1. Introduction: Girlhood on
TV
As media and audience scholars, we are well aware that
representations matter, and that representations are constantly
proliferating, growing both in terms of quantity and quality, within the
media system, giving space to a never-ending process of constructing,
dismantling, or reinventing the definition of girlhood.
Girlhood representations are currently shaped by both traditional
media and social media storytelling and narratives, and they are
immediately incorporated into girls’ minds through media consumption.
This process of “double articulation” (Hall 1996) arises in both the
media discourses that explicitly “interpellate” (in Althusser’s sense)
those female audiences and in their own social discourses that negotiate
the multiple meanings of being a young woman nowadays.
In the last twenty years, television has gradually gained visibility
(even within academic discourses) and has earned a different social
status thanks to a high level of textual production, often defined as
‘quality TV’ due to its innovative content, high production values,
casts increasingly borrowed from the world of cinema, and substantial
endorsement by critics.
This quality popular television (Jancovich & Lyons 2003) depends
on the presence of fandom phenomena (Jenkins 2006; Hills 2002, Scaglioni
2006) that legitimate the status of must-see TV, and more recently
must-click tv (Gillan 2010). Scholars also refer to cult television,
namely, those serial productions characterized by an active and
participatory fandom and audience, which is engaged in creative
practices and production around the media text (Gwenllian-Jones &
Pearson 2004; Andò, Marinelli 2016).
The quality television series, therefore, has had the effect of
reinforcing the idea of television as a cultural form and as a producer
of the imaginary (Andò, Antonioni 2024), even in the case of the
youngest generations who have had experienced what we may call a sort of
“divorce” from the traditional TV screen (and broadcast television
model) in favor of social media, but who are currently strongly
attracted by the cult TV content introduced by the over the top
television services (such as Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.) (Lotz 2014;
Lobato 2019.
Moving back to the focus of this paper on teen female audiences, we
have to consider that in such a frame everyday TV platforms provide
adolescents with a huge library of targeted content that may be explored
according to an “anywhere and anytime” model of consumption which
perfectly suits adolescents’ habits and expectations. Moreover, these
platforms become highly recognizable brands that provide adolescents
with “certified” content aligned with their tastes and expectations.
Particularly focusing on teen television, thanks to this huge production
of TV content dedicated to them, female teenagers may select and combine
different kinds of representations of female role models, creating a
sort of bricolage of personalities that is strongly consistent with the
idea of an identity under construction: tentative, contradictory, but
open, productive and definitely experimental.
In a sense we may say that the contemporary complexity of television
content and protagonists (Mittell 2015) goes hand in hand with the
complexity of female adolescent identity – that is even more under the
microscope compared to the past – and the (TV) screen acts as a
reflective surface of both teens’ own image and those of current society
depicted by TV-makers.
The aim of this paper – and of the research behind it – is to analyse
how TV content provides girls with identity tools and symbolic
materials, and how much the girls are aware of the constant process of
identity negotiation that happens through and thanks to media
content.
2. It’s
been a long journey. Becoming girls, becoming women
Actually contemporary TV shows question many crucial issues with
respect to girlhood studies: at a general level they stress the
representation of female adolescence within media culture and the
multiple possibilities of appropriation open to young people as their
personalities evolve; they also emphasize girl friendship as a
post-feminist idea of sisterhood (Winch 2013) and offer a redefinition
of the mother-daughter relationship as an opportunity to build girls’
identities in continuity with, instead of separating from, other women
(Irigaray 1985, 1991; Muraro 2018).
In many recent TV series based on female characters, the fil
rouge is the idea of becoming. As Renold and Ringrose stated, it is
now more correct to refer “the concept of ‘becoming’ to foreground the
transitional space of young femininity as always in-movement, where
transitions are experienced as multiple, liminal and reversible, rather
than one progressive state to another” (2011, p. 392). This is true not
only in the case of adolescents: this sense of becoming seems to be a
constant feeling in women’s lives, because of their precarious balance
and the belated (and incomplete) recognition of their social role in
contemporary society.
However, in order to understand this complex, variable and ongoing
girls’ work, we need to briefly analyze the media scenario where this
process of becoming takes place using a longitudinal lens.
