Tween Girls' Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore: Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast? (Perspectives on Children and Young People, 13) 9811695105, 9789811695100

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Perspectives on Children and Young People 13

Bernice Loh

Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast?

Perspectives on Children and Young People Volume 13

Series Editors Johanna Wyn , The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia Helen Cahill , The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia Hernán Cuervo, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

This series builds on the Springer Handbook on Childhood and Youth, and on the widespread interest in current issues that pertain to young people and children. The series contributes to the field of youth studies, which encompasses the disciplines of sociology, psychology, education, health, economics, social geography and cultural studies. Within these fields, there is a need to address two distinctive elements in relation to children and youth. The first of these is social change, and in particular, the risks and opportunities that are emerging in relation to the global changes to young people’s lives captured by the metaphor ‘the Asian Century’. The second of these is the emerging interest in building on the traditions of ‘northern’ theorists, where the traditions of the field of youth studies lie, through an engagement with new conceptual approaches that draw on the global south. These two elements frame the Handbook on Childhood and Youth, and in so doing, set the scene for a deeper engagement with key topics and issues through a book series. The series consists of two types of book. One is the research-based monograph produced by a sole author or a team of authors who have collaborated on a single topic. These books meet the need for deep engagement with emerging issues, including the demonstration of how new concepts are being used to understand the complexities of young people’s lives. The second is edited collections that provide depth on particular topics by bringing together key thinkers and writers on that topic. The edited collections are especially relevant to new and emerging areas of youth studies where there is debate. These books are authored by a mix of established academics, mid-career academics and early career academics, ensuring that the series showcases the work of emerging scholars and offers fresh approaches and insights in the field of youth studies. While the focus is ‘youth studies’ this series contributes to a deeper understanding of the ways in which this field is enriched through inter-disciplinary scholarship and research, reaching across the fields of health and wellbeing, education and pedagogy, geography, sociology, psychology, the arts and cultural studies.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13560

Bernice Loh

Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast?

Bernice Loh National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore

ISSN 2365-2977 ISSN 2365-2985 (electronic) Perspectives on Children and Young People ISBN 978-981-16-9510-0 ISBN 978-981-16-9511-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To my late aunt, Shirley Loh, whom I’ve spent a lot of time with growing up as a girl. The memories that I’ve had with her as a primary school student still feels like yesterday. I miss her everyday.

Preface

Girls fashioning themselves after adults have been a topic of extensive debate. In the West, there is significant concern over girls who are now purchasing scaled-down versions of adult clothing and wearing clothes that make them look like ‘mini-adults’. Inbetween childhood and teenhood, tween-aged girls are often at the centre of this debate as are framed as unaware of the deeper implications of what they want to wear. Most prominently, the discourse of sexualisation has gained hegemonic status in the way that tween girls’ adult-like dressing is being conceptualised. Girls this age are often seen as prematurely sexualised when they have desires to fashion themselves after adults. The young girl subject, often understood to be an ‘unknowing’ victim, is framed as uncertain about the physical, sexual and psychological harm that they might be exposing themselves to when they fashion themselves after adults. When young girls learn to prioritise certain rewards (such as the attention that they might receive when they fashion themselves after adults) over other rewards (such as academic accomplishment), there is worry over how they might unknowingly short-change their future educational and occupational opportunities. However, the current scholarship on girls’ dressing is highly Western-centric and there is a lack of research on girls’ young femininities and tween girls’ cultural or fashioned identities in Singapore or Asia for that matter. In Singapore itself, discussions about girls and girlhood have also centred on their roles and identities as students. It is against this backdrop that this book seeks to understand how tween girls in Singapore negotiate their young femininities and desires to fashion themselves after adults. Through 12 focus groups with 29 Singaporean girls aged eight to 12, this book aims to show how girlhood in Singapore is complex and multi-faceted and the values and meanings that tween girls’ attach to their dressing intersect at the individual, social and cultural level. Extending the work of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, this book underscores that it is imprecise to understand girlhood based on the assumption that there is one dominant way to grow up as a young person. There should be new ways of approaching and looking at girls’ adult-like dressing that move beyond the discourse of sexualisation, especially when the girls in Singapore, as a group of social actors, encompass a unique set of experiences and circumstances. vii

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In adopting a minority perspective and girl-centred approach, this book also establishes how girlhood, young femininities and dressing outside the West can contribute to and advance the current state of knowledge about girls. Singapore, or any context outside the West, serves as a possible way of shifting points of reference, to break away from the sexualisation-of-girls discourse, or the victim/agenticindividual binary that has dictated much of the discussions surrounding girls’ adultlike dressing. This book shows how the discourse of sexualisation while popular may not be fully relevant in understanding, acting on and interpreting tween girls’ dressing within this context. It is in my hope that this book is of value and utility to future studies that wish to focus on similar themes in Singapore, or in the wider context of Asia. This book underscores why tween girls’ dressing Singapore should be a topic of interest and demands a more culturally-specific approach. Singapore, Singapore

Bernice Loh

The original version of this book cover was revised: Non-series book cover has been changed to a series cover template updated with the volume number. The correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_7

Acknowledgements

This book is a product of my doctoral thesis, that was completed at Monash University, Australia. It could have never been complete without the help of many kind and generous people at the university. A/Prof Kirsten McLean and A/Prof Steven Roberts, my supervisors who saw me to graduation; both of whom generously took over this research project mid-way and proofed so many chapters of this book in its thesis form. Prof Anita Harris, who was my primary supervisor for almost the first two years of the thesis and whose insights were always useful and brilliant. Thank you for seeing value in this project, which brought me to Monash in the first place. A/Prof Mark Davis, whom I taught for during my time at Monash, and never forgot to ask how the thesis was going. My colleagues turned close friends Sally Lo, Karla Elliott, Harry Tan, and Akane Kanai from the Monash Sociology department. All of you have been the most supportive and loving people that I have ever met; thank you for extending that to me. Living in Melbourne, my friends Shirleen Ng, Sharon Tan and Rakshinda Kabir, were my constant support, ensuring that I kept going over the years. Their friendship is invaluable. Midway writing this book, I moved to Singapore, to take on a new position at the National University of Singapore, Centre for Family and Population Research. I am blessed to have made new friends and forged a small support group consisting of Gi and Nawal, who commiserated and helped me find time, light and space for writing. After years of being away from home, I am grateful to Lynette Chan and Sara Wee, two people whom I’ve known since I was 13, who helped me find my bearings back in Singapore. Last but not least, my parents Henry and Pauline, deserve a special mention. This book is a product of their generosity and belief in their children.

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Growing up in Singapore, I remember that my parents would often be disappointed when I chose to wear pants instead of skirts. They always questioned why, despite ‘being a girl’, I did not want to put on more dresses. At that time, I did not want to wear any of the dresses that my parents bought, because I felt that the dresses they chose were certainly not what I would usually wear. I was also in a pinafore or skirt all the time when I was in my school uniform. I did not want to continue to wear a dress or skirt when I finally had the chance to put on something else. Rather than boy bands, I grew up loving and listening to the Spice Girls, but never knew what ‘girl power’ truly meant until I began reading up on (post)feminism as a student in Sociology. Girl Power up until then was always a commercial message, or a ‘thing’ that the girl group had because they were the Spice Girls. The all-girls’ primary school that I attended subsequently banned music from the Spice Girls from being played in school. The teachers explained that the lyrics from the Spice Girls were becoming too ‘adult-like’. My parents were less concerned about the popularity of Western popular culture or the raunchy celebrity culture (Jackson, Vares & Gill 2013) that was a significant part of the tween girl culture growing up. My parents were more focused on whether I got into the best academic stream in primary school or whether I had achieved Band 11 in all my subjects. Since young, it had been strongly ingrained that doing well at school and going to university was important to succeed in life. However, today, my father reminds me that my Ph.D. serves as a deterrent for marriage. While doing well at school and going to university was important to secure a job as an adult, further education for women was not deemed as desirable. My father was, of course, influenced by the unpopular graduate-mother scheme, first imposed in 1984 (Chua 2002). Afraid that educated women in Singapore were unable to find ‘suitable’ partners, this scheme encouraged women who had university degrees to get married

1

Band 1 is the highest grade that can be awarded in primary schools in Singapore. It usually requires a score of 90 and above. In its aim to be less punitive for students, the grading system in Singapore has seen changes in the recent years. xi

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and for those who were already married to have more children by giving out generous tax incentives. While socialised into the role that striving to be the best student I could be was the most important task as a primary school student, I envied my friend, Calista, who was taller and prettier because she reached puberty earlier than any of us and could wear teenager or adult-like clothes at age 10. Calista was ‘cooler’ than any of us in the same standard, because she was able to knew how to dress like the girls that we saw on television. Being from an all-girls’ school, there were numerous rumours about Calista being extremely popular amongst the boys outside school. In my mid-20s, I bumped into Calista 1 day in Singapore. We briefly shared about our lives, and she revealed that she is now a mother of two. What really struck me was that she told me she regretted ‘acting’ or dressing that way when she was in primary school. She expressed that she should have transferred her efforts into studying better, getting into a better academic stream and secondary school. Primary school children have to take a Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at the end of Primary 6 (12 years old), which decides which secondary school they can enter. I wondered how these experiences would determine how Calista was going to raise her two daughters. This snapshot of my experience growing up as a girl in Singapore shows how girlhood is inherently complex and interacts with social expectations, traditional ideas of femininity (what a girl ‘should look’ or ‘be like’), education policies, peer and popular culture, amongst other things. From my own, and my friend Calista’s experiences, it also shows how girlhood can be a crucial part of one’s life and have enduring impacts on adulthood and future life decisions. However, much of the research on girls and girlhood in Singapore and Asia has predominantly focused on their identities or roles as students (see Ning 2018; Peer & Fraser 2015; Yeo & Garces-Bacsal 2014). The term ‘tween’ is also rarely used in the Singaporean context. MacDonald (2014:45) notes that the label ‘tween’ has been “widely used by the producers, advertisers, marketers and retailers […] as well as social commentators and policymakers who define this age group of girls through their consumption activities.” In Singapore, tween-aged girls are often referred to as ‘young girls’, or ‘primary school children’. This paints a narrow picture of what it means to grow up as a young girl from the ages eight to 12 in Singapore.

Girls’ Dressing While my personal experience of a girl growing up in Singapore sets the background for this research, this book is more specifically concerned with how girls in Singapore today want to fashion themselves after adults and the myriad of values and meanings that they may attach to their dressing. Girls’ dressing has been a topic of much debate in the West, with popular celebrities like Amy Schumer also weighing in on the discussion on Instagram. In September 2016, Schumer posted a picture of

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the covers of two US magazines, Girls’ Life and Boys’ Life, on Instagram with the caption “No.” (see Loh 2017). This cover of the US magazine Girls’ Life, whose target readership is tween girls (Velding 2017), featured a girl dressed and made up to look like an adult, with long, wavy, well-styled hair. The issue was also replete with stories on beauty, fashion and popular hairstyles. Contrary to this, Boys’ Life was headlined Explore Your Future, with high-achieving careers listed as options (Astronaut? Artist? Firefighter? Chef? Here’s how to be what you want to be). In the boys’ magazine, there was also no mention of how boys ‘should look’. This post by Schumer went viral and was covered by many popular media outlets in the West (see Medrano 2016). Popular actress Blake Lively also responded: Wow. @amyschumer I second that emotion. Ladies, let’s not let this happen anymore. Schumer makes an important point. Further, the emphasis for girls to look more grown-up is has been observed outside the cultural West. A number of articles in local mainstream media highlight how adult-like clothing for young Singaporean girls is increasing in popularity. Yap (2013:6), for instance, underscores how retailers in Singapore have been selling sexy clothes “which resemble adult outfits worn by stars such as Britney Spears” since the mid-2000s. In 2017, Singapore’s longest standing lifestyle magazine, 8 Days, also featured an article on how “Twinning is Winning” (Tan 2017). This article outlined how mothers and girls can and should dress up like each other, framing it as something that both girls and women should aspire to do. However, despite the growing number of reports that reflect the popularity of girls’ adult-like dressing, much of the scholarly work on girls in Singapore has failed to attend to their cultural or fashioned identities. This misses the role that adult-like clothing has to play in this process. Entwistle (2000) explains that a traditionally small body of work has studied sociology, dress, fashion and clothing in close relation. She highlights that “this neglect is surprising when one considers that fashion has been important to the development and character of western modernity and remains an industry of considerably economic and cultural significance today” (Entwistle 2000:53). For Entwistle (2000:6), “human bodies are dressed bodies”, and clothing have a large part to play in the presentation of self in everyday life. Nonetheless, she notes that the growth of cultural studies and the study of youth subculture in the late 1960s in particular greatly contributed to and popularised this field of work (Entwistle & Wilson 2001). Scholars like McRobbie (1989) and Hebdige (1979) sought to understand why certain groups of young people like the hippies and punks dress the way they do, and the meanings that these alternative dressing styles represented for them. In more recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies in the West that have focused on children and their participation in consumer culture that may have an impact on their dressing. Pilcher (2011), for instance, interrogated girls’ proclivities towards branded clothing and the significance of brands in their social worlds. Schor (2004:11) similarly evaluates how “children’s social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming” and children have become increasingly “bonded to brands” (Schor 2004:25). However, this book recognises that while discussions surrounding tween girls and their dressing have gained traction in the

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West, there are certain groups of girls who still do not receive enough focus. Projansky (2014:16) similarly makes the point about “the myopia of some of girls’ studies scholarship.” This means that while the focus on girls and their dressing has become more popular, there are certain groups of girls who are less studied, or are inaccurately represented. Since I began this research in 2014, there has been a gap in research that focuses on tween girls’ dressing outside the West and an absence of Singaporean tween girls’ voices that explores the importance of their cultural or fashioned identities. In seeking to understand young Singaporean girls’ femininities, identities and subjectivities through what they wear, this book is situated as part of yet adjacent to the widely established discussions of girls’ adult-like dressing in the West. In most discussions in the West, there is significant concern over girls who may now desire scaled-down versions of adult clothing, wearing clothes that make them look like ‘mini-adults’. In many public discourses and academic scholarship, what girls wear is an issue of paramount concern primarily when the discourse of sexualisation is invoked. Within this discourse, scholars argue that tween girls are being prematurely sexualised when they fashion themselves after adults. In eliciting young Singaporean girls own perspectives on adult-like dressing and the values and meanings that they attribute to what they wear, this book seeks to shed light on the significance of adult-like clothing and dressing in their social worlds. It aims to nuance the discussions surrounding girls’ adult-like dressing, that is often been presented as a potential developmental issue for young girls and has created forms of moral panic in the West. In the discourse of sexualisation, there are scholars like Zurbriggen et al. (2010) who believe that adult-like dressing is especially harmful because tween girls exist in a phase of time where they are still developing their sense of self. Furthermore, it is often suggested that girls this age are young ‘unknowing’ subjects, unable to critically decipher sexualising messages found in a number of sources. Projansky (2014:14) highlights that by the 1990s and up until today, “anxiety texts that articulate at-risk girlhoods” is one of the main ways to discuss girlhood.

Conceptual Framework Where scholars McRobbie and Thornton (1995:180) point out that “moral panics [about the girl] seem to have become a goal” in recent scholarship, I address in this book how the discourse of sexualisation is problematic when it is used as a hegemonic framework (Renold & Ringrose 2013) to understand girls’ adult-like dressing. A discourse of sexualisation supports and contributes to the at-risk narrative (Harris 2004) and scholars like Projansky (2014:5) underscore that the processes of paying attention to and focusing on the ‘at-risk’ girl often popularises “the at-risk narrative, reproducing and reifying images” of the hyper-sexualised girl and “perpetuates— rather than helps to overcome—the discursive notion of her existence.” Following the work of scholars like Jackson, Vares and Gill (2013) and Vares and Jackson (2015), this book broadly adopts a feminist, post-structuralist approach to understand girls’

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dressing. According to Jackson and Vares (2015:557), this approach to understanding girlhood and its related practices situate “subjectivity or identity as constructed in discourse.” In adopting a girl-centred approach that prioritises young Singaporean girls’ perspectives, this book acknowledges that there are multiple discourses for girls that serve as “a frame of intelligibility or a constructed worldview” (Pomerantz 2005:4)—such discourses may also be a product of “historically specific, socially situated, signifying practices” (Fraser 1992:185). Girls’ perspectives towards and experiences of adult-like dressing is therefore likely to be viewed as ‘in process’, fluid and shifting, yet also constrained by the effects of disciplinary power that require self-regulation and monitoring of compliance with dominant social norms. (Jackson & Vares 2015:557)

This coalesces with Walkerdine’s (1981:4) earlier ideas, in which she explains that girls are not unitary subjects uniquely positioned, but produced as a nexus of subjectivities, in relations of power which are constantly shifting, rendering them at one moment powerful and at another powerless.

In this book, apart from the way girls talk about about dressing and what it means for them, the term ‘discourse’ also attends to “the ways in which knowledge is produced about girls, and the normalising effect this knowledge production institutes” (Pomerantz 2005:4). I discuss this in more detail in Chaps. 1 and 2, where the Western discourse of sexualisation operates as one of the dominant ways that guide the discussions surrounding girls’ adult-like dressing. Given a lack of research on girls, adultification or sexualisation in Asia and Singapore, this book underscores the need to create a space for the multiple discourses, reasons and complexities as to why tween girls within this context want to fashion themselves after adults. This might have little relation to what has been taken-for-granted in the discourse of sexualisation. In taking seriously girls’ identities as tweens and their experiences of girlhood both in and outside the confines of school, this book more importantly seeks to extend the work done in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, in which James, Jenks and Prout (1998) argue that concepts of childhood (and hence girlhood) are never unified and consistent. Within this framework, childhood has to be recognised and understood through routine and emergent collective perceptions that are grounded in changing politics, philosophy, economics, [and] social policy. (James et al. 1998:196)

More recent scholarship that aligns with the ‘new’ sociology of childhood has also approached girlhood through the lens of postcolonial theory (see Liebel 2020), arguing “for a decolonization of childhood in research and practice—both in the conventional sense of confronting Western civilizing constructions of childhood and as a means to challenge the patriarchal underpinnings of the politics of knowledge production about children” (Cheney 2018:91-2). Rather than a unifying discourse of

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sexualisation, this book shows how girlhood and girls’ desires for adult-like clothing is likely to be a product of an ecosystem, informed by individual, social and cultural factors unique to Singapore. By attending to this socio-cultural context and what it means for young girls growing up in Singapore, this book further highlights the tendency of girls’ studies to be framed in predominantly white, middle-class, able-bodied and ‘adultist’ terms (i.e. adult perspectives on how girls should dress) (Morris-Roberts 2001). As Bickford points out, “[t]ween femininity is normatively constructed as white, affluent, suburban, and consumerist” (Bickford 2015:69). As I further discuss in the following chapters, the discourse of sexualisation not only fuels moral panic and narrowly defines what girls ‘should be like’, it also assumes how girls should be dressed according to Western accounts of children and childhood. There are scholars like Projansky (2014:17) who emphasise that the “meanings of particular social categories—such as ‘child’ and ‘girl’ vary considerably over time and across place.” There are cultural specificities of girlhood within the Singaporean context, where the discourse of sexualisation may be inadequate for understanding, acting on and interpreting tween girls’ dressing.

Terminology Scholars like Projansky (2014) note that ‘tween’ is a relatively new term that emerged in the US in the early 1990s. While I mentioned above that the term ‘tween’ is relatively unused and unheard of in the Singapore context and girls this age are often referred to as ‘young girls’ or ‘primary school children’, the term ‘tween’ is important as it acknowledges that girls can construct and negotiate identities outside their roles as students. In addition to this, the term ‘tween’ has been argued by certain scholars to be a “consumer-media label” (MacDonald 2014:44), further illuminating the cultural aspects of girlhood. MacDonald (2014:45), for instance, notes that the label ‘tween’ has been “widely used by the producers, advertisers, marketers and retailers […] as well as social commentators and policy makers who define this age group of girls through their consumption activities.” The term ‘tween’ thus acknowledges that apart from their identities within the domain of school, girls have agency and take on roles as consumers of popular culture and products in the current landscape. Apart from functioning as an age band that delineates preteen girls aged eight to 12 (Vares et. al 2011), the term ‘tween’ also accounts for the complex nature of being a girl inbetween the ages of a child and a teenager, that has been left out in much of the academic scholarship on girl/childhood in Singapore. Correspondingly, in this book, the terms ‘adultification’, ‘adult-like dressing’ and tween girls ‘fashioning themselves after adults’ are generally used to signify the young femininities and adult-like clothing that are now made available to girls via the tween commercial market (Harris 2005). Harris (2005:212) notes how “tweenie” as site of “feminine child-ness” and “girl-ness” can be found in girls’ consumption practices. Accordingly, Speno and Aubrey (2018:625) use the term “adultification” to describe the way that girls today are encouraged and dressed up to look like women.

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They explain that “[y]oung girls, even as young as 4 to 6 years old, receive messages about how to be sexy and attractive, and they appear in imagery complete with the trappings of woman adulthood, such as mature clothing, jewelry, and makeup” (Speno & Aubrey 2018:628). Likewise, Macdonald (2016:22) explains that in the current tween consumer market, “the desire to be in control of their mature, but young, feminine self places the pre-teen girl in conflict with long-held discourses of childhood innocence and vulnerability.” These tensions are especially prevalent when it comes to the clothing that is offered to tween girls today—girls are often seen as encouraged to dress more maturely at younger ages, and the discourse of sexualisation is often used to discuss girls’ adult-like dressing. In this book, however, I am particularly careful about using the terms ‘adultification’ and ‘sexualisation’ synonymously. While the terms ‘adultification’, ‘adult-like dressing’ and tween girls ‘fashioning themselves after adults’ acknowledges the increasingly mature or sexualised landscape in which types of clothing and young femininities are made available to young girls, there is a need to be more careful about using the terms interchangeably. Correlating ‘adultification’ with ‘sexualisation’ supports the idea that tween girls who fashion themselves after adults are being inappropriately sexualised and that these girls are susceptible to a range of negative effects. There are several scholars who have criticised the discourse of sexualisation for focusing exclusively on the harmful effects on girls (Renold and Ringrose 2011; 2013)—they argue that this discourse does not take into consideration how girls themselves make meaning of and negotiate such sources in their everyday lives. Currently, there is a lack of understanding why girls in Singapore may find a need to fashion themselves after adults. Additionally, the sexualisation-of-girls argument is highly Western-centric. It is misleading to assume that tween girls in Singapore are being sexualised at earlier ages and their adult-like dressing are necessarily processes and outcomes of the sexualisation-of-girls discourse. The careful usage of the terms ‘adultification’ and ‘sexualisation’ also emphasises the importance of this book: the need for tween girls’ voices to understand what clothing meant to them and how they themselves made sense of adult-like dressing. As I will discuss in the following chapters, girls attach different values and meanings to adult-like clothing and the array of negotiations that form a significant part of girls’ clothing choices should not be left out of the discussion. Girls’ desires to fashion themselves after adults can extend beyond the clothing that they put on and simply wanting to adopt or emulate adult lifestyles.

Research Methodology The research methodology for this book is closely aligned with what was emphasised by Jones (1993:162), who argued from a feminist perspective that researchers should take an interest in the processes through which girls ‘correctly’ position themselves in available discourse, including the sanctions against particular positionings and encouragement

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towards others, which vary considerably across—and within—class and race, cultural and discursive contexts.

This book adopts what can be defined as a “minority group perspective” (James et al. 1998:184) to understand what it means to grow up as a tween girl in Singapore and the values and meanings that young girls attach to their dressing and practices of young femininity. Research in the field of girl/childhood has been of growing interest in the West since the 1980s (O’Kane 2008). However, there are scholars like Blitzer (1991) who have noticed that there is a prevailing tendency for scholarship in this field to approach children as objects of study. Although more research has started to incorporate children’s own, unique views, Alderson (2008:287) claims that although there is a growing volume of research concerning children, children (and girls) still remain “an under-estimated, under-used resource.” Darbyshire, MacDougall and Schiller (2005:419) have previously coined the term “the missing child” to highlight the significant efforts in understanding issues concerning girls/children, but a lack of inclusion of girls/children as key informants in research.

