Child beauty pageants in popular culture depict the competing discourses of girlhood and motherhood that arise in the post-feminist context. These pageants portray hyperbolic femininity as a meritocratic practice of gendered discipline and consumption that yields material rewards, conflating girl power with subscription to the current social fetishisation of girl power. Moreover, this representation of girlhood highlights the irrelevance of older generations, in a way that speaks to the post-feminist-and third wave-repudiation of second wave feminism. Specifically, I analyse the TLC reality television show Toddlers and Tiaras as a text that represents the motherdaughter dyad so as to make mothers obsolete and a hindrance to the potential of their dynamic and empowered daughters. This allows post-feminist girlhood to triumph as the most relevant and desirable model for young women, while scapegoating monstrous moms for the problematic, exploitative aspects of the show. When such mother-daughter relations are highlighted, diametrically opposed and negatively portrayed, they recall the symbolic logic of contemporary feminist movements and their rejection of the experiences and knowledge of older generations of feminists. I argue that destroying the rich historical legacy of feminism further distances postfeminist subjects from the potential of future political coalitions.
