down cake or French macarons. Stewart, along with Cwiakala and other

MasterChef Junior winners, also assist with Camp MasterChef where, for $1,690 per week or

$3,480 per two weeks, kids can learn to cook like their MasterChef heroes. Additionally,

children who want to cook like their favorite contestants at home can purchase the show’s line of

branded merchandise that includes “cutting boards, pepper mills, recipe boxes, and measuring

cups priced up to $50” (Bulik). Despite these opportunities for aspirational kid chefs,

MasterChef Junior’s brand of girl power as a force for change in the food industry comes at a

steep price.

MasterChef Junior as a reality talent show produces images of professionalized girls

thriving in competitive environments and leading the way for other young female chefs to smash

the patriarchal kitchen ceiling. Yet the fact that cooking and home kitchens have traditionally

been sites of feminine domestic life are important to consider in the context of this show.

MasterChef Junior positions girl contestants as breaking into and shaking up the male-dominated

culinary industry rather than addressing how this industry has appropriated and commodified

domesticity in the first place. As aspirational cooks, girls must then have their parents enroll

them in expensive cooking classes and purchase the kitchen tools and food necessary to practice

and experiment with different flavors and techniques that will legitimize their talents. The

visibility of young female star chefs like Osta Smith, Stewart, and Cwiakala further emphasizes

how important testing one’s culinary aptitude in a competitive space is if girls want to have any

impact in shifting the gendered nature of the cooking profession. Watching these girls labor on

MasterChef Junior and in their adjacent lifestyle media appointments provide hope and

inspiration for those invested in the potential of girl power. At the same time, these programs are

built to reproduce the anxieties of competition, reveling more so in the dramatic potential of

social and cultural challenges than in solutions for enacting institutional change.

Insecurity and Confidence in America’s Got Talent

Talent show girls demonstrate the principles of empowerment and hope for a future

where women can advance in underrepresented professions. They also are subject to visual

displays of anxiety and insecurity that structure reality TV’s dramatic narratives arcs. As

mentioned earlier, reality competition programs have framed these anxieties through gestures of

empathy and encouragement for participants when they fail or when they appear nervous in their

abilities to perform well. Children participating in junior talent shows have arguably already had

the privilege of receiving this level of comfort and support when their acts produce less than

desired results. Yet on programs like America’s Got Talent, where contestants of all ages compete

against each other, children have had to endure varying levels of criticism as the show has

adjusted its evaluation methods since it first premiered in 2006.

Similar to MasterChef Junior, girl competitors on AGT are subject to competing

discourses of self-improvement and authenticity in an effort to produce celebrity figures who do

not appear to have the trappings of manufactured fame often associated with reality TV stardom.

Yet what AGT also does is embrace awkward and imperfect presentations by inviting audiences

to invest empathy and hope in its contestants through humanizing underdog stories. As girls get

included in these “relatable” profiles, the anxieties and low self-confidence that purportedly hold

them back become important branding elements in the creation of their emerging celebrity

identities. In a way, AGT engages girlhood anxiety by reimagining it as a professional

opportunity, rather than a drawback, that can lead to a more confident, successful, and

compelling media star.

AGT is a long-running American reality talent competition that debuted on June 21, 2006

on NBC. As part of Simon Cowell’s global Got Talent franchise, AGT solicits a variety of

talented participants across the United States to audition with acts including singing, dancing,

magic, acrobatic stunts, comedy stand-up, animal tricks, and other genres. After American

audiences and the four celebrity judges vote and eliminate contenders through a series of rounds,

the winning act goes on to win one million dollars and the chance to headline their own show on

the Las Vegas Strip. Unlike other talent competitions like American Idol and The Voice, AGT has

no age restriction for who can audition, often lending itself to a high number of kids and teens

trying out for the show (Keegan). Since AGT’s debut, the show has attracted a high volume of

young female contenders, several of whom have gone on to win first place or achieve runner-up.

The transformation of the program’s format over the years, particularly in the way AGT relies on

social media to expedite the talent hunt and promote its rising stars in viral YouTube videos, has

created a highly visible space for career-minded girls. Moreover, the talent show’s longevity

reveals the changing demands of young female labor in the early part of the twenty-first century,

demands that consider not just the public appeal of girls’ talents but also their authentic

presentations to different audiences across popular media platforms.

While the early years of AGT welcomed talent acts that were less-than-perfect, it still

heavily relied on efforts to makeover certain contestants so that they appeared more suitable for

the image of fame it desired. In the first season of AGT in 2006, 11-year-old Bianca Ryan became

one contestant in need of improving her stage presence. During her audition, Ryan wore a short

black ruffled dress and white ballet flats as she sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”

from the musical Dreamgirls. While the young contestant received praise from judges Brandy

and David Hasselhoff, her appearance needed an update according to Piers Morgan.

“Change your hair. Change your dress. Change your shoes. And you will win this tournament,”

Morgan stated, before adding, “I have never heard a voice like that on an 11-year-old in my life.”

While Ryan demonstrated incredible range in her singing abilities, the one roadblock potentially

getting in the way of her winning was the way she was dressed. Particularly as she competed

against other performers, many of whom were adults, her special vocal talents would not be

enough to earn her first place; she would need to adjust to adult expectations and dress and act the

part of a seasoned star—despite not being one in the first place. In her second performance,

Ryan sang Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” while wearing a denim vest and a long

bohemianstyle skirt that hovered just above her bare feet. While Brandy and Hasselhoff did not

like the song choice, preferring Ryan in a more Broadway-style, Morgan softened the blow by

saying,

“Well, I like your clothes.” When host Regis Philbin asked Ryan how she was handling all of the

harsh feedback, she gracefully (although a little shaken) said, “I appreciate all the criticism

because I can take it and I can fix it.”

The makeover of the reality TV contestant, as Brenda R. Weber has written about

extensively, is centered on “television’s imagination of the reasons one must be made over, the

shame of refusing alteration, and the glory in becoming a polished, refined, beautiful, and

confident individual” (5). While this is often represented in programs focused on adult women’s

bodily and self-transformations, girls also endure similar modes of criticism. The main difference

is that girls are expected to alter their appearance and conduct to seem more mature, refined, and

professional. In the case of singing competitions, as P. David Marshall argues, girls experience an

identity construction called “the cusp-persona,” where “the child celebrity actually uses music to

shift their identity from child to adult” (“Music/Image and the Cusp-Persona” 190). This does not

necessarily mean the girl embodies the erotic personae often seen in adult female performances

(although this does not protect them from audience members fetishizing them).

Rather, the girl projects a certain air of “becoming” where her talents make her seem

developmentally advanced for her age. It is through this becoming where feminized expectations

of the girl begin to form, where the girl’s remarkable talents signal a promise for the professional

woman she will one day be, as well as a commitment to her normative femininity. In Bianca

Ryan’s finale performance, the young star seemed to manage the disconnect in her cusp-persona

by wearing a formal mid-length green dress and styled hair to better accompany her mature

singing voice (Figure 7). After finishing her song, another Dreamgirls ballad titled “I Am

Changing,” Piers Morgan noted that Ryan had changed her looks and now might even win the

competition. The fact that Ryan did indeed win affirmed the importance of the professional

styling of girlhood achievement, yet it also highlighted the necessity for these changes to point to

a future career.

The makeover paradigm in later seasons of AGT has been more subtle in addressing the

ways its contestants, especially its young female contestants, should change if they want to win

the competition. As Su Holmes articulates in her analysis of the music competition Pop Idol,

there is “emphasis on the external labor that goes into the image” of the competitor, yet this

process must also factor in their “raw, natural talent, and, of course, an acceptable physical

appeal (‘what someone’s got’)—which is then yoked to a deliberately ambiguous focus on

Figure 7: The Professional Styling of Bianca Ryan on AGT

specialness” (155). While the image and talents of the girl are important in these reality

competitions, the girl’s selfhood—specifically, her sense of authenticity—must also be

compelling factors in the girl’s achievement. Starting in 2016 when Simon Cowell joined the

season 11 panel of judges, which included TV personality Howie Mandel, former Spice Girl Mel

B, and model and fashion designer Heidi Klum, AGT began to craft what I refer to as the

“perfectly imperfect narrative” of some of its contestants. This narrative particularly engaged the

confidence gap discourse girls had supposedly fallen victim to by profiling the insecurities and

anxieties of its young female contestants through their backstories.

Grace VanderWaal, a 12-year-old ukulele singer from Suffern, New York, became the

prototype for the perfectly imperfect talent girl that AGT would inadvertently measure other girls

by. After her first audition, Simon Cowell noted that VanderWaal’s “notes are a little bit wrong,

voice is croaky at times, but that is what makes you perfect, so sweet, so charming, so real.”

VanderWaal’s authenticity and down-to-earth nature were further constructed through her

original songwriting. With ballads like “I Don’t Know My Name,” VanderWaal seemed to evoke

a feeling of anonymity that spoke to audiences while also ironically finding a stage to make her

name known and escape a life of ordinariness. During her taped interviews, AGT worked to show

VanderWaal’s relatability through fandom as well as a renouncement of fame. At one point, AGT

filmed VanderWaal watching a compilation of YouTube users singing covers of her song before

responding: “It feels like I’m a famous person or something—I’m not, don’t worry!”

AGT’s characterization of VanderWaal as “the most original diamond of them all” (in

Heidi Klum’s words) became a consistent branding strategy utilized in the representation of the

young star’s authenticity and relatability. Moreover, AGT negotiated this authentic brand by

emphasizing VanderWaal’s cusp-persona, associating her with established adult acts like Taylor

Swift and helping her sign a recording deal with Columbia Records, with whom she released her

debut EP Perfectly Imperfect in 2016. Following VanderWaal’s win on AGT, two more girls

would advance to the final stages of AGT’s twelfth season in 2017: 13-year-old ventriloquist

Darci Lynne Farmer and 10-year-old singer Angelica Hale. The originality of Farmer’s act, along

with her backstory of using ventriloquism to overcome shyness, endeared her to the judges and

audiences who eventually voted for her to win the competition; Hale, on the other hand, placed

second, despite her own reputable talents and compelling story of adversity where she survived a

critical illness and went on to perform empowering pop ballads at children’s hospitals.