The Minority Group Perspective In order to negotiate this “essentialism” (Christensen & James 2008:2)—where only adults are situated as able to produce stable and coherent perspectives of the world— that has plagued much of the earlier work done on children, James et al. (1998:184) assert that there is great hermeneutic value when researchers seek to elicit children’s “perspectives on and comprehension of an adult world in which they are required to participate.” The minority group perspective, in particular, reinforces the work done in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood (James & Prout 1997) as it situates children as “active agents in the creation of meaning through their interactions with adults and other children” (Prout 2011:4). Although the ‘new’ sociology of childhood is not novel and has been established “within the larger, multi-disciplined umbrella of Childhood Studies” (Swauger, Catro & Harger 2017:1), in the context of Singapore, there is scant research on girls’ cultural identities and what they want to wear. By incorporating the direct experiences and viewpoints of tween girls, this book aims to create a space for how Singaporean tween girls can and should be engaged as active participants, who have the ability to construct, mediate and determine their own life experiences, thus affecting the society they live in. From a “minority group perspective”, social anthropologists James et al. (1998:184) argue that children should be situated as a legitimate social group and social actors in their own right, with their own unique cultures waiting to be expounded. This epistemological viewpoint not only poses a challenge to the taken-for-granted meanings of what it means to be a girl/child, it also gives importance to “the historical and temporal specificity of childhoods” (Prout 2011:4). James et al. (1998:184) argue that as opposed to theories that prescribe children as passive

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recipients of an adult culture and incapable of presenting any autonomous perspectives about any issue, children can be framed as “competent participants in a shared, but adult-centred world.” Lloyd-Smith and Tarr (2000:61) similarly contend that the reality experienced by children cannot be simply “comprehended by inference and assumption” and the meanings that children attach to their experiences might not necessarily be those that adult social actors ascribe, illuminating the importance of their voices. Dimensions worthy of research will be overlooked if researchers do not learn to incorporate children’s voices.

A Girl-Centred Approach Notably, the “minority group perspective” (James et al. 1998:184) is also suited for research on girls’ young femininities and dressing in Singapore as studies on tween girls’ dressing have been predominantly situated in the West (Bailey, 2011; Rush & La Nauze, 2006; Zurbriggen et al., 2011). There is not only an absence of Singaporean tween girls’ voices in extant scholarship, the discourse of sexualisation is also highly Western-centric and based on Western understandings of childhood (a point that I discuss in the following chapters). It is against this backdrop that the need to incorporate Singaporean tween girls’ (minority) voices is situated, and as LloydSmith and Tarr (2000:67) similarly highlight, a “vast conceptual leap” can be achieved when “adults begin to consider the opinions and views of children seriously enough” and “encourage them to speak their minds and express their opinions.” In order to simultaneously ‘break away’ and usefully contribute to scholarship on girlhood and tween studies, the findings in this book were based on focus group interviews with Singaporean tween girls, aged eight to 12, focusing on their perspectives about the clothes they would like to wear and what adult-like clothing might mean to them. The fieldwork for this book was conducted in Singapore in 2015, and I recruited girl respondents first through my personal networks of acquaintances who were private educators, and later by subsequent referral from the girl respondents themselves. In Singapore, private educators mainly work for tuition centres. They usually conduct lessons in a classroom setting, rather than travel to students’ homes to provide private one-to-one lessons. Some of the private educators that I approached were also the owners of tuition centres. Most of them were helpful with recruitment and were keen to offer their classrooms as a focus group venue. As part of the snowballing efforts, I made a point to ask at the end of every focus group if the girls who participated had any close friends or family who would be interested in doing a similar session. This greatly helped in the recruitment of new young girl participants. I required that the young girl participants handed in signed consent forms by their parents or guardians before they were allowed to participate. According to Gallagher (2009:15–16), informed consent for children is achieved in four ways: it involves an explicit act (for example, a verbal or written agreement); can only be given if participants are informed about and have a working understanding of

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the research; must be given voluntarily without coercion; and must be renegotiable so that children may withdraw at any stage of the research process. Thus, before each focus group session, I explained again to the girls what the focus of these sessions would be about and the girls were also expected to sign an assent form. Keeping in mind how information received and understood by children and parents can be problematic “regardless of how comprehensive and encompassing it is” (Graham et al. 2013:61), I also took extra care to explain to the girls how they should not feel obliged to take part and could request to drop out from the focus group discussion anytime.

Focus Groups I held a total of 12 focus groups, with a total participant pool of 29 Singaporean tween girls aged eight to 12 (see Table 1). The majority of the young girl participants in this research were of Singaporean-Chinese ethnicity, with 3 girls of mixed ChineseIndian heritage. Because these girls were mainly recruited through the tuition centres, or they were friends of the girls who had attended these tuition centres, most of them are considered middle-class. There is a lucrative private tuition industry and the cost of tuition in Singapore is fairly steep (see Yong 2018). Lower-income families in Singapore often worry about being able to afford tuition for their children and if their children will be able to do as well academically without this form of support (see Teo 2018). About half of the girls in the study also attended all-girls’ schools and the rest attended co-ed primary schools. I did not find any difference across the schools in what the girls wanted to wear, what dressing meant to them or how they wanted to carry themselves. There were not necessarily higher levels of ‘surveillance’ in all-girls’ primary schools than in co-ed schools, especially when the local education system requires students to wear school uniforms. I did not specifically ask the girls for their religious backgrounds, although some of them had attended all-girls’ Catholic primary schools. Nonetheless, studies show that Singaporean students were not hindered race, nationality or religious groups, both within and between schools, in establishing friendship groups (Bakar et al. 2021). All the focus groups discussions were transcribed verbatim and after the transcription process, the transcripts were coded according to the themes that will be discussed in the following chapters. According to Timmermans and Tavory (2012:167), this analytic strategy is referred to as an “abductive analysis.” Scholars like Foster (2016) elaborate that abduction is often an “inferential creative process” (Timmermans & Tavory 2012:170) where “researchers purposefully oscillate their attention between their data and extant literature in order to contrast their empirical findings with existing theories” (Foster 2016:28). I also employed other forms of analysis, in order to further make sense of the focus group data. For instance, because YouTube was a prominent theme in the discussions with the tween girls and there were numerous local and non-local YouTubers that

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Table 1 Research Sample Focus group

Focus group size

Participants

Relationship

A

5

Gem (11 years old) Kim (11 years old) Penny (11 years old) Nicole (10 years old) Victoria (10 years old)

All enrolled in the same tuition centre, but some of the girls did not know each other because they were in different standards or classes.

B (follow-up focus group)2

2

Gem (11 years old) Penny (11 years old)

Enrolled in the same tuition centre and class.

C

2

Ellie (8 years old) Lily (8 years old)

Enrolled in the same tuition centre and class.

D

3

Emily (11 years old) Fee (12 years old) Velda (12 years old)

Enrolled in the same tuition centre and class.

E

2

Han (8 years old) Eve (8 years old)

Childhood friends.

F

2

Alison (10 years old) Felly (9 years old)

Did not know each other prior to the focus group.

G

3

Ashley (9 years old) Eva (12 years old) Kira (11 years old)

A pair of siblings and their childhood friend.

H

2

Michelle (8 years old) Ray (8 years old)

Did not know each other prior to the focus group.

I

3

Aria (12 years old) Maddison (12 years old) Sophia (11 years old)

Classmates and one church friend.

J

2

Grace (10 years old) Winnie (8 years old)

Schoolmates. Both their mothers were best friends since primary school.

K

3

Charlotte (11 years old) Lola (11 years old) Ruien (11 years old)

Enrolled in the same tuition centre and class.

L

2

Brie (10 years old) Sophie (8 years old)

Siblings

were brought up by them, Chap. 3 also consists of a brief content analysis of the videos by the girls’ favourite YouTubers. It was through the process of watching the videos uploaded by the tween girls’ favourite YouTubers that I gained a better

2 I conducted this additional follow-up focus group because Gem and Penny (both 11 years old), who were both initially from Focus group A, could not express themselves fully given the initial focus group size of five girls.

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understanding of the haul videos3 and the ‘DIY ethic’ that the tween girls highlighted were commonly employed by their favourite young female YouTubers. It was through this process that also showed how the tween girls had mainly enjoyed YouTube videos that subscribed to a specific trajectory of girlhood.

Research Position When working with children, Westcott and Littleton (2005:141) urge researchers to move towards “conceptual clarity” and go on to explain that researchers are seldom explicit about how they perceive the interview context, what model of the child they assume or invoke, how they conceptualise the interviewer’s role, and the processes by which they create meaning from what is said in interviews.

Here, I attend to the “processes of analysis, writing and reporting” (Alldred and Burman 2005:176–193) as an adult, female, Singaporean early career researcher. In response to several studies that outline an over-reliance on the adult researcher’s point of view when relating accounts of girlhood, I draw upon Alldred and Burman (2005:187–188) to emphasise that “researchers’ personal interpretations […] emerge as crucial to the determination of interpretive emphasis.” Young Singaporean girls’ accounts of how they wish to dress encompass social and culturally-specific meanings, and the usefulness of these findings is dependent on the ability of the researcher to connect these microlevel interactions with the “macrolevel of broader social conditions and meanings” (Alldred and Burman 2005:188). Without wanting to naturalise the role of the researcher in such a project, my Singaporean heritage has a useful role to play. Having grown up and completing most of my education in Singapore, I noticed that although certain aspects of girlhood have changed, there are elements that are still deeply embedded and play a pivotal part in the construction of girlhood today. Parental pressures on education and the need to excel academically are some of the enduring features of girl/childhood in Singapore. It was in sharing some of these similar experiences across time that also helped to build a positive relationship with the tween girls both in and outside of the focus groups. There were a few occasions that some of the girls stayed back after their focus group sessions to speak to me, because they wanted to know how I studied for my PSLE, and as one 12-year-old girl asked, how I “managed” to get into university. They felt that they were able to relate to me, knowing that I was a girl who spent most of my formative years in Singapore. Our rapport was built on what the girls felt were similar difficulties and life experiences.

3

Haul videos are usually uploaded by YouTubers to showcase products they have purchased in a shopping trip. This may range from video games to new cosmetic products. I discuss this in more detail in Chap. 3.

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Chapter Outline This introductory chapter established the key concerns of the book and set the background upon which this research on tween girls’ dressing in Singapore was built. There has been a lack of research on what girls want to wear, and girls’ cultural or fashioned identities in Singapore are often left out of consideration; in Singapore, girls are mainly understood to have roles and identities as students. While studies on girls’ adult-like dressing are Western-centric, young Singaporean girls’ voices on this matter are absent and the values and meanings that young Singaporean girls attach to their dressing and how adult-like clothing may mean different things in their social worlds has been left out. This introduction also includes an account of the research methodology that the research project was based upon. As much of the research on tween girls’ dressing has relied on theory, and/or research with older girls, teenagers and women (Jackson et al. 2013), the methodology section provides a greater discussion outlining the ways that a girl-centred approach is pivotal for research on tween girls’ dressing in contexts such as Singapore. The following chapter, Chap. 1, will critically examine the discourse of sexualisation that has be argued to gain hegemonic status (Renold & Ringrose 2013) in the way that girls’ adult-like dressing is being understood. At a time where “girls can no longer be seen as simply socialised into their appropriate gender roles” (Jones 1993:159), Chap. 1 attends to how tween girls are seen to be offered a range of ideas from Western popular culture, the raunchy celebrity culture and tween consumer culture on how to dress. In the discourse of sexualisation, these are primary sources that place pressures on girls to fashion themselves after adults before they are ready to do so. However, Chap. 1 also addresses how girls’ adult-like dressing when presented as a process and outcome of premature sexualisation is problematic (Tsaliki 2016). More clearly, Chap. 1 examines how the discourse of sexualisation “over-simplifies and obfuscates related concerns around girls, bodies, sex and sexuality in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference” (Renold & Ringrose 2011:391). Furthermore, given that the discourse of sexualisation is Western-centric, there is a need for more care in applying this discourse to understand girls’ dressing in contexts like Singapore (Tsaliki 2016). As emphasised in Jackson, Vares and Gill’s (2011:139) work, there is a need to allow for “contradiction, complexity and diversity” in how tween girls approach and interact with (adult-like) clothing in current scholarship. Extending the work of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, where the experiences of girl/childhood should not be assumed as homogenous, Chap. 2 outlines the sociocultural domains of what it means to grow up as a girl in Singapore. As Jenks (1996) elaborates, there are a variety of childhoods that exist over different social locations and across time, and even within the same context. In mapping the contours of childhood, consumption and femininity, Chap. 2 illuminates how girls in Singapore encompass a unique set of experiences and circumstances. This chapter demonstrates why tween girls’ dressing in Singapore is a topic of interest that demands a more culturally-specific approach. Together, both Chaps. 1 and 2 illuminate how solely

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relying on the discourse of sexualisation to understand and interpret tween girls’ adult-like dressing is an inadequate approach. The findings of this research will be presented in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 of this book. Chapter 3 first examines tween girls’ dressing from a popular culture paradigm. It attends to the popular argument in the discourse of sexualisation that girls are heavily influenced and adversely affected by the images that they see on Western popular culture. However, Chap. 3 highlights that girls’ popular culture consumption in Singapore is more likely to be a pastiche of East and West, a cultural nuance that has not been accounted for in the sexualisation-of-girls argument. This chapter problematises the widely circulating view that girls are heavily influenced, and adversely affected by Western popular culture on what can be defined as traditional popular media (i.e. television, books, magazines). Given the changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives, the girls in the study were also found to spend most of their time on the video-sharing site YouTube. Through the themes of fashion, beauty and behaviour, YouTube/YouTubers were found to have “soft power” (Chua 2012:119) over tween girls’ dressing. Moving beyond a popular culture paradigm, Chap. 4 underscores that YouTube is only one of the ways that the girls in the study are exposed to and internalise messages about young femininities. This chapter provides a cultural perspective of tween girls’ dress, which shows how girls’ dressing in Singapore can be better understood in relation to the three themes of aspiration, allowance, and affiliation. While there may be elements present in YouTube videos that encourage tween girls to fashion themselves after adults, Chap. 4 addresses how girls’ dressing and the way girls want to fashion themselves is more likely to be informed by a range of economic, social and cultural factors that are of relevance to Singapore. This chapter sheds light not only on the importance of clothing and clothing style in girls’ everyday lives, it also illuminates what having certain types of clothing meant amongst the tween girls in the study. It was mainly through clothes that the young girl participants made sense of class and social mobility (i.e. what it means to be rich and afford more clothing). Chapter 5 delves into girls’ interpretive repertoires (Wetherell & Potter 1992) of what it means for young girls today to fashion themselves after adults. Research on children’s dressing often fails to look at “children themselves, whether by talking with them, [or] through observation of their negotiations in commercial space” (Martens et al. 2004:159). Girls’ dressing has also tended to be studied through an analysis of the apparel being marketed to them or the proliferation of sexualised images on popular media. In addition to how young Singaporean girls’ perspectives on this topic are important, this chapter pays attention to the ways that a number of girls in the study had deliberately avoided discourses of adultification or sexualisation when they talked about their own clothing. In the words of Projansky (2014:6), this book avoids a “spectacularization” of girls’ adult-like dressing. In examining what it means for young girls when they fashion themselves after adults from their own unique perspectives, this book emphasises in the concluding chapter that it does not offer any pronouncements on whether young Singaporean girls should dress in a particular way, or whether certain dressing styles are better than others. Rather, this book prioritises girls’ complex and often

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contradictory perspectives on what it means for them when they fashion themselves after adults. The girls in the study were not passive recipients of a sexualised, hyperfeminised culture when it comes to their own dressing and they moved in and out of “‘older’ sexualities” (Renold & Ringrose 2011:392) when discussing adult-like dressing and what girls their age should be allowed to wear. Following Jackson et al.’s (2013:144–145) suggestion, this book aims to “open up spaces to explore meanings of femininity that escape limiting, repressive boundaries”, especially where the sexualisation-of-girls discourse has become a dominant way to discuss girls’ adult-like dressing. The concluding chapter, Chap. 6, also addresses how an examination of girls and their dressing in Singapore can be useful for advancing research on girls, girlhood and girls’ young femininities. It highlights how a move toward Asia, or any context outside the West, may be “a possible way of shifting points of reference” (Chen 2010:216), in order to break away from the active-passive binary, or the sexualisationof-girls discourse that has dictated much of the understandings of girls’ adult-like dressing. In addition to the importance of not over-relying on the Western discourse of sexualisation, Chap. 6 also underscores that a better way of understanding tween girls’ dressing would be to acknowledge the complexities and contentions that emerge from liminal space that tween girls are likely occupy. Situated inbetween childhood and teenhood, tween girls are also at centre of discourses not limited to childhood, girlhood, popular culture, consumption and gendered ideas of respectability. Overall, this book aims to refine and advance the way that scholars and adults have thought about and conceptualised tween girls’ dressing. While understandings from the discourse of sexualisation are useful, girls’ desires to fashion themselves after adults in Singapore overlap with many other dimensions, such as their aspirations for some sense of style, the need to establish themselves as a group of young female subjects and to affiliate with a certain class or group of girls. There are nuances to girls’ dressing in the context of Singapore that may be overlooked when the sexualisation-of-girls argument is used as a sole lens to understand girls’ adult-like dressing.

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Contents

1 Understanding Girls’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Discourse of Sexualisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western Popular Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Traditional’ Popular Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Raunchy Celebrity Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tween Consumer Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Commodification of the Tween Girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The ‘Unknowing’ Tween . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Discourse of Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critiques of the Sexualisation-Of-Girls Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Definition of Sexualisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sexualisation as a Linear Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Problems of a Discourse of Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Class and the Discourse of Sexualisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postfeminism and Girls’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 2 3 4 5 7 9 9 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 20 21

2 Girlhood in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western Dominant Accounts of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Childhood in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Population Policies and Childhood in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Education Policies and Childhood in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consumption and Adult-Like Clothing for Girls in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . Asian Values and the Culture of Consumption in Singapore . . . . . . . . . Consumption and Social Class in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Femininity in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contesting Femininities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 25 26 28 29 31 33 33 37 39 39 42

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 YouTube and Girls’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Girls’ Popular Culture Consumption in Singapore: A Pastiche of East and West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptualising Girls’ Popular Culture Consumption in Singapore . . . . . The Changing Mediascapes in Tween Girls’ Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . YouTube as an Emergent Popular Media Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tween Girls’ Spectatorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “I Just Look at the YouTubers”: Popular YouTubers/YouTube Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Local Singaporean YouTubers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Popular Western YouTubers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rethinking YouTube and Tween Girls’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The DIY Ethos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 47 48 53 54 56 59 60 61 63 66 67 68 70

4 A Cultural Perspective of Tween Girls’ Dress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Aspirations of Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Girls’ Definition of Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Style as Necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Style Through Boundary-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Style as a Youthful Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Allowances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Girls and Brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Purchasing New Clothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Girls as Reflexive and ‘Sensible’ Consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Affiliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Class, Social Mobility and Adult-Like Clothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5 Girls’ Interpretive Repertoires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Confidence Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Effort in the Production of Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Confidence and Not Contentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Accoutrement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Girls and Nail Polish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hair and Heels—Diversity, Complexity and Contradiction . . . . . . . . . . Makeup as Accoutrement: “No, No. Just Don’t Wear Makeup” . . . . . . Adultification as Something Extrinsic: “They Dress Too Old” . . . . . . . . . . Critical Readings of Celebrities’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105 105 106 108 110 112 112 114 117 122 123

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Critical Readings of Other Girls’ Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reframing Adult-Like Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

124 128 130 132

6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Slowing Down’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existing Inbetween . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Asia as Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Girls’ Feminism and Postfeminism in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 137 140 141 144 145

Correction to: Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Understanding Girls’ Dressing

Introduction As emphasised earlier, tween girls’ dressing has been the topic of popular discussion in especially the West. In particular, scholars like Renold and Ringrose (2013: 248) point out that a discourse of sexualisation has gained “hegemonic status” in the way that girls’ adult-like dressing is being discussed. As argued by Kennedy and Coulter (2018: 1), there is a “continued spectacularization of tweenhood as an idealized form of white feminine beauty tied to consumer culture, and one that shores up contradictory notions of the can-do/at-risk girl binary.” There are continuities of the argument that tween girls are inappropriately sexualised when they fashion themselves after adults and this is a cause for concern as girls this age are argued to be unable to fully comprehend a range of physical, psychological and sexual dangers that they may expose themselves to when they fashion themselves after adults. This chapter unpacks and critically examines the discourse of sexualisation, a primary way that tween girls’ adult-like dressing has been understood. It illuminates how in the discourse of sexualisation, tween girls are argued to be offered a range of ideas from Western popular culture, the raunchy celebrity culture and tween consumer culture on how to dress. It discusses the possible implications of girls’ adult-like dressing “which go beyond seeing girls as ‘disadvantaged’ and socialised within oppressive patriarchal structures” (Jones 1993: 157). In the sexualisationof-girls discourse, there are a number of sources that have been identified to place pressures on girls to adopt forms of adult sexuality before they are ready to do so. While this chapter underscores the ways that the discourse of sexualisation has accompanied the growing visibility and desire of girls to fashion themselves after adults, it also acknowledges that the discourse of sexualisation as a dominant lens through which to understand girls’ dressing and why girls might want to fashion themselves after adults may be myopic and conceptually flawed. Besides laying the groundwork on the common debates surrounding girls’ adult-like dressing, this chapter acknowledges that there are several specificities of girlhood that the discourse © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_1

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of sexualisation as part of the ‘stock of knowledge’ from the West may be unable to account for. An extension of the work in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, Jones (1993: 159) asserts that “any talk of ‘girls’ must be seen as problematic because of its shifting meanings.” In critically examining the dominant debates in the discourse of sexualisation, this chapter addresses why there is a need to remain prudent about the sexualisation-of-girls argument and establish a productive space for thinking about how girls are not always passive recipients of a sexualised, hyper-feminised culture.

The Discourse of Sexualisation I begin this chapter by first outlining the ways that girls’ adult-like dressing has been woven into and presented as part of the discourse of sexualisation. Entwistle (2000: 181) highlights that “if adornment is close to the body, it would seem to go without saying that it is close to sexuality.” She explains that sexuality is often intertwined with the way one’s body looks, and thus, the clothing that individuals wear is “potentially at least, sexually charged” (Entwistle 2000: 181). Such links to girls’ adult-like dressing are often made in the discourse of sexualisation. In addition to academic literature from the West where most scholarship on girls’ dressing is located, the following sections include discussions from three formal inquiries about girls’ sexualisation from the US, UK and Australia. The APA Task Force’s report (2010) (US), the Bailey Review (2011) (UK) and the Report on Corporate Paedophilia (2006b) (Australia) have significantly contributed to understandings of girls’ adult-like dressing; all three inquiries formed an early authoritative source for many scholarly articles (see Barker and Duschinsky 2012; Faulkner 2010; Renold and Ringrose 2013), as well as other formal inquiries into the sexualisation of young girls (see the SPARK Movement in America and the Commissioner for Children and Young People’s 2013 inquiry into the sexualization of children in Western Australia). More importantly, all three formal inquiries while concerned with girls’ sexualisation dedicate a significant part of their reports to addressing the impact and outcomes for young girls when they want to fashion themselves after adults. The APA Task Force’s report (2010) on sexualisation was originally developed to understand the physical, psychological and emotional impacts that an increasingly sexualised culture had on young girls in the US. Olfman (2009: 3) highlighted that the APA Task Force’s report (2010) brought together an “expertise of leading authorities on gender and sexual development” to investigate the risks to children growing up in an increasingly sexualised culture. The Bailey Review (2011), commissioned by the UK government, was a response to children who were believed to be pressured to grow up more quickly. In addition to looking into the multiple ways that children’s lives were being saturated with age-inappropriate products, the Bailey Review (2011) also included the responses from parents who felt that their children were growing up more quickly than before. The Report on Corporate Paedophilia (2006) was developed by The Australia Institute, a think tank for Australian public policy. According to Egan and Hawkes (2008a), this report drew attention to how girls were being

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fashioned in the advertising industry, initiating public discourse and concern over the commodification and adultification of young girls in advertisements in Australia. Because the anxieties over the sexualisation of girls or girls’ dressing appear across disciplines (i.e. sociology, psychology, child development studies, etc.), this chapter first provides a comprehensive review of the ways in which tween girls’ adult-like dressing has been popularly discussed in commissioned reports, academic scholarship and the mass media and unpacks the “affective wave of public anxiety over child [and more importantly girls’] ‘sexualisation’” (Ringrose 2013: 42).