As a matter of fact the girls we are talking about constantly
struggle to balance the girl-power that TV representation has circulated
since the Nineties, the post-feminist claim of independence and “do it
yourself identity”, and the corresponding growing neoliberal
individualism that is based on a progressive obsolescence of feminism as
something that is taken for granted in the everyday life of the youngest
generations (McRobbie 2009).
On the one hand, when we talk about girl power in relation to
contemporary adolescents and young women, it is worth noting that our
interviewees are part of that generation which has grown up with
cartoons that were the first to feature new girl heroines as
protagonists of children’s TV, i.e. The Powerpuff Girls
(1998-2005), Kim Possible (2002-2007), My Life as a Teenage
Robot (2003-2007) etc. As documented by Sarah Banet-Weiser in her
analysis of Nickelodeon, the story of this TV network reveals its role
as producer of girl power in more than one sense: first of all
Nickelodeon implies girls as active audiences who are able to position
themselves in a variety of relationships with the ideological structures
and messages of the media. Secondly it empowers girls as a consumer
group, not totally free from the commercial power of the media but in
active relation with it. Finally it promotes girl power also in terms of
investment in women as cultural producers: girls then not only consume
content but produce content for themselves. In the experience of
Nickelodeon the conceptual association between girl and power “become[s]
normalized within the discourses of consumer culture. In the
contemporary cultural climate, in other words, the empowerment of girls
is now something that is more or less taken for granted by both children
and parents, and has certainly been incorporated into commodity culture”
(Banet Weiser 2004, pp. 119-120).
On the other hand, the idea of girlhood agency with respect to the
process of identity-building seems coherent with the idea of
post-feminist independence, while at the same time it seems not to be
perceived in cultural continuity with the second wave of feminism.
Analyzing social discourses produced by adolescents, their consciousness
about female independence and self-confidence, in particular with
respect to sexual relationships, are not necessarily (or explicitly)
read as the historical consequences of past generations’ agency in terms
of collective political movements. What we see in media content and we
hear from girls’ discourses is a feminism taken for granted that
provides the youngest generation with the freedom to experience
contradictions, to make mistakes as a part of their life trajectory, and
finally to evolve. That process allows the girl audiences to experience
everything at the same time, strength and fragility, power and
dependence, moral and immoral behaviours within girlhood
representations, while appearing aware and conscious of themselves and
of their position within society.
Not surprisingly, within contemporary TV shows contradictory
characters often coexist; moreover, the same character may experience
the coexistence of contradictory personalities within a plot that is
diluted over many seasons (that mirrors the long path of the adolescent
evolution too).
As we will address in the last part of this essay, for our
interviewees girl power consists of the ability to deal with the
challenges of everyday life, without depending on a stereotypical
representation that depicts girls as good or bad. The characters are not
one-dimensional and inflexible: rather they are genuine and convincing
because of their ambivalence.
To overcome this contradiction, we have to consider that “these
elements of empowerment—as a consumer group, as media visibility, and as
cultural producers—are all part of girl power. The dynamics between
these variations within the theme of empowerment are complicated, and
represent significant tensions and even ambivalence within feminisms”
(Banet-Weiser 2018, 126).
In other words, a self-centered attitude can be seen as a product of
neoliberal capitalists’ reinforcement of individualism; but it can also
be read “as a feminist quality, a female expression of beauty for her
own pleasure not the male’s” (Bae 2011, p. 37).
The idea, then, that femininity has to play between the polarities of
submissiveness and independence leads us to reflect on “feminism’s
renewed mattering to popular culture” (Keller & Ryan 2018, 1). And
it puts into question the way girls are addressing this dichotomy in
their everyday life, while negotiating their adolescence through
sisterhood, mother-daughter relationship etc.
3. Methodology and Research
Questions
The results that we are going to discuss in this essay are part of a
wider research project, A Girls’ Eye View, funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council (UK) from 2021 to 2024.
In part the project aimed to enquire into the relationship between
girls’ representations within Italian teen media (mostly cinema and
television) and the young audience’s negotiation of female images and
discourses that coalesce in building their identity in everyday
life.
More specifically the research questions were:
– Q1. Investigating how girls in Italy build their identities: what
are the models they are inspired by, what are the narratives of girlhood
they bond with;
– Q2. Understanding the degree of correspondence between girlhood
media representation and the actual experiences of girls in Italy, if
the girlhood portrayed in films and TV series is somehow reflective of
the actual experience of girlhood, if there are any discrepancies or
points of suture;
– Q3. Which models of femininity are Italian girls most inspired by,
nowadays, what are the emotions that stand out in the experiences of
girlhood narrated in the media.