The narrative and visual framing of the talent show girl as authentic becomes just as

important as her exceptional skills in determining a winner. In the profile sequences for Hale, the

young girl was often shown with her family or in her bedroom, daydreaming about the glamour

and perks fame will bring. Conversely, Farmer was often interviewed outside, sometimes

watching YouTube videos on her iPad of fans playing with their own puppets (Figure 8). In this

way, AGT closely aligned Farmer with her predecessor VanderWaal, who was similarly filmed in

the natural environment of her backyard engaging with fans over the internet. Especially as both

girls are white, blonde, middle-class, and have experienced personal challenges to their

selfconfidence, AGT reinforced the notion that this type of achieving girl is relatable and

inspiring to their many viewers, some of whom attempt to replicate the girls’ talents. This works

to place

Figure 8: Angelica Hale (left) and Darci Lynne Farmer (right) Sequences on AGT

Hale, who is Filipino-American, outside this ideal; while her story is moving, her reliance on

manufactured pop hits cannot compete with the originality and participatory appeal VanderWaal

and Farmer seem to offer.

In reality competitions, women and girls of color typically fail in their endeavors to win

and are often seen as performing inadequately because the media narrative usually questions

their authenticity and commitment to the show. As Rachel E. Dubrofsky argues, reality shows

exhibit “strategic whiteness” by centering the emotional narratives of white women and

marginalizing racial and cultural differences (30). This showed up in the 2018 season of AGT

when two girls of color were identified for their authenticity and then scrutinized when they

seemed to deviate from it. When the judges met 15-year old singer Amanda Mena, they

commended her authentic story of immigrating to the United States from the Dominican

Republic and persevering the bullying she received because she could not speak English. After

singing Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman,” Simon Cowell praised her for having “genuinely

natural soul.” Yet it was in the live shows where Cowell saw Mena’s stardom dim when she sang

a Latin twist on Pink’s “What About Us.” Cowell remarked that Mena had potential to be a star

but that she would be better in a girl group. Another instance occurred with 14-year-old African

American rapper Flau’Jae. The Savannah, Georgia native was inspired to pursue music after her

father, an up-and-coming rapper, was gunned down before she was born. In response to

Flau’Jae’s audition, where she rapped about gun violence, Howie Mandel expressed,

“Wow…you are a wow…and it’s not somebody who wrote a song, and it’s not somebody who

sings a song, it’s somebody who lives a song and teaches us a lesson, and you’re a star.” Even

Cowell seemed impressed, saying, “We provide the platform, you do the hard work. I’m not an

expert, but I think you, the lyrics, the tracks, everything feels real.”

From the beginning, it seemed that Flau’Jae’s story fit AGT’s ideal young female

contestant: an authentic girl who uses her talents to triumph amidst personal hardship. Yet as

Dubrofsky maintains, “behaviors attached to white bodies are at an advantage, and authenticity,

naturalness, and whiteness are intricately aligned” (20). Not long after, Flau’Jae’s authentic stage

performance would be questioned. After receiving the distinguished golden buzzer from guest

judge Chris Hardwick, Flau’Jae was catapulted into the quarter finals where American audiences

then failed to vote for her. Despite Howie Mandel and Heidi Klum’s proclamations that Flau’Jae

was “real,” “honest,” “inspirational,” and “smart,” all qualities that should make her a star, it was

Mel B who provided the most discerning critique. According to the Spice Girls judge, Flau’Jae’s

hand-waving during the chorus of her song seemed unoriginal and manufactured compared to the

rest of the work she had shown thus far. In other words, Flau’Jae’s choreography seemed to

pander to a commercial audience rather than emulate her true self. Flau’Jae’s elimination,

arriving after the judges lumped Amanda Mena’s performance in the constructed arena of girl

pop groups, demonstrates the extra hurdles placed on girls of color in reality TV. In the same

season, 13-year-old Courtney Hadwin, a white singer from England who performed classic rock

hits, had audiences questioning the authenticity of her stage fright when press reports revealed

that she had previously competed on other reality talent shows and was not as shy as her stage

presence suggested. However, Hadwin’s performative shyness still allowed her to proceed to a

later point in the competition than Flau’Jae or Mena. Girlhood achievement, as AGT

demonstrates, must have natural, widespread appeal without trying too hard. Yet as these reality

programs struggle to relate the personal hardships of talented girls of color to audiences

unfamiliar with their experiences, these girls end up appearing desperate and disingenuous.

At stake in these representations of girlhood achievement is the preservation of

authenticity in the face of constant critique and revision, the privileging of success at all personal

costs, and the need to conform to a narrow ideal of professionalized girlhood that promises

career longevity. In the 2019 season of AGT, this balancing act continued most notably with the

tween girl group GFORCE from Toronto, Canada. Prior to their audition, AGT emphasized the

celebrity potential of each of the five girls who go by pseudonyms (Zen G, OG, Boss G, Speedy

G, and Hype G) that seem to evoke the girl power spirit of the Spice Girls. After performing an

original song and dance routine, judge Gabrielle Union commented that she could hear Radio

Disney playing the girls while Simon Cowell noted, “This is all about being authentic. You’re

very cute, very ambitious, the audience like you…girls your age should be having fun, and

telling us…we should be learning from you, not the other way around.” While the girls of

GFORCE have professional and celebrity potential as a girl group that would fit right at home

with Disney, they still required a commitment to presenting the truest version of themselves that

they could. The professional lifestyling of girlhood, as AGT defines it, must attempt to balance

confidence with insecurity and not conform too strongly to the artificiality of mass-produced

celebrity. At the same time, authenticity becomes a part of this mass production of girlhood

achievement on reality competitions, where its construction as confident or insecure becomes a

professional endeavor with commercial appeal.

Hope and the Comfort of Young Female Labor in Little Big Shots

So far, this chapter has examined how the junior reality talent show engages with

discourses of confidence and anxiety that reinforce the narrative that representations of girlhood

achievement must maintain an honest portrayal of the girl while adhering to ideals of

professionalism and marketability. These ideals, particularly as they are reproduced in

entertainment contexts, privilege the practice of celebrity and branding in the career building of

the talented girl. While authenticity is greatly considered in the presentation of the girl, it is an

authenticity that speaks to the normative expectations of audiences that is most valued. This

authenticity is informed by the social and cultural preoccupations that determine how the girl’s

perceived confidence or insecurity can truthfully reflect a hopeful narrative of professional

achievement that preserves her place in a neoliberal society.

The format of the reality talent show creates an even more precarious environment for the

girl’s talents as audiences and/or judges ultimately decide her elimination or continuance in the

competition. As Guy Redden states, “the dispensability of the contestant at any time (and

winners within a contracted period) is consistent with manipulation of transience by new

capitalist elites so as to reap its benefits but externalize its costs to other parties, including an

ever-more-flexible workforce” (“Learning to Labour on the Reality Talent Show” 137). In this

way, the stakes of the professionalized girl in early twenty-first century media culture lie not only

within the tensions between authenticity and identity transformation but also within the

normalization of “fun labor” that benefits the commercial needs of the entertainment industries

but does not guarantee future success, security, or compensation for the girl.

By “fun labor,” I refer to work that is performed during leisure time, often with the goal

of enjoyment, that in some way can contribute to the development of professional skills. Similar

to what Brooke Erin Duffy calls “aspirational labor” or what Angela McRobbie terms

“passionate work,” fun labor is often uncompensated and is built around the notion of “doing

what you love” at the risk of unstable work conditions and the blurring of leisure and labor

boundaries. Where fun labor differs is that the intention of the work is not necessary to further

one’s career or even seek payment, although it can indirectly lead to those things; rather, it is to

do work that is gratifying and entertaining for the sole purpose of pleasing the self. Often,

children are the subjects of fun labor, as they usually do not have the same home and career

responsibilities in mind as the adults who care for them do. However, as McRobbie illustrates,

young people, especially girls, are inundated with messages of the “dream job” in the creative

industries. This makes fun labor a contestable space for girls as any interest they have is

somehow framed as a future career. She argues that “capitalism makes a seductive offer to young

women with the promise of pleasure in work, while at the same time this work is nowadays

bound to be precarious and insecure and lacking the protection of conventional employment” (Be

Creative 105). With this in mind, fun labor for girls acts as another tool in orienting them

towards their future becoming—a confident self that values enjoyable, passionate work in a

talent-led economy and also pleases the audiences who validate their accomplishments. Even

more, fun connotes authenticity in the girl’s work. Supposedly, if the girl is enjoying herself,

then the work must not be exploitative.

Fun labor shows up most notably in the variety talent show Little Big Shots, an American

production that features young children demonstrating a variety of impressive talents in between

commentary and interviews with host Steve Harvey.9 Specifically, fun labor, as represented

through girlhood achievement, becomes a tool of hope and comfort in the reproduction of

heteronormative femininity as an authentic brand of girlhood. Premiering on NBC’s Sunday

night timeslot on March 14, 2016, LBS surprised television executives when it attracted 12.8

million people and 14.6 million with DVR viewing (Yahr). The program had been the brainchild

of Steve Harvey and Ellen DeGeneres who saw LBS fitting in with NBC’s talent show line-up

9 Harvey has since been replaced by actor and comedian Melissa McCarthy for the fourth season.

that already included AGT and The Voice. LBS, however, would nix the competitive storyline and

instead operate as a celebration of children’s talents and accomplishments, ranging from

yodeling and acrobatics to arbitrary acts that highlighted their cuteness or special interests. With

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DeGeneres producing, Harvey served as host, engaging with the young participants in comedic

interviews reminiscent of another child-centered series, Kids Say the Darndest Things

(19982000).

While the show has been a hit with NBC’s heartland audience, its global format has

found success in other countries such as the Philippines and Great Britain, suggesting that there

might be larger reasons for why LBS resonates with audiences worldwide. Paul Telegdy, NBC’s

president of alternative and late-night programming, speculated that child prodigies offer

something to viewers that they cannot get anywhere else. In an interview with The Washington

Post in 2016, Telegdy stated, “What is going on out there is so all-consuming and revolting, and

I mean that…You spend your life absorbing what’s going on out there at the moment…man oh

man, come Sunday night, you just want to believe that there is something hopeful and fresh for

the future. And kids just give you that” (Yahr).

