Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration

This book considers teens’ social media use as a lens through which to more clearly see American adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century. It investigates how young women use social media to address, mediate, and negotiate the struggles they face in their daily lives as minors, females, and racial minorities.

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Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles considers teens’ social media use as a lens through which to more clearly see American adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century. Detailing a year-long ethnography following a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse group of female, rural, teenaged adolescents living in the Midwest region of the United States, this book investigates how young women creatively call upon social media in everyday attempts to address, mediate, and negotiate the struggles they face in their offline lives as minors, females, and ethnic and racial minorities. In tracing girls’ appreciation and use of social media to roots anchored well outside of the individual, this book finds American girls’ relationships with social media to be far more culturally nuanced than adults typically imagine. There are material reasons for US teens’ social media use explained by how we do girlhood, adolescence, family, class, race, and technology. And, as this book argues, an unpacking of these areas is essential to understanding adolescent girls’ social media use.