The project, that lasted three years, was divided in three distinct
phases that employ different methodologies (Andò, Hipkins 2022):
– The first phase consisted of a series of individual qualitative
interviews with girls between 14 and 19 years old, coopted in the
research with the help of different schools across the country. After
the individual interviews, that over time involved 81 girls from ten
different schools, the girls were interviewed
collectively through focus groups where they were invited to engage in a
discussion concerning scenes from different Italian films and TV series
we screened.
– For the second phase, we wanted to engage the girls in a more
active and creative way, asking them to work in groups for the
production of a video essay responding to a film or TV show based on
female adolescent characters (Andò, Hipkins 2025).
The third and final part was intended to emphasize the active
participation of the girls, enabling them to become qualitative
researchers themselves. In order for the project to acquire a historical
dimension, it was important to investigate how different generations of
women thought about their adolescence, so we elaborated a questionnaire
the girls could use as the base for an oral history interview with their
mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, aunts, female teachers, that could
constitute a moment of bonding, a chance for girls to experiment with
qualitative research and interviewing, and a further means for us to
collect sources of oral history. Along with it, we asked the girls to
encourage their interviewees to talk about a significant object of their
adolescence, and to photograph it in order to build a digital archive on
girlhood culture in Italy.
The interviews we conducted, and the interviews the girls conducted
with their interviewees, aimed at investigating two different aspect of
being a girl in the contemporary mediascape. On the one side, we wanted
to investigate media consumption in the broadest sense: their
relationship with mass media and social media and the impact on
teenagers’ lives (Drusian, Magaudda, Scarcelli 2019), everyday life
routines and habits, media representations of girlhood (Hipkins 2016;
Antonioni & Checcaglini 2025), and a comparison between cinema and
TV content produced in Italy and abroad. Over the last few years, many
streaming platforms and company productions in Italy have created
content specifically targeted for teenagers, that narrate adolescence in
its multiple forms and in many different social contexts: these products
address topics typical of contemporary adolescence such as slut shaming
and catcalling, body issues and eating disorders, conflict with parents
and adults, digital intimacy, gender identity, sexual orientation, and
sexuality in general. Some of these products have met with great
enthusiasm among Italian teenagers: this is especially the case for
Skam Italia (2018-present), the Italian version of the well
renowned Norwegian webseries, and Mare fuori (2020-present), a
TV series produced by Rai focused on the life of teenagers and young
adults into the Nisida youth detention centre.
On the other side, it was important to collect data on girls’
definition of adolescence, gender, mother-daughter relationships,
sisterhood, and their body image.
For the purpose of this essay we decided to focus on i) the
definition of adolescence, as both an abstract imagined concept and a
real-life ongoing experience; ii) the body changing in terms of
physicality, and the development of female features that in adolescence
enter the regime of heterosexual desire; iii) the relationship with
their mothers.
4. Defining
adolescence through gender and body
In common sense, adolescence has always been defined as a moment of
transition, of becoming, very often connected with the experience of
conflict.
The first shared definition of adolescence that emerges from the
interviews is the idea of a playground, a space and time where teens are
continuously testing their emerging identities.
“Adolescence for me is an age of change, one goes through different
situations in life that maybe, when you’re a child, you tend not to
consider. That’s the age that shapes you, that you need for
when you’ll be an adult. In my opinion, based on that, it’s very
important. Based on that, you become the person you’ll be” (A_17_18).
In this sense adolescence is mostly narrated, in a variety of
expressions, as a time of change and evolution. Some of them tend to
define adolescence in very generic (and quite conventional) ways: a
period of rule-breaking, of passage between childhood and adulthood, of
experimentation, incomprehension, confusion, of highs and lows; some
others get more complex, and almost poetic, in defining it as a time of
“throwing oneself in another world” (A_2_16), “an explosion of emotions”
(D_4_15), “a testing ground” (B_6_17) and also “a meteorological
phenomenon: one day it’s sunny, the next day there’s bad weather.”
(C_4_16).