Telegdy’s comments touch on, albeit vaguely, the bleak political and social climate that

has plagued not just the United States but other countries around the globe. Specifically in the

U.S., the deluge of mass shootings, hate crimes, and opioid overdoses have dominated news

media headlines, while the rise of far-right and fascist-leaning political leaders in high

government positions have become a universal crisis many nations now face. Telegdy’s

observation that child-themed reality television for the whole family would provide a fun

sanctuary from the cruelties of the world, though, is not a new discourse by any means. Film

historian Kristen Hatch, in her book on Shirley Temple, relays how the child star of the 1930s

“functioned as an antidote to the ravages brought by modern life and as a repository of all that

was lost with the turn toward rationalism and industrial capitalism” (12). On a personal human

level, Jane O’Connor raises that society valorizes child stars “because they are what we can

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never be again and their ‘natural’ charm makes us believe in the ultimate goodness of people in

their uncorrupted, pre-adult state” (142). While LBS does not address all these issues directly, or

in the same way, the presentation and performance of its child stars do emphasize the

lightheartedness of pure talent and the joys of work when done outside the high-stakes pressures

of the real world.

During a 2018 episode, Steve Harvey’s conversation with Ariana Jalia, a six-year-old

self-proclaimed author and entrepreneur, illustrates how the fun labor of girls exemplifies charm

and ambition in order to receive attention for their achievements. In the interview, Jalia discusses

a couple of books she has written, including one about a mustachioed character modeled after

Steve Harvey. “I can’t tell you any more than that, ’cause that would ruin the whole surprise of

the book,” Jalia says, before adding, “And second of all, I need to protect my IP.” Harvey, taken

aback by Jalia’s industry knowledge, explains to the audience that the girl is referring to her

intellectual property. “I’m going to quit talking to you like you’re six,” Harvey says. “Do you

have any business goals or aspirations?” Jalia replies that by the age of nine she plans to have

three million dollars in the bank. Despite the outrageousness of Jalia’s prediction, her confidence

and charisma are what endear her to audiences rather than the fact that she can write a book or

has the connections needed to publish it. Treating her like the CEO of her own company, Harvey

last asks if Jalia has a life mantra. The young girl readily answers, “Well, if you put your mind

and your heart into it, you can achieve anything you want to do. You can be an entrepreneur.

You can be an artist. You can be an author. You can do anything your heart desires.”

The inclusion of ambitious girls like Jalia on LBS sheds light on how the commercial

industries use child labor to create a space of fun and inspiration for audiences. Despite slow

economic recovery and workplace harassment, the girl power optimism LBS espouses sends the

message girls can achieve anything as long as they have the confidence and drive. As Anita

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Harris asserts of twenty-first century girls, “their bodies and labor power have become integral to

the new economy, and they provide comforting images of continuity and cohesion in times that

feel risky and uncertain” (Future Girl 184). Youthful femininity as comfort relates to the

affective innocence and emotional vulnerability of girls, but it also refers to the self-made and

can-do spirit evoked in postfeminist rhetoric.

The girl child as a symbol of hope during troubled times also supports the Horatio Alger

myth that has influenced American ideology over the last century, stating that if one works hard

enough, they can succeed despite the odds against them. Feminist researcher Valerie Walkerdine

identifies Little Orphan Annie as the quintessential girl heroine with an inspiring “rags to riches”

story. She writes that “positioning her as an orphan and destitute places her as without any kind

of social or community support or without any psychological support: she is the archetypal

selfmade individual, the person who, it seems does not need anybody else and just has to get by

and fend for herself” (87). Furthermore, Walkerdine notes, audiences have not viewed this

feminine cultural archetype as “rational enough to be a natural child”; rather, the girl heroine

would need to adopt characteristics of a “nurturant mother-figure” in order to be seen as rational

(80). In this discourse, the girl heroine might represent the struggles and triumphs of the working

class attempting to climb the social ladder, but society would only accept her achievements as

they preserve a maternal sensibility. This does not necessarily mean that the girl needs to

symbolize a motherly figure, who herself is a source of comfort and care. Rather, the girl needs

to maintain or at least not disrupt the familial social order through her professional achievements.

In LBS, girlhood achievement is often framed and valued by its association with

heteronormative coupling. For instance, Steve Harvey’s interactions with child talent participants

often devolve into discussions of whether or not the children have “boyfriends” or “girlfriends,”

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suggesting that kids must always consider their future marriage plans alongside their talents.

These questions elicit laughter from the audience while the children squirm and smile nervously

at the idea of having a romantic interest. During an episode in 2017, Harvey interviewed young

dancing couple Lev Cameron and Sofia Sachenko about how they met. While Sachenko insists

on saying “partner,” Harvey’s interruptions maintain that she says she was dancing with a boy.

When Cameron tells his side of the story, he adds that Sachenko was the one who insisted on

dancing with him. Sachenko’s face puckers up as Harvey checks with Cameron: “So, she was

pushing up on you.” Sachenko attempts to justify this fact by noting how Cameron was one of

the best boy partners at the studio, but Cameron responds with “I also have this theory that she

likes me.” Sachenko pushes back, claiming that Cameron is actually the one who likes her.

Harvey tries to clear up the story, telling Cameron, “You broke up with that girl you was dancing

with, ’cause you saw her.” Sachenko’s face lights up, preferring this retelling of events as it

absolves her of the embarrassment of admitting she has a crush on her male dance partner. At the

same time, Harvey’s framing of the story contains Sachenko and Cameron in a heteronormative

narrative that excludes the girl’s rationalization that she selected a boy as a partner because of his

dancing abilities. While the omission of Sachenko’s dance strategy does not exactly downplay

her skills and hard work, it does accentuate the importance of the personal—particularly as it

enforces heteronormative kinship—in the representation of girlhood achievement.

The discourse of comfort and hope in LBS focuses on the normativity of gendered social

roles and romantic relationships, constructing these details as authentic in the media

representation of the girl performer. Even more, this emphasis on the personal begins to align

girlhood talent with the public discourse of the self that audiences find endearing. In other words,

the interiority of the girl becomes a spectacle of professional achievement by virtue of her media

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visibility and fame. While LBS showcases young girls who perform talents that require practice

and skill, like playing a musical instrument or yodeling, it also presents girls who become

famous for something cute they did that their parents recorded and then put on the internet. One

four-year-old girl in particular made it onto LBS after a video of her eating blue cotton candy

with an excited face at a Seattle Mariners game generated 600 million views online. The

interview segment with Beatrix Hart, also known as “Cotton Candy Girl,” applauded her

accomplishment of becoming “internet famous” while awarding her with more cotton candy she

could enthusiastically eat with Harvey in front of a live studio audience. Another young girl,

sixyear-old Bella Kaylor, achieved internet fame from a video her mother posted of her freaking

out about seeing the live-action movie Beauty and the Beast. Kaylor’s appearance on Little Big

Shots showed her in a yellow princess dress being escorted by adult performers in royal-style

costumes to the stage. After Harvey has Kaylor talk about her love of Beauty and the Beast and

sing a couple of her favorite songs, he informs her that the show will be paying for a family

vacation to

Disneyland. “That’s my dream come true,” Kaylor exclaims to the audience. “That’s all I ever

wanted.”

The attention given to young female internet stars like Hart and Kaylor might recall early

criticisms of female celebrity and the talent crisis, where the focus on the private dramas of the

(often female) public personality suggests that society no longer knows, or cares, what talent is

anymore. As far back as the 1940s, Frankfurt School scholars like Leo Lowenthal made

observations that American society had shifted from a nation that spotlighted “idols of

production” (e.g. politicians, entrepreneurs, war generals, etc.) to one that idealized “idols of

consumption” (anyone working in the entertainment industry). This shift helped create the

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conditions for a celebrity system, and, as Christine Geraghty proposes, the category of celebrity

and its emphasis on personal relationships, domesticity, private life, and leisure became

particularly suited for female stars (105).

However, as Su Holmes and Diane Negra show, attention to the lives of female

celebrities demonstrates a cultural anxiety over the perceived diminishment of reputable

achievement. Holmes and Negra explain that “the coverage of physically, emotionally and/or

financially ‘out of control’ female celebrities is predicated on public fears that we don’t know

what talent is anymore and that the traditional expectation that fame is based on talent is dying

out, giving rise to a set of ‘illegitimate’ female celebrities who are famous for ‘nothing’” (3).

Particularly in the digital age of instant internet fame, what constitutes talent and achievement

is varied and largely depends on popular reaction rather than cultural experts. Contemporary

variety shows like LBS attempt to curate their talent not necessarily by how skilled the child is

but by how they resonate with audiences. In this way, placing an acrobatic protégé next to a

kid whose online video went viral is acceptable as long as they both elicit strong responses

from the studio audience. Yet as girls are positioned in this lineup, their representations must

still negotiate the gendered anxieties of illegitimate fame that determine if the comfort they

provide for the public is enough to justify the recognition they receive. As a result, girlhood

achievement hinges on the perception of authenticity behind the talent, where audiences must

believe that the girl is genuine in her skilled efforts in order to garner any attention or reward.

With its staged discussions between the host and child guest in front of a live studio

audience, LBS stresses that the celebrification of the girl is just as important as her achievements.

It is at this intersection of public persona and talent where fun labor comes into play, where an

internet famous child enthusiastically eating cotton candy becomes valuable for the industries

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that market off of recognizable faces and family-friendly content. While some of the children

who go on LBS end up pursing their talents more professionally, as AGT’s Darci Lynne Farmer

did when she first performed on the variety show, other kids slide back into everyday anonymity.

The ambivalence of success forms the bedrock of fun labor, where making a career out of a

momentary guest appearance is not always the result or end goal (although it can be in certain

circumstances). This is made possible when competition is left out and the focus instead is on the

sheer enjoyment of watching children perform. Without this competitive framework, the

discourses of girlhood achievement that expect confidence, ambition, and hope concede to the

construction of authenticity and the publicization of private life. The celebrity identity of the girl,

then, becomes an achievement in and of itself as it bends to the production whims as well as

institutional demands that seek positive expressions of young female life.