Western Popular Culture In the analyses of media and mediated cultures amongst young girls, Western popular culture is often identified as one of the prevailing ways through which girls learn to fashion themselves after adults. Jackson and Vares (2015b) note how current public and academic interest in girls’ consumption of popular culture often converge on a sexualisation-of-girls focus. Steinberg and Kincheloe (1997: 27) explain that “kinderculture” today is inextricably linked with popular culture/media, with “information saturation” in the form of TV shows, movies, magazines and music now depicting the new experience of childhood. The relationship between girls and their popular culture consumption is often guided by the understanding that the content in Western popular culture is increasingly sexualised and this has mainly harmful effects for young girls (Jackson and Vares 2015b). The APA Task Force’s report (2010) identifies Western popular culture as one of the main sources of girls’ adult-like dressing; authors Zurbriggen et al. (2010) claim that Western television programmes, music videos, lyrics, movies, magazines and advertising inundate young girls today with the wrong messages, teaching them that it is normal for women to be treated and portrayed as sex/-ual objects. Murnen and Smolak (2013: 239) similarly explain that Western popular culture can socialise young girls to believe that being attractive to men should be of importance, and that there is an image that they should live up to in order to be considered attractive. There is worry that for young girls to consider themselves desirable, they may find themselves having to subscribe to the mass-mediated image of women “having thin hips and waist, large breasts and long legs” (Murnen and Smolak 2013: 239–240). In a similar vein, the Bailey Review (2011) (UK) attends to the increasing number of media channels through which children may be exposed to adult-like and sexualised images in the UK. As a result of the growing number of channels made available and accessible to young children, Bailey (2011) takes into consideration the growing presence of sexual material during family-friendly viewing times on television. More specifically, the review is concerned about the eroding ‘watershed’ of television. As described in the review’s Call for Evidence, “the television watershed is an industry standard and is well known and understood by the audience […] In all but exceptional circumstances, programmes before 9 pm are suitable for general

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audiences including children” (Bailey 2011: 29). However, from its survey findings, the Bailey Review (2011) found that 41 per cent of the parents in Britain had seen programmes or advertisements that they felt were unsuitable or age-inappropriate for their children before 9 pm. This coincides with a 2007 Kaiser Family Foundation study that found “over half of the parents surveyed were worried about the sexual content that their children were exposed to on TV” (Levin 2009: 81). Levin (2009: 81) highlights that parents and professionals alike are increasingly concerned about the loss of control over how children are being “introduced to ideas about sex and sexuality.” Further, Levin (2009: 81–82) underscores that the sexualised images in Western popular culture and media receive “far less attention, criticism, or controversy than violence.” This is especially when talk about sex and sexuality “often feels more difficult and more complex” and “many adults struggle to talk openly and comfortably about sex and sexuality with other adults, let alone with their children” (Levin 2009: 85).

‘Traditional’ Popular Media In the discourse of sexualisation, the argument that Western popular culture is a prominent source that is able to influence girls’ dressing mainly pertains to what can be found on traditional popular media, such as books, television, movies and magazines. Between 1990 and 2006, Maine (2009: 69) found that there was a trend for women to be presented in highly sexualised ways in what can be defined as traditional popular media. Drawing her examples from a study on G, PG and PG-131 movies in the US, she notes that as opposed to the male roles (who were given more screen time and dialogue), young female characters in films were best described as taking up peripheral role of the “eye candy” (Maine 2009: 69), further embellished by their hyper-sexual dressing. She highlights that “females were more than five times as likely to be clad in sexually revealing outfits, typically covering a distorted, very thin body” (Maine 2009: 69). Other authors concerned with Western popular media similarly observe that female characters in contemporary Disney film like Pocahontas have “more cleavage, fewer clothes, and is much sexier than Cinderella ever was” (Levin 2009: 80). Authors like McRobbie (2008) also scrutinised the ways that femininity has been portrayed for young girls in teen/tween magazines. According to her, magazines like Bliss and Sugar in the UK commonly popularise objects of adult or teen beautification, such as thong-style underwear, bikinis, body lotion and lipstick for tween girls. She further illustrates that as written columns in teen and tween girl magazines are gradually phased out, magazine pages are now populated with adult-like fashion spreads, including “gossip, pop music, boy bands and girl stars [for young girls] 1

Film classification categories from the United States: G for ‘General Audience’; PG for ‘Parental Guidance Suggested’; and PG-13 for ‘Parental Guidance strongly suggested for children under 13’ (Motion Picture Association of America 2017).

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to emulate” (McRobbie 2008: 545). Such images may indirectly manufacture and popularise a “perilous way” to think about young femininity, conflating femininity for young girls with adult fashion items “such as crop tops, thongs, low-rider jeans, tiny bikinis, and provocative T-shirts” (McRobbie 2008: 545). Scholars like Jackson and Westrupp (2010: 357) similarly highlight that while such popular culture material open up possibilities for “sexually savvy girls”, feelings of “(hetero)sexual selfsurveillance” may still be present. This is where rather than freely chosen, Jackson and Westrupp (2010: 373) argue that what is often sold as ‘empowering’ in magazines “camouflages the regulatory power of normative heterosexuality”, where girls feel that they have to portray themselves in certain ways or know about certain things, such as how to dress up like adults or how to use makeup. Expecting that a majority of girls would at least have read of one the popular tweengirl magazines, Rush and La Nauze (2006a: 1), authors of the Report on Corporate Paedophilia (Australia) assert that there is power behind traditional popular media to sexualise young viewers/readers. According to the authors, such popular culture material from the West can teach tween girls to “dance in sexually provocative ways”, and to “idolise [and emulate] highly sexualised women such as Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan” (Rush and La Nauze 2006a: 35). Indeed, Western female celebrities have been criticised for normalising the adultification of girlhood and promoting age-inappropriate, “hypersexualised clothing” to grade-school girls all over the world (Durham 2008: 28–29). Postman (1994), who is concerned about the ‘erosion’ of childhood also argued that Western television programmes provide preadolescent girls access to sexual information and adult imagery at an age when they are incapable of fully understanding or dealing with such information. He notes that this is especially when “children [on such shows] do not differ significantly in their interests, language, dress, or sexuality from the adults” (Postman 1994: 122–123).

The Raunchy Celebrity Culture Closely related to the forms of young femininities present in Western popular culture on traditional popular media, there are claims that it is the raunchy celebrity culture that provides tween girls with an “avalanche of material” to engage with the figure of the ‘sexy’ adult-like girl (Jackson et al. 2013: 146). As noted by Durham (2008), author of the popular book The Lolita Effect, the emergence of the Lolita—the image or figure of the “sexy little girl”—accompanies the growth and popularity of Western popular culture. More specifically, she describes the Lolita as the baby-faced nymphet with preternaturally voluptuous curves, the one whose scantily clad body gyrates in music videos, poses provocatively on teen magazine covers, and populates cinema and television screens around the globe. (Durham 2008: 24).

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According to Durham (2008: 25), the Lolita “has become an everyday allusion, a shorthand cultural reference to a prematurely, even inappropriately, sexual little girl— that is, a girl who is by legal definition not yet an adult and is therefore outlawed from sexual activity.” Further complicating this, she highlights that the Lolita takes on “various incarnations”—ranging from the packaging and marketing of idols such as Britney Spears, to the “sex-kittenish” animated girls of Japanese anime (Durham 2008: 24). Durham (2008: 24) questions whether such images encourage young girls to adopt some form of “grown-up eroticism and sexuality” before they are mentally and physically prepared to do so. Scholars concerned with the construction of young femininities in popular media have similarly noted how the young female idol is often portrayed as a sex symbol, with the frequent adornment of bra tops, brief shorts, mini-skirts and body-contouring dresses (see Evans and Riley 2012; Jackson et al. 2013). Noticing that celebrities can serve as an inspiration for young girls on how to dress, authors of the Report on Corporate Paedophilia, Rush and La Nauze (2006a) have expressed worry over the messages that girls might receive from such images, which includes messages such as “being sexy [and dressing like adult women] is the way to be successful and feel good about oneself” (Rush and La Nauze 2006a: 2). Relatedly, a number of feminist media scholars have identified how young female celebrities are labelled as ‘trainwrecks’ when they display characteristics of an “undesirable, out of control, over-sexualised femininity” (Jackson et al. 2016: 549). Authors like Jackson et al. (2016) observed how Miley Cyrus’s “sexually controversial” (Jackson et al. 2016: 547) performance at the 2013 Music Video Awards “evoked scrutiny, chastisement and, sometimes, affectively charged expression of outrage and disgust” (Jackson et al. 2016: 548) from many different social groups. Cyrus’s performance at this award featured her twerking and gyrating with a large foam finger on her hand, scantily clad in “flesh-toned underthings” (Michaels 2013: n.p.). While Cyrus’s previous role as Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel was “an icon of idealised ‘good girl’ femininity”, Jackson and Vares (2013: 143) note that Cyrus provocative dancing at the 2013 Music Video Awards strongly contradicted her previous image. In particular, the authors note that there was a “unifying concern about the effect of Cyrus’ hypersexualised performances on the young girls who have long comprised her main audience” (Jackson et al. 2016: 548). Further, the raunchy celebrity culture is not exclusive to young adult female celebrities. Toddlers and Tiaras, a US reality television show following the families and lives of child pageant contestants, lasted seven seasons. It had several spinoffs, including Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which focused on Alana Thompson, a popular child pageant contestant who was only six when the filming started (Gunter 2014). There was much controversy, from child psychologists to news media outlets, about the welfare of these contestants “some as young as four, [who] wore adult makeup, padded bras and tight dresses and acted far older than their actual age” (Halper 2015: 307). Scholars like Maine (2009: 68), concerned about the sexualisation of childhood, argue that it is likely that “beauty pageants for preschool girls introduce them to a world of sexual objectification and the crafting of a false self before they are even in school.” Such considerations, in fact, prompted the French government to ban child

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beauty pageants in 2013 on the grounds that they promote the hyper-sexualisation of girls and subject preadolescent girls to the scrutiny of what it means to be beautiful in the adult world (BBC 2013).

Tween Consumer Culture While not discounting the role of Western media and mediated cultures, other scholars like Cook and Kaiser (2004) argue that girls’ adult-like dressing should be studied more closely alongside processes of commercialisation and consumption. They explain that this is because tween girls can no longer be understood apart from their consumption activities or their role as consumers. As Driscoll (2002: 218) surmised, “feminine adolescence [is now often] channelled into and constituted in consumption.” The term ‘tween’ has also been argued by some scholars to more accurately represent a “consumer-media label” (MacDonald 2014: 44). Harris (2005: 212) similarly notes how “tweenie” as a site of “feminine child-ness” and “girl-ness” is highly led by consumption and to many girls ought “be acquired through the purchase of the right products” (Harris 2005: 212). In tracing the emergence of ‘tween’ as a consumer label, Cook and Kaiser (2004: 206) highlight that it was in the early 1990s that clothing makers and entrepreneurs began capitalising on this group of children, expounding on preadolescent “sartorial and bodily practices.” This defined a space in the market, creating a demand for tween girls’ products. Writing at that time, Postman (1994) articulated some worry about the ‘disappearing child’, which he claimed was accelerated by the children’s clothing industry adultifying what was once considered to be children’s apparel. He hypothesised a loss of childhood for children who do not differ significantly from adults in both dressing and hence, sexuality. However, profit-motivated advertisers and retailers continue to value tweens as “an influential market with growing power to influence parental choices” and “a market segment […] with increasing disposable income and power to purchase particular goods” (Kline 1995: 115) today. In her book Born to Buy, Schor (2004: 22) highlights the “explosion of youth spending”, noting how girls are becoming shoppers at younger ages. She elaborates: “six to twelve-year-olds are estimated to visit stores two to three times per week and to put six items into the shopping cart each time they go” (Schor 2004: 23). Pugh (2009: 4) whose work analyses the longing and belonging of children also observes how “many moments of childhood now involve the act of buying, from daily experiences to symbolic rituals, from transportation to lunches to birthdays.” In consideration of these statements, the Bailey Review (2011) argues that another source of sexualisation stems from the commercial and profit-motivated world of marketers—an extension of the content found in Western popular culture on traditional popular media. Durham (2008) similarly notes that while celebrity Paris Hilton and the pop-group Pussy Cat Dolls as idols in Western popular culture can encourage

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young girls to fashion themselves like adults, it is the marketers like Abercrombie & Fitch who ultimately materialise this, by producing thong underwear for seven to ten-year-old girls, with suggestive slogans such as ‘Wink, Wink’ and ‘Eye Candy’ printed on them (Huff 2011). Schor (2004: 55) underscores that one of the popular marketing tactics today is “age compression”: the practice of pushing products originally designed for adults or teens to tweens. Boocock and Scott (2005: 225) also note that there has been an “aggressive promotion of cosmetics and elaborate hairstyling as well as high-heeled shoes, low-rise jeans, miniskirts and other provocative clothing” for preteen girls. Pugh’s (2009: 6–10) work on an “economy of dignity” further complicates tween commercialisation and consumption, as she recognises the possibility that girls may find a need to purchase adult-like or sexualised products in order to fit in and be seen or heard amongst their peers. Schor (2004) argues that it may be the result of a prolific tween consumer culture that children today now believe clothes and brands are able to define who they are; the preteen girls in her study displayed a lot more “brand affinity” than any of the other age groups (Schor 2004: 13). According to her, “children’s [and girls’] social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming”, and brands and consumer products have come to determine who is ‘hot’ and who is not, and “who deserves to have friends, or social status” (Schor 2004: 11). It is to these understandings of the consumer landscape that government commissioned reports like the Bailey Review (2011) urge “irresponsible” (Bailey 2011: 6) marketers to cut back (and better still, eliminate) adult imagery and ‘ageinappropriate’ consumer products that are targeted at tween-aged girls. The Bailey Review (2011) claimed that messages from retailers are compelling children to consume more than before, also creating pressures for tween girls to buy more nonessential, ‘adult’ items, such as clothes, makeup or perfume. The review goes a step further to use the metaphor ‘wallpaper’ to describe how sexualised imagery and products may have already pervaded and become “a mainstream part of children’s lives, forming the ‘wallpaper’ or backdrop to their everyday activities” (Bailey 2011: 23). The way the review uses the metaphor ‘wallpaper’ is important, because it reflects how adult-like clothes, accessories and other consumables may have already formed the background to tween-aged girls’ lives, with parents and children no longer actively registering such consumption (Bailey 2011: 23). It is in response to this passivity that the Bailey Review (2011) and other major inquiries2 demand for more action against commercial retailers, given that both children and adults may no longer be able to discern the consumption of such products.

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See Sexualisation of Children and its Impact on their Wellbeing report (2012) and the Sexualisation of Children report (2014) from the Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Western Australia.

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The Commodification of the Tween Girl While the discussion above addressed the type of consumer products that are being sold to tween girls, girls’ adult-like dressing has also been argued to take place as a result of the commodification of the tween girl. As highlighted in Maine’s work (2009: 69), “advertising that is directed at tweens … [often] exploits their desire to be seen as older and more independent by using models that look like sexualised teens. Preteens are thus encouraged to act, dress, think, and spend money like teens.” Rush and La Nauze (2006b), authors of the Report on Corporate Paedophilia (2006b), frown upon the practice of young girls striking adult-like poses for magazine covers, where girls are also commonly featured with heavy makeup. It is suggested that the clothing and poses that young girls are made to wear often reference forms of adult femininity or sexuality. Rush and La Nauze (2006b) claim that this kind of advertising, which is devised to draw specific attention to a physical feature of the child, encompasses a sexualising effect that young girls may be unaware of. It is a dramatic shift from the earlier ideas or roles of children, where the child is supposed to lack consciousness about his or her own body (Freeman-Green 2006). Authors Rush and La Nauze (2006b) also argue that it should be of larger concern that corporate-led adultification can lead to misleading messages that children and in particular girls are receiving about sex and sexuality. Young girls may easily misconstrue sex and sexuality to be a commodity or an instrument, given the frequent exposure to the ‘adult’ images of other children or girls in advertisements. Under these conditions, Rush and La Nauze (2006b: 1) emphasise that there is always a need to critically question whose interests does “sexualisation serve and at whose expense it occurs.”

The ‘Unknowing’ Tween Thus far, the chapter has discussed the dominant ways that girls’ adult-like dressing is presented as part of the discourse of sexualisation. The discourse of sexualisation acknowledges that girls are offered a range of ideas on how they should be fashioning themselves from Western popular culture, its raunchy celebrity culture and the growth of a tween consumer culture. The ‘problem’ of tween girls fashioning themselves after adults is aptly summarised by Egan and Hawkes (2008a): preteen girls seeking the need to adultify themselves (through their clothing or otherwise) is taken to be both a process and outcome of premature sexualisation, which should be of concern especially when the young girl subject, an unknowing victim, is uncertain about the risks of sexualisation. The concept of the ‘unknowing’ young girl subject is primarily derived from theories of developmental psychology. Here, processes of sexualisation are detrimental, because young, preadolescent girls are argued to still be negotiating their sense of self. Scholars like Gruber and Grube (2000) and Zurbriggen et al. (2010) concerned

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with child development suggest that this is a critical period of time, where girls’ cognitive skills have yet to be “fully developed” (Gruber and Grube 2000: 211); this limits their ability to discern and analyse the sexualising messages found in a number of sources. Further, Durham (2008: 29) argues that as opposed to celebratory readings about the knowingness of girls who actively choose to fashion themselves after adults, there will always be young girls who are unable to tell that sexualised representations of women and girls on the media are fabricated, “sensationalised and unrealistic.” The APA Task Force’s report (2010) warns that Western popular culture might be indirectly socialising tween-aged girls into specific and unattainable physical appearances, that confuses adult sexiness as healthy sexuality (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). Newman (2009: 80) similarly acknowledges that children learn by observation, and cumulative exposure to sexualised imagery can reinforce “a particular female self-image and identity.” Given that few women meet the socially-constructed and unattainable cultural standards for an attractive, sexy appearance (Wolf 1991), the inevitable comparison to the female subjects on traditional popular media has also been argued to lead to feelings of inadequacy and shame amongst young girls (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). Calvert and Wilson (2008) have found that girls select or consume media content with the goal to learn about femininities, self-evaluate and compare themselves to other girls or young women. Tiggemann and Slater (2014) found that social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace had a large impact on girls’ ideas of body image, although more research is needed in this area as these sites are no longer the most commonly used by tween girls today (a point I discuss in more detail in Chap. 3). More recently, Booker et al. (2018) found that in the UK, girls’ use social media more than boys and at age 10, they were more likely experience social-emotional difficulties that could have lasting impacts. Drawing on several clinical studies, scholars like Lucas et al. (1991) similarly traced an increase in the incidence of anorexia nervosa amongst young girls, paralleling changes in fashion and idealised body image over a 50-year period. According to Rush (2009), an early-onset of eating disorders is also highly related to the way young girls perceive their bodies. While agreeing that the reasons for eating-disorders in younger girls are more complex, Rush (2009) cites the Australian Medical Association’s Position Statement on Body Image and Health, stating that popular media and advertising greatly contributes to this problem in their “portrayals of physical perfection” (AMA 2009: 1). Levin (2009: 84) also argues that “while children struggle to make sense of mature sexual content, they are robbed of valuable time for age-appropriate developmental tasks.” While there are worries that young girls may equate physical appearances and attractiveness with social success when they fashion themselves after adults, these worries extend to how they may also be drawn away from developing other facets of their everyday lives, such as opportunities for sports or academic development. The APA Task Force’s report (2010) suggests that when young girls learn to prioritise certain rewards (such as the attention that they might receive when they fashion themselves after adults) over others (such as academic accomplishment), they may inadvertently and unknowingly short-change their future educational and occupational opportunities. Murnen and Smolak (2013: 246) similarly acknowledge that

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the proclivities of girls to fashion themselves after adults may divert their energy away from other “potentially empowering activities.” Further, what is perceived as more worrying in these studies is how ideas of adult sexuality or femininity are often found to be imposed on girls, rather than knowingly chosen by them (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). This follows Pipher’s (1996) earlier argument that highlighted that young girls are adultifying themselves even earlier than before, facing pressures often subconsciously from magazines, music videos, Western television and movies to fashion themselves after sexy adults. As Levin (2009: 79) elaborates, girls often receive “shallow messages about being female and sexuality from toys and the media. Girls are taught that they should have skinny bodies and that they need to be consumers of clothing, makeup and accessories in order to look pretty, grown-up and sexy.”

A Discourse of Protection One of the common responses in the discourse of sexualisation to the ‘unknowing’ tween-aged girl who is vulnerable to a range of physical, psychological and sexual harm, centres on role of the responsible adult and a discourse of protection. The authors of the APA Task Force’s report (2010) recommended several measures that would help adults and institutions ‘neutralise’ the pervasive power of popular media. Some of these measures include media education and literacy at schools; increased participation in sports; and the establishment of support groups to help young girls “challenge the narrow prescriptions for girls in this culture” (Zurbriggen et al. 2010: 36). Levin (2009: 85) notes that “parents are often told by the wider society (and especially by the industries that markets to children) that it is their job to decide what is appropriate for their children and to protect them from what they believe is not appropriate”. Hawkes and Egan (2008: 193) claim that almost universally, the premature sexualisation of tween girls has been taken to be a damaging and “unwanted consequence of the ‘modern [consumerist] world’” which cannot be avoided and thus, the protection of the child by adults is “the only recourse.” While parents are often seen as the ones primarily allowing or deterring processes of sexualisation, and as such, “the best or only solution to it” (Bragg and Buckingham 2012: 644), Bragg and Buckingham (2012) argue that this might not be such a simple issue. According to them, this is especially when it is through the act of buying that many parents from the West are able to identify with their childhood selves. In purchasing things that their children ask for, parents and adults are able to acknowledge the continuities between their own and children’s childhoods, reminiscing how at a time in their childhoods, they too had wanted to be grown up and had desires for adult goods, cajoling their own parents into making purchases of clothing or makeup (Bragg and Buckingham 2012). Levin (2009: 85) underscores that the task of buying things for children may also be “less difficult for parents in the past when the prevailing cultural messages were more compatible with the values and goals they held for their children.” In interviewing the parents of young children, sources such as the Bailey Review (2011) point out that the

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inevitable growth of children as consumers poses difficult problems for parents who want to be seen as good providers. The review highlighted that many parents succumb to “pester power” (Bailey 2011: 56), regardless of whether they feel that the products for their children are too sexualised or adultified. As many parents wish for their children to have the same things and opportunities as their peers, they have found it increasingly difficult to say no to their children, even when marketers and advertisers consistently push the ‘wrong’ kind of messages, imagery and consumables. And while some parents have stood up against age-inappropriate clothes or consumables, a large majority of parents felt that there is simply “no escape” or “clear space” from sexualised imagery and products where children can once again “be themselves” (Bailey 2011: 23). Given the dual-income families of today, parents may also find it difficult to find the time and energy required to consistently fight the ubiquity and influence that sexualised products and imagery may have over their children’s everyday lives.

Critiques of the Sexualisation-Of-Girls Discourse So far, this chapter not only outlined the ways that girls’ adult-like dressing is often presented as a process or outcome of harmful sexualisation, it also underscored how the concerns over girls’ dressing are heavily dependent on the notion of the ‘unknowing’ tween. However, as I discuss below, there are some problems to the discourse of sexualisation and the sexualisation-of-girls argument. According to Jones’s (1993: 159) feminist research on girls, she argues that “discourses which provide the available positions or ‘ways to be’ (subjectivities) shift in contradictory ways. There is no one way in which girls as a group, or as individuals, can be fixed in our understanding.” More specifically, the sections below will address how many scholars have argued that while popular, the discourse of sexualisation is an over-deterministic framework to understand tween girls’ adult-like dressing. Indeed, arguments contributing to the sexualisation-of-girls discourse have been noted to stem from different ideological currents, with different underlying agendas. Barker and Duschinsky (2012), for example, recommended that the Bailey Review (2011) should be considered a political tool, rather than a commissioned report that addresses the growing number of sexual images seen by young children on the media. Barker and Duschinsky (2012) suggest that the way that the Bailey Review (2011) chastises young girls who might exude any form of sexuality, without acknowledging any social, cultural or economic differences, reflects a conservative “right-wing narrative” (Barker and Duschinsky 2012: 304). Buckingham et al.’s (2010) response to the Scottish government’s report on sexualised goods also found that there appears to be a lack of evidence of ‘sexualised’ consumer products that were targeted specifically at children. The scholars argue that “this is not to suggest that sexual imagery in consumer culture is not widespread, or that children do not consume products surrounded by such imagery” (Buckingham et al. 2010: 39) but rather, the consumer industry alone cannot explain why children

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are being sexualised earlier than before. In noticing that the term ‘sexualisation’ has been “remarkably opaque”, Duschinsky (2013: 254–256) also points out that the contexts in which the term has been used in media and policy texts “attends less to gender inequity than to sexuality as a contaminant of young femininity.” Indeed, the term ‘tween’ in public discourse has almost little or no connotations to young boys. In current scholarship, there has been less concern over what boys aged eight to 12 want to wear, or whether they fashion themselves after adults. Broader shifts in research on sexualisation and tween girls’ adult-like dressing have likewise noted that it is myopic to perceive girls as passive recipients of an adult culture (Bragg and Buckingham 2014; Jackson and Scott 2015). A number of scholars have noted that missing from much of the discussion on girls’ sexualisation is the recognition that girls can be active agents in their social worlds (see Duschinsky 2013; Egan and Hawkes 2009; Jackson and Scott 2015). Correspondingly, scholarship in the recent decade has begun to be more judicious about incorporating girls’ own perspectives and viewpoints in research. Pomerantz (2008) and MacDonald (2016), for instance, both adopted feminist, poststructural ethnographic research methods with the young girls themselves to understand their clothing styles and consumption practices. Renold and Ringrose (2011; 2013) work serves as a useful frame of reference for the following sections; the authors have distilled a number of flaws that appear across literature and the sexualisation-of-girls argument. According to them, the discourse of sexualisation has significant conceptual limitations, namely it: • Codifies almost any sexual expression (e.g. sexual desire) and its related concerns (e.g. body image, sexual violence, etc.) as an effect of and thus evidence for ‘sexualisation’; • Focuses exclusively on the harmful effects of media exposure with little analysis of how girls themselves make meaning of and negotiate the media in their everyday lives; • Produces a ‘scary futurology’ (Smith 2010), with an overemphasis on protectionism, victimisation and objectification; and • Legitimises a heteronormative and linear developmental trajectory of ‘healthy’ female heterosexuality. (Renold and Ringrose 2013: 248).