It was especially interesting to discover that the interviewees
seemed to empathize a lot with films and tv series that depict
adolescence as a multilayered and everchanging experience. Many of them
mentioned Skam Italia as a narrative that encompasses their own
experience as teenagers, all the highs and lows, their daily lives: “I
liked Skam a lot, because every season represents, I mean,
tells a problem that is present in everyone’s adolescence. So, for
example, in the first one there’s the use of drugs, the second one was
about first love, the third one was about gay love, and the fourth one
about religion. And they are all very contemporary issues, that are
present in my life, in the lives of my girlfriends, of my sisters
(A_4_18); “Skam is like a diary, not written, but filmed”
(A_6_18); “Skam is a reality that belongs to all teenagers,
right? I mean, it shows friendships, schools, it’s like a recording of
my day, my days altogether, the parties” (F_5_16).
Many interviewees highlighted the exquisitely emotional quality of
adolescence, defining it as a time of first experiences: “first love,
first pain, friendships, clubs” (I_5_17), “new experiences and first
love” (A_20_18). The focus on love and emotionality, as well as the need
for freedom and the general lightness of Italian adolescence was brought
up by second generation migrant students too, especially in comparison
with the experience of adolescence in their homelands. In one case
(A_18_17), the recounting of adolescence is split between Italy and
Albania, and compared on the themes of love and freedom: in Albania,
teenagers do not necessarily emphasize such things, while in Italy they
are solid staples of adolescence. In another case, cultural differences
are underlined through clothing (a topic that will be addressed later):
“going out with the veil here [in Italy] it’s a bit difficult. […] The
stares, sideways glances, so, maybe it’s a bit annoying, while when I’m
in Morocco I wear long dresses, I’m relaxed, I wear pajamas for example,
I don’t have to worry about how I’m dressed there […] Yes, it’s how they
look at you perhaps. You can’t tell if it’s out of curiosity or they
look at you maybe with, let’s say, a mean face. So you never know what
people think” (A_13_21).
As we mentioned, adolescence is very often spoken of, represented and
experienced as a terrain of conflict. There is an extended literature
(mostly pedagogical and psychological) that deals with the themes of
adolescence and conflict with parents, and focuses on conflict
management and resolution, the issues adolescents and their parents
argue about, the intensity of conflict according to age, gender and
closeness with parents, family dynamics and affective economy (Deković
1999; Kim 2006; Branje et al. 2009). Moreover, the emergence of
conflicts during teenage years is one of the most preferred topics in
films and tv series as well, as demonstrated by films on girlhood such
as The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lady Bird (2007),
Come te nessuno mai (1999) Caterina va in città
(2003), Cosmonauta (2009), Genitori & figli – Agitare
bene prima dell’uso (2010), as well as in TV shows like
Skins (2007-2013), This Is Us (2016-2022),
Euphoria (2019-present), Sex Education (2019-present),
Padri & Figli (2005) L’amica geniale
(2018-present), Baby (2018-2020), and in general in coming of
age novels (Ferrante 2011; Ciabatti 2017; Caminito 2021; Campofreda
2023).
However, in the interviews, adolescence is not necessarily addressed
as a part of life characterized by conflict with parents, and conflict
with parents and adults is not necessarily explicitly addressed in the
films and TV series mentioned by the interviewees.
A few of the girls interviewed mentioned adolescence as a time of
conflict, but not in explicitly conflictual terms: “They can’t fully
understand” (G_13_18); “One feels a bit let’s say, not completely
understood, especially by family, so one starts to have maybe more
serious arguments” (A_4_18).
If anything, adolescence becomes a terrain of conflict in terms of
gender differences, as they are built and acted out not by the girls,
but by parents in their relationship with their kids: “I think females
have more fights with their parents, let’s say, I mean, they’re a bit
more controlled by parents… compared to boys who are a bit more stubborn
sometimes, but it also depends on the type of person so I don’t know”
(F_2_16). In this case, the source of conflict is located in gender
differences, something that has been discussed in different ways by a
lot of girls especially concerning the distribution of domestic labor
and differences in upbringing between girls and boys in the same
household.
Girls are well aware that the distribution of domestic work is
unbalanced between girls and boys, that boys are not taught to be
responsible for the household as much as girls are: “They often tell you
that you also need to, I don’t know, do the laundry.