Conclusion: The (Show) Business of Authenticity

The case studies examined in this chapter reveal how the discourses of achievement and

authenticity that mediate conversations about girls emerge in different ways on the reality talent

show. As these discourses inform how audiences interpret the production methods that strive for

a more equitable competition, such as on MasterChef Junior, they also inform the conflicting

demands that evaluate the performances of girls on talent show stages like AGT. When these

talents are removed from a competitive context and placed in an environment like LBS that

celebrates and marvels over exceptional kids, girlhood becomes a site of comfort and hope that

does not need to rely on traditional understandings of achievement to gain recognition. However,

the variety show format feeds into discourses that cast doubt on girlhood achievement when the

girl’s reason for being on a program fails to present a recognizable talent like singing or

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tapdancing. Yet thinking about achievement in this way works to reinscribe masculinist notions

of work built upon rigor and natural intellect, where privileged access to the social world allows

for achievement to be based in professional work or citizen activity. As Michele Paule relays,

“not only are girls already subject to gender discourses which require them to shape themselves

as objects of desire and so involve them in a constant process of self-invention and subjective

construction, but also a further complexity is added through their requirement to adopt some

qualities which have heretofore been associated with masculinized success” (134). By measuring

girls’ achievements through the traditional framework that rewards male accomplishments,

limitations are placed on how we value girlhood, and even more, how the work they do gets

represented.

As authenticity continues to be an important factor for the professional lifestyling of

girlhood across different media spaces, the practice of celebrity and the attainment of fame will

remain processes that measure success later in life. For branding purposes, programs might edit

the girl to appear confident in her presentation or more doubtful to provide a dramatic narrative

enticing to audiences. Discursive anxieties also pervade these mediated spaces, calling attention

to how girls are not achieving enough or not achieving in the right, often normative, ways. While

these anxieties intensify the makeover narratives of young female competitors on talent shows,

they also work to validate the media attention girls receive. Overcoming these anxieties on a

talent show frames the confidence gap as something that can be resolved within a neoliberal

capitalist system that depends on women’s and girls’ labor to operate. This has further

implications when considering the ways race and class determine the media legitimation of girls

of color and their achievements. The imperative for girls to identify their anxieties in order to

feel more confident thus must be read with the understanding that self-improvement and

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authenticity promise hope by enforcing traditional social and cultural hierarchies in a celebrity

brand culture.

CHAPTER THREE

The Digital Girl Economy: Influencers, Slackers, and the Branding of Relatability

In August 2018, The Atlantic published an article by Taylor Lorenz titled “Posting

Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job” that detailed how the digitization of work

in a post-recession United States had impacted girls’ relationship to employment and

professional development. According to Lorenz, teen girls have increasingly started to monetize

their social media following for pay in response to the national shortage of seasonal and

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minimum-wage jobs, as well as the rigorous requirements of academic work limiting their

availability for after-school employment. Small clothing brands and accessories start-ups, like

Boogzel Apparel and Doux Lashes, had also begun reaching out to teens on Instagram and

paying them $5 to $20 per post (depending on audience size and experience) to showcase

specific consumer products. Furthermore, the article emphasized the professional skills girls

would acquire by agreeing to these partnerships, from setting up a business email and PayPal

account to creating media kits to negotiate better brand deals.

The following summer, Lorenz wrote about another entrepreneurial project lining the

wallets of Generation Z girls in “Why Teens Are Selling Clothes Out of their Closets.” Using the

app Depop, a social shopping platform that is “a little bit eBay and a little bit Instagram,” young

people sell fashionable thrifted clothing at a low price while building their social media presence.

The professional opportunities profiled in these two articles construct a hopeful and resourceful

future for girls in the digital gig economy even while acknowledging the insecurities of a shifting

jobs landscape. Girls’ relationship to work in this context relies on a keen understanding of how

the personal space as well as the cultural values that make up contemporary girlhood discursively

construct a profit-making professional identity. In a digitized labor market, girls appear to have

greater access to the tools, resources, and social and governmental support that invest in their

abilities and capitalist output as future female leaders in the corporate world. Yet in order to

obtain social and economic clout in today’s fragmented economy, the girl and her entire life must

become a business. As girls participate in the monetization of their social media activity, the

question remains how discourses of confidence and authenticity inform the professionalization of

girls online. In other words, what might digital gigs like sponsoring Instagram content or

thrifting clothes on social media platforms reveal about girls’ relationship to entrepreneurial work

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in these intimate settings? How are race and class considered in the commodification of girls’

social media spaces? To answer these questions, I investigate the seemingly discordant figures of

the influencer and the slacker that have populated girls’ digital culture and mediated professional

development in the 2010s.

The professional lifestyling of the girl in the digital age relies on the practice of celebrity

and self-branding to create multiple public identities that engage confident and anti-confident

sensibilities. First, influencer refers to any social media user who produces corporate sponsored

digital content that has the power to affect the lifestyle and purchasing decisions of those who

follow them. As the role applies to mediated girlhood cultures, the influencer traffics in specific

affective qualities, invoking the rhetorics of confidence and aspiration that make this online

persona appealing and seemingly achievable to young audiences. In many ways, the girl

influencer is an extension of Anita Harris’ formulation of the can-do girl subjectivity, whose

positivity, ambition, and independence make the girl a hopeful future citizen and participant in

the consumer marketplace. The girl influencer is the can-do girl realized in a professional

lifestyle context: she is already doing what the can-do girl promises in the way of corporatized

branding and mass audience cultivation. On the other side of the coin is the girl slacker, a social

media persona dominant in what young audiences call “slacker YouTube” or “relatable

YouTube,” a quirky style of video-making defined by random zooms, vocal distortions, awkward

insertion of memes and poorly Photoshopped JPEGS, and stream-of-consciousness storytelling.

This content is also produced by what fans call “average” (read: white, Western, middle-class,

thin) teens. What makes these videos “relatable” or “slacker” is the low-production quality and

supposed lack of care for how to edit and structure the video, giving the impression that the girl

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is just like anyone else in their laziness, insecurities, and aimlessness. In short, these videos are

stripped of the unachievable coiffed filter of traditional influencer content.

Despite their differences in expression, both the girl influencer and the girl slacker engage

the logics of entrepreneurialism by practicing self-branding, audience engagement, and project

and life management. The adoption of an everyday, leisurely aesthetic in their digital

performances is supported by a longer history of women’s work in digital spaces highlighting

how emergent technologies have extended rather than optimized professional and domestic

responsibilities. As communications researcher Marsha F. Cassidy shows, advertisements for

home PCs in the 1980s and 1990s tried to convince women that they could move their work from

the office back into the domestic sphere, thus leading to a greater focus on maintaining the

family. In the convergence era of Web 2.0, Laurie Ouellette and Julie Wilson observe how

selfhelp media reconstructed the “second shift” for women to perform extra work on the self in

addition to their professional and household duties.10 While the digitization of the workplace has

made work seem more flexible and convenient (especially for women pursuing the elusive

worklife balance), Melissa Gregg notes that this restructuring of labor makes it so that

10 Ouellette and Wilson examine the Dr. Phil multimedia self-help franchise as a specific case study. Their analysis

reveals that participants’ interactivity with the franchise reinforced an “ongoing, mundane regimen of

selfempowerment” that intensified the second shift of familial and affective labor completed at home rather than

increased the enjoyment of the text (549).

“communication platforms and devices allow work to invade spaces and times that were once

less susceptible to its presence” (2). While the blurring of personal and professional boundaries

in the digital age have noticeably encouraged compulsory behavior and neoliberal positionalities

amongst women—many of whom are called to work more hours to achieve workplace stability

and career advancement—this setting may have different implications for the next generation of

girls who are more accustomed to its hybrid structure.

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The scattered and fragmented environment of the post-recession economy has greatly

informed how girl influencers and slackers appear contradictory when they really cohere to

similar modes of branding and promotion. Critics and business analysts have observed the

normalization of this work environment through what they call the “sharing economy” or “gig

economy,” defined by the move away from stable employment and by the embrace of temporary

positions and contractual work usually obtained through mobile app services. Although

freelancing and temp work have always been around, the gig economy expanded with the growth

of lodging and rideshare apps like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft in the early 2010s (Strom). Female

workers in particular have been addressed by the gig economy’s promise of work-life balance on

a schedule that affords flexibility and control over domestic labor and childcare (Katz and

Krueger 394). This growing trend has spurred a number of think pieces touting the benefits of

choice, flexibility, and extra income for women (“Why Women Can—and Should—Cash in on

the Gig Economy”) as well as decrying the lack of attention the gig economy has paid to worker

protections and benefits, affordable childcare, and workplace harassment (“The Gig Economy

Won’t Be a Feminist Godsend”)11. Moreover, these discourses have evoked the growing dread

that these constant work cycles will contribute to what cultural critics like BuzzFeed’s Anne

11 See DeFelice and Doyle for popular commentary.

Helen Petersen have termed “burnout,” a syndrome clinically recognized as the result of chronic

workplace stress and mismanagement. Even as entrepreneurs have lauded the gig economy for

opening up more pathways to flexible employment for people, concern for the social, economic,

and mental precarity of female gig workers (especially women of color, working class women,

and differently abled women) draws attention to existing structural problems that underline this

supposedly more liberated form of labor.

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While some girls might not be old enough to drive for Uber or freelance through

TaskRabbit, many still take advantage of the free-for-all employment market the gig economy

has introduced. Most notably, the monetization of ads on YouTube has allowed girls to earn

income from the creation of beauty and style video blogs as well as toy review channels and

baking tutorials. Social media apps like Musical.ly and TikTok (lip-syncing platforms where

users create and share their own videos) also provide teens with opportunities to grow an

audience, attain stardom, and subsequently secure lucrative brand deals. Perhaps due to their

protected status as minors, options for young girls to participate in the gig economy are limited

and tend to be circumscribed in visibly gendered performances, branded content, and the practice

of celebrity. As content creators, girls enact what Theresa Senft calls “microcelebrity” through

the “commitment to deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded

good…” (“Microcelebrity and the Branded Self” 1). In her book CamGirls: Celebrity and

Community in the Age of Social Networks, Senft chooses homecamming as an object of study

where women foster a celebrity persona by broadcasting themselves to a captive audience over

the web. Characteristic of this online performance is the blurring of private and public life into a

branded commodity that relies on confession and visibility for cultural capital. The attention

generated from microcelebrity is what sustains this kind of work, yet it also assigns new values

and creates different relationships to labor that girls now experience. Instead of the girl striving

for work-life balance, the girl’s life strives to become her work.

