A Girls’-Eye View: Italian female adolescence and girlhood media representations

Abstract

Over the last few years, production companies and streaming platforms in Italy have enriched their catalogues with films and TV series targeting adolescents, where the topoi of this age are addressed in order to build identification and engagement: conflict with parents, school, self-discovery in terms of identity and sexuality, body changes, friendship, love, rule breaking and so on.

In the plethora of adolescent-themed films and TV series, the experience of girlhood is narrated with its own specificity, and not necessarily within the frame of post-feminist girl power culture, but in more nuanced ways, representing all the issues and contradictions of being a girl.

In order to understand the degree of identification with such products, the A Girls’ Eye View research project has interviewed girls from ten different schools across Italy on themes such as media consumption, adolescence, body issues, gender issues.

This article focuses on three main aspects of girlhood and how it is narrated by both interviewees and media products: parent-adolescent conflict, the relationship with one’s own body especially once it enters the regime of heterosexist society, and mother-daughter relationships. What the research has discovered is that, even though streaming platforms and production companies have made significant effort in portraying relatable experiences of girlhood, some topics are addressed in ways that are very different from the responses of the girls interviewed. Nonetheless, the multiplication of girlhood narratives has led to a higher degree of appropriation, adaptation, and negotiation between media products and audience.