But they don’t tell my [male] friend to do the laundry” (A_5_18);
“Maybe I don’t know, some mothers ask their daughters to clean the
dishes, to clear the table, but not because it’s about helping the
parents to manage at home, but because they’re female, and maybe if they
have a smaller or bigger brother they don’t make them do it because
they’re men” (F_7_16).
This consideration leads us to address the gender issue, from a
double perspective: firstly, we were interested in investigating how the
participants perceived themselves as girls in terms of social injustice
related to gender issues; secondly, we intended to understand their
perception of society from a gendered perspective. In this way we can
frame the impact of films and TV series in terms of representation of
diversity as well as to investigate how they impacted on the girls’
perspective of themselves as girls. The results have been very complex
to analyze, especially because the topic of gender, particularly in
adolescence, always intersects with the themes of body and more
specifically with beauty standards, as well as with peer pressure
generated by social media.
A significant proof of the cultural work done by TV series, films,
and social media in general, in terms of gender awareness and diversity,
is given by the consideration that girls strongly believe in gender
equality. Many of the interviewees follow feminist social media pages
that address women’s and gender issues in all sorts of fields, and tend
to share information on such topics with their girlfriends. Moreover,
gender issues such violence against girls and women, slut shaming, and
sexual harassment are increasingly represented in films and TV series in
Italy and abroad (Euphoria, Baby, L’amica
geniale), and girls are depicted as strong enough to face these
issues within the safety net of sisterhood. However, the topic of
feminism is addressed in more nuanced ways: “For me there’s absolutely
no difference between male or female. Some think that feminism is that
girls, that women in general are better than men but that’s not
feminism, that’s absolutely equality” (G_1_17); “For example the idea
that every girl has to be a feminist, let’s say. Or the idea that girls
must defend girls. […] I prefer to say that I’m a paritarist
[paritarista], equalist [egualitarista], because I don’t proceed from
the assumption that women can do everything that men do, I proceed from
the assumption that every individual can do one way or the other
everything that everybody else does independently of sex, age, skin
color or anything else. I don’t like to generalize and confine myself to
what is man or woman” (G_7_16); “I’m so honored to be a part of this
gender. Additionally, I’m a big feminist” (G_9_18). However, the
conviction regarding gender equality interferes with the reality of
gender issues: a lot of girls, in different ways, perceive differences
in how they are treated as females, especially the ones who have
brothers, close male relatives, or boyfriends.
In this sense, many of the interviewees’ responses concerning gender
differences resonate with Erving Goffman’s “The Arrangement Between The
Sexes” (1977), especially when it comes to the issues of domestic labour
and body sexualization in the public sphere, exemplified the numerous
episodes of catcalling and sexual harassment narrated. Following
Goffman, it seems that girlhood, in the experiences narrated by the
interviewees, is the quintessential age where girls learn the structure and rules of heterosexist
society, despite the general sensitivity on gender issues having been
enhanced by media narratives.
Moreover, a big difference emerges when it comes to sexualization of
the body, which is partially connected with girls’ representations in
the media and results in a sexualized adult male gaze. As R. Danielle
Egan has suggested, sexualization is not so much a problem per se as its
discursive effect on girls’ lives (2013). Many academics and researchers
“have argued that some early adolescent girls are likely to internalize
the notion that being sexually attractive is an important aspect of
their identity and, as a consequence, experience negative outcomes in a
number of domains (e.g. self-esteem, academic outcomes, peer relations)”
(McKenney & Bigler 2014, 172).
Almost the totality of the girls interviewed feel scared, insecure,
and anxious in the public sphere, describing multiple cases of
catcalling, which is exactly the opposite of the process of girls’
self-sexualization emphasized by media: “You don’t know what’s behind
that look, but also from men of any age. In fact it happened to me many
times on the subway that … maybe I was relaxed, I was minding my own
business, like normally and maybe it happens to me that a man in front
of me, also older than me, starts staring at me. Or I move on purpose
because I didn’t want to be stared at and immediately that man starts
looking for you maybe and let’s say that there’s always a bit of fear”;
“That I was going home back from the beach and a man started whistling
at me from his car but I pretended nothing happened (I_2_15). But it was
something that never happened to me before so I got a bit… scared”; “It
happened once that a man that must have been fifty years old, more or
less, in his car, I was with my girlfriends and he was taking pictures
of us saying ‘That’s a nice picture’” (D_8_15).