Taking into account both the girl influencer and the girl slacker in the digital gig

economy, this chapter adopts a Marxist feminist approach that considers the intersections of

gender, race, and sexuality in digital culture and how work is structured in and around the

various presentations of the girl’s life and labor online. The analytical frameworks of Kylie

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Jarrett and Kathi Weeks are particularly pertinent to this study in understanding how the girl

becomes a business in a capitalist digital economy, where the commodification of everyday life

must negotiate ambition and relatability in the self-branding of the girl. By relatability, I refer to

Akane Kanai’s formulation of the relatable as an “affective relation” in digital culture that

“requires the production of a pleasing commonality…” (41). This process, which Kanai grounds

in Arlie Hochschild’s “feeling rules,” particularly considers how young women “may articulate

their experience of regulation to others in a neoliberal environment that demands both

approachability and ambition” (31). The expectation to navigate the different realms of ambition

and relatability creates a professionalized girlhood that seems to eschew work even as she works

tirelessly to generate the desired results of her digital celebrity. As I argue, representations of

influencing and slacking across digital environments recreate similar modes of productivity and

reinforce racial and class hierarchies through the branding and commodification of private life.

Influencing and Flexing

According to a 2019 CBS news report, becoming a social media star who broadcasts her

daily life to millions of followers while getting paid through brand endorsements and

sponsorship deals has become a common aspiration among young girls (Novacic). From a very

young age, and sometimes with the help of family, girls can monetize their selfies and videos and

become social media influencers, a term that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s to describe

the influx of microcelebrities on Instagram and similar image and video-hosting platforms.

Performing as an influencer means photographing and sharing one’s life, interests, and style

through a highly polished online persona that promotes an enviable lifestyle other users want to

admire and emulate. Such images, as Alice Marwick observes, replicate aspirational lifestyles,

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contributing to the notion of “Instafame” that “reinforces an existing hierarchy of fame, in which

the iconography of glamour, luxury, wealth, good looks, and connections is reinscribed in a

visual digital medium” (“Instafame” 141). While influencer work is not specific to any age or

gender, young girls who participate in this digital media production assert an entrepreneurial

cando girlhood that responds to the social panic over girls’ low self-esteem and the impact it

might have on their future careers. Girl influencers thus represent the optimization of the

professionalized girl showing how her emotional and creative work from a very young age is

commodified and assimilated into the digital gig economy. Despite the illusion of democratic

freedom, choice, and intimacy digital labor promotes, girl influencers exemplify hegemonic

principles of race, class, and professionalism as the norm for successful microcelebrity girls.

In Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy, and Value,

Akane Kanai explains how the female professional identity strives to be accessible to internet

audiences, writing that “young women in influencer, lifestyle and micro-celebrity work are

labouring to produce a seamless account of the self to digital audiences in which the intimate and

the commercial are deeply entwined” (9). This entanglement of the personal and the professional

contributes to the idea that influencing can be empowering for women and girls seeking careers

that seem cool, glamorous, and under their creative control.12 Often characterized as “passionate”

work in popular discourse, influencing and similar jobs in the creative arts sector have put forth

the idea that “work must become a fulfilling marker of self” (McRobbie, Be Creative 22).

Feminist scholars have theorized that neoliberal capitalism has reshaped, and in some cases

dislodged, young women’s relationship to work, family, and community relations, creating a

deep unhappiness that only a rewarding career can satisfy. In regard to influencing, girls appear

to build networked communities that validate the life and work they present online through

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monetized attention when other in-person relationships fail to fully recognize their value.

However, as girls are continuously subjected to a life fully commodified and managed under

digital surveillance, their aspirations and emotions become strategic pawns in the construction of

their developing professional identities.

Central to the girl influencer lifestyle is the expression of confidence that builds trust with

online audiences and makes the girl seem approachable, empowered, and aspirational. Amy

Shields Dobson identifies confidence as a valued trait of postfeminist femininity and as an

affective commodity in digital media contexts where “girls’ circulation of self-images that signal

confidence and self-worth through smiles, bodily display, and sociality has exchange value”

(Postfeminist Digital Cultures 134). More than just an emotion, confidence aligns the girl with a

postfeminist tradition that values choice and independence not just in the female subject but in

her audience relations as well. The girl who projects confidence inspires hope and positivity in

her followers, and she entices them to mimic her life through specific consumer habits so that

they may feel as happy and successful as she does.

12 See Duffy and Hund’s work on fashion bloggers.

The performance of confidence in girls’ influencer accounts is significant for how the

digital gig economy teaches girls at a young age to operate as professional entities and assume a

can-do persona that appears to exist in every facet of their personal life. Employing confidence in

this way works to create an entrepreneurial identity that will enable girls to participate in the

processes and promised rewards of neoliberal capitalism. The work that goes into maintaining

the appearance of confidence thus falls under what Eva Illouz terms “emotional capitalism,” a

process in which the marketplace and the language of self-value in the twentieth century have

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merged so that emotions are now “entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained,

quantified, and commodified” (109). The ability to perform sentimentality and intimacy in the

public sphere gives girl influencers an advantage in a digital economy that measures profit and

value through attention—that is, through likes, shares, and retweets across a networked

community. With this in mind, I want to think about confidence as a product of immaterial labor,

which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as labor which “produces immaterial goods

such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge or communication” (292).

As immaterial labor, confidence can seem easily exploited in its use as a tool of

empowerment in the girl influencer’s celebrity self-brand. Kylie Jarrett puts Hardt and Negri’s

definition in the context of Marxist feminism and the commercial web, utilizing “the digital

housewife” as a concept to show how the invisible entrapment and devaluation of domestic labor

can explain the “contradictory dynamics of exploitation and agency associated with digital media

capitalism” (3). Jarrett posits that feminist inquiry can clarify the ambiguities in the socially

meaningful and exploitative work performed in online spaces, such as generating free user data

for platforms and advertisers to use for their own benefit. Similarly, confidence straddles this

contradictory line of exploitation and agency in giving girls’ mediated displays added value

while demanding self-regulation in their celebrity performances for the purpose of maintaining

advertising and brand relationships. As certain girls make a name for themselves on social media

and attract corporate interest, upholding a consistent image of success, confidence, and

selfrespect helps keep the girl’s business alive.

When teen YouTube star and influencer JoJo Siwa signed with Nickelodeon in 2017,

confidence became a more structured trademark that included not just Siwa’s effervescent

personality but also the original programming, commercial products, and live events advertised

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to the kid network’s audience. Siwa, who got her start on Lifetime’s reality competition series

Dance Moms (2011-present), initially garnered a reputation for being disrespectful in her mission

to obtain a spot in Abby Lee Miller’s esteemed dance company. Her association with her

conceited mother, Jessalyn, also left Siwa in a difficult position to advance her career in a

positive direction after her time on Dance Moms ended in 2016. In an interview with Rolling

Stone in 2019, Siwa relayed how her YouTube channel became the perfect rebranding tool to

help her form a more likeable public image (Spanos). Early videos of Siwa showed her sharing

experiences as a competitive dancer, demonstrating dance moves, participating in viral video

challenges, and starting a weekly segment called “JoJo’s Juice” where the young star poured a

different juice on her head after answering fan questions from Twitter. In short, Siwa’s YouTube

channel allowed her to perform confidence in a way that seemed genuine and more in line with

her true personal self outside Dance Moms. While her management team’s plan to engage fans

across multiple platforms allowed her to cultivate a tight circle of devoted followers, Siwa’s

high-energy delivery and perpetually perky attitude quickly became her calling card in being able

to reach both kids and parents searching for positive role models (Weiss). By building a self-

brand imbued with cheerful confidence, Siwa demonstrated that the power of the girl influencer

lies in her affective labor and ability to appear authentic and non-commercial, even with her

image deeply rooted in the processes of commodity capitalism.

By managing the intimate moments audiences see, girl influencers like Siwa create an

authentic, confident persona that subtly engages the commercial markets that give them

economic and social value. In situating corporate sponsored content in the authentic space

developed online, the girl influencer makes consumer products feel familiar and amenable to her

followers. This can be seen in what Crystal Abidin calls the “advertorial,” a portmanteau of

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“advertisement” and “editorial” that is “thought to be more effective than dispassionate, clinical

advertisements since they take the form of a personal narrative and incorporate Influencers’

perspectives of having experienced the product or service first hand” (“Influencer Selfies” 7).

For instance, Siwa frequently promotes her merchandise on Instagram as part of her everyday

life and representation of her can-do personality (Figure 9). A post made on November 25, 2019

shows Siwa sporting a pink and white onesie with the text “Bows Are My Super Power” next to

Figure 9: JoJo Siwa Advertorial on Instagram

an image of her face; the adjacent caption reads: “Just living my best life in my JoJo onesie.

Listen…this onesie is everything, I’m the happiest human! It’s available right now at Walmart!!

Go check it out and Let me see you rocking your JoJo PJs!!!” While the advertorial invites

Siwa’s followers to purchase the onesie through a specific retailer, making its direct consumer

address obvious, it also personalizes the girl influencer’s request by reminding fans of their

affiliation with Siwa’s confidence. By obtaining the JoJo onesie, and then tagging the young star

in an Instagram post while wearing it, Siwa’s fans can participate in the affective narrative of

“living my best life” as the “happiest human.” Furthermore, Siwa’s advertorial conforms to what

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Harris calls the authentic look and “confessional style” of the girl’s brand, drawing on the

intimate and recognizable experiences framed in the friendly language captured in teen

magazines (Future Girl 128). Especially as Siwa’s hyperfeminine merchandise appears to

perfectly coordinate with her eclectic style in her personal life, the advertising language the

Instagram post employs feels honest and devoid of opportunistic gain.