Although girls’ adult-like dressing is often intertwined and presented as part of the discourse of sexualisation, tween girls fashioning themselves as adults should not be viewed as an exclusive outcome of this. This is even more so in contexts like Singapore, where a gap in research is evident. The following sections will attend to these contentions in more detail, reworking some of the common debates over tween girls’ adult-like dressing. The latter half of the chapter will identify some of the gaps in the sexualisation-of-girls argument, and highlights how other domains and processes may have a larger part to play in tween girls’ dressing in contexts like Singapore. Following Renold and Ringrose’s (2011: 391) work, the following sections scrutinises how the discourse of sexualisation and the sexualisation-of-girls argument “over-simplifies and obfuscates related concerns around girls, bodies, sex and sexuality in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference.”

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The Definition of Sexualisation A number of authors have noted that the term ‘sexualisation’ was not widely known prior to 2005, although it has now been made popular across social, political and policy spheres (Attwood et. al 2013; Tsaliki 2016). Renold and Ringrose (2013) add that ‘sexualisation’ when used as an overarching and blanket term can be problematic; they note that the term ‘sexualisation’ “codifies almost any sexual expression and its related concerns (e.g. body image, sexual violence, etc.) as an effect of and thus evidence for ‘sexualisation’” (Renold and Ringrose 2013: 248). This is further complicated by how the term ‘sexualisation’ has been employed in varied and ambiguous ways, in a number of studies across different disciplines. For instance, a close analysis of the APA Task Force’s report (2010) reveals that sexualisation occurs under four main conditions: when (1) a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behaviour; (2) a person is held to a standard that equate physical attractiveness with being sexy; (3) a person is sexually objectified; and (4) sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person (Zurbriggen et al. 2010: 1). ‘Sexualisation’, however, features differently in the Report on Corporate Paedophilia (2006b). This report defines sexualisation more narrowly as the “act of giving someone or something a sexual character”, hence problematising the ascription of “stereotypical forms of adult sexuality” onto children in advertising (Rush and La Nauze 2006b: 1). In noticing such incongruities, authors Smith and Attwood (2011: 329) contend that the discourse of sexualisation as a primary lens to understand the adultification of tween girls needs to be challenged. They explain that at times, sexualisation expresses a “concern with the speed of development of sexual identity, and at others with a problematic expression of sexuality” (Smith and Attwood 2011: 329). It is also not clear if sexualisation is unproblematic for adults but not for young people, or whether sexualisation is acceptable for young girls so as long as it is not premature or hyper (Smith and Attwood 2011). In its simplest form, the term ‘sexualisation’ also means to “make something sexual”, but at its broadest has been used to analyse a number of social issues (Smith and Attwood 2011: 329). For instance, sexualisation has been used to denote an emerging cultural landscape and at the same time, individual girls who want to fashion themselves after adults. As a result, it is not surprising that the term ‘sexualisation’ confuses a number of elements, such as “adult sexuality with sexual objectification” and “hypersexualisation with hyperfeminisation” (Smith and Attwood 2011: 329). Thus, rather than being used as a springboard for further discussion, girls’ dressing in the discourse of sexualisation has been commonly discussed as having “a single source with clear and measurable ‘effects’” (Smith and Attwood 2011: 330). Ringrose (2013: 47) points out that there is a tendency for the discourse of sexualisation to theorise girls’ adult-like dressing “as having specific psychological, cognitive and health effect for all girls”; this neglects “the complex classed and raced construction of girls’ sexuality, and the complexity of issues different girls might be facing” (Ringrose 2013: 47).

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Similarly, Smith and Attwood (2011) caution that when the term ‘sexualisation’ is broadly used, girls’ adult-like dressing risk misrepresentations, which might result in incorrect blame and allocation of responsibilities. The authors, for instance, highlight how the ‘Together We Can End Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy’ in the UK strongly focused on the media in creating sexualised messages, rather than addressing “the problems of violence and coercion some young people will meet in their sexual relationships” (Smith and Attwood 2011: 328). Ringrose (2013: 50) also stresses that there is a need to critically think about how the “discourse of children growing up ‘too fast’ is presented as an age-appropriate, moralising discourse for parents to make [more] responsible marketing choices for their children.” What has not been addressed is how the discourse of sexualisation tends to be inherently gendered. Ringrose (2013) explains that although studies like the Bailey Review (2011) state that they are essentially concerned about the sexualisation of children, “the actual gendered discursive locus of concern is around the inappropriately sexualised girl’s body, with issues related to boys largely shunted to the sidelines” (Ringrose 2013: 50).

Sexualisation as a Linear Concept Given the arbitrariness of the term ‘sexualisation’ and what it means for young girls to be sexualised, there is a need to be careful about essentialising or ‘spectacularizing’ (Projansky 2014: 6) girls’ adult-like dressing, especially through the discourse of sexualisation. There is a need to pay more attention to the socio-cultural context in which girls’ dressing takes place, as Renold and Ringrose (2011: 392) contend: young girls are more likely to encompass “schizoid subjectivities”, which result in “anti-linear becomings.” Renold and Ringrose (2011: 393) explain that “this concept [of schizoid subjectivities] is used to articulate how gender and sexual norms can be simultaneously displaced and refixed.” The notion of girls’ schizoid subjectivities thus poses a challenge to the “distinct linear developmental lines” that has been adopted in the discourse of sexualisation (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 393). In Garcia-Gomez’s (2018: 45) study, she similarly underscores that there is complexity to tween girls’ agency, beliefs about and motivations for sexting rather than simply a reproduction of a culture of (hyper)sexualisation: “tween girls construct, negotiate, and navigate multiple feminine identities in the context of sexting.” Such studies are at odds with the dominant understanding in the discourse of sexualisation, where girls have been argued to be susceptible to a range of negative effects when they prematurely fashion themselves after adults. As outlined in the above discussion, many scholars who subscribe to the sexualisation-of-girls argument underscore that tween girls are unable to comprehend the far-reaching impacts of self-objectification or sexualisation when they fashion themselves as adults at younger ages, as they have yet to gain the cognitive and cultural knowledge to discern sexualising messages found in a number of sources (Gruber and Grube 2000; Zurbriggen et al. 2010).

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As opposed to the theories of developmental psychology upon which the idea of the ‘unknowing’ young girl subject relies, other scholars have also argued that the idea of the innocent, unknowing child is a social construct. It was not until the eighteenth century that the idea of children as “essentially pure in heart” and “angelic and uncorrupted by the world they have entered” came into existence (James et al. 1998: 13). French philosopher Rousseau was one of the first to declare children as “pure and perfect, like nature, and thus innocent” (Brooks 2008: 52). This was a radical shift from the prevailing Lockean ideas of children as “wild and savage and desperately in need of discipline and civilising” (Brooks 2008: 52). As authors like Jackson et al. (2013) have noted, the taken-for-grantedness of the ‘innocent’ and ‘unknowing’ young girl subject in the discourse of sexualisation is flawed as it succumbs to a type of developmental determinism. This (re)produces a particular vision of the preadolescent girl that negates the possible unification of the tween girl subject with any form of female sexuality. The image of the innocent, unknowing child also denies the possibility that young girls can engage in cultural products (such as their clothes) as “critical ‘savvy’ consumers” (Jackson et al. 2013: 143). Relatedly, Gonick (2003) makes the argument that anti-linear becomings have “always shaped [girls’] experiences of femininity” (Gonick 2003: 19). There can be a multitude of ways that girls engage with and negotiate adult-like clothing that lie outside what has been theorised in the discourse of sexualisation. It would be incorrect to assume that all girls who fashion themselves after adults will face similar negative repercussions, and girls who fashion themselves after adults are being improperly sexualised. In the discourse of sexualisation, there is often “no place for the sexual subjectivity of children, their agency or recognition of their rights as sexual citizens” (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 393). While the emphasis on childhood innocence has contributed to the moral panic over tween girls’ adult-like dressing (Lumby 1998), the linear arguments in the discourse of sexualisation fails to consider that children and young girls may not necessarily ‘sponges’ to everything that they see or hear and can discern the sexualising messages that they receive (Egan and Hawkes 2009).

Problems of a Discourse of Protection Given the contestations over the linear lines of arguments in the discourse of sexualisation and how the innocent, unknowing child is more likely to be a social construct, the discourse of protection similarly faces criticism. As mentioned above, there is an emphasis on the ‘responsible adult’, where a number of scholars also take the stand that there needs to be some boundaries for young girls against sources of sexualisation, which they believe socialises girls into ways of adult dressing (Bailey 2011; Zurbriggen et al. 2010). Nonetheless, the “discourse of protection” (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 389) that is hinged on ideas of the innocent, unknowing child is challenged on many accounts. One of its prominent contentions relates to the idea that premature child sexuality, often seen as the result of deviant, external social factors, should be controlled or prevented at all costs for the benefit of the vulnerable child.

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Egan and Hawkes (2009) argue that such understandings of protection and why it should be implemented for the benefit of tween girls produces and crystallises the idea of the innocent, vulnerable child, which is dangerous because it normalises and justifies control over tween girls. This fails to give any thought to whether healthy young sexuality is possible, and it is this outright rejection of tween sexuality (through clothing or otherwise) that also leads other authors to suggest that discussions about protection are rarely about children themselves. Ringrose (2013: 43), for instance, argues that anxiety over girls’ adult-like dressing is highly related “to maintaining classed and raced moral boundaries and regulating appropriate norms of feminine sexuality.” However, scholars like Egan and Hawkes (2009) emphasise that they are not arguing for the discourse of protection to be made redundant. Rather, the discourse of protection is troubling when there is “no place for the sexual subjectivity of children, their agency or recognition of their rights as sexual citizens” (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 393). More specifically, Egan and Hawkes (2009) seek to challenge the mainstream understanding that sexualisation and the adultification of tween girls’ dressing is an outcome and process that responsible adults must view as wrong and take action against. Kleinhans (2004: 19) similarly highlights that an overemphasis of the image of the innocent, unknowing child may result in “more suspicious readings” of cultural material, which can be counterproductive, and women’s and girls’ contemporary engagements with their body (and hence clothing) may signify different things in a variety of contexts (Duits and van Zoonen 2006).

Class and the Discourse of Sexualisation An extension of the discussion above, both the discourses of protection and sexualisation inevitably reinforce and fuel class-based fears over girls’ sexuality (Ringrose 2013; Egan 2013). Cook (2005) notes that the ideals of an innocent and safe childhood, that demands the protection by adults, are essentially middle-class constructions. Historically, sexual excess has been framed as predominantly belonging to the sphere of working-class women (Egan 2013), which is at odds with a respectable, “middle class feminine sexual subjectivity” (Ringrose 2013: 50). Ringrose (2013: 50) further explains that “historically dangerous, licentious sexuality has been constructed as the purview of working class women that may potentially contaminate an idealised, sexually innocent, or at least ‘coy’, purer guise of, middle class feminine sexual subjectivity.” What is worrying is that threads of classed-based ‘fears’ still underpin contemporary research on girls’ dressing and sexualisation. Oppliger (2008), for instance, claims that girls are embarking on a ‘slippery slope’ when they adopt a hyperfeminised performance of sexuality. According to Egan (2013: 89), such understandings forward a stereotypical argument that assumes that “the consumption of sexualised products stimulates sexual action”, that compromises the respectability of middle-classed girls. In this sense, both discourses of sexualisation and protection

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for young girls tend to be reductive in that they reify “renewed binaries around good and bad femininity”, whereby sexualisation “is okay for some (low class) women and that others (middle class girls and women) need to be sheltered and protected” (Ringrose 2013: 46). Egan and Hawkes (2008a: 294) similarly point out that the sexualisation-of-girls argument often reproduces moralising beliefs about female sexuality, “particularly the sexuality of poor and working class women.” Ringrose (2013: 50) argues that in “unpacking the discourse of pre-mature sexualisation, it seems that the projected focus of anxiety surrounds the letting loose of an unbridled, classed female sexuality that is dirty and degenerate.” Thus, rather than generate a productive discussion about young girls’ adult-like dressing, both discourses of sexualisation and protection have a tendency to fuel anxieties over girls’ young femininities and sexualities that ‘traditionally’ belong to working class girls and women. These lines of inquiry often gloss over how girls are encouraged to believe that they are competing in a “sexism-free, genderneutral meritocratic world”, but still might be socialised into a raunchy celebrity culture, for example, that encourages them how “to use their bodily and erotic capital for money” (Ringrose 2013: 47). Further, Egan (2013: 82) highlights that “anxiety based upon a set of middle-class presumptions about the eroticism of the poor” is also not an accurate reflection of the lives of working-class girls. In focusing on the harmful effects through the sexualisation-of-girls argument, rather than turning to an understanding as to why certain girls choose to fashion themselves the way they do, the discourse of sexualisation inhibits more nuanced discussions about girls’ young femininities and cultural identities, while “constructing a story about precocious girlhood that at once erases class, race and cultural specificity” (Ringrose 2013: 50). This leads Ringrose (2013: 50) to argue that “the [sexualisation] discourse is actually constructed through moralising cautionary tales about working class sexuality and excess seeping into middle class life.”

Postfeminism and Girls’ Dressing Given these contentions over the discourse of sexualisation, debates over girls’ dressing tend to be polarised: “between those who condemn sexualisation and call for greater regulation of young people’s use of various media and those who critique the ‘sexualisation thesis’ as part of a moral panic that robs children of their rights, sexuality and agency” (Ringrose 2013: 43). What is commonly known as a postfeminist approach is often at odds with the sexualisation-of-girls argument. The postfeminist approach to understanding girls’ adult-like dressing involves the cultural belief that gender inequality is now over, and that girls should now be able to do or dress as they please. As Kanai (2016: 10) outlines: [p]ostfeminism has had multiple meanings. However, the Western portrayal of the ‘pastness’ of feminism as a collective social movement now underpins the dominant understanding of postfeminism in contemporary scholarship.

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Under postfeminist ideology, girls should be given greater choice, independence and agency in the way that they might want to fashion themselves. As Pomerantz and Raby (2017: 14) explain, postfeminism signals the belief that “girls are now seen to embody individualised freedom, which often includes the ‘choice’ to consume, hook up, ace school, find a job and upset the traditional gender order in education and beyond.” The postfeminist approach opens up an important space for thinking about how girls are not passive recipients of a sexualised, hyper-feminised culture when it comes to their own dressing. This contradicts some of the concerns that have been brought up in the discourse of sexualisation. Furthermore, scholars like Harris (2004) add that in late modernity, choices for girls are also framed as abundant, with successes in career or school ready for them to take up. Harris (2004) argues that girlhood today is more likely to be a “choice biography” (Beck 1992: 135); girlhood is now expected to be actively and subjectively experienced, rather than “a fixed set of predictable stages and experiences” (Harris 2004: 8). Given that the postfeminist approach situates girls as “unhampered by their gender, enabling a feeling of limitless possibility” (Pomerantz and Raby 2017: 12), scholars have also pointed out that allowing girls to select their own clothing in an unfiltered world of “girlie products” is a way for them to learn to make “empowered choices” (Jackson et al. 2013: 145). In being able to choose their own clothing, girls learn to become “powerful citizens” (Jackson et al. 2013: 145). Barker and Duschinsky (2012: 306) similarly explain that opposed to what scholars within discourse of sexualisation caution about, it is possible that children engage with sexualised messages “in ways that are critical and resist obvious readings.” Baumgardner and Richards (2000: 136) similarly assert that embracing one’s femininity through clothing does not mean succumbing to the ‘traps’ set up by the “patriarchal society.” When tween girls fashion themselves after adults, it can be a conscious and active individual pursuit; an expression of ‘girl power’ (Harris 2004). According to Jackson and Westrupp (2010: 358), “Girl Power arguably comprises one of postfeminism’s most potent expressions, seductively inviting girls to be fun loving, sassy, independent and selfpleasing.” Girl power is also often tied to the tween consumer market, where there is a prevailing need for girls to purchase or own certain products (i.e. clothing) in order to become “powerful, smart and independent” (Jackson and Westrupp 2010: 359). Relatedly, scholars have argued that if adults and institutions are overly-concerned with administering a protective course of action, such as strictly regulating the type of clothing being sold on the market or the kind of images that are being shown on television, another group of girls might grow up conforming to traditional, ‘passive’ forms of femininity (Egan and Hawkes 2008b, 2009). A point more clearly articulated by Egan and Hawkes (2009) is how the discourse of sexualisation fails to recognise children as sexual subjects, negating forms of knowingness and agency for most young girls. And even when girls are being recognised as autonomous individuals, “the social recognition of children as sexual citizen[s] is still ideologically tethered to what adults deem to be socially acceptable sexuality” (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 365). Egan and Hawkes (2009: 397) are concerned that in a socio-cultural landscape where girls’ dressing is predominantly understood through the discourse of sexualisation, another group of girls will grow up unwilling to challenge the status quo, and “a

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multiplicity of sexualities and sexual expressions” are left out of consideration. For the authors, “the shape of children’s sexuality cannot be known, defined or supposed in advance”, and “childhood sexuality should not be the ground upon which both the normative and deviant get produced” (Egan and Hawkes 2008b: 397). Nonetheless, there are also problems of simply adopting a celebratory postfeminist discourse when it comes to girls’ dressing. Feminist scholars debating the myth of postfeminism have argued that forms of sexism still exist for girls (McRobbie 2009; Pomerantz and Raby 2017). Scholars like Jackson et al. (2013: 145) similarly emphasise the need to critically question why “being ‘sexy’ and being ‘empowered’ are [often] conflated” for girls. Furthermore, situating tween girls’ aspirations to fashion themselves after adults under the “ideology of postfeminism” (Jackson et al. 2013: 144) also fails to consider how girls may simultaneously receive contradictory and confusing messages about what they should wear. Jackson et al. (2013: 147) explain that “despite being ‘free’ to experiment with body-exposing or ‘sexy’ clothing”, some girls are still subjected to being “derogated as ‘sluts’” when they do so. While girls may recognise that it is possible or ‘normal’ for them to fashion themselves after adults, the next chapter more clearly addresses how their dressing and desires do not take place in a vacuum. Girls internalise messages about what they ‘should be’ wearing according to the socio-cultural domains that they were brought up in, and young Singaporean girls also receive various messages about young femininity.

Conclusion In critically examining the discourse of sexualisation, this chapter outlined the prevailing ways that girls’ adult-like dressing has been presented as part of this discourse, leading to outcomes that have been framed as negative. At the same time, this chapter underscored the need to be astute about simply employing the sexualisation-of-girls discourse to understand girls’ dressing. For numerous reasons not limited to the ambiguous yet broad usage of the term ‘sexualisation’ and the class-based lines upon which it is built, the sexualisation-of-girls discourse is an inadequate framework to fully understand the reasons and implications of why girls themselves want to fashion themselves after adults, and the deeper meanings and values that tween girls may attach to adult-like clothing. There is a need to remain open to other processes that can better explain tween girls’ clothing choices, especially in the context of Singapore where research on girls’ young femininities and cultural identities is lacking. There are other authors like Jackson et al. (2013: 146) who have also pointed out that studies on girls mostly draw conclusions from “theory, research with women and older teens and supposition”; anything but the narratives of preteen girls. The following chapter will address this, by demonstrating that there is significant knowledge to be gained when girls’ young femininities are understood from their own perspectives. Given that the discourse of sexualisation is also highly dependent on Western dominant accounts of childhood, the next chapter will address

Conclusion

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how the youth and children in Singapore are a group of social actors who encounter a unique set of experiences and circumstances. The next chapter (Chap. 2) maps the contours in which the tween girls’ adult-like dressing takes place in Singapore, highlighting social-cultural domains and paradigms that are missing in the discourse of sexualisation. This reveals the complexity of issues surrounding tween girls who wish to fashion themselves after adults in Singapore, which further contradicts the popular understanding that adultlike dressing is a ‘problem’ for all young girls. More specifically, the following chapter demonstrates why tween girls fashioning themselves after adults in Singapore should be a topic of interest, that demands a more culturally-specific approach.

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Jackson S, Vares T. ‘Perfect skin’, ‘pretty skinny’: girls’ embodied identities and post-feminist popular culture. J Gender Stud. 2015b. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2013.841573. Jackson S, Westrupp E. Sex, postfeminist popular culture and the pre-teen girl. Sexualities. 2010;13(3):357–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460709363135. Jackson S, Goddard S, Cossens S. The importance of [not] being miley: girls making sense of miley cyrus. Eur J Cult Stud. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549416632008. Jackson S, Vares T, Gill R. ‘The whole playboy mansion image’: girls’ fashioning and fashioned selves within a postfeminist culture. Fem Psychol. 2013;23(2):143–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0959353511433790. James A, Jenks C, Prout A. Theorizing childhood. Wiley; 1998. Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People’s inquiry into the sexualization of children in Western Australia. Sexualisation of children. 2014. https://www. parliament.wa.gov.au/parliament/commit.nsf/(report+lookup+by+com+id)/e7d4e8553f6256b 548257d02001fa408/$file/sexualisation+report+-+june+2014+-+19+june.pdf. Accessed 10 Feb 2021. Jones A. Becoming a ‘girl’: post-structuralist suggestions for educational research. Gend Educ. 1993;5(2):157–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025930050203. Kanai A. Managing the self-social tension: digital feminine self-production in an intimate public. Australia: Monash University; 2016. Kennedy M, Coulter N. Locating tween girls. Girlhood Stud. 2018;11(1):1–7. https://doi.org/10. 3167/ghs.2018.110102. Kleinhans C. Virtual child porn: the law and the semiotics of the image. J Vis Cult. 2004;3(1):17–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412904042267. Kline S. The play of the market: on the internationalization of children’s culture. Theory Cult Soc. 1995;12(2):103–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327695012002006. Levin DE. So sexy, so soon: the sexualization of childhood. In Olfman S, editor. The sexualization of childhood. Westport, Conn, London: Praeger; 2009. p, 75–89. Lucas AR, Mary Beard C, et al. 50-year trends in the incidence of anorexia nervosa in Rochester, Minn: a population-based study. Am J Psychiatry. 1991;148(7):917–22. Lumby C. No kidding: paedophilia and popular culture. Continuum. 1998;12(1):47–54. https://doi. org/10.1080/10304319809365751. MacDonald F. Negotiations of identity and belonging: beyond the ordinary obviousness of tween girls’ everyday practices. Girlhood Stud. 2014;7(2):44–60. MacDonald F. Childhood and tween girl culture: family, media and locality. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan; 2016. Maine M. Something’s happening here: sexual objectification, body image distress, and eating disorders. In: Olfman S, editor. The sexualization of childhood. Westport, Conn., London: Praeger; 2009. p. 63–75. McRobbie A. Young women and consumer culture. Cult Stud. 2008;22(5):531–50. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09502380802245803. McRobbie A. Aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change. Los Angeles, London: SAGE; 2009. Michaels S. Miley cyrus criticised for Raunchy Mtv video music awards performance. 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/27/miley-cyrus-mtv-video-music-awardscriticism. Accessed 30 Dec 2016. Motion Picture Association of America. Film ratings. 2017. https://www.mpaa.org/film-ratings/. Retrieved 29 September, 2017. Murnen SK, Smolak L. I’d rather be a famous fashion model than a famous scientist—The rewards and costs of internalizing sexualization. In: Zurbriggen EL, Roberts T-A, editors. The sexualization of girls and girlhood: causes, consequences, and resistance. New York: Oxford University Press; 2013. p. 235–53.