A premise on the Italian context here is needed, as many of the
gender issues that girls and women face today can be easily read within
the cultural framework of “velinism” (Hipkins 2011), particularly
related to Berlusconi’s business and media ventures in private
television and the exploitation of the sexual archetype of female
adolescence, where sexual objectification, catcalling and sexual
harassment were spectacularized and very often legitimized.
The tangible perception of these issues, and what it means to feel
constantly subjected to the male gaze brings the girls to narrate
themselves as more sensitive, but also more aware and responsible, than
boys. Moreover, the fear of being harassed in the public sphere causes a
more tense relationship with fashion and clothing. Fashion is an
essential aspect of one’s own adolescence: it helps experiment with
identity and in constructing one’s own personality (Marion & Nairn
2011, Lincoln 2013, Blanchard-Emmerson 2022), but the very idea of
receiving unsolicited and unsettling attention from men because of the
way a girl is dressed, often makes them tone down their fashion choices:
“I see many times, maybe I’m wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of trousers
and they honk at me. In my opinion it’s so wrong. […] I should be free
to wear what I want” (A_2_16); “Also on the street simply, it happens
that maybe they whistle and honk at you, anyway you feel bad, but you
say,
oh well that’s a habit, but it’s bad even thinking that if you’re
dressed in a certain way, you might expect something like this; so, also
bad to think it’s a habit that happens every day. I think something like
that would never happen to a man” (A_6_18). “You’re a bit more in danger
if you dress a bit more low-necked, with shorts or miniskirts, something
that apparently, as a girl, you would say that’s fine, there’s nothing
wrong. But it could be a reason for harassment from other people”
(F_15_16).
5.
Mother and daughter stuff. From separation to continuity
A crucial aspect that emerges from the research is the way the girls
interpreted the mother-daughter relationship. As mentioned before (see
the methodology) we asked the girls to reflect on both media
representation of the girlhood and on their own idea and experience of
growing up as a girl. Within this frame we asked them to answer about
adult female figures that count in their life, and as a matter of fact
most of the girls immediately mentioned their mother together with
friends. If the answer was not surprising per se, what really impressed
us were the words and discourse used by the girls to describe their
mothers.
Mothers are mostly depicted by the girls as someone who is always
present, “always beside me”, someone to confide in, someone to be
admired for her ability to manage a life in constant balance between
work and family. They are portrayed as strong, courageous women,
aspirational figures who have chosen resilience and versatility to
manage an increasingly complex life: “My mum is very strong, in my
opinion. And brave, let’s say, empathetic, kind, cheerful” (F_13_17);
“She can turn her hand to anything […] to say she’s a smart woman
because she has had some highs and lows as a person. But she’s always
been strong and never burdened me with her problems she’s always stayed
silent sometimes I would see her a bit off. But she didn’t, she’d
reassure me because obviously I think every mother would want this for
their child” (I_8_17).
Several considerations have emerged from these premises: first of all
the question of the absence of conflict and contraposition with parents
(see above), and specifically with the mothers; or in any case the
erasure of conflict within the hierarchy of feelings and thought that
define the mother-daughter relationship.
This almost total absence of a mother-daughter conflict in girls’
discourses could be read as the projection of new models of
mother-daughter relationship that already went through a series of media
representations since the ‘90s. This shift has involved the mothers (who
were daughters at that time) and successively the girls who are
daughters nowadays and it is still ongoing in the continuous exchange of
reciprocal references about the definition of the relationship itself.
In this rearticulation of the mother-daughter relationship, media
representations and especially television have probably played a crucial
role.
Within media representations the relationship between mother and
daughter was very often problematized and we can select three important
turning points that we consider could have had an effect in rewriting the relationship as an affective alliance as proposed by
the girls.
The first turning point was the rise of the “Responsible daughtering”
(Alford & Harrigan 2019) where mothers were represented as both
demanding a close relationship with her daughter and as sexually
awakened (Terms of Endearment [1983]; Mermaids
[1990]).
The second turning point was the shift introduced by Gilmore
Girls (2000-2016) in the 2000s. The show’s main characters are
thirty-two-year-old Lorelai Gilmore and her sixteen year-old daughter
Rory (Lorelai, as named after her mother). Over six seasons (and a
recent TV sequel) they are both engaged in navigating the world of
adulthood as an accomplished pair, who share thoughts, feelings,
emotions, fears, and expectations.
