Queer Girls and Popular Culture explores relationships between media representations and the creative media receptions of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. Drawing upon examples from a wide range of media including television, film, magazines, Internet, and music, this book pays critical attention to the emergence of visual images and narratives of girls desiring girls. Framed as a dialogue, the voices of queer girls are interpreted in response to their increasing public visibility and commodification within mainstream media as well as the development of alternative popular cultural engagements. This book combines youth and media studies with feminist and queer theories, bridging previously separate areas of theory and research to understand queer girls as dynamic cultural subjects.
«Susan Driver's marvelously rich and inventive account of queer responses to popular culture breaks new ground for media studies, queer studies, and gender studies. With chapters on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', queer magazines, subcultural music scenes, and online communities, Driver nimbly locates and characterizes the modes of interpretation that queer girls use to transform popular culture into their own playground. This is the first and only book of its kind and it is a powerful testament to the imaginative range of queer youth cultures.» (Judith Halberstam, Author of 'In a Queer Time and Place and Female Masculinity')
«Through smart and provocative readings informed by queer girls' engagements with contemporary popular culture, Susan Driver enriches our understanding of the queerness within girl-centered media texts as well as queer girls' negotiations of that cultural terrain. Challenging the heteronormativity that has shaped both the academy's and the media industries' constructions of girlhood and girls' culture, 'Queer Girls and Popular Culture' is a groundbreaking book and a welcome contribution to girls' studies, queer studies, and media studies.» (Mary Celeste Kearney, Author of 'Girls Make Media')
«Through smart and provocative readings informed by queer girls' engagements with contemporary popular culture, Susan Driver enriches our understanding of the queerness within girl-centered media texts as well as queer girls' negotiations of that cultural terrain. Challenging the heteronormativity that has shaped both the academy's and the media industries' constructions of girlhood and girls' culture, 'Queer Girls and Popular Culture' is a groundbreaking book and a welcome contribution to girls' studies, queer studies, and media studies.» (Mary Celeste Kearney, Author of 'Girls Make Media')