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Newman L. The psychological and developmental impact of sexualisation on children. In: Tankard Reist M, editor. Getting real: challenging the sexualisation of girls. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex Press; 2009. Olfman S. The sexualization of childhood. Westport, Conn., London: Praeger; 2009. Oppliger PA. Girls gone skank: the sexualization of girls in American culture. 2008. Pipher MB. Reviving ophelia. Neutral Bay, N.S.W.: Transworld; 1996. Pomerantz S. Girls, style, and school identities: dressing the part. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan; 2008. Pomerantz S, Raby R. Smart girls: success, school, and the myth of post-feminism. 2017. Postman N. The disappearance of childhood. Vintage Books; 1994. Projansky S. Spectacular girls: media fascination and celebrity culture. 2014. Pugh AJ. Longing and belonging: parents, children, and consumer culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2009. Renold E, Ringrose J. Schizoid subjectivities? J Sociol. 2011;47(4):389–409. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1440783311420792. Renold E, Ringrose J. Feminisms re-figuring ‘sexualisation’, sexuality and ‘the girl’. Feminist Theory. 2013;14(3):247–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700113499531. Ringrose J. Postfeminist education?: Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. London; New York, NY: Routledge; 2013. Rush E, La Nauze A. Letting children be children stopping the sexualisation of children in Australia. Congress. 2006a. http://www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP93.pdf. Rush E, La Nauze A. Corporate paedophilia. Congress. 2006b. http://www.tai.org.au/documents/ dp_fulltext/DP90.pdf. Rush E. What are the risks of premature sexualisation for children? In: Tankard Reist M, editor. Getting real: challenging the sexualisation of girls. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex Press; 2009. Schor J. Born to buy: the commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner; 2004. Smith C, Attwood F. Lamenting sexualization: research, rhetoric and the story of young people’s ‘sexualization’ in the UK home office review. Sex Educ. 2011;11(3):327–37. https://doi.org/10. 1080/14681811.2011.590314. Smith C. Review: papadopoulos, Linda: sexualisation of young people review. Participations: J Audience Recep Stud. 2010;7(1). Steinberg SR, Kincheloe JL. Kinderculture: the corporate construction of childhood. Boulder, Colo.: WestviewPress; 1997. Tiggemann M, Slater A. Nettweens: the internet and body image concerns in preteenage girls. J Early Adol. 2014;34(5):606–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0272431613501083. Tsaliki L. Children and the politics of sexuality: the sexualization of children debate revisited. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK; 2016. Wolf N. The beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women. London: Vintage; 1991. Zurbriggen EL, Collins RL, Lamb S, Roberts T, Tolman DL, Ward ML, Blake J. APA task force on the sexualisation of girls. 2010. http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf. Accesed 20 Apr 2014.

Chapter 2

Girlhood in Singapore

Introduction In the previous chapter, I outlined the dominant ways in which tween girls’ adultlike dressing has been conceptualised as part of the discourse of sexualisation. In addressing the critiques towards the sexualisation-of-girls discourse, I showed that there are limitations when girls’ adult-like dressing is singularly assumed to be an outcome or process of harmful sexualisation, leading to a range of negative impacts and effects. Following Jones’s (1993: 158) work on girls as they “are both ‘made subject’ by/within the social order” and “agents/subjects within/against it”, this chapter illustrates the specificities of girlhood in Singapore. This chapter builds on the ideas from the ‘new’ sociology of childhood to show that apart from what has been taken-for-granted in the discourse of sexualisation, there are other meanings of what it means to be a girl that play a crucial part in how young girls might want to fashion themselves. Kennedy and Coulter (2018: 4) similarly point out that while there are an increasing number of studies that acknowledge the “ways in which girls engage with, negotiate, and resist the framing of the tween as, largely, a white, middle-class, heteronormative subject, there is still much work to be done in the field to explore the representations and lived experiences of tweenhood that does not fit the definition of it as able-bodied and/or Western.” In mapping the contours of childhood, consumption and femininity in Singapore, this chapter examines the ways that young Singaporean girls “take sense from their location within historical and cultural sets of meanings” (Jones 1993: 162), and how local factors have influence over their desires and purview towards adult-like clothing.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_2

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That said, this chapter does not dismiss traces of tween girls’ dressing that may coincide with what is happening in the West. Scholars like Appadurai (1990) theorise about the growing interconnectedness of cultures and images around the world, through the ideas of mediascapes, technoscapes and ideoscapes.1 Chua’s (2003) exposition of popular culture consumption in Singapore also highlights that Singaporeans predominantly consume imports from the West. Rather, this chapter emphasises the need to be careful about extrapolating and applying arguments from the Western discourse of sexualisation to contexts such as Singapore. As the next section will show, Western dominant accounts of childhood that inform the discourse of sexualisation are distinct from the experiences of childhood and children in Singapore. Where the topic of girls’ adult-like dressing is populated by studies from the West, this chapter seeks to contribute to the feminist scholarly work on the various positions and “possible discourses on/for girls” (Jones 1993: 162), advancing the work in girlhood studies and the ‘new’ sociology of childhood.

Western Dominant Accounts of Childhood Western “dominant accounts” (Prout and James 1997: 10) of childhood are important because they are often taken-for-granted and strongly influence arguments in the discourse of sexualisation. These accounts of childhood often depict childhood as a biological and psychological ‘fact’, and a dedicated time of innocence (Prout and James 1997). Children are often seen as “‘incomplete’ human beings”, and a child’s journey to become “fully human” starts from childhood, an assumed biopsychological phase of time (Lee 2001: 38). Cregan and Cuthbert (2014), for instance, note how in modern Western societies, a child is often seen as a young human being in a distinct stage of life known as childhood, who has not yet matured into an adult. Similarly, Liebel (2020: 13) argued that it is specifically in Western societies that there is a clear distinction between children and adults and the ‘quality’ of childhood is “measured by whether the children are kept away from adult roles.” Western dominant accounts of childhood are also often presented as ‘natural’ and a standard that all should children adhere to, which leave them unquestioned (Prout and James 1997). In particular, Western dominant accounts of childhood support the argument in the discourse of sexualisation, where tween girls who want to fashion themselves after adults are seen as improperly sexualised. Western dominant accounts of childhood often view children’s psychological development as adhering to a “series of predetermined stages, which lead towards the eventual achievement of logical competencies” (James and Prout 1990: 11). Prout and James (1997: 10) liken this understanding of 1

Appadurai (1990:296) used terms with the suffix -scape, to show how “the new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models.” In particular, technoscapes refer to transfer and flows of technology all over the world, and ideoscapes refer to the sharing of ideas, terms and images that now easily take place across borders.

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childhood to an “evolutionary model”, where the older children become, the more mature and rational they are expected to be, enabling them to learn more skills to better function in the world of adults. Given this understanding, adult-like clothing for tween girls creates controversy because girls are being introduced to clothing way ahead of their ‘time’. As outlined in the previous chapter, girls’ adult-like dressing is seen as detrimental because girls in tweenhood are thought to exist in a phase of time where they are still negotiating their sense of self (Gruber and Grube 2000; Zurbriggen et al. 2010). In the discourse of sexualisation, there is worry over this group of girls who are believed to lack the cognitive skills to fully comprehend what it means to fashion themselves after adults yet are being encouraged to do so at younger ages. In Western dominant accounts of childhood and discourse of sexualisation, a child is believed to ‘progress’ through developmental stages, from childhood to adulthood, following a “simplicity to complexity of thought” (James and Prout 1990: 11), and this linear process is disrupted by adult-like clothing that are made popular and available to tween girls. Similarly pointed out by Liebel (2020: 13) that while the strict differentiation of adulthood and childhood aims to prevent children from being “overwhelmed, exploited or abused”, “they leave no space for the imagination of childhoods or lifestyles of children” in which children can have legitimate views and the ability to make choices. In addition to childhood defined as a biological and psychological ‘fact’, innocence is often taken be an “a-priori given” (Taylor 2010: 53) and a modern standard of what an ideal, Western childhood is supposed to be like. Taylor (2010: 52) claims that there has always been a proclivity of Western thought to “essentialise, de-historicise and universalise childhood as a natural state of innocence.” James et al. (1998: 13) argue that the taken-for-granted idea of childhood as an innocent phase of time that possesses “natural goodness” leads to childhood innocence becoming a value worthy of protection. Projanksy (2014: 18–19) similarly points out that in the recent 20 years [p]olicy is written about the tween. Psychologists and sociologists research tween behaviour. New stores emerge to produce and cater to tween tastes. And, of course, advertisers try to reach tween dollars, while journalists and pundits worry over tween behaviour.

The consequence of viewing children as innocent also explains why arguments in the discourse of sexualisation emphasise the need for a discourse of protection and the concerted effort of responsible adults to prevent girls from dressing ageinappropriately. The authors of the APA Task Force’s report (2010), for example, recommended several measures that would help adults and institutions ‘neutralise’ the pervasive power of popular media. Ideally, childhood in Western societies should be free from worries of the ‘adult world’ and a period of fun, ample time and play. Advocates of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, Prout and James (1997), however, argue that such understandings of childhood are misleading, because they mainly subscribe to what childhood in the West is ‘supposed’ to be like. In addition to this, they put forth the argument that

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2 Girlhood in Singapore [c]hildhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies. (Prout and James 1997: 8)

In his influential work, Ariès (1962) makes the argument that childhood (vis-à-vis adulthood) is a social construction. He draws on historical accounts of language, art, photographs and the everyday life of people to make his point that children were no different from adults throughout history. Instead, children were simply mini-adults. He notes that in the Middle Ages, not only was work and play not differentiated between adult and child, but there were no words in language itself to distinguish a child from an adult—words like ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ could be used to denote a person of any age. Through medieval art and iconography, Ariès (1962: 31) similarly found that children were never portrayed as distinct from adults. Instead, they were reproduced to look like miniature adults. Children’s clothes in paintings were always smaller versions of what adults were wearing, and there was no discussion about whether this was precocious or age-inappropriate. According to the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, there are also a variety of childhoods that exist over different social locations and across time. Jenks (1996) notes that this plurality can even be found within the same social context in which children conduct their everyday lives. However, the pluralities of childhood are not acknowledged when there are claims in the discourse of sexualisation that girls’ adult-like dressing is harmful and that adults should be concerned. As the earlier chapter has also noted, the sexualisation-of-girls argument fails to attend to the classed and raced experiences of girlhood (Ringrose 2013). In Singapore, there are several divergences from the Western accounts of childhood that can be observed through its education and population policies. The following section illuminates the shifting values and importance of childhood as a result of highly pragmatic socio-political changes in Singapore.

Childhood in Singapore This section examines the construction of girl/childhood through population and education policies, because academic literature, official and public discourses on the lived experiences of girl/childhood in Singapore is lacking. Wee (1995: 185) also recommends understanding childhood in Singapore through population and education policies because childhood, indirectly shaped and modelled by the government, is not something new in “politically centralised societies.” She explains: [s]uch a situation means that the government is the most powerful of powerful others in the making of children’s lives, since it is the government that holds the monopoly of violence and the legal legitimacy to govern its nation of citizens. (Wee 1995: 191)

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Wee (1995) explains that it is normal in a country with a predominant ruling party and an emphasis on Confucianist values that the government dictates the ‘mould’ to which children should subscribe to and the ways that they are to experience childhood. Childhood in Singapore is more accurately described to be in a triadic relationship: between the child, adult and the state (Wee 1995). In Singapore, the state often acts as a sort of “third party” in controlling or influencing pre-existing ideologies, especially when it comes to children (Wee 1995: 186). In unpacking ideas of childhood in Singapore, this section highlights the ways in which the discourse of sexualisation falls short in making sense of tween girls’ dressing within this context. As Matthews (2007: 325) points out, it is erroneous to write about children (and by extension, girls) as if all children experience the same kind of childhood regardless of location and social context. Because the pluralities of childhood are not acknowledged in discourse of sexualisation (that heavily relies on Western dominant accounts of childhood), a social constructionist approach to looking at girl/childhood in Singapore is important. According to James et al. (1998: 27), “to describe childhood, or indeed any phenomenon, as socially constructed is to suspend a belief in or a willing reception of its taken-for-granted meanings.” Such an approach interrogates the popularly accepted notions of what it means to grow up as a child and the effects of the sexualisation-of-girls discourse. The following sections usefully illuminate the range of femininities, positionings and cultural resources (Jackson et al. 2013) made available to girls in Singapore, that shape the way that they are able develop their fashioned identities.

Population Policies and Childhood in Singapore As a small nation-state, most discussions about the economic growth of Singapore indicate that the country has always depended on its human resources to stay competitive. Not surprisingly, issues pertaining to the youth and children have been one of the nation’s greatest concerns. Most recently, in order to encourage young families to have more children, parents working in the public sector were granted up to 6 months’ parental leave (Channel News Asia 2017). However, the emphasis on youth/children was never uniform for Singapore. There have been phases of family policies that sought to influence the value of children and ‘type’ of child that was desirable for families, in different directions. While childhood can be described as stable, pertaining to the ideals of innocence and protection in Western dominant accounts, the value of children and childhood in Singapore is more likely to be transient and influenced by the interests of the government at different points of time in history. The population policies of Singapore can be categorised into three distinct phases, that mainly follow: (a)

Family planning policies to curb population growth in the pre-industrial Singapore through the mid-1980s;

(b)

The selectively pro-natalistic period from mid-1980s to 1999, where those who could afford to were encouraged to have more children; and

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The distinctly pro-natalistic policies with the advent of the ‘baby bonus’ announcement in 2000, where the primary concern was on preventing falling birth rates.

(Straughan 2008: 49)

Under the first two phases, the Singapore government aimed to control family size and birth rates by popularising slogans such as “Girl or boy, two is enough”, “Stop at two” and “Small families have more to eat” (Wee 1995: 195). The anti-natalist campaigns from 1970 to 1986, targeted at controlling population, framed children as consumers and as extra mouths to feed, rather than producers of family wealth. As opposed to Western dominant accounts of childhood that present children as a bundle of positive attributes (James et al. 1998), population policies in Singapore at this time framed children as economic liabilities. In this sense, there was no room for nurturing or considering childhood to be an exceptionally precious phase of time. Adults were instead encouraged to transfer their efforts to being economically productive in order to boost the country’s national wealth. However, with changing socio-economic conditions from the mid-1980s to the present, the Singapore government changed its stance to a pro-natalist one, urging Singaporeans to “Have Three or More If You Can Afford It” (Straughan 2008: 52). Many researchers have suggested that this is in response to the fertility rate falling to 1.4 in 1986, which led the government to rethink its population policies (Straughan 2008). Concerned about the consequences of an ageing population, there were many campaigns from 1986 to 1999 that encouraged families to have more children, using the slogans of “Children Life Would Be Empty Without Them”; “Life’s Fun When You’re A Dad And Mum”; and “The Most Precious Gift You Can Give Your Child Is A Brother Or Sister” (Wong and Yeoh 2003: 12). Since 1989, a growing family was the focus of the population policies developed by the state. While pro-natalist campaigns are clustered around the importance of having children (Wong and Yeoh 2003), this change in perspective for children was similarly emphasised in speeches by state leaders: The house would be so much emptier without the laughter of children. How miserable we would be if we have no children to look after us when we grow old and weak. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, National Day Rally speech (2000)

The move away from previous anti-natalist ideas surrounding children led to scholars like Straughan (2008: 62–64) to theorise the shifting ideology of children/childhood in Singapore as the “sacredisation of the economically worthless.” As opposed to the pre-mid-1980s family policies that saw children as an economic burdens, children today through population and family policies are seen as desirable and having “intrinsic worth” (Straughan 2008: 62). As a result of situating children as encompassing some sort of economic and social potential, Straughan (2008: 64) notes that this ‘sacredisation’ led to the valorisation of “the innocence and purity of childhood.” While ideas of purity and innocence are similar to those in Western accounts of childhood, the discussion above showed that the value of children and ideas of childhood in Singapore is contingent on and responsive to developments in state ideology. In order to boost birth rates, childhood in Singapore, indirectly

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shaped by population policies, has transformed into a crucial stage of life worthy of investment and care. This is significantly different to the earlier years when children were seen as a liability for young couples and families.

Education Policies and Childhood in Singapore In an increasingly globalised and competitive world stage, many countries have realised that having an educated populace is key to economic survival and future success. In Singapore, the government has been known to take its human capital very seriously (Kang 2004). Many studies indicate that the Singapore government has always sought to shape or maintain the ‘standard’ of its human capital through its education system. As emphasised by Lee, Goh and Fedriksen (2008), one of the aims of Singapore’s education system has been and will continue to be producing a globally competitive workforce. In order to maintain a well-educated populace, academic milestones start as young as seven for Singaporean children. Most children enter primary school knowing that they will encounter an academic streaming process at Primary Four (10 years old). Although there have been refinements in the academic streaming process, for a large part of Singapore’s education history, children had to abide by this arrangement. And while this process is no longer made mandatory by the Ministry of Education, certain schools still keep this procedure in place. Further, primary school children still have to take a Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at the end of Primary Six (12 years old). The rhetoric behind academic streaming at such an early age is to differentiate students according to their abilities, and consequently, a number and type of subjects. Each ‘stream’ tracks students into different classes and schools, and this differentiation is believed to create a positive, competitive environment for students who excel academically. Weaker students would also benefit from a likeminded, supportive environment. The pressure to perform in school is intensified by the country’s meritocratic system that highly favours individuals who have attained excellent academic results. Quek (2014: 149) writes about how pressures to perform in schools in Singapore create an environment where parents load on hours of tuition on top of regular schoolwork, some even taking leave from work so that they can monitor, coach and study with their children at home. There has also been reports of a growing demand for parents to attend tuition so that they can gain skills to coach or help their children with their schoolwork (Yang 2017). Singapore’s emphasis on education for its youths has been criticised by many scholars for its “highly competitive system”, where its “rigorous streaming and testing procedure, selects and prepares pupils for vocational, polytechnic, and university level education” (Sharpe 2002: 10). In comparing the state of education in Singapore with the UK, Hetherington (2012: 44–45) claims that there is immense “pressure on the country’s youth to succeed academically” and goes so far as to call it “madness in Singapore’s method.” Given rounds of streaming and national examinations, childhood in Singapore is not always one of fun and ample time. Often, it is a period

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that is characterised by rigorous study and discipline and this is in spite of Singaporean schools being established as some of the best in the world (Quek 2014). The republic has not only come out on top of the world’s OECD global education ranking (Ng 2015), in 2016, Singapore was proven to have the highest achieving students by coming in first in the Pisa rankings (Coughlan 2016). The Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) is an international test that measures the proficiency of youth in math, reading and science in economically-developed countries (Coughlan 2016). Singapore’s education policies not only determine and influence the kind of childhood to be experienced by children; such policies also indirectly manufacture a specific ‘type’ of child that is desirable for families. Given the competitive nature of the school system, many parents have revealed anxieties about their children’s academic progress and their own roles in this process (Sharpe 2002: 11). This leads to the quantity/quality debate put forward by Sun (2012), whereby parents decide to have fewer children because they are concerned with being able to produce what the state defines as ‘quality’ children (see also Yeoh and Huang 2010). Asian parents are known to set higher educational goals for their children than those in the West, and expect their children to put in the effort to reach these goals (Hau and Salili 1991; Salili 1996). Through both family and education policies, it is clear that girl/childhood in Singapore is one that is disparate from Western dominant accounts. This aligns with Goldson’s (1997: 19) claim that childhood should never be “enduring, historically consistent and universal”, and should more accurately be taken to be a product of time and place. Although its aim might not be to create a certain type of childhood, in its developmental pursuits, Singapore’s population and education policies have inevitably created certain experiences for local children. As mentioned above, girls’ experiences of childhood are more likely to be characterised by period of intensive study and competitive educational attainment (Luo et al. 2013; Salili et al. 2001). There is a tendency in the sexualisation-of-girls argument to homogenise the experiences of childhood when adult-like dressing is argued to be detrimental for girls. A discussion of family and education policies shows how girl/childhood in Singapore can be experienced quite differently, presenting nuances to girls’ young femininities and subjectivities. There are incongruities with the Western values of childhood, and the motivations and implications of tween girls fashioning themselves after adults should be seen as separate from what has been discussed in the discourse of sexualisation. As the next section further outlines, the value and meanings of consumption in Singapore complicate girls’ desires and contradict arguments surrounding girls’ proclivities for adult-like clothing in the discourse of sexualisation.

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Consumption and Adult-Like Clothing for Girls in Singapore Life for Singaporeans is not complete without shopping! Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, National Day Rally Speech, 1996

I noted in the earlier chapter that a growing number of studies have underscored that tween girls should no longer be understood apart from their consumption activities or their role as consumers. Driscoll (2002: 218) surmises that “feminine adolescence [is now often] channelled into and constituted in consumption.” The term ‘tween’ has also been argued by some scholars to more accurately be a “consumer-media label”, rather than an age-delineated designation (MacDonald 2014: 44). Harris (2005: 212) similarly articulates how “tweenie” as a site of “feminine child-ness” and “girl-ness” is highly led by and intertwined with consumption practices. Singapore shows evidence of a consumer culture comparable to that of many advanced nations. Many reports in local mainstream media also highlight how clothes for young girls in Singapore are becoming scaled down versions of adults’ (Ong 1994, 1995). Fashion labels for children have been noted to reap profits of S$90,000 to S$130,000 monthly because parents no longer prefer ‘kiddy’ clothes (Lim 2000). However, such reports in the local mainstream media mainly reflect the popular clothing trends available to young girls and how parents are spending large amounts of money buying clothes for their children who want to be trendy. While the development of a tween consumer culture is inevitable and considered detrimental for the ‘unknowing’ young girl subject in the discourse of sexualisation, this section illuminates how the consumption of, and the way girls develop their desires for adult-like clothing may not be as straightforward in the case of Singapore. One of the main reasons for this is discussed in Chua’s (2003) work, where the growth of a consumer culture is often seen as the hallmark of Singapore’s modernity. As some sort of ‘compensation’ for the “material deprivations” that Singapore faced during its colonial days, Chua (2003: 3) underscores that it has always been the strong pursuit of the government to be able to improve and extensively expand the material wellbeing of Singaporeans. Singaporeans are also known to make the most meaning of national economic growth when they are able to buy new things, with this directly being translated to an improvement of their social lives (Chua 2003). As a starting point, this shows how the need to wear or buy adult-like clothing can take on different meanings for tween girls in Singapore.