Finally the third turning point is the one introduced by Lady
Bird (2017), where we can observe a feminist recalibration within
which maternal love is depicted with a necessary brutality, and is far
from idealized. Sometimes it could even be perceived as passive
aggressive and abusive because of a lack of communication about
emotions. However, the mother fosters in her daughter the grit and
resolve required to exist in the world, a strength she vividly
inhabits.
Even if from a textual analysis of the media content mentioned by the
girls (see Baby, Skam Italia, Summertime
[2020-2022] or even Mare fuori) parents emerged as almost
entirely invisible or marginal, or even unstable and destabilizing, the emphasis of the girls on their
affective liaison with their mothers dramatically resonates with a model
that media have contributed to building.
To understand this model and the revolutionary elements it introduced
– not focusing here on the criticisms devoted to it, for example to the
lack of intersectionality in the social representations and other
elements of superficiality it is necessary to dwell on the fact that for
the first time in a continuous way (several episodes) the
mother-daughter relationship was staged as a constant and developing
dialogue, capable of absorbing the generational repercussions and the
confrontation between the second and third waves of feminism.
Until the 2000s, the mother-daughter relationship was defined by
society and reinforced within the media in terms of separation; media
representations have built absent mothers, incapable of feeling and
empathy (Mommie dearest [1981], Postcards from the
Edge [1990]), unhappy, unable to reconcile motherhood with their
own professional affirmation, very often frustrated and violent towards
their daughters (Family Life [1971], Anywhere but Here
[1999], A nuanced version of this model is the one of “unacceptable”
mothers, unhealthy mothers who were stigmatized due to their
embarrassing behaviors; who are definitely unable to adapt to social
norms and therefore rejected by patriarchal society (La prima cosa
bella [2010], L’immensità [2022]). Finally, the sexualized
independent mother who emerged from cult movies like Terms of
Endearment (1983) and Mermaids (1990).
For many decades, then, film, print and television representations
worked on mother/daughter separation and particularly on the daughter’s
need to separate from the mother in order to enter the world of
adulthood. Indeed, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn has argued, postfeminist
cinema often reinscribed a vision of “Girl World” as “daddy-identified,
a bittersweet recognition that outside it’s still a man’s world” (Rowe
Karlyn 2011, 98).
However, in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) Chodorow
argues that for girls (different than boys who differentiate a gender
identity that is not female) gender identity is built on unity and
continuity, not in separation. In other words, a girl’s identity is
formed not in opposition to her first object love (mother), but in
continuity with it.
In this sense among the three turning points we mentioned,
Gilmore Girls represents the most extraordinary opportunity to
explore this continuity as it emerged from the interviews. Both Lorelai
and Rory incarnate the ideals of post-feminist girl power culture:
Lorelai is the single mother who raised her daughter on her own,
refusing to be an authoritative figure and preferring a mother-daughter
relationship model focused on equality and honesty; Rory is the
ambitious “girlculture” daughter who is very much looking forward to
pursuing the education that suits her aspirations the most.
These representations seem to resonate in the interviewees’
discourses. As one of them states “My mom is always close to me, I tell
her everything. When I come from school, I tell her things that some
girls tend not to say to their parents because they’re ashamed, and I
tell her everything because she often gives me advice when there are
some discussions et cetera” (F_9_14).
Even if Gilmore Girls was rarely mentioned during the interviews, we
may suppose that thanks to OTT libraries and the sequel produced by
Netflix in 2016, this portrait of mother-daughter connectiveness and
mutuality is part of the collective imagery.
What we found here is a kind of new and active girl-culture that is
stressing the importance of talking through feelings and emotions.
During the interviews separation was never cited by the girls as a
moment to go through in order to gain independence, as in the
psychoanalytic frame. Even if we found many references to patriarchal
culture in the interviewees’ discourses, no one mentioned directly or
indirectly, the perception of one’s own independence as inevitably based
on the symbolic matricide, on the separation of the daughter from the
mother, which definitely means for women to align themselves with the
symbolic order of the father.
