Daddy's Girl--young girls and popular culture

Daddy's Girl-young gis and popular culture VALERIE WALKERDINE, 1997 London, Macmillan ix + 201 pp., 11.99

As Valerie Walkerdine herself points out, there has been very little research and writing about young girls and popular culture. This book, then, begins to fill this curious gap in the literature since it addresses `the relation of little girls to the popular by interrogating both media presentations of little girls and little girls' own engagement with popular culture' (p. 3). Walkerdine's research is based on actual case material as well as her own autobiographical analyses. She discusses the methodological implications of involving her own subjectivity in the research process by reflecting upon critiques of her earlier work in which she also studied her own experiences of growing up in a white, working-class family. Walkerdine specifically looks at how class, psychology and the popular have been socially formed and how this impacts on the study of young girls and popular culture.

Daddy's Girl. Young Girls and Popular Culture raises important questions for researchers about how they design their studies as well as how they interpret their participants' responses to media representations and the social consequences of these practices. Walkerdine is one of the few media/educational researchers who is willing to examine critically...