Asian Values and the Culture of Consumption in Singapore The emphasis on the growth of a consumerist culture can be observed from how the Singapore Tourism Board has promoted the country as the “Fashion Shopping Capital

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of Asia” (Chan 2011: 1). Orchard Road, the main shopping district in Singapore has been hailed as “one of the world’s greatest shopping streets” (Chan 2011: 1). As a mark of its transition into a modern, cosmopolitan space, Chua (2003: 5) describes a “globalisation of commodities” and an influx of almost every international brand, with malls built all over the city-state. Abercrombie & Fitch Kids, H&M Kids, Zara Girls, Cotton On by Free and Fox Kids are a few of the many international labels with a dedicated line of clothing for young girls that have opened up stores in Singapore. In early 2017, Seed Heritage, an Australian label, also opened its first children’s clothing store in Singapore. Although Seed has a dedicated women’s clothing line that is performing well in Australia, the company chose to mainly export its childrenswear, reflecting the growing market and demand for trendy children’s clothes in Singapore. Given that shopping has been declared to be a national pastime for Singaporeans, it is not too difficult to see how this climate continues to encourage profit-motivated retailers to continue to import clothing for tween girls that may be considered ‘ageinappropriate’ in the discourse of sexualisation. Most recently, major fast fashion retailer in the UK, Matalan, is under controversy over selling sexualised clothing to mainly tween girls, with many parents questioning if the same sexualised clothing would be sold to boys (Gill 2021). Popular in Singapore, the Abercrombie & Fitch Kids’ line has also been criticised by many mothers for selling push-up and padded bra bathing suits to tween girls (Huff 2011). As a result of being ‘primed’ for economic growth and continual improvements in material life (Chua 2003), it is not surprising that Singaporean tween-aged girls’ lives are organised around the activity of shopping. In addition to window-shopping being ranked as one of Singaporeans’ main activities outside the home (Ho and Chua 1995), since the mid-1990s, companies have increasingly acknowledged that “kids and cash go together” and are keeping up with “young fads” in order to draw in younger crowds (Abdoolcarim 1994: 22). Furthermore, it is likely that the consumer landscape for Singaporean children is shaped by global advertising campaigns that portray tween girls in ‘grown-up’ lifestyles. While there are instances outside Singapore where advertisements featuring children have been banned or incited some form of controversy (see Choi 2019), the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore has not developed a set of codes2 prohibiting advertising that portrays children in suggestive, ‘adult-like’ ways. That said, while consumerism is often taken as an indication of the improvement in the standard of living, celebratory readings of consumption are mediated by ongoing debates about the excesses of affluence and social ills of Western-inherited consumerism in Singapore (Chua 2003). Chua (2003: 6) explains that there has always been an “ideological/moral discourse” about the better and “more wholesome” Asian cultural values that Singaporeans should encompass, versus the ‘bad’ 2

The rules of conduct for advertising to children in Singapore can be found here: http://www.mda. gov.sg/RegulationsAndLicensing/ContentStandardsAndClassification/Documents/TV%20and% 20Radio/PoliciesandContentGuidelines_TV_TVAdCode.pdf

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and more ‘decadent’ Western values that are inherited from a rife consumer culture. Although Singapore has been challenged on numerous accounts for claiming itself to be an ‘Asian nation’ that strongly upholds ‘Asian values’ given its cultural hybridity since its founding years, consumerism as part of Westernisation has been understood to be a “‘Westoxification’ of Singaporeans and a new infection of the young” (Chua 2003: 6). While a climate of hyperconsumerism is taken to reflect positive national economic growth and the increasing economic capital of Singaporeans, feelings of cultural imperialism are also invoked. According to Chua (2003: 22), cultural imperialism as a “simplistic thesis” stems from the understanding that “the Third World is being ‘Americanised’ by the inundation of American-produced consumer goods and entertainment products”, resulting in the need to reassert one’s culture and cultural identity. Chua (2003: 21) recounts that such sentiments that emerged in the late 1990s were greatly emphasised by the Singapore government consistently articulating some form of concern over the ‘Western values’ that followed the growth in consumerism in Singapore. This rhetoric against the rising popularity of Western values was especially focused on the Singaporean youth (Chua 2003). Afraid of consumerism being a “harbinger” of “Western ‘liberal’ values”, the Singapore government sought to create a sense of Otherness by emphasising on importance of the more traditional and conservative Asian values that Singaporean youth should encompass (Chua 2003: 23). This cemented the (imagined) difference between Singapore (the East) and the West. In this discourse of difference, Western values of consumerism such as “liberal individualism” are frowned upon, with the government discursively articulating how notions of individualism and “self-interest” can potentially displace local ‘traditional’ values (Chua 2003: 23). The anti-Western values debate that came with the rise of consumerism in Singapore was thus not only a “discourse of value difference, but of value conflict” (Chua 2003: 23). While the ideological/moral discourse between the East and the West was mainly held by the older generation of Singaporeans, their concern over this ‘loss’ of Asian values was often directed on the Singaporean youth, whom they felt were brought up in an environment of relative prosperity and are hence more likely to internalise ‘Western values’ through their consumption patterns (Chua 2003). While excessive consumerism especially amongst the youth in Singapore has been frowned upon and seen as an outcome of Westernisation, youths’ consumption of clothing remains as a main way that many young people are able to define or portray themselves. Unlike adults and unable to afford ‘big ticket’ items such as cars, homes or holidays, the body is a “primary locus of consumption” for many Singaporean youth (Chua 2003: 25). Items of fashion (and hence clothing) are usually appropriated, because “body adornment” is the cheapest, and most prominent way for the young to express and (re)assert their identity (Chua 2003: 25). According to Chua (2003), adults are “puzzled” as to why young people in Singapore, in the process of emphasising their identity through fashion, often dress to “shock” their elders (Chua 2003: 26). This may range from how some teenagers wear “American street fashion” (Chua 2003: 27), to dressing themselves up to be more ‘Western’ or sexualised than what is acceptable by Singapore standards (see Hudson 2015). Young

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people’s consumption of clothing makes them the target of criticism by parents or the older generation of Singaporeans because the consumption of imported clothing has been taken to reflect their aspirations to adopt Western/American consumer lifestyles. This is further supported by the rhetoric of the Singaporean government, that claims that the aspirations amongst the youth for a consumer lifestyle are symptomatic of a loss of or confusion over young Singaporeans’ ‘rightful’ cultural identity as Asian (Chua 2003). The tensions between the ‘rightful’ identities of Singaporean youth and what they are expected to wear contradict discussions in the discourse of sexualisation. Studies such as the Bailey Review (2011) describe how sexualised or adult-like clothes, accessories and consumables may have already formed the backdrop to tween-aged girls’ lives, with parents and children no longer registering such consumption consciously (Bailey 2011). Counter to this, Singaporean youth, parents and adults show that they still critically engage in the proliferation and consumption of adult-like clothing, and the East versus West debate maintains relevance. While the youth in Singapore may aim to strategically aim to differentiate themselves from the older generations by dressing more ‘Western’, parents can be said to utilise ideological/moral discourses of the East versus the West as a form of resistance to young people’s spending and fashion choices. In both instances, both the young and adults in Singapore show that they are highly active and conscious consumers when it comes to clothing choices. There are studies in the discourse of sexualisation that also situate parents at the centre of what girls’ today choose to wear (Bailey 2011; Zurbriggen et al. 2010). Purchasing products for their children allow some parents in the West to simultaneously identify with their childhood selves, reminiscing about how at a certain time in their youth they too had wanted to be grown up. However, when it comes to clothing, Singaporean youth are more likely to be at the receiving end of criticism by adults for being too ‘Western’ or spendthrift (Chua 2003). Therefore, while sources like the Bailey Review (2011) recognise that the (inevitable) growth of children as consumers poses some difficult problems for parents who want to be seen as “good providers” (Bailey 2011), the definition of good parents is divergent and may also refer to the adults who are able to inculcate in their children the good ‘Asian virtues’ of thriftiness given the concerns over youth consumerism. As Chua (2003: 28) underscores, the older generations of Singaporeans have been forced to live in conditions of economic underdevelopment and at times poverty, resulting in them developing a “language of thrift.” Overall, this section outlined some of the cultural specificities of consumption in Singapore. This includes consumption as a sign of modernity, and youth consumption and clothing choices as embedded in a larger East/West discourse. These meanings that are attached to consumption reflect why there is a need to remain critical about the applicability of the Western discourse of sexualisation, and understandings of girls’ adult-like dressing should not be simply extrapolated. Furthermore, girls’ consumption of adult-like clothing is made more complex when several authors have pointed out that the ability to purchase things is deeply tied to the concept of class and social mobility for many Singaporeans. As part of the agenda to reinforce class and status, many authors found that Singaporeans tend to irrationally favour the purchase of

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certain groups of items. The following section goes on to examine how consumption and social class for young girls intertwine with adult-like clothing and can create desires for young girls to fashion themselves after adults. The following section further discusses the socio-cultural terrain of consumption in which Singaporean girls grow up in and what adult-like dressing may come to signify amongst young Singaporean girls.

Consumption and Social Class in Singapore While the earlier section addressed how the older generation of Singaporeans frown upon youth spending, this chapter outlines how Singaporeans’ spending have been observed to be strongly shaped by ideas of class and social mobility (Chua 2003; Yao 1996). Girls’ consumption of adult-like clothing is therefore made more complicated, when the adults, some parents of these children, have been characterised as conspicuous consumers (Veblen 1994), predominantly concerned with the symbolic value of items. Receiving only nominal amounts of pocket money, tween girls’ ability to purchase clothing is often bound by how much their parents are willing to spend. Coclanis (2009: 2) describes how many adult Singaporeans, as part of their materialistic pursuits, “avidly desire” and consistently strive to attain what is colloquially known as the 5Cs: Cash, Credit card, Country club, Car, and Condo. Yao (1996: 343) offers a more in-depth view of the material aspirations of Singaporeans, stating how, with the presence of an expanding middle class, it is normal that the ability to consume comes to determine a “middle class lifestyle.” She explains that expensive items may now well be the “necessary badges that signify middle class credentials” (Yao 1996: 345). Individuals and families who wish to be considered as part of this class have a “duty” to acquire these goods, in order to “live up to” peer evaluations (Yao 1996: 345). Further, Yao (1996: 344) adds that the consumption of expensive goods may be attributed individual meanings, such as a reward for “virtuous behaviour”, especially for the adults who have worked hard at their jobs. This viewpoint mirrors what Chua (2003) has observed about Singaporeans, making most meaning of national economic growth when they are able to consume. The consumption and ownership of expensive items has therefore become “a natural outcome of ‘good behaviour’” in Singapore, “crystallised in the very position and achievements of the middle class” (Yao 1996: 344). Such value and meanings that are attached to the ability to consume have several implications for tween girls’ adult-like dressing. They show how tween girls’ dressing in Singapore may not be an outcome of solely girls’ own, autonomous decisions, but also as a result of the social domain that they grow up in. Where girls fashioning themselves after adults has been framed as an issue of poor taste and a problem of the working class (Bragg and Buckingham 2012; Egan 2013), in Singapore, tween girls’ adult-like dressing may form part of the material aspirations that define middleclass individuals and families. This is especially when in more recent years, other

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wealthy or middle-class parents, both local and international, exhibit similar practices. A popular topic covered by many fashion or lifestyle media is how Hollywood celebrities have been starting their children’s “style education early” (Hutching 2014: n.p.). Suri Cruise (15-year-old daughter of actors Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise) has been reported to have a collection of heels more expensive than most adults. Harper Beckham (10-year-old daughter of fashion designer Victoria Beckham and footballer David Beckham) has also been photographed at the front row of many haute couture fashion shows (Hutching 2014). In addition to the mainstream articles in the media that suggest fashion labels in Singapore have been reaping enormous profits because parents no longer prefer ‘kiddy’ clothes (Lim 2000), there has been an explosion of luxury, international designer labels for children. Brands such as Burberry, Polo Ralph Lauren and Armani Junior in Singapore have been known to sell expensive, scaled-down versions of clothing for young girls. Locally, one of the pioneers of expensive children’s clothing, Kids21, has also been steadily growing since 1997. Importing over 80 international designer labels and lifestyle brands, the label caters to ‘modern’ and ‘chic’ Singaporean children and girls whom they believe now represent the market. Expensive items as a “natural outcome” or reward for ‘good behaviour’ for the burgeoning middle class in Singapore (Yao 1996: 344) can be extended to tween girls who might now request expensive, adult-like clothing as a reward for what they have achieved at school. Tween girls’ desires for adult-like clothing as something ‘prized’ or to be ‘earned’ contradicts how tween girls’ dressing has been understood in the West. It is common for arguments in the discourse of sexualisation to criticise profit-motivated retailers for implementing marketing techniques such as “age compression” (Schor 2004: 55) that promote “cosmetics and elaborate hairstyling as well as high-heeled shoes, low-rise jeans, miniskirts and other provocative clothing” (Boocock and Scott 2005: 225) to tween girls. There has been growing worry over how young girls might, in turn, be drawn away from developing other potentially empowering opportunities when they equate appearance and physical attractiveness with social success (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). However, such viewpoints in the discourse of sexualisation miss the issue at heart for girls in Singapore. It may be through educational attainment, good grades or other accolades that tween girls can request and gain ‘rightful’ access to expensive, adult-like clothing in Singapore in the first place. Where there is great importance on children’s educational success and parents in Singapore are known invest time, effort and financial resources so that their children are ahead in their academic pursuits (Goransson 2015; Lim 2020; Quek 2014), part of this process involves parents who may choose to reward girls with the clothing of their choice to encourage them to do better at school. In outlining some of the aspirational values behind consumption in Singapore, this section highlights other paradigms that need to be carefully examined in order to fully grasp the complexity of issues surrounding tween girls’ dressing in Singapore. There is a need to understand the circumstances under which girls in Singapore can gain access to adult-like clothing and in what context girls develop desires for certain clothing. A clearer understanding of the broad consumer landscape in Singapore elucidates how tween girls’ adult-like dressing may not be an exclusive outcome

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of premature sexualisation and the need to remain astute towards a discourse of sexualisation. This returns to an earlier point, that a culturally-specific purview needs to be developed in order to fully comprehend the complexities surrounding tween girls’ adult-like dressing in Singapore.

Femininity in Singapore While this section addresses the forms of femininity for adult women that are prevalent in Singapore, the following discussion has strong relevance for tween girls. As Jones (1993: 162) has argued: “girls perceive (in their wide observations from media, family, everyday life) the positions—including the silences—available to ‘normal’ women, and usually regulate their own desires and behaviours within those parameters.” A discussion of the femininities in Singapore is also important because there is a widely circulating view in the discourse of sexualisation that tween girls are easily influenced and affected by the images that they see in Western popular culture. Nonetheless, this section illuminates that there are other forms of femininity that are emphasised in Singapore. While Chua (2003) noted earlier that popular culture consumption in Singapore is dominated by Western imports, he later claims that an East Asian popular culture has been gradually converting a significant proportion of audiences around the region (Chua 2004). Arguments in the discourse of sexualisation fail to account for such shifts and nuances, and not much is known about girls who simultaneously consume various (and at times, conflicting) images of what it means to be and dress as a girl. More importantly, a discussion of the ideas of femininity in Singapore also elucidates the difficulties of adopting a celebratory postfeminist framework in this context. While authors like Ringrose (2011) note that the discussions of girls who fashion themselves after adults often oscillate between the sexualisation-of-girls or a celebratory postfeminist perspective (whereby girls should be allowed to dress in ways that they want), the following sections illuminate why there is a need to move away from this binary understanding and open up a space for more “contradiction, complexity and diversity” (Vares et al. 2011: 139). The sexualisation-of-girls argument or the celebratory postfeminist perspective tend to operate as mutually exclusive frameworks for understanding tween girls’ adult-like dressing, which does not fully capture the experiences of tween girls in Singapore. Similarly emphasised in Jackson et al.’s (2013: 148) work, “it is in the contradictory spaces within and between ‘new’ and older discourses that negotiated identity work is most clearly seen.”

Contesting Femininities The type of femininities that adult women and girls are exposed to can be most easily observed through the fashion and beauty programmes aired in Singapore. Drawing

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on popular East Asian programmes broadcasted on local free-to-air television channels in Singapore, Martin, Lewis and Sinclair (2013) note that feminine subjectivities or the roles for women in Asia should be seen as a ‘double-bind’. Martin et al. (2013: 2) note how women in Asia (and by extension Singapore) are often depicted as free and encouraged to adopt “models of reflexive, choice-based feminine selfhood”, especially when it comes to their dressing. This aligns more broadly with what is known as a postfeminist viewpoint. However, while striving to attain this form of individuality, there is a constant emphasis for Asian women to return and live up to the ‘Asian (gender-conservative) norm’ of what womanhood is supposed to be like. Using the example of the Singaporean production, Style Doctors, Martin et al. (2013: 53) illustrate how this particular television programme reifies stereotypes of a “masculine” working world by framing women as in need of fashion and style advice because they have neglected their appearance due to their busy work schedules. According to the authors, the show was developed with the aim of helping Singaporean women return to their ‘original’ image of being “soft, family-focused and feminine” after being in a competitive work environment (Martin et al. 2013: 3); this indirectly suggests that having a professional career is incongruous with a woman’s ‘normative’ lifestyle, which also contradicts how a Singaporean woman ‘should look like’. A similar theme was also found on Her Sense, a popular Taiwanese beauty and fashion television programme in Singapore. This programme stressed the need for women to maintain an appearance of gentleness, alongside their entrance into the “masculine realms of wage labour” (Martin et al. 2013: 3). Such readings of the fashion and beauty shows aired in Singapore elucidate the conflicting messages that women and by extension, girls receive. While Singaporean women were encouraged to develop themselves as empowered, individual subjects, they were reminded that their aspirations should also be confined within traditional Asian feminine stereotypes. This is not something new, and there known struggles of emerging femininities and feminism both as an ideology and media image in Hong Kong, a country similar to that of Singapore. It has been outlined by scholars like Marchetti (2018: 193), that women in Hong Kong “wrestle with the demands of national histories of oppression, diaspora inequities, and local traditions involving gender inequities” despite changing times. In Singapore’s case, Martin et al. (2013: 3) elaborate that in fashion and beauty television programmes, “[women] viewers were advised to develop workplace looks that gave the appearance of softness, cuteness and pliability while avoiding the twin perils of overt self-sexualisation and appearing ‘too powerful’.” Authors like Kho (2013) and Hudson (2013) note that there have always been pressures for women in Singapore to uphold traditional ‘feminine roles’. Kho (2013: 11) further pinpoints “the important role played by schools in developing gender ideologies is key to understanding why women in Singapore still adhere to certain conservative gender beliefs and stereotypes.” For Kho (2013), the inculcation of traditional femininity starts young and through the domains of formal education. According to her, the Singaporean education system “perpetuates both gender and

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class inequality as schools socialise girls by transmitting messages about appropriate roles and activities for girls” (Kho 2013: 12). Hudson (2013: 155) reveals that that attempts “to recover an idealised Asian feminine past” is also evidenced by how the local newspaper with the highest readership, Straits Times, once published opinion pieces from writers that remind women that they should subscribe to a heteronormative, family-oriented and partriarchal role. In one opinion piece, women were advised to return to their roles of ‘peeling prawns’ (see Xie 2001). According to Hudson (2013: 151), these reveal signs of the “deep unease, if not distress” over Singaporean women gradually moving away from the stereotype of the submissive, feminine woman. The emphasis on recovering the ‘Asian woman’ and the types of femininities made available to young girls reflect the difficulties and inadequacy of a celebratory postfeminist reading of tween girls who might want to fashion themselves after adults in Singapore. As noted in the earlier chapter, the postfeminist approach to understanding girls’ dressing opens up a space for thinking about how young girls are not passive recipients of a sexualised, hyper-feminised culture. As Ringrose (2013: 1) explains, postfeminism is often referred to “as a set of politics and discourses grounded in assumptions that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education, the workplace and the home.” While there are scholars that suggest that the likelihood of girls to have desires to fashion themselves after adults comes from “a culture defined by and infused with girl power” (Pomerantz and Raby 2017: 13), where they can be, do and have anything they want, forms of sexism in Singapore still clearly exist in many ways. In Singapore, while girls are encouraged to develop their individual identities through dressing, they are reminded of the need to remain “soft” and “family-focused” (Martin et al. 2013: 3). Other forms of more sexualised femininities in Singapore have also been criticised and described as morally abject (Hudson 2015). The girl power discourse that offers girls “‘power’, independence and choice” (Jackson et al. 2013: 144) is thus at odds with the image of the ideal ‘Asian woman’ that has a large presence in popular media and the cultural landscape of Singapore. In addition, there are scholars like Gwynne (2013: 328) who point out that the socio-cultural climate in Singapore has yet to enter a “post-feminist epoch.” He differentiates between the terms ‘post-feminism’ and ‘postfeminism’, with the former mirroring a historical period and the latter a “cultural sensibility” (Gwynne 2013: 327). While postfeminism operates on the premise that girls are now living in a world where sexism no longer exists (Pomerantz and Raby 2017), with scholars like McRobbie (2004: 3) outlining that feminism is often considered “aged” and “made redundant” in lieu of postfeminism, most literature surrounding women in Singapore still reflects a predominant engagement with second-wave feminist ideas. For instance, in interpreting women’s magazines in Singapore as social texts, Basnyat and Chang (2014: 90) reflect that it is only recently that ideas of femininity have become more flexible and begun to incorporate more “masculine traits” such as independence and confidence. Moreover, while feminism is often described as “absorbed and supplanted by postfeminism” (Projansky and Vande Berg 2000: 15), this is an inaccurate depiction of the ‘state’ of feminism in Singapore. Even as a ‘stage’ before

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postfeminism, feminism in Singapore has been described by authors such as Lyons (2004) and Purushotam (1998) to be in a state of ambivalence, with issues pertaining to race, class and sexuality conveniently omitted. Thus far, in outlining the types of femininities that young girls in Singapore might be socialised into, this section also addresses how postfeminism as an “empowering period of social development” (Gwynne 2013: 328) is an inadequate lens to fully understand tween girls’ dressing in Singapore. More specifically, this section showed that while Singaporean girls are encouraged to develop their individuality and young feminine subjectivities (a seemingly postfeminist perspective), they too simultaneously receive messages that remind them that “overt self-sexualisation and appearing ‘too powerful’” (Martin et al. 2013: 3) is not ideal of an Asian girl/woman. For many scholars, this might speak to ideas of “conventional passive femininity” (Jackson et al. 2013: 145). These incongruities reflect the need for more research on girls who simultaneously consume different types of popular culture and receive contrasting messages about what it means to dress as a girl/woman from different sources. In the context of Singapore, neither the discourse of sexualisation, nor the postfeminist ideas of choice, independence and agency, are adequate for understanding girls’ adult-like dressing. As Ang and Stratton (1995: 68) highlight, Singapore is a contradiction in terms: on the one hand, its very existence as a modern administrative unit is a thoroughly Western occasion, originating in British colonialism; on the other hand, the Republic of Singapore now tries to represent itself as resolutely non-Western by emphasising its Asianness.

Conclusion The beginning of this chapter contextualised tween girls’ dressing in Singapore further, showing how there are several divergences from the plethora of work done in the West. In outlining the ideas childhood, consumption and femininity, this chapter showed that while useful, the discourse of sexualisation may offer over-simplistic interpretations of tween girls’ dressing. While I have cautioned against exclusively framing tween girls’ dressing as a process and outcome of sexualisation, this chapter highlights the nuances to girlhood and girls’ young femininities that the discourse of sexualisation is unable to fully address. This chapter also draws on Vares et al. (2011: 142) argument, to show that it is highly useful to go beyond the “active/passive binary” and the discourse of sexualisation vis-à-vis postfeminism to fully understand tween girls who are fashioning themselves after adults. In addition to the discourse of sexualisation, this chapter also addressed the difficulties of applying a celebratory postfeminist discourse to understand tween girls’ adult-like dressing within the Singaporean context. While a prolific consumer landscape affords different types of femininities and adult-like clothing for tween girls, local scholars like Kho (2013) note that girls are still socialised into highly gendered and traditional heteronormative roles from a young age, by way of the Singaporean education system. Additionally, there are competing ideas

Conclusion

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of femininity on popular media, whereby Singaporean women were encouraged to develop themselves as empowered, individual subjects, but are yet constantly reminded that their aspirations have to be confined to traditional Asian feminine stereotypes. Building on the arguments outlined in Chap. 1, this chapter points out that there is significant knowledge to be gained when girls’ adult-like dressing is investigated as a unique set of processes and practices that take place in Singapore. The case of tween girls in Singapore illuminates how there are some key questions that the extant literature on girls’ dressing is unable to fully answer, and a culturallyspecific approach is required to better understand tween girls’ fashioned identities in Singapore. More specifically, the next chapter will examine the changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives, moving the discussion of girls’ adult-like dressing beyond the sole focus of Western popular culture on traditional popular media. Chap. 3 will address the shifting terrain and emerging complexities of girls’ young femininities from a popular culture paradigm.

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Sharpe P. School days in Singapore: young children’s experiences and opportunities during a typical school day. Child Educ. 2002;79(1):9–14. Straughan PT. Family policies: interface of gender, work, and the sacredisation of the child. In: Social policy in post-industrial Singapore; 2008. Sun SH-L. Population policy and reproduction in Singapore: making future citizens. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis; 2012. http://www.MONASH.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p= 987987. Taylor A. Troubling childhood innocence: reframing the debate over the media sexualisation of children. Aust J Early Childhood. 35:48+. Vares T, Jackson S, Gill R. Preteen girls read “tween” popular culture: diversity, complexity and contradiction. Int J Media Cult Polit. 2011;7(2):139–54. https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.7.2.139_1. Veblen T. The theory of the leisure class. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books; 1994. Wee V. Children, population policy, and the state in Singapore. In: Stephens S, editor. New Jersey: Princeton University Press; 1995. Xie W. Prawn peelers wanted. In: Straits times. Singapore; 2001. Wong T, Yeoh BSA. Fertility and the family: an overview of pro-natalist population policies in Singapore. Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis; 2003. Yang C. Parents go for tuition—to help their kids. 2017. https://www.asiaone.com/women/parentsgo-tuition-help-their-kids. Accessed 18 Jan 2022. Yao S. Consumption and social aspirations of the middle class in Singapore. Southeast Asian Aff. 1996;23:337. Yeoh BSA, Huang S. Mothers on the move: children’s education and transnational mobility in globalcity Singapore. In: Chavkin W, Maher J, editors. the globalization of motherhood: deconstructions and reconstructions of biology and care, Vol. 35. London: Routledge; 2010. p. 31–54. Zurbriggen EL, Collins RL, Lamb S, Roberts T, Tolman DL, Ward ML, Blake J. APA Task force on the sexualisation of girls. http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf. Accessed 20 Apr 2014.