Transmitting the emotional value of advertorial content to users on a digital platform

works to enhance and tighten attachments to the commodity, engaging with what theorists

Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman call “affective branding,” a process where users are

“persuaded to consume signs and commodities that always already have a preemptive affective

value built into them, which will be activated in the future” (cited in Garde-Hansen and Gorton

41). It is through affective branding that girl influencers are professionalized. Not only are they

positioned as aspirational commodities with potential for brand longevity as they enter

adulthood, they also engage with the immaterial enterprises of confidence and feminine

empowerment seen as vital to future girlhood success.

While Siwa’s fan engagement work on social media has allowed her to arrest some

control over her sullied narrative on Dance Moms, the 2016 launch of her music video

“Boomerang” more formally established the affective brand of confidence that would begin to

carry her career. In the music video, Siwa and her mom drive up to school in a vintage sedan

with one of Siwa’s signature hair bows fastened to the front. A montage reveals different

traditional cliques at the school, such as the mean girls, the obnoxious jocks, and the lonely shy

girl. In the car, Siwa sings to her mom, “I don’t really care about what they say, I’mma come

back like a boomerang,” while her mom lip-syncs back, “Won’t let the haters get their way.” The

rest of the video follows Siwa in a sparkly purple skirt and pink denim vest, her blonde hair in

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her signature tight ponytail and bow, linking arms with two other girls in matching bows as they

march through the hallways of the school.

While the song repeats that Siwa will “bounce back like a boomerang” despite the gossip

and hateful words said about her, the music video ensures that this mantra extends beyond its

star. As Siwa dances in the hall, she directs her song to the shy girl walking by the gossiping

bullies: “Talk to the phone / Like they’re all alone / Hide behind the screen / ’Cause they’re just

so mean / But we don’t play it like that / We don’t even fight back.” Instead of making the video

about Siwa’s experiences dealing with the negativity of the Dance Moms set, attention is turned

to the introverted tween girl (Siwa’s target audience) who can find confidence and self-respect

through the optimistic chorus Siwa delivers. Together, Siwa and fans can rise above the hate.

During a later scene in a classroom, the shy girl gets into an altercation with the mean girls

before Siwa steps in and initiates a dance-off to resolve their issues. Soon, everyone is dancing

together and putting their conflicts aside in a world of acceptance and glitter.

While “Boomerang” helped set the course for Siwa’s entertainment career, which further

exploded on Nickelodeon, it also became a pivotal branding moment that related Siwa’s personal

struggles and solutions to a more universally shared experience: overcoming gossiping and

bullying through the power of confidence. This self-confidence has been imbued in multiple JoJo

Siwa consumer and service products as the star has gained popularity, including “JoJo’s Closet”

collection at Target, hair bows, sparkly notebooks, dolls, and concert tickets for her 2019 tour

D.R.E.A.M. In many ways, Siwa’s enterprise participates in Banet-Weiser’s “market for

selfesteem,” where “self-esteem is crafted as a commodity, positioning the girls who are seen to

be suffering from low self-esteem as particular sorts of vulnerable consumers” (“Am I Pretty or

Ugly?” 90). By purchasing JoJo Siwa merchandise or listening to her music, girls can

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theoretically tap into the star’s contagious confidence and can-do attitude that the star asserts

really represents who she is. Siwa’s celebrity narrative is thus positioned to be an antidote for

insecure girls, especially as confidence is paraded as a vital entrepreneurial skill for future career

success.

It is important to note here that Siwa’s successful rebranding as an inspiring entertainer

emerges from her ability to align confidence and authenticity with a white upper-class tradition

of professionalism. For girl influencers who exist outside this realm, other approaches are taken

to perform confidence and direct attention to their work for profitability. In a more extreme

rendition of the influencer, the “flexer” is a lesser known identity in the social media arena

drawing on the boastful energy of the rap artist scene. Popularized in the Rae Sremmurd song

“No Flex Zone,” a flexer refers to someone who tries to flaunt their wealth and reputation, even

if their status actually suggests they market in off-brand or borrowed goods to substantiate their

claims. In hip hop and rap music, flexing has been used to assert social power over opponents

and parade one’s riches or sexual prowess, mostly from a Black male perspective (Anwar). In

early 2018, flexer entered internet lexicon when a foul-mouthed Chinese Canadian 9-year-old

girl from Vancouver by the name of Lil Tay began promoting herself on Instagram as the

“youngest flexer of the century.” Born Claire Eileen Qi Hope to a Canadian father and a Chinese

mother, Lil Tay adopted the moniker when her older teenage brother Jason started sharing

Instagram videos of the tween cursing and peacocking around luxury cars and homes. “I’m only

9-years-old but I be flexing on your momma’s rent,” Lil Tay says to her followers in one video

while holding a wad of cash in a porcelain white bathroom suite. While both JoJo Siwa and Lil

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Tay draw on discourses of confidence in their respective microcelebrity brands, Lil Tay’s

racialized performance combats normative constructions of professionalized girlhood as it

attempts to model achievement after Black male-dominated capitalist lifestyles.

Lil Tay’s microcelebrity, while negotiating racialized and classed narratives of

achievement, reveals a contradictory persona that initially thrived on the attention her

inauthenticity generated before fizzling into obscurity. Audience fascination with Lil Tay boiled

down to the unbelievable display of the rags-to-riches story the brother and sister team

concocted. According to Lil Tay’s videos, she grew up “broke as hell” in Atlanta, began

“moving bricks” to get by, dropped out of Harvard, and at one point was even “partially black”

before finding success as a rap artist (Levy). Instead of aligning Lil Tay with more traditional

models of successful can-do girlhood, her microcelebrity relies on the spectacle of notoriety and

risk by placing girlhood where audiences believe it should not go. In doing so, Lil Tay performs

what Lisa Nakamura terms “identity tourism,” a type of racial identity appropriation usually

taken up in online forums where users can assume a race for its exciting and exotic appeal

without experiencing the risks of being that minority in real life (183). Although audiences did

not necessarily believe Lil Tay’s claims about being partially Black or even wealthy, the young

girl’s identity performance attracted attention and provided a platform for her and her brother to

pursue fame. As she made more videos, Lil Tay demonstrated “aspirational production” by

creating content that positioned her microcelebrity in a light similar to more established rap artist

celebrities (Marwick, Status Update 122). By confidently performing as though she were a

notable rap star riding in Rolls-Royces and destroying luxury items because she can afford it, Lil

Tay challenged popular understandings of professionalized girlhood online by aligning herself

with more racialized and masculinized modes of success.

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While Lil Tay’s digital popularity led to lucrative brand deals, the blending of her

celebrity persona and her personal life disrupted the presentation of her overly confident

performance. After being offered a five-year management deal, Lil Tay, Jason, and their real

estate agent mother moved to Los Angeles to negotiate the terms of the young girl’s career in

April 2018. As an intertextual celebrity appearing on other internet stars’ platforms, Lil Tay

acquired a larger audience and more brand deals that permitted her family to live in California

for about two months until a series of damning videos surfaced showing the tween smoking a

hookah and being coached by her brother. An interview with ABC’s Good Morning America

attempted to clear up these troublesome videos. However, Lil Tay’s conduct in the interview

seemed to add further confusion around her persona as she asserted can-do qualities (ice skating,

playing piano, performing ballet) with the at-risk behavior that she claimed was “really her”

(Thorbecke and Ghebremedhin). Even more, a short-lived reality program on YouTube’s Zeus

Network titled Life with Lil Tay, where the young flexer attempted to apologize for using the

Nword in a staged scene with her manager and mother, failed to authentically humanize her

public persona. Finally, when her estranged father issued a court order to have Lil Tay return to

Canada, the young flexer disappeared from the internet except for a series of disturbing

Instagram posts alleging abuse and neglect from her father, using the hashtag #FreeLilTay.

Despite the efforts of Lil Tay’s management team to align the young girl with an

alternative performance of confidence, achievement, and professionalism through the identity of

the flexer, audience expectations of girlhood and Lil Tay’s brand inconsistency created

roadblocks. At the same time, Lil Tay demonstrated how professionalized girlhood in the digital

age is highly dependent on race and class in the performance of authenticity. What Lil Tay’s

momentary flirtation with internet fame conveys, though, is a growing trend among internet stars

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who are migrating from the perfectly constructed nature of the confident girl influencer seen in

commercialized examples like JoJo Siwa. While these girls produce content that appears

different from traditional influencer media, their work actually reveals similarities in branding

and promotion. As the following sections explore, professionalized girlhood in the digital gig

economy adapts to the ephemeral landscape of internet culture, revealing how the girl attempts to

obscure her labor for aesthetic purposes, and therefore, become more susceptible to the

exploitation of her resources, energy, and time.

Memes and Online Media as Branding

Under the consolidation of personal and professional life in the gig economy, girls’ digital

culture has helped reimagine the aesthetic parameters and editorial content of influencer media

by challenging the idyllic picture of the influencer. As the lines between private and public blur,

the professionalization of girlhood online emphasizes the importance of imperfection and

transparency, rather than propriety and restraint, in how the girl sells her labor.

Professionalism, in the traditional sense, can begin to feel suspiciously covert under the

surveillance culture of digital spaces. Even as some girl influencers attempt to redefine the

professional attributes of confidence, positivity, and aspiration in terms that feel more natural to

their followers, their labor still relies on similar skills, tools, and strategies to maintain their

audience and brand. In order to appear as if their digital media production required no planning

or exertion, these alternative girl influencers apply concerted efforts in constructing and

managing the appearance of authenticity. Often, this work still privileges hegemonic

performances of gender, race, and class. In doing so, the professionalization of girlhood online

becomes an invisible venture that masks its ruling class undertones. What this looks like for girl

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influencers manifests in different ways where the self-brand appears to maintain distance from

consumer culture while refusing to reject the attention and value it provides them.

