Popular feminism and teen girl fashion blogs

In this paper, I explore the popular feminism that is expressed through teen girl fashion blogs. Popular feminism is a nascent movement which displaces postfeminism as the dominant discourse of feminism in popular culture and, while it is a varied movement, I view one important tenet of popular feminism as the connection wrought between creative media production, precocious girlhood and feminism. Drawing on a sample of fifteen teen fashion blogs, I identify the defining themes of this genre before exploring the integration of popular feminism into the performance of the girl blogger identity. I see popular feminism as being incidentally inserted into the performance of girlhood and, notwithstanding the sincerity of the feminism performed by these bloggers, I ultimately raise concerns about the exclusive investment of popular feminism within a media and corporate-defined performance of idealized girlhood which is currently fetishized as novel but understood as a transient condition of the female subject.