Chapter 3

YouTube and Girls’ Dressing

Introduction In the earlier chapters, I outlined that there is a prominent line of argument in the discourse of sexualisation that suggests that girls are heavily influenced and adversely affected by the popular culture they consume. In particular, this line of argument links Western popular culture on traditional popular media to the development of precocious or premature sexuality amongst young girls, especially in the way that tween girls may want to fashion themselves. Durham (2008), for instance, points out that the ‘Lolita’ constitutes a significant part of Western popular culture. Where mainstream media consistently emphasise and replay images of the Lolita, she is most concerned about the “Lolita Effect” (Durham 2008: 27). This is where there are misrepresentations about what constitutes female sexuality, and adult-like images on Western popular media displace or interfere with young girls’ ideas of what it means to dress ‘as a girl’. Durham (2008: 27) contends that rather than offering girls and the rest of their audiences “thoughtful, open-minded, progress and ethical understandings about sexuality”, the way Western popular culture portrays girls may cultivate a group of “prosti-tots”: preadolescent girls who are inclined to fashion themselves after sexy adults. However, beyond what has been discussed in the discourse of sexualisation, I pointed out that girls in Singapore receive contradictory messages about what they should wear. Through the analyses of popular fashion and beauty shows aired in Singapore, women are encouraged to develop themselves as individualised subjects although this is often countervailed by a constant reminder for them to return to traditional Asian feminine stereotypes (Hudson 2013; Martin et al. 2013). As illustrated by Martin et al. (2013: 3), “[viewers] were advised to develop looks that gave the appearance of softness, cuteness and pliability while avoiding the twin perils of overt self-sexualisation and appearing ‘too powerful’.” Hudson (2013) similarly notes that in an attempt to recover the ‘Asian woman’, the national newspaper in Singapore,

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_3

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Straits Times, has published columns that remind Singaporean women to return to a subservient role that prioritises the family and men. In acknowledging the confluence of ideas on what it means to dress as a girl in Singapore, this chapter opens with an overview of the popular culture products that the tween girls in the study consumed. The first part of the chapter highlights how girls’ popular culture consumption in Singapore is more likely to be a pastiche of East and West, a cultural nuance that has been overlooked in the discourse of sexualisation. While the Singaporean tween girls in the focus groups showed proclivities towards the same kind of celebrities and popular culture material considered ‘problematic’ in the discourse of sexualisation, they too consumed a significant amount of East Asian popular culture. This heterogeneity underpins why tween girls fashioning themselves after adults in Singapore is a topic worthy of focus, and that there should be new ways of understanding girls’ popular culture consumption and what they want to wear. The girls in the study were not singularly exposed to nor negatively influenced by Western popular culture/media. Further, the girls that I spoke to no longer predominantly engaged with traditional popular media sources. With girls no longer solely paying attention to the television, books or tween magazines, this chapter elucidates the shifts in popular culture consumption that have not been accounted for in the discourse of sexualisation. Much of the previous work on girls’ dressing has focused on traditional popular media content, with numerous studies considering the advertisements on these platforms to be the primary sources that influence tween girls to fashion themselves after adults. This chapter expands this frame of reference, to include YouTube as an emergent and prominent platform through which Singaporean girls now consume popular culture, illuminating also the new forms of young femininities that are now present and being circulated in this digital space.

Girls’ Popular Culture Consumption in Singapore: A Pastiche of East and West Given what Chua (2003) has noted about popular culture in Singapore and its consumption of predominantly Western imports, I initially anticipated the tween girls’ popular culture consumption in Singapore to strongly resemble what is considered ‘problematic’ of Western popular culture. There is a unifying view in the discourse of sexualisation that Western popular culture and its sexualised representations of young women and idols have socialised young girls to prematurely fashion themselves after adults. Teen sitcoms like Hannah Montana and iCarly, that are considered by some studies to be a significant source through which girls actively construct their ‘adult-femininity’ (Jackson et al. 2013) have become topics of debate (Rush and La Nauze 2006a; Zurbriggen et al. 2010), and books and magazines like Winx Club and Sweet Valley High that feature main female characters in

Girls’ Popular Culture Consumption in Singapore …

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heavy makeup and skimpy clothing have been suggested to encourage tween girls to sexualise themselves (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). When asked about their idols or online personalities, a number of white Anglophone female idols were brought up by the tween girls. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande were the most popular female celebrities amongst the tween girls; both celebrities are also known to have a large young female fanbase in the West. Other young actresses who have starred in notable teen/tween sitcoms such as Girl Meets World, Victorious, and Sam and Cat were similarly mentioned. The girls in the focus groups spoke about these young Western female celebrities favourably: Interviewer: Do you have any favourite celebrities? Gem: Ang moh1 one got a lot … Interviewer: Like who? Gem: Ariana Grande. Kim: I stalk Ariana Grande [on social media]. Penny: Sometimes if I’m very boring (bored) then I stalk all the celebrities, like the ang moh one lah.2 Ariana Grande very pretty leh! Focus group A

Nicole: Sabrina Carpenter. Aria: Yes! (her emphasis) Jade: Rowan Blanchett. Nicole: Rowan Blanchett! Yes! Aria: They’re the cast of Girl Meets World (teen sitcom). Interviewer: Oh, so all of them are from the cast of Girl Meets World. Together: Yah. Jade: I like Tess Christine also. She’s something like Bethany Mota (both American YouTubers). Aria: I think Zendaya also. She’s a singer, fashion icon. Jade and Nicole: (in unison) Zendaya! Jade: I like Bella Thorne (popular American teen actress) also. Aria: I like Beyonce. Sophia: I like Taylor Swift. Maddison: Wait, I have a list of [favourite] online personalities ... somewhere! Focus group I

1

Singaporean slang for Caucasian. Singlish. Often used at the end of the sentence, lah, leh and lor functions as an (re)emphasis on a point made.

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The girls’ investments in Western popular culture can be observed from how many of them had went beyond the characteristics of the uncritical mass consumer that proliferate studies of popular culture consumption (Adorno and Bernstein 2001). The girls displayed in-depth knowledge of the Western popular culture that they had consumed and critically engaged with the celebrities that they were fond of. Kira (11 years old), for instance, had introduced herself as a “Swiftie” to the focus group. In doing so, she not only affiliated herself with the singer, but the legion of Taylor Swift fans around the world. She further mentioned that she felt that Taylor Swift had a “deep personality” and when asked why, Kira replied that she had made the effort to watch all of Swift’s interviews on YouTube, and analysed the lyrics of all her songs. Another girl, Penny (11 years old), also shared that she knew what Ariana Grande’s bedroom looked like and that there were many other girls on YouTube who were “copying” her style. Her friend, Gem (11 years old), added that these girls on YouTube usually use a lot of makeup so as to look like Ariana Grande, which resulted in them having to go for facials and adopting “morning routines”, activities that were implied in their dialogue as ‘adult’ and age-inappropriate. In the excerpt below, both Penny and Gem (both 11 years old) speculate whether these ang moh girls had gone through plastic surgery so as to look more like Ariana Grande: Interviewer: Have you all seen girls your age dress like Ariana Grande? Penny: Yes, Facebook. Interviewer: Your friends? Penny: No, no, no. Ang moh people. I think they go dress up, zhˇen r˘ong (mandarin for plastic surgery), plastic surgery to like Ariana. Interviewer: Why do they do plastic surgery? Are they young people or ... Gem: A lot of ang moh kids right, they are like very young then they go put like all the makeup, then [so as to look] like Ariana Grande. Then they need to use like all the facial stuff. Yucks. Interviewer: How do you know? Is it on Facebook also? Gem: No, it’s on YouTube. Then they go and do like the ‘morning routine’ thing. Penny: Got one [YouTuber] right, ‘cause Ariana Grande the bedroom right is like white colour and stuff, they went to copy Ariana Grande’s room and go and paint on the pillows. Interviewer: Paint on the pillows? (laughs) Penny: Yah. Because Ariana Grande’s pillows got (has) like words, so they just paint on it, then it looks like Ariana Grande’s bedroom. Focus group B

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In similar ways outlined in the discourse of sexualisation, discussions like these show how Western female celebrities formed a large part of Singaporean tween girls’ everyday lives and their expression of self, femininity and identity. This type of detail, embellished with the most up-to-date information of their favourite celebrities or fans, elucidates the extent to which these girls were invested in popular culture consumption and critically engaged with this information. The conversations that the girls had about their favourite celebrities also attests to how popular culture was a vital topic of conversation amongst tween girls in school or at home, a point that I discuss in more detail below. However, to assume that Singaporean girls are influenced in the same negative manner as framed in the discourse of sexualisation would be to overlook how the girls in the study also consumed other forms of popular culture. In fact, the girls had used the term “ang moh” to distinguish Western popular culture from the other East Asian popular culture that they were invested in. “Ang moh” is a racial-othering term in Singapore, that is often used to identify people of a Western or Caucasian background. The girls had used this term to clearly demarcate this group of celebrities from the West. In his earlier work, Chua (2003: 5) emphasised that “Singapore exports almost everything it produces, [and] imports almost everything Singaporeans consume.” However, he later claims that Singapore has evolved to become a location of reception and consumption of popular culture from not only the West, but also from the rest of the world (Chua 2004). He explains that this is largely a consequence of its small and ethnically heterogenous population, which is unlike that of other East Asian Pop Culture locations where the populations are highly homogeneous and thus support a ‘national’-language pop culture. (Chua 2004: 67).

Through further conversations with the tween girls about their favourite celebrities or idols, East Asian popular culture was also shown to form a large part of their popular culture consumption. All the girls in my study revealed that on top of Western popular culture products, they too consumed a significant amount of Korean, Japanese and/or Taiwanese popular culture. Their interests in East Asian popular culture were most distinctively observed when one of the girls, Gem (11 years old), interjected with the question of whether the other girls had listened to K-pop in order to steer the focus group discussion to the idols and celebrities in East Asian popular culture. The rest of the girls responded instantly, by joining in the discussion about the Korean girl and boy bands that they liked and currently listened to, also occasionally mentioning other popular Taiwanese celebrities whom they supported. Some of the girls in the study also shared that they consumed a considerable amount of East Asian popular culture because it is what their parents or families enjoyed doing together: Kim: I like one actress ... Cameron Diaz. Interviewer: Isn’t she older?

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3 YouTube and Girls’ Dressing Kim: No! She’s like 40 now. When she was 20 she was beautiful (her emphasis)! Nicole: I like the one in the Maleficent show (movie) ... Interviewer: Angelina Jolie? Gem (to focus group): Actually right, do you all listen to K-pop? Kim: (almost instantly) Girls Generation! Gem: Yah, EXO. Penny: I like VanNess Wu (Taiwanese male pop star). Focus group A

Interviewer: What do you all watch? Brie: Korean shows. Interviewer: Korean drama? Brie: Yah. Interviewer: How you know what Korean drama to watch? Who introduces you what Korean drama to watch? Your friends? Brie: Grandmother. Sophie: We just see one [Korean] show, and then after that show finish then we continue the other (next) show. Interviewer: So usually do you all watch alone or with your grandmother? Sophie: With my mother. Interviewer: Oh, so your mother also likes to watch Korean shows? Together: Yah. Brie: Our mother likes to watch too. Focus group L

Conversations such as these reveal how in addition to Western popular culture, Singaporean tween girls were exposed to East Asian popular culture and their popular culture consumption was more likely to be a pastiche of East and West. Girls’ consumption of East Asian popular culture if not self-motivated, was highly regulated by the preferences and practices of their parents—the social domain that they were brought up in. Chao and Tseng (2002) have noted that interdependence between the child and parents are common in families in Asia and Lim (2020: 32), in particular, has underscored that children in Asia are “socialized to regard the family as their main locus in life, and to treasure kinship ties above all else.” In this collectivistic arrangement, familial harmony is therefore sustained by the roles that children must fulfil out of obligation, that may include spending time with their parents and extended family

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and watching the television shows that the adults in the family enjoyed. Such understandings that further contextualise girls’ popular culture consumption highlight how arguments in the discourse of sexualisation are highly Western-centric, and fail to account for several (non-Western) cultural divergences. While a significant part of the discourse of sexualisation is dedicated to addressing how girls fashion themselves after adults as result of the images that being circulated in Western popular culture, it fails to consider that there are girls who also consume other types of popular culture. Little is known about how to make sense of girls’ adult-like dressing when they simultaneously consume various and at times, contradictory ideas of young femininity. As a hegemonic way (Renold and Ringrose 2013) of understanding girls’ dressing, the discourse of sexualisation also fails to take into account that there are other popular culture sources outside the West that may have an influence on the way girls want to dress. Gwynne (2013), for instance, suggests that schoolgirl characters in Japanese and Taiwanese manga and anime can influence the way girls want to wear their uniforms. The Korean-wave3 and emergence of Korean girl idol industries have similarly been proposed by Kim (2011) to transform ideas of young femininity around the world. Kim (2011: 338) describes how many Korean girl groups commoditise “erotic femininity” through their performances and management companies in order to gain fans. She asserts “it is not merely in a metaphorical sense that girls’ bodies are commercially objectified; it is in the actual and material sense that they are designed, shaped and exhibited [provocatively] under the control of entertainment companies” in order to reap monetary profits (Kim 2011: 338). East Asian popular culture contributes the landscape of images that may have an impact on ideas of femininity (Ahn 2011), although it has not been accounted for in the discourse of sexualisation.

Conceptualising Girls’ Popular Culture Consumption in Singapore In theorising girls’ popular culture consumption in Singapore as a pastiche of East and West, with girls being highly invested in their own ‘regimes’ of popular culture consumption, I am not suggesting that the tween girls’ dressing in Singapore is more likely to be ‘subdued’ or less ‘adult-like’ due to popularity of East Asian popular culture and its more ‘traditional’ ideas of femininity (see Chap. 2); Martin et al. (2013: 3) underscored that in East Asian fashion and beauty shows “[women] viewers were advised to develop workplace looks that gave the appearance of softness, cuteness and pliability while avoiding the twin perils of overt self-sexualisation and appearing ‘too powerful’.” Rather, the findings above show that the mainstream understanding of Western popular culture negatively affecting and leading to girls’ adult-like dressing is not straightforward in the case of Singapore. The contexts under which girls consume popular culture demonstrates how discussions in the discourse 3

Term used to describe the spread of the South Korean popular culture all over the world.

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of sexualisation fail to consider that popular culture can be attributed different sociocultural meanings in different contexts. From what the tween girls have shared, East Asian popular culture consumption in Singapore was also likely to be a familial activity and a way that children could spend quality time with their parents and grandparents. Several girls in the study had explained that they watched Korean dramas because these activities constituted pastimes for their mothers or grandmothers. Where authors who subscribe to the discourse of sexualisation suggest that it is the duty of the ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ adult to protect tween girls from the ‘wrong’ messages in Western popular media (such as in the Bailey Review), it fails to consider the role that popular culture consumption may have and how it can be used to narrow generational differences or as a tool for family-bonding in contexts such as Singapore. Furthermore, the girls in the study revealed a general shift in engagement with what can be defined as ‘traditional’ popular culture sources. From the excerpts above, it can already be seen that the girls were making constant references to YouTube. Rather than Western popular culture on traditional popular media, the next part of the chapter examines the changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives. Rather than tween books, magazines and television shows, the following sections will discuss the ways that YouTube has become an integral part of tween girls’ lives, and their participation and consumption of popular media on YouTube should be taken as a new or emergent form of citizenship. More specifically, the following sections will illuminate the ways that YouTube has been overlooked in girls’ popular culture consumption and the discourse of sexualisation, and how it has become a crucial cultural component that intertwines with tween girls’ dressing. The girls in the study who were more likely to be on the video-sharing site were also more likely to able to relate more closely to each other during the focus groups as a result of this common shared knowledge. The following sections will further address the implications of the shifting mediascapes in tween girls’ lives and a particular appropriation of the digital space on YouTube for tween girls.

The Changing Mediascapes in Tween Girls’ Lives When presented with the question of what activities they usually took part in after school, all of the girls replied that they spent most of their time on mobile communication devices. They closely followed celebrities, idols, and online personalities, people whom they did not personally know, via their smart phones. Most of the tween girls had accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and some of these girls even went as far as to use the term “stalker” to describe the investments that they had in social media: Interviewer: I want to know what do you do during your free time and what are the activities you take part in outside school? Penny: Phone?

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Interviewer: What do you use on your phone? Penny: I go [on] social media. Interviewer: What do you like on social media? Facebook? Kim: Yes! Penny: Instagram. Gem: I got Facebook and I got Twitter. Penny: I usually post on Instagram. Kim: Post photo. Stalk people. Penny: Yah, I’m a stalker! Kim: I stalk everybody. Penny: I stalk my teachers. Focus group A

Some of the other girls (especially the younger ones) who were not allowed to use social networking sites, or were not exposed to them yet, were nevertheless using mobile communication devices in similarly engaged ways. They mentioned that they read Wattpad (a fan-fiction app), listened to music or looked at photos online via their phones or personal tablets (usually iPads). A common search term to look at photos on the Internet were the names of their favourite celebrities or idols. Given this engagement with their mobile devices, it was not surprising that all of the tween girls in the study revealed that they rarely purchased books or magazines. Kira (11 years old) did not own any magazines because, as she said, “we’re not teenagers yet.” Aria (12 years old) explained: “No, my mum doesn’t allow me [to buy magazines]. Expensive!” Print media were also not popular amongst tween girls because as primary school students, they did not have the financial capability to be purchasing magazines on their own. Sisters Sophie and Brie (aged 8 and 10 respectively) disclosed that they only owned three magazines that they shared. Even so, they did not read the magazines in depth, but “see the pictures only.” Likewise, some of the girls explained that they were not motivated to read magazines (which were mostly imported) because the magazines did not relate to the lived experiences of being a girl in Singapore. Sophia (11 years old) explained: “I look at it and I don’t understand anything, and I flip to the movies section.” Girls’ gradual detachment from what can be defined as traditional popular culture sources can be further observed from how Ashley (9 years old) made a poignant remark about how she has no idea what “MTVs” are: Interviewer: Do you all like MTVs? Do you all still watch MTVs? Ashley: I don’t know what’s that. Focus group G

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Western popular culture has been a large part of Singapore’s broadcasting history, which initially signalled its transition into a modern, English-speaking, cosmopolitan city-state. Music videos, which were first made popular by the American pop music channel have become synonymous with the channel name, MTV. However, from the excerpt above, it is possible to observe that for girls like Ashley, music videos are no longer consumed via the pop music channel or television; the once-popular acronym ‘MTV’ for music videos is lesser known amongst the tween girls. Most prominently, discussions like these exemplify how traditional popular media no longer have the same reach amongst the girls in the study. Books, magazines and television programs are no longer the tween girls’ first point of access to popular culture, sources that have been argued to significantly influence the way they dress in the discourse of sexualisation. While MTV, the pop music channel on television has been suggested to expose tween girls to a raunchy celebrity culture (Jackson et al. 2013), the conversations with the tween girls demonstrate that arguments like these fail to accurately depict the changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives. According to Appadurai (1990: 9), “mediascapes refer to […] electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information”, especially through traditional forms of media, such as newspapers, magazines, and television programmes. However, from the excerpts above, tween girls no longer predominantly consume Western popular culture from traditional popular culture sources such as MTV, the television or magazines. The following sections outline the ways in which these girls have now shifted their attention to the video-sharing site, YouTube.

YouTube as an Emergent Popular Media Source In addition to spending most of their time on their mobile communication devices, the girls shared that they spent a large amount of their time on the video-sharing site YouTube. Ray (8 years old) exclaimed that she spends almost all of her free time on YouTube: Ray: Everyday I [am] forever looking in the phone or YouTube. There was once I watch[ed YouTube] for 6 hours! Focus group H

Most of the tween girls mentioned that they frequently went on YouTube to consume what was trendy and popular at that point of time, and to update themselves on their favourite YouTubers and television programmes. Aria (12 years old) described YouTube as a place that she could go to to “catch-up” on the popular culture material that she has missed during the school week: Interviewer: What do you do after school? Together: YouTube!

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Interviewer: What do you watch on YouTube? Aria: I like to watch shows. Interviewer: What shows? Aria: I like to watch ... Maddison: I like to watch Bethany Mota (Macbarbie07 on YouTube) ... Aria: Yah! And Zoella (Zoella on YouTube) ... I like to watch shows, like catch-up [on] shows. Sophia: Disney Channel [on YouTube]. Maddison: Yes! Disney Channel! Focus group I

The extent to which YouTube plays a large part in the tween girls’ lives can be observed from Ashley’s (9 years old) immediate reply to the question about what the girls frequently did after school: “That’s easy (her emphasis), watching YouTube!” Older girls, such as Kira (11 years old) and Eva (12 years old) also highlight that apart from doing homework, YouTube was their next main “activity” after school. YouTube played a large part in these tween girls’ everyday lives by keeping them abreast of what is happening in popular culture, at the same time allowing them to invest specific efforts in the YouTubers or celebrities that they were fond of. Even mainstream celebrities today find a need to build a presence on YouTube, given its reach and popularity as a platform (Kleeman 2019): Kira: Her (Taylor Swift’s) new music video just came out today! Interviewer: Which one? Kira: Bad Blood. Like just came out today … Interviewer: You watched it already? Kira: It’s on YouTube! It’s on YouTube (her emphasis)! Ashley: It’s on YouTube (her emphasis)! Kira: Search ‘Taylor Swift Bad Blood’ [on YouTube]. It’s amazing (her emphasis). Focus group G

YouTube is currently estimated to stream more than 4 billion videos daily (Burgess et al. 2009; Oreskovic 2012). More recently, it changed the measurement of its success to hours watched instead of video views, attaining a watch-time of over 500 million hours daily in July 2015 (D’onfro 2016). However, besides operating as an extensive repository providing users with a plethora of popular culture material, the video-sharing site has become an integral element in tween girls’ daily lives for more profound reasons. YouTube is not only regularly updated with new videos of girls’ favourite celebrities and YouTubers, it is also free to use (with Internet access)

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and easily accessible via their mobile communication devices. Additionally, the girls favoured YouTube because the videos uploaded are often much shorter than a TV episode and are of ‘snackable portions’. This means that they can consume more and have full control over what they want to watch than if they were to set aside this time for television. YouTube is thus a tool that complements girls’ investments in popular culture, forging a symbiotic relationship with their popular culture consumption. YouTube as a form of citizenship and a shared sphere of meaning was also observed from how the girls found common things to speak about, such as which YouTubers they enjoyed watching and why. Maurer (2018:27) found that intimate conversations about what they watched on popular media helped tween girls negotiate friendships, as popular culture material “provided them with a shared lexicon of characters, narratives, and scenarios—reference points through which they could trade opinions and expertise.” Through YouTube, the girls were similarly able to strengthen their newly formed friendships with one another. While some of the girls did not know each other prior to the focus group, they showed more interest in interacting with each other and were more willing to share their experiences when the topic of YouTube was brought up. Not surprisingly, in the girls’ conversations, there were several popular YouTubers who were popularly mentioned, which for the purpose of the chapter can be neatly organised according to the categories of local (Singaporean) and non-local YouTubers—this follows the pastiche of East (Singaporean) and West: Gem: I watch PewdiePie ... Interviewer: Who is PewdiePie? Penny: It’s like a YouTube channel, they do a lot of fun stuff. Gem: It’s like a man playing video games lah ... Penny: They are very funny sometimes. Like do funny videos ... Gem: But then right, he says vulgarities ... Kim: I also like TreePotatoes (Singaporean YouTubers). Penny and Gem: Oh yah! Penny: And Wahbanana (Singaporean YouTubers). They are very funny leh ... Gem: And Night Owl Cinematics (Singaporean YouTubers)! Focus group A

Charlotte: YouTube is very good. But it’s just that whenever you watch one channel, then they’ll keep recommending channels to you and it’s really annoying. Interviewer: What YouTube channels do you all like then? Do you like Wahbanana? Together: Yah! Ruien: TreePotatoes! JianHaoTan! NaomiNeo! N.O.C (Night Owl Cinematics)! I can name all those. They are really funny! Focus group K

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Conversations between the tween girls build on Lange’s (2014: 32–62) work, where she points out how children these days increasingly forge “video-mediated friendships”. However, unlike the children in Lange’s (2014) ethnographic study, the tween girls were not interested in appearing on YouTube or sharing their own lives on the Internet. They did not want to specialise in video-making, nor want to master the technical knowledge behind YouTube (Lange 2014). The girls in my study mainly enjoyed being spectators on YouTube.