One of the primary modes of professional branding girls have utilized in the digital age is

the creation and proliferation of internet memes and viral content. According to Limor Shifman,

an internet meme is “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content,

form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated,

imitated, and/or transformed via the internet by many users” (7-8). Memetic content, with its

ability to thrive in an economy of attention, sharing, and participation, can easily develop a

brand’s presence and reputation online—good or bad—and encourage audience engagement and

feelings of attachment. It can also relate to audiences in ways that acknowledge the constructed

nature of certain social and cultural rituals and institutions. For girls, memes as professional

branding material tap into relatable approaches to gender performance and invite a variety of

interpretations of mainstream gender norms. For instance, the circulation of the Hot Girl Summer

meme in 2019, based on the song of the same name by rapper Megan Thee Stallion, led to a

wave of posts that included selfies of girls partying on the beach drinking hard seltzer, ironic

photos depicting the challenges of fitting into hot girl standards, and corporate content from

companies like Wendy’s and Forever 21 capitalizing on the meme’s popularity. The flexibility of

the meme format thus permits more opportunities for self-brands to play within and even benefit

from commercial culture without directly creating business contracts with corporations.

While memes provide ways for girls to develop self-brands and build an audience, they

also contribute to the professional restructuring of everyday life, where the smallest moments in

a day can be manipulated and generated into social and economic clout for one’s business.

However, memes also reveal how professionalized girlhoods adopt the language of marketing

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and consumerism and translate it through a process that strives for transparency. In other words,

memes provide structure to the girl’s brand as well as flexibility in steering it away from the

inauthenticity of consumerism often associated with influencer media.

Memes are significant to girls for how they offer a sense of social belonging in ways that

commercial culture may not always provide. The organization of relatable or remarkable

experiences into shareable bytes of information is the cornerstone for most branding strategies,

and memes can deliver both professional and personal advantages to girls in their online

presentation. For example, in her study of “girl pain” memes on YouTube, Amy Shields Dobson

reveals that girls perform anxiety, depression, harassment, and self-harm in the creation of web

videos where they silently hold up title cards that narrate their traumas. By sharing their pain

online, girls are able to foster comfort, understanding, and sociality with each other while

drawing attention to universal problems that affect girls around the world. Memes also provide

opportunities for expressing disillusionment or dissatisfaction with the status quo, especially

when the concerns of marginalized and oppressed identities are not represented in mainstream

society. Marcella Szablewicz’s observations of disaffected youth in China and the expression of

self-deprecation through the meme diaosi convey how young people structure their feelings

around humor and develop alternative pathways for social and economic mobility through digital

networks. As these memes nurture community ties amongst their creators and audiences, they

adhere to similar brand culture logics found in influencer media that “facilitate ‘relationships’

between consumers and branders and encourage an affective connection based on authenticity

and sincerity” (Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM 37). While the intention behind creating meme content

may not be to develop a brand or generate profit, the strategies for distribution and the fostering

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of a captive audience strongly reflect how brands cultivate interest between consumers and the

product or service being advertised.

As the commercial industries gradually integrate memes in strategies of profit-making,

girls on social media have taken advantage of the social and economic capital that can come

from engaging meme trends.13 According to Lifman, because memetic photos and videos display

a highly performative self, “uploaders become both the meme’s medium and its message: their

faces and/or bodies are integral parts of it. Thus, such memes are emblems of a culture saturated

with personal branding and strategic self-commodification” (30). Girls’ reliance on memes works

to affiliate their brand with a larger, more recognizable cultural phenomenon. This can be seen on

the lip-synch app TikTok where teen girls have created a subculture of bloggers called “egirls”

that exhibit self-aware humor and performative femininity. The egirl is defined by a specific look

(thick black winged eyeliner, cute hearts drawn under the eyes, and an anime style of dress) and

is sometimes used ironically by users who find that exercising the egirl hashtag can

13 Recognition of this process permeates the social media accounts of businesses that leverage meme content to

illustrate how their brands are cognizant of internet youth culture. While communications researcher Whitney

Phillips relays that the early days of participatory meme culture evaded marketers, likely because of its

indecipherable and constantly changing nature, the organization of sites like Know Your Meme increased access and

visibility, further encouraging the commodification of memes into brands (139).

generate thousands of followers and views (Strapagiel). For example, in the video trend “egirl

factory,” TikTok users record themselves being “taken” and turned into an egirl automaton

dancing to a bass-boosted Japanese club song (Figure 10). Despite being framed as “internet

flirts,” egirls illustrate how young girls online utilize memes to develop a brand around the ironic

use of heteronormative femininity. As TikTok egirl Ashley Eldridge proclaims in one of her

videos, “Ok, riddle me this, why is it that men get so mad over girls being egirls. Listen,

Jonathan, you’re going to sexualize me anyway, so why can’t I do it for a quick buck on the

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internet?” Acknowledging the perceptions their audiences have of them, girl influencers who

create memes demonstrate a level of self-reflexivity that allows their brands to survive in a

culture increasingly aware of the processes of commodification.

The distinction between memes and virals is important to make as each indicates different

ways girls incorporate popular content into their self-brands. Lifman determines that a viral

“comprises a singular unit (such as a video, photo, or joke) that propagates in many copies”

whereas an internet meme “is always a collection of texts” (56). For example, egirl factory is a

meme because it consists of video compilations parodying the egirl aesthetic. To describe

Figure 10: A YouTube Compilation Video of Egirl Factory Memes

something as “going viral” often means that the video, photo, or joke in question acquired

thousands of views online in a short span of time and has led to other users making multiple

versions or parodies of the original copy. A viral would be something like Rebecca Black’s

“Friday” music video from 2011 that quickly gained notoriety for being a terrible song, and in

turn, generated GIFs and remixes riffing off the video.

However, some digital scholars, like Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green,

advocate against the use of viral for the way it “[o]ver-estimates the power of media companies

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and underestimates the agency of audiences” (21). Viral, they claim, connotes contagion and

assigns too much authority in the way media can influence identities and perspectives. Instead,

they offer “spreadable media” as a way to privilege the existence of choice and actions in how

online content garners value. This is significant when looking at girls on the internet who find

success through sponsored posts and commodified memes. The spreadability of their image may

not always cohere to the personal brand they have established on their social media accounts as

audiences reinterpret it through different contexts and manipulate it to fit their own situation. For

girls, this can mean losing control over an image to capitalist interests that draw on the sexist,

racist, and classist discourses that permeate the digital stratosphere. How to recast this attention

back to the personal brand becomes a professional, and familiar, challenge for girls accustomed

to navigating a culture that frequently infantilizes and dismisses their perspectives.

The process of rerouting the girl’s media narrative online was a prominent part of the

spreadability of microcelebrity teen Danielle Bregoli, also known by her rapper stage name Bhad

Bhabie. In September 2016, an episode of the daytime talk show Dr. Phil (2002-present) featured

then 13-year-old Bregoli and her mother Barbara Ann. The episode segment, titled “I Want To

Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried To

Frame Me For A Crime,” attempted to reconcile the Florida-native mother and daughter

relationship until Bregoli, provoked by audience laughter, challenged the studio to a fight outside

by saying, “Catch me outside, how about that?” However, Bregoli’s accent, a manipulation of

African American Vernacular English, made the phrase sound like “Cash me ousside howbow

dah.” The incomprehensibility of the teen’s words inspired a stream of memes parodying the

episode segment, and Bregoli quickly became known as the “Cash Me Ousside Girl” (Figure 11).

The spreadability of the meme not only remained in meme groups on Facebook and Reddit

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threads. Eventually, in February 2017, the Dr. Phil segment scored a song remix by DJ Suede the

Remix God and debuted on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs at #34 and the Billboard Hot 100 at #88

(Zellner). Around this time, Bregoli reappeared on Dr. Phil to talk about her experience on a

Utah ranch for “troubled teens.” Accompanied by a psychologist and her mother, Bregoli

presented a softer yet self-assured disposition. When Dr. Phil asked Bregoli if she thought the

attention and bullying she received online was good or bad, the teen responded, “Both. I guess

what’s good for you is I made you like how Oprah made you. You were nothing before I came on

this show.”

Figure 11: “Cash Me Ousside/Howbow Dah” Meme from KnowYourMeme.com

Bregoli’s reluctance to give Dr. Phil credit for providing the platform for her success,

both as an internet star and as a reformed juvenile delinquent, was primarily interpreted by the

public as a girl being disrespectful to her elders. However, Bregoli’s defiance transformed into a

pivotal branding moment that capitalized on the predatory nature of the self-help industry,

positioning Bregoli as the evasive bad girl who is required to exist in order for Dr. Phil to

function. By returning to Dr. Phil and showing she can play the game without sacrificing her

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authentic self, Bregoli’s star image demonstrated the strength and potential of her brand to exist

beyond her meme origins.

Indeed, a month after the episode aired Bregoli continued to develop her celebrity by

participating in a viral marketing ploy for rapper Mook Boy’s new song “Juvy” featuring the teen

star. As part of the campaign, Bregoli’s Instagram and Twitter accounts appeared hacked by a

group called FACE Security that issued cryptic videos with an ominous message: “This is the

modern day celebrity? This country glorifies and makes famous a young girl for being

disrespectful to her mother. She is no idol. She is no role model. She is no god. Pay close

attention to what happens next” (Baila) Utilizing Cyrillic script and distorted red graphics, the

campaign worked to align Bregoli’s “interference” with American ideals of girlhood and

celebrity with the very timely nationwide concerns of Russian inference in the 2016 U.S.

election. A girl’s success, the videos posed, should not be determined by her surly temperament.

The eventual release of the music video dispelled rumors that Bregoli’s accounts were

truly hacked. In the video, Bregoli lip-syncs along as parodied images of Donald Trump,

Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Harambe (the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla killed and later turned

into a meme) cut in and out of the digitally glitching space (Figure 12). The teen is dressed

simply in jeans and a Brooklyn NYC T-shirt, her long raspberry red ponytail and claw-like

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Figure 12: Danielle Bregoli in Mook Boy’s “Juvy” Music Video

manicure giving her look enough edge without being provocative. Lining her teeth is a platinum

grill that further incorporates Bregoli into the rap aesthetic of Mook Boy’s song. Relying on the

theme of political memes, the music video attempts to subvert the alleged danger Bregoli poses

to society by putting her in the same space as government leaders who pose real threats to the

global order. Despite public fears that the “Cash me ousside” meme might have a bad influence

on young people who engage it, Bregoli asserts that her image is mostly harmless in the grand

scheme of things, and thus, approachable in the mainstream.