“Where I live, like at home too I see that my mother, that really my
mother and my grandmother had a lot of courage. My grandmother because
she had a lot of courage in raising four daughters not far from each
other and with an absent husband because he did… he worked, he always
worked far from home so it takes courage. My mother has always had a lot
of courage in raising two daughters with a husband that worked all the
time. […] And because raising two daughters… daughters always resent
their mothers. At least I’ve noticed this, because being the only ones,
me and my sister are the only girls because the other ones are all male
cousins. So I see boys that have a beautiful relationship with the
mother. Us girls instead from eight or ten years of age already we start
being mad at our mothers for anything. So it takes courage in raising a
daughter” (G_3_18).
Let us consider Muraro’s reflection in The Symbolic Order of the
Mother (2018) about a culture in which the mother’s love is not
taught to women. Within the same culture we may see the mother/daughter
relationship reduced to jealousies and resentments.
If we want to assume that girls in the Generation Z can count on a
taken for granted feminism then we can find the trace of this shift in
the focus put by the interviewees on both friendship, and on the
mother-daughter relationship. The film 18 regali (2020), based
on the true story of Elisa Girotto and her daughter Anna, and the
appreciation it received from more than half of the interviewees
demonstrates girls’ crave for deep and nuanced representations of the
mother-daughter relationship.
Attention to friendships and mother-daughter relationships can be
considered as a new paradigm through which to rethink the relationships
between women, including those between teachers and pupils that we have
been able to observe in our experience in schools: “My mother but I
would also say my Italian teacher. I think my teacher is a very strong
woman that really deserves a lot. I really love her” (C_2_18).
The recovery of a female genealogy that emerged so powerfully from
the first phase of our project and which will be accounted for in the
last part of the research, which is dedicated to the collection of adult
women’s oral histories about their own adolescence, therefore appears
decisive: “My mother and my two grandmothers because they’re my biggest
love, I love them too much and my cousin as well… My cousin [matters] a
lot, she’s basically my best friend. We talk about everything even
though she’s bigger than me because she’s twenty-three, so she’s bigger
but I see her as a guide and… and that’s all, they are the main figures
of my life” (F_12_16).
When asked to describe their mother through adjectives, girls clearly
attempted to solicit the woman in the mother. Following Irigaray,
looking for women in the mothers means giving value to a process of
knowledge, which is based on “getting out of roles” and in which the
relationships established with other women and the relationship with the
mother become bipolar and destructive terms of the social order.
“She’s really my guide that I see, I want to be like this person,
it’s my mother because I mean, me and mum are very much alike in our personalities and I would really like
to become like she’s become because she has grown strong, she’s
beautiful and I hope to become like her” (D_8_15).
Tracing the originality of the female path allows the woman to become
an autonomous subject, because only through the relationship with the
mother, can the woman affirm her own specificity and difference.
6. Conclusion
Over the last few years production companies and streaming platforms
have made an effort to represent adolescence, and girlhood more
specifically, through films and TV series in Italy, trying to depict the
very multifaceted experience of girlhood. Despite adolescence being
narrated as a time of enhanced generational conflict, the interviewees
have defined it in a multiplicity of ways that do not necessarily
highlight the need to distance themselves from their families in search
for their identity. On the contrary, a lot of the girls interviewed
deemed their mothers and other women in their families and social
circles as examples to follow and cherish in order to build their own
identities. It is almost as if the positive 1990s/2000s narratives on
mother-daughter relationships have affected girls without them
necessarily having been consciously exposed to those products. In this
sense, mothers in contemporary films and TV series, as we have
mentioned, are often distant or absent, frivolous, childish, while their
daughters are represented as realistic and disenchanted.
Nonetheless, the role that films and TV series, and social media as
well, in raising both a personal and social conscience concerning gender
issues, is undeniable.
Moreover, as demonstrated by the interviewees, the multiplication of
girlhood media representations brings a higher possibility of
appropriation, adaptation, and negotiation. Ultimately, as shown by the
general acclaim for Skam Italia and Mare fuori, the
most appreciated products are the ones where identification happens
immediately, where girls are able to recognize their own experiences,
whether this identification happens objectively or emotionally. The fact
that identity narratives and media narratives proceed simultaneously
demonstrates the capacity of streaming platforms and networks to respond
to a need for representation, as audiences continue negotiating their
identities having media as intermedial landscapes, where media
storytelling and girlhood narratives collide.
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