By leaning into audience outrage of the “Cash me ousside” meme, Bregoli managed to

create a self-referential celebrity identity that was both transparent in its construction and

wellcomposed in its commercial consumerism. While Bregoli might not fit the traditional model

of what an influencer looks and acts like, the ability to translate her audience’s affective

attachment to a meme into a profitable brand illustrates how girls’ digital culture supports as well

as challenges professional ideals. Following the release of “Juvy,” Bregoli’s management team

worked to integrate the branding success of the “Cash me ousside” meme into the teen’s budding

rap career. In May 2017, lawyers representing Bregoli sued Walmart and demanded that the

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retailer stop selling T-shirts and sweatshirts that displayed her famous phrase (Peterson).

Although Bregoli’s way of speaking and dressing directly coopted urban African American

culture, the popularity of the teen’s catch phrase as a brandable, and therefore, commodifiable

meme allowed her to enjoy the rebellious benefits of racial difference in a white-privileged

society. Bregoli was able to use the spreadability of her meme to reimagine the cultural

boundaries of the influencer identity all the while managing the threat of difference in the

professionalism her whiteness could afford.

The professionalization of Bregoli further demonstrated the importance of managing race

and class in creating a self-brand based off her meme. Performing under the stage name “Bhad

Bhabie,” Bregoli continued to use AAVE as well as reference the backlash her meme generated

amongst critics in the launch of her first two music videos in August and September 2017 on

YouTube. In her first music video, “These Heaux,” Bregoli’s “haters” are personified through

angry mobs of middle-aged women holding signs that read “We Will Not Catch You Outside”

and “Mothers Opposed to Bhad Bhabie.” Bregoli’s second music video, “Hi Bich/Whachu

Know,” represents her critics as members in a judgmental, out-of-control court room who have

put Bregoli on trial. In the back rows are supporters who hold signs that say, “We Luv You Bhad

Bhabie!!!” and “You Grown as Hell but You Still Hatin,” referencing the self-righteous adults

trying to save, persecute, and capitalize off of Bregoli’s popularity. By the end of the video,

Bregoli is electrocuted in an orange jumpsuit that transforms into a white lace shroud that gives

the teen a holy appearance. “Grown as hell and you still hating / I look at you and thank God I

made it,” she raps. As Bregoli’s song points out the irony of her (mostly) adult haters resorting to

immature and tactless behavior in criticizing her infamous trajectory to fame, it also commands

respect for how Bregoli turned a meme into a career. However, the music video also indirectly

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shows how Bregoli’s whiteness allows her to reinforce this respect in her branding. The

repetition of “White J’s, white Porsche / White wrist, white horse” in “Hi Bich,” layered onto the

image of Bregoli in a white shroud, at first attends to the irony of purifying or saving the

troubled teen who found success by being troublesome. Yet what this pattern also accomplishes

is the reinstitution of whiteness, specifically the whiteness of girlhood, as an incorruptible and

highly revered state of being.

Because of her status as a young white female teen rapper, Bregoli has been afforded

more opportunities to challenge the commodification of her memetic image while maintaining

the rewards of her newly minted celebrity position. In another music video, this time for her

single “Bestie” featuring Kodak Black, Bregoli is seen grumbling about being “forced” to stop

the song to do a mandatory product placement. In February 2019, the release of her Snapchat

reality series (aptly titled Bringing Up Bhabie) also showcased Bregoli challenging the

production structure of the docu-series. During “previously on” montages of each five-minute

episode, Bregoli interjects and complains to someone off-camera that viewers do not need to see

a recap for something they just watched. The demonstration of Bregoli’s awareness creates a

more intimate picture of the girl’s personal and professional life as her managers seamlessly

integrate her celebrity into the social matrices of Snapchat and YouTube. Her whiteness has

given her a more accessible presence, a way for audiences to indulge in her performative

misbehavior with reassurance that she is not really in trouble and is actually in on the

construction.

As memes have opened up ways for girls and their guardians to play with and be more

reflexive with their image, practicing self-awareness in the commodification of the brand allows

girls to negotiate the expectations of a professionally personal life and encourages the expression

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of frustration, anxiety, and insecurity. At the same time, the breakdown of more formalized

digital media content obscures the work girls actually do without removing the white capitalist

framework in which they operate. Girls’ professionalization in digital spaces appears to offer a

progressive escape from overburdened and high stakes workloads even as it recreates pressures

and limitations to succeed.

Towards a Slacker Aesthetic

The increasingly personal nature of professional life in the digital realm has provided

outlets for girls to establish a work-oriented identity around their daily online activity. Where

memes were once simply the province of 4chan, Reddit message boards, and private blogs, they

have now been translated into a language marketers and entrepreneurs can use to reach a

specialized audience that claims to value transparency and authenticity in social and even

business interactions. This reimagining of public presentation, ushered in by the flexibility of the

digital gig economy, has noticeably appeared in the visual aesthetics and communication patterns

of girls’ social media content. In April 2019, The Atlantic observed how some teen girl

influencers have begun to reject curated feeds and staged Instagram pop-up experience

photoshoots (Lorenz “The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over”). These girls now veer towards posting

unfiltered or unflattering pictures of themselves that might include paragraphs of text detailing

their struggles with burnout and the stress of maintaining an ideal self. In the same month, writer

Rosie Spinks of Quartzy noted that this oversaturation of preened influencer content had peaked.

Spinks predicted a swing in the opposite direction, where the slacker sensibility of the early

1990s could return as the self-optimization of neoliberalism begins to show little returns for

members of Generation Z, who will eventually be saddled with student loan debt and few career

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prospects. This move towards a slacker aesthetic, especially located in girls’ entrepreneurial

digital work, is interesting for a number of reasons. While these discourses highlight how girls

may be trying to escape the social pressures of performing an ideal and empowered feminine

self, they also convey how the marketplace is adjusting to understand and commodify this

authentic-leaning aesthetic.

While journalists have only recently noticed this trend of girls migrating away from the

picturesque performance of the Instagram look, feminist scholars have determined that similar

rejections of work and achievement have been happening in other girl cultural spaces as well.

According to Michele Paule, popular discourses of girls in educational environments have

advanced the “girls hang back narrative” where girls disengage from the pressures social and

educational institutions place on them to achieve. Presented with multiple ways to pursue their

professional careers, girls supposedly feel paralyzed with fear of making poor decisions,

especially when it seems girls are expected to succeed now that women have more freedoms and

resources to make the path to self-fulfilling achievement easier. This reluctance to choose

specific aspirational endeavors, Paule argues, is rooted in issues of class and cultural capital,

where the reinforcement of middle-class values and masculinized models of competition in

schooling can present a feeling of unbelonging or unpreparedness for girls who do not identify

with certain class practices and systems of knowledge (136).

Yet even as these girls attempt to extricate themselves from the rhetorics of achievement

and confidence, their “hanging back” does not necessarily signal an outright rejection of work or

upward mobility. As Kathi Weeks posits, “the refusal of work, as both activism and analysis,

does not simply pose itself against the present organization of work; it should also be understood

as a creative practice, one that seeks to reappropriate and reconfigure existing forms of

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production and reproduction” (99). In this way, the girls hang back narrative, as it applies to the

hybrid personal/professional space of digital contexts, should be conceptualized as another mode

of creative and even entrepreneurial expression. Akane Kanai furthers this claim in looking at

how girls’ expression of boredom in work suggests a “hyper-awareness in relation to rules of

productivity” rather than a rejection of work (49). The present model of working forty or more

hours a week may no longer be conducive to young people’s lives, which are increasingly

organized across social networks, mobile apps, and other digital technologies. Refusing the

capitalist system of waged labor, where productive output is valued over human life, means

finding a way of working that is favorable to the structure of private existence. However, as

privacy has become more and more organized around public spaces, girls’ digital media

production continues to operate under capitalist jurisdiction.

The girls hang back narrative has appeared in twenty-first century popular culture as the

female slacker, a figure who negotiates the limitations that come with living under a neoliberal,

postfeminist regime that promises opportunity for young female professionals. The female

slacker, however, is not just a withdrawal from traditional structures of work. Rather, she is the

embrace of an alternative focus of work in women’s lives, a focus that seeks to shed the polished

exterior of professionalization and privilege the chaotic interior with all its frustrations and

anxieties. The term slacker in girls’ digital media seems to call back to a masculinized popular

culture that has championed anti-establishment burnouts from 1980s and 90s films like Ferris

Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Slacker (1990), Clerks (1994), and Reality Bites (1994). In a

twentyfirst century context, fictional women on television, such as Liz Lemon in NBC’s 30 Rock

(2006-2013) and Hannah Horvath in HBO’s Girls (2012-2017), reclaimed slacker to illustrate the

exhaustion and dejection of young women who strive to “have it all”—a career, relationship,

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family, and beauty—only to face personal, social, and economic barriers preventing them from

achieving middle-class dreams (Hoby).

As members of Generation Z have come of age, “slacker YouTube” and “VSCO girls”

have normalized the girl slacker through recognizable styles and modes of address on social

media. For instance, the VSCO girl (named after the photo editing and sharing app) is known for

her minimal makeup and effortless vibe dressed in oversized T-shirts, Birkenstocks and Crocs,

and large scrunchies to hold up her messy beach waves. Most notably, the girl slacker tends to be

white, thin, and traditionally feminine with enough economic and social privilege to spend time,

money, and energy posting and managing her online accounts (despite the insistence that her

work is spontaneous and requires little planning). While the slacker, in all its various gendered

iterations, is representative of a collective frustration with traditional structures of work and

productivity (not to mention despair with an economy that offers restricted opportunities to

succeed), it is also a racialized and classed performance privy to the visual politics of

commercialization and branding.

Even in her supposed refusal to engage in any sort of management or commercialization,

the girl slacker’s aesthetic is still calculated and cognizant of the social currency relatability has

in the current digital economy. By aesthetic, I refer to what Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, and

Christina Scharff define as not only “appearance” but also “voice, posture, demeanor, body,

language, self-presentation on social media, and so on” that make up the visual and performative

presentation of the self or object on display (35). The appearance of the slacker aesthetic in girls’

social media performances evokes the reluctance and anxieties of the girls hang back narrative.

The maintenance of such an aesthetic relies on neoliberal practices of labor that typically draw

on the self-surveillance and feminine upkeep of the beauty-industrial complex. The slacker

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