Tween Girls’ Spectatorship Tween girls’ spectatorship on YouTube invites a relatively different set of considerations in relation to how/why girls are encouraged to model themselves after adults. While authors like Rush and La Nauze (2006b: 1) assert that adults should not underestimate the power of tween books, magazines and television programmes to sexualise or adultify young viewers and readers, this growing spectatorship indicates that rather than fixating on broadcast, cable or print media, YouTube as a new media platform should be given more focus. Given the attention to children’s usage of the Internet, social networking sites and the advertisements that they may be exposed to online through these sites, there is a need to examine how YouTube fits into the narrative and anxiety around girls’ adult-like dressing and so-called ‘sexualisation’. Most prominently, the growing popularity of YouTube poses a challenge to the way that the “discourse of protection” (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 392) calls for protective boundaries in order to slow down or prevent adult-like dressing brought about by Western popular culture on traditional popular media. Firstly, I noted above that traditional popular media sources such as books, television and magazine are no longer tween girls’ first choices; girls are now paying more attention to YouTube. Secondly, it would be difficult to employ a ‘discourse of protection’ (Egan and Hawkes 2009: 392) and limit tween girls’ access to YouTube without considering the power of peer culture. YouTube has emerged as a popular and powerful topic of conversation for the tween girls in the study, with what they were viewing also likely to foster some sense of sociality. Parents in the Bailey Review are already known to succumb to “pester power” (Bailey 2011: 56) as they are afraid that if they do not indulge their children in what is currently popular, they would be opening up opportunities for their children to be bullied or teased at school. In a similar vein, it is not too difficult to understand why some parents would be unsure about strictly limiting girls’ access to YouTube; there is worry that their daughters might be left out by other children of the same age. Furthermore, some of the girls revealed that they went on YouTube sometimes under the guise of ‘researching’ schoolwork—this makes it harder for parents to control what the girls were watching on YouTube, given

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that Singaporean parents too want their children to excel academically. Parents in Singapore have been known to load hours of tuition on top of regular schoolwork, some even taking leave from work so that they can monitor, coach and even study with their children at home (Quek 2014). It is likely, then, that Singaporean parents encourage their children to spend time online (even on YouTube) so as long as it benefits them at school (see Lwin et al. 2021). According to the girls, their parents can be broadly described as ‘digital immigrants’, whereas the tween girls themselves were ‘digital natives’. As families have become more democratic and negotiations are more likely to occur (see Beck 1997), parents are expected to be more allowing when it comes to their children’s media usage, especially when “changes in the digital environment differentiate parent and child generations so strongly” (Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020: 32). While there are arguments in the discourse of sexualisation that focus on the raunchy celebrity culture that girls are exposed to, the growing presence of YouTube in tween girls’ daily lives also points to a need to reconsider what it means to be a ‘celebrity’ in girls’ social worlds. While some argue that videos on YouTube are essentially popular culture material recycled from the television or magazines, it is important to recognise that YouTube opens tween girls to a network of “microcelebrities” (Senft 2008: 25) who may now have more influence on the way tween girls’ are fashioning themselves. Marwick (2015: 337) describes micro-celebrities as people online who adopt “a mind-set and set of practices in which the audience is constructed as a fan base, [and] popularity is maintained through ongoing fan management, and self-presentation is carefully assembled to be consumed by others.” A survey conducted by the University of Southern California found that YouTubers are more likely to be able to gain the attention of young people, as opposed to celebrities who only have a presence on traditional mainstream media (Ault 2015; Dredge 2016a). There are also reports of the struggles of YouTube to move beyond its core audience of teens and tweens (Winkler 2015). The next section will discuss some of the video-mediated ways that YouTubers are able to cultivate an ‘emergent’ femininity, by teaching girls how they should dress or behave through the videos or tutorials that they post online.

“I Just Look at the YouTubers”: Popular YouTubers/YouTube Channels This part of the chapter seeks to further exemplify how YouTube as a popular culture source is different from that of traditional popular media, and has implications on the way that tween girls might want to fashion themselves. It aims to extend the existing scholarship that has focused on the celebrity culture found in traditional mainstream media, and studied in relation to the sexualisation or adultification of tween girls’ dressing (Jackson and Goddard 2015; Jackson and Vares 2015a; Jackson et al. 2016). There are shifting boundaries of tween girls’ popular culture consumption

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and the ways in which YouTubers typically construct and celebrate what it means to be girl are significantly different from what tween girls have previously viewed on traditional popular media. With the changing mediascapes of tween girls’ lives, it is not surprising that there was a fandom created around YouTube stars. As Eva (11 years old) pointed out: Eva: Usually I don’t, um, look at the singers or actresses at all ... I just look at the YouTubers. Interviewer: Oh, so who are your favourite YouTubers? Anyone else besides MyLifeAsEva? Eva: Actually I like iHasCupquake more ... Interviewer: So what are all these people doing? Makeup? Or actually like vlog (video-blog) about their lives? Eva: For MyLifeAsEva, she’ll give you [lifestyle] tips and makeup tips. Focus group G

Similarly, in one of the later excerpts, Maddison and Aria (both 12 years old) described in detail Bethany Mota’s (one their favourite female YouTubers) fashion line with Aéropostale (a large American clothing retailer). This was even though this line of clothing was not available in Singapore, and Mota’s fashion collaboration with Aéropostale had not received much publicity outside America. The girls in the study invested significant time and effort in order to be up to date with the content from their favourite YouTube stars. There were both local and non-local YouTube channels that the tween girls frequently accessed and the following sections will provide an overview of the channels and videos that tween girls regularly consumed and examine the ways that these YouTubers and YouTube videos appealed to the tween girls in the study.

Local Singaporean YouTubers Wahbanana, RyanSylvia (also producing videos under the name of Night Owl Cinematics) and TreePotatoes were the three most popular Singaporean YouTube channels brought up by the tween girls in the study. Although three separate groups of Singaporeans maintain these channels, they exist in a strongly integrated network and often support each other by starring in each other’s videos. Whilst competing for similar audiences, Wahbanana, RyanSylvia and TreePotatoes produce almost the same type of videos, that capitalise on young female subjectivities in Singapore. Their popular videos on YouTube revolve around almost similar content, such as “You are Single for a Reason” (Wahbanana), “Valentine’s Day Woes” (TreePotatoes) and “Ways to Seduce Men” (RyanSylvia). These videos are

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often replete with Singlish,4 in order to attract and engage with a Singaporean audience. In one of the more popular videos from RyanSylvia (reaching over a million views), they teach female audiences “How To Be a Girly Girl” (RyanSylvia 2013). In the caption that introduces the video, the YouTubers behind RyanSylvia inquire: “Are Singaporean girls feminine enough? Here are some tips to be more attractive and girly for Singaporean men!” (RyanSylvia 2013). This video goes on to suggest that young women should be “well-groomed”, “put on makeup” and “lose weight” in order to fit into the stereotype of what is considered to as “feminine” for Singaporean men (RyanSylvia 2013). The other local, individual YouTubers mentioned throughout the focus groups, NaomiNeo and JianHaoTan, started out as teen bloggers in 2009, gaining popularity from their much-publicised relationship online. They have since shifted their focus to YouTube, also creating a hashtag #AskNaoHao, an amalgamation of both their names. Since their breakup in 2016, they each have individual channels exploring their respective interests. Naomi has always received much attention for her bold statements made on the Internet. One of her more popular Facebook posts addresses the issue of “double standards” when girls are deemed as sluts when they sleep around, but “guys can have sex with so many girls and nothing happens” (Neo 2012). In 2014, in response to the criticism she received on social media for posting provocative photos to receive ‘likes’, she retaliated with a video titled “It’s Just Boobs” (NaomiNeo 2014b). This video garnered over 1 million views on YouTube. In this video, Naomi argued “there comes these self-righteous people, who claims that it (her picture) is inappropriate because kids are seeing it”. She goes on to justify that children see such images all the time: at bookstores, convenience stores and petrol kiosks, and that adult male magazines such as FHM are easily found “all over the counter”. She concludes, “to say that kids don’t see them (sexualised/provocative images of women), that’s bullshit”, and that she has the right to wear what she wants. Almost all of the Singaporean YouTubers that the tween girls mentioned uploaded videos that use parody and comedy to reinforce their message. This was even when some of the YouTube videos had reproduced narrow ideas of what females should look or be like, and featured young women in revealing, sexualised clothing (such as low-cut singlets or wet T-shirts) for the pleasure of the male gaze. This explains why some of the girls had used the term “funny” or “random” to describe the content of these videos. In the comedy skit “You are Single for a Reason”, Wahbanana introduces a young female character who intentionally drops ice cream on herself as a way to make the boy she fancies pay attention to her (WahBanana 2014). One of Jian Hao’s (JianHaoTan on YouTube) more popular videos that is entitled “10 Ways to Be Famous in Singapore” (JianHaoTan 2015) caricatures 10 ways in which young people can gain followers and popularity on social media. By stating that there are a number of online personalities who have already done the same thing, he tells

4

A variety of English spoken in Singapore. As a creole, it consists of a mixture of English, Malay, Mandarin and Chinese dialects.

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his presumably young female audiences to “show their boobs”, or “date a famous person” in order to gain followers. This brief overview of the Singaporean YouTubers that were mentioned throughout the focus groups illuminates the young femininities and cultural elements found on YouTube that may have an influence over what tween girls feel that they should wear. The following section will discuss the types of videos from the nonlocal YouTubers that the tween girls regularly watched, centring on the ways that Western young female YouTubers typically construct and celebrate what it means to be girl. Following the pastiche of East and West, the tween girls in the study also watched a significant amount of videos uploaded by other non-local, Western YouTube personalities.

Popular Western YouTubers The tween girls in the study did not solely consume videos made by local, Singaporean YouTubers, and also watched a significant amount of videos uploaded by other non-local, Western YouTube personalities. They preferred videos made by young adult, female YouTubers, including the likes of Bethany Mota (McBarbie07), Zoe Sugg (Zoella) and Tess Christine (TessChristine). These popular female YouTubers have all received significant media coverage for being “ultra-celebrities”, due to the millions of subscribers that they have (Fitzpatrick 2015). Most of the tween girls in the study expressed that they enjoyed watching “haul videos” uploaded by the young female YouTubers such as Mota and Sugg. In haul videos, young female YouTubers typically introduce and describe products that they purchase after each shopping trip, which often takes place over the weekends or during the holidays. Mota (MacBarbie07) first uploaded videos about her fashion purchases back in 2009, which saw her subscribers on YouTube grow exponentially. Media reports speculate that she earns approximately half a million dollars a year from YouTube, just by shopping and filming what she buys (Halperin 2014). Sugg (Zoella), who has recently reached 11 million subscribers, similarly posts videos updating her female fans on where she shops at for the ‘most fashionable’ clothes. The fashion labels mentioned include New Look, Topshop and H&M, stores that are also available in Singapore. According to Vogue magazine, Sugg has become one of the biggest stars on YouTube, with 270 million views on her channel at any time (Casparis 2014). Like Mota, she gained more YouTube viewers by doing haul videos, but has now gone on to develop her channel to offer more in-depth fashion and beauty advice to young female viewers. Besides haul videos, the tween girls also claimed that they enjoyed watching videos in which female YouTubers explore and explain clothing styles, and how to “get the look” of popular celebrities. YouTubers like Christine (TessChristine) demonstrates the easiest way for girls to draw ‘winged’ eyeliner and use vibrant red lipstick, something that Taylor Swift is notable for. She also teaches her viewers

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how they can emulate thousand-dollar outfits worn by Taylor Swift, for less than a hundred dollars each (TessChristine 2014). Relatedly, a large genre of videos uploaded by the girls’ favourite YouTubers also attempt to inspire and influence young girls’ fashion choices, by giving them advice on how to ‘put together’ an outfit. In one of her ‘Get Ready’ videos, Eva (MyLifeAsEva) mentions that “after the fear and nervousness of getting the date”, girls “have to worry about your hair, your makeup and your clothes” (MyLifeAsEva 2013). Her video is structured with a “makeup and hair tutorial” at the beginning, and an “outfit tutorial” at the end. Besides videos on fashion, there is a strong, growing community of non-local, Western YouTubers who are dedicated to generating beauty and makeup content for a young female public. These types of videos range from letting viewers know what their beach essentials are for spring to sharing their morning beauty routines. Christine’s morning routine video, for example, features herself getting out of bed, shaving her legs and applying makeup, checking social media and wearing high heels before she steps out of the house on a “casual day out” (TessChristine 2015). It is worth noting that videos on fashion, beauty and makeup are not specifically produced for a preteen girl audience. In fact, videos on makeup, behaviour and dress constitute a significantly different ‘genre’ from what girls have traditionally been allowed to watch on television (i.e. teen/tween sitcoms on the Disney Channel). However, with tween girls’ increasing access and presence on YouTube, videos like these have become legitimate and ready sources of information for girls to closely follow. This is especially when YouTubers employ a DIY approach and articulate clear instructions on how young girl audiences can apply makeup, for instance, to look like Selena Gomez (Macbarbie07 2011b). Popular YouTuber Zoey Sugg (Zoella) also has a number of videos teaching her female fans how to do makeup or beautify themselves from the comforts of their own home. In a video that has received over 5 million views, Sugg provides a step-by-step tutorial teaching girls how to apply makeup to get what she defines as an “autumn look” (Zoella 2015c). In the information section of the video, she has also included a detailed list of cosmetic products that she has used to “achieve this look”. Given the immense popularity of YouTube as a new media platform, the practice of YouTubers providing lists of products to purchase in the description box of their YouTube videos adds another layer of complexity to how girls today may want to fashion themselves. Not only are tween girls socialised into certain ‘ideal’ appearances and receive specific instructions from YouTubers on what they can be doing to gain entry into the world of young adult women, they are now supplemented with a list of products that they should be buying or using, directly from their favourite YouTube stars. Some of these products featured on YouTube may actually be sponsored, but are masked as products that YouTubers have purchased with their own money because it is ‘quintessential’ or ‘useful’ to have them ‘as a girl’.5 There is research that has shown that influencer marketing on YouTube 5

Calls for more regulations to prevent YouTubers from covert advertising with children have been discussed by Green (2015).

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raises ethical concerns because sponsored content and vlog advertising blurs the line between what is advertised and what is not, and children have reported difficulties recognising hidden and embedded advertising on YouTube (see De Jans et al. 2018; Evans et al. 2018; Martinez and Olsson 2019; Van Dam and Van Reijmersdal, 2019). However, it was found that even with disclosure, children do not have negative brand attitudes if the products were being sold by their favourite YouTubers (Boerman and van Reijmersdal 2020). Besides videos on fashion, beauty and behaviour, young female YouTubers have begun to delve into more in-depth issues that are more identifiable in tween girls’ daily lives. This type of engagement takes on many forms, with some YouTubers addressing the complexities of being a girl more directly than others. Unlike the videos on beauty and makeup, videos that specialise in girl issues are most of the time targeted at younger girl audiences. They primarily align with the key theme of assisting preteen girls to navigate the complexities that they might be facing or will face in their teenage years. Eva (MyLifeAsEva), for instance, talks about “How To Be a Girl” (MyLifeAsEva 2015). In the introduction of this video, YouTuber Eva mentions that “growing up as a girl can be difficult”. She therefore created this video to recommend some “life hacks” on “how to be a girl” and “how to reach your maximum girl potential”. Eva takes on the voice of an “older sister” in this video, teaching girls how to avoid making “mistakes” that she had made when she was younger. She goes on to educate her young female audiences on how to ease period pains, or how girls should be trying their bras to know if they fit well. She concludes that with these little tips, “being a girl just got a whole lot easier”. This brief content analysis of the local and non-local YouTubers summarised the distinctive ‘genres’ of the videos on YouTube that appealed to the girls in the study. Besides videos predominantly made by young adults, girls generally enjoyed videos that construct a specific trajectory of girlhood and focuses on fashion, beauty and behaviour. In these videos, girls are taught by YouTubers how they should look, dress or conduct themselves both in and outside school. From the videos that I have examined, girls were also instructed about the gender-heteronormative roles that they should take on. For instance, a point suggested in the video “How To Be a Girly Girl” by local Singaporean YouTube channel RyanSylvia was for girls/young women to become a “domestic goddess” (RyanSylvia 2013). While the comprehensive instructions on ‘how to be a girl’ are key to understanding the differences between YouTube and that of traditional popular media, it is the affective relationships that YouTubers are able to forge that were especially meaningful for the girls in my study. I discuss girls’ perceptions of and affective relationships towards YouTubers in more detail in the final section below.

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Rethinking YouTube and Tween Girls’ Dressing In describing what girls enjoyed watching on YouTube, the section above sought to show in what ways YouTubers encompassed some form of “soft power” over tween girls’ dressing (Chua 2012: 119). The term “soft power” is adopted from Chua (2012: 119), where he distinguishes between the Weberian ideal of power as “the ability to get others to do things that they may not be willing to do”, and “soft power” as associated with how mediated cultures (hence YouTubers and YouTube videos) are able to shape the preferences and everyday habits of those who are consuming it. YouTubers are able to capture and maintain girls’ attention, by attending to a range of topics that relate to them on a more personal level. This unique way of relating to the audience resonates with Horton and Wohl’s (1956) theory of parasocial relationships, where the relationships that YouTubers are able to forge are significantly different from that of a ‘traditional’ celebrity. The girls in the study felt that they were able to relate to YouTubers on a more personal level through their videos, akin to learning about a new friend in school. According to them, by sharing their lived experiences, YouTubers were more ‘authentic’ because they willingly offered their “life advice” online. Such interpersonal feelings were also built on an increasing number of videos that were specifically dedicated to a preteen girl public, seeking to help them navigate the complexities of being a girl. Both Maddison and Aria (both 12 years old) made clear references to this, by claiming how the YouTubers that they followed were able to make them feel like they are “worth it”: Maddison: They (YouTubers) give like life and fashion advice. DIY! Aria: They do like DIY. Lifestyle tips ... Interviewer: Like what kind of advice do they give? Like what you should wear or what you should not wear? Aria: Like what she wears (her emphasis)! Maddison: Bethany actually designs her own Aéropostale collection. She has a clothing line. Zoella, she blogs and she gives, er, like, she tells you what’s nice to wear with this (pointing at her own clothing). Interviewer: So why do all of you like them? Aria: They are very down to earth compared to some celebrities. Yah. She gives like advice, like life advice! Maddison: Yah, they just make people feel like ... Aria: You’re worth it. Maddison: That was what I was about to say! Focus group I

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The girls considered YouTubers to be the more intimate and affective ‘celebrity’ because they believed that YouTubers lead somewhat normal lives and understand the difficulties of what it means to be a girl today, and readily offer their useful life experiences and advice online. Scholars like Burgess et al. (2009: 23) similarly refer to YouTubers as “ordinary celebrities”, identifying the unique relationships that YouTubers are able to forge with their audiences. Burgess et al. (2009) elaborate that YouTubers are able to blur the distinction between the people who are spectators, as opposed to the traditional celebrity that is situated far from the audience’s reach. Tethered to this understanding is the need to recognise that YouTubers are more likely to influence tween girls’ mode of dress because they are seen as relatable in many aspects of their daily lives and have readily-available instructions online about how girls should be dressing, looking, or carrying themselves in everyday situations. Nevertheless, it is not the central point of this discussion to animate debates about how girls are fashioning themselves after adults as a result of the videos that they are watching on YouTube. It is important to be careful about making the same kind of generalisations present in the discourse of sexualisation that assume that tween girls’ adult-like dressing is synonymous with sexualisation and harmful for all young girls. A look at the videos that the girls regularly watched on YouTube and the relatability that YouTubers have amongst the tween girls shifts arguments in the discourse of sexualisation beyond the individualistic framing that Western popular culture on traditional popular media and the raunchy celebrity culture are primary sources that encourage tween girls to fashion themselves after adults. The growing popularity of YouTube points to a need to reassess the ways scholars in the discourse of sexualisation have interpreted a range of popular culture factors, which they argue lead to the adultification of tween girls’ dressing.

The DIY Ethos Furthermore, YouTube as a popular media platform in tween girls’ lives produces new ways of understanding tween girls’ dressing. The girls in the study emphasised that the YouTubers they preferred often encompassed a “DIY” ethic. In academic scholarship, there has been many explorations of the term ‘DIY’, especially in relation to girl power and the punk philosophy of DIY (Harris 2004). Indeed, YouTube has been identified as a fertile site in which issues related to feminism for young girls and women can be brought up and advanced today. Moorti (2018: 109) outlines how YouTube has accelerated the growth of ‘millennial feminism’ for gender-based violence and the video-sharing platform has become a “productive site for the articulation of an indignant feminism, a form of activism that aims to cultivate a transnational community of sentiment.” The DIY ethos and the establishment of a free space on YouTube for young girls to communicate or exchange views have thus farreaching impact and effects (or what Jenkins et al. 2012 term as ‘spreadability’) on girls’ everyday lives. Most of the girls in the study had also used ‘DIY’ as an umbrella term to depict the instructive nature of the YouTubers and videos that they enjoyed

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watching. In the excerpt above, Maddison and Aria (12 years old), for instance, had used the term ‘DIY’ to refer to how the YouTubers they closely followed were able to offer fashion, beauty and life advice that is achievable for tween girls. Ostensibly, the term ‘DIY’ used by the girls is closely linked to how they felt that they were able to actively learn something from the videos and young adult YouTubers, outside the confines of school or instruction by their parents. In this sense, the term ‘DIY’ is related to feelings of empowerment, because for the girls, YouTubers are ‘ordinary’ people who have stood up to share their life tips online, showing them the ropes of being a girl. In an earlier excerpt, Maddison (12 years old) exclaims how YouTuber Zoella is able to “tell you what’s nice to wear with this! (pointing at her own clothing)”. Accordingly, the ‘DIY ethic’ that the tween girls identified is closely aligned with how Tolson (2010: 283) described YouTubers as the “ordinary experts.” YouTubers are able to influence tween girls’ mode of dress through their ‘DIY’ videos not only because they are viewed as relatable (both off and online), but also because they appear as experts in negotiating the complexities of being a girl. More often of than not, YouTubers take on the role of ‘mentors’ who are able to provide ‘solutions’ to what girls should or should not be doing in order to fulfil the role of the young female subject. This is despite some of the videos made for older girls and imbued with narrow notions of femininity, or where gender-normative ideas of girls’ dressing and appearances are framed to be of paramount importance.

Conclusion This chapter examined young Singaporean girls’ popular culture consumption, especially in relation to how the discourse of sexualisation has understood girls’ mediated cultures and the ways that young girls are likely to fashion themselves after adults. I showed that a leading argument in the discourse of sexualisation—that Western popular culture leads to an adultification of tween girls’ dressing—does not account for girls’ multi-layered patterns of popular culture consumption in Singapore. Girls’ consumption of popular culture in Singapore is more likely to be a pastiche of East and West, presenting nuances to the argument that tween girls are vulnerable and susceptible to the images and representations of the older girls/women that they see on Western popular culture. This chapter also points out that little is known about how girls who simultaneously consume different types of popular culture develop their young femininities and gain ideas on how they should fashion themselves in the discourse of sexualisation. Further, this chapter identified a shift in young Singaporean girls’ popular culture consumption that has not been accounted for in the discourse of sexualisation. No longer predominantly watching television or browsing teen magazines, this chapter acknowledged the changing mediascapes in tween girls’ lives, whereby girls are now gaining mobility online and converging on YouTube (see also Loh 2019). This chapter called for a closer examination of the video-sharing site YouTube,

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as YouTube as a prominent popular culture source in tween girls’ lives complicates several understandings of why girls may want to fashion themselves after adults. For instance, where the discourse of protection highlights the need for measures to slow down or prevent adultification brought about by traditional Western popular media, I underscored how it is not a simple matter for parents or adults when tween girls’ spectatorship on YouTube can be a form of citizenship or sociality. However, it is not the aim of this chapter to suggest that YouTube as a new media platform has eclipsed all the other, more traditional forms of popular media in tween girls’ lives and YouTubers are encouraging tween girls to fashion themselves after adults. Rather, this chapter outlines why academic discourse concerned with tween girls’ dressing should not dismiss the community of YouTubers whom tween girls are engaging with, nor treat tween girls’ spectatorship on YouTube as part of a teenage fad. Research on ‘influencers’ in Singapore has tended to centralise on other social media sites such as Instagram or online blogs (Abidin 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Furthermore, a brief content analysis of the videos, YouTubers and YouTube channels that the tween girls regularly accessed revealed that they enjoyed watching videos that focused on young female subjectivities and subscribed to the themes of fashion, beauty and behaviour. There is a particular appropriation of the digital space on YouTube for the young female public, that has been made increasingly available and accessible to tween girls (see Loh 2017). While some of the YouTube videos reproduce highly narrow ideas of what a female should look or be like, this chapter acknowledged that the DIY ethos engaged by the YouTubers may also constitute threads of empowerment for some of the girls. Where authors like Ringrose (2011) note the polarity of arguments (between the discourse of sexualisation and postfeminist perspective) when it comes to understanding tween girls’ dressing, this chapter has shown that a victim versus agency approach does not correspond with the current understanding of these girls who have now shifted their attention to YouTube. Some of the girls in the study felt that young female YouTubers were more authentic than traditional mainstream celebrities because they willingly shared the ropes of ‘being a girl’. Besides the more direct methods of learning how to put on makeup or to dress like celebrities from certain YouTube tutorials, the way that the girls related to YouTubers also outline the possibilities of the new kinds of subjectivities that may emerge and complicate why tween girls may fashion themselves after adults. While not explicitly mentioned, girls may fashion themselves after adults, in order to present themselves as “self-taught” (Lange 2014: 189–215), embodying the DIY ethic they saw as important in their favourite YouTubers. Tween girls’ dressing in Singapore is thus more likely to be an amalgamation of factors that has not been fully considered in the Western discourse of sexualisation. While there may be elements present in YouTube videos that influence tween girls to fashion themselves after (sexy) adults, YouTube is only one of the ways that tween girls may be exposed to and internalise messages on young femininity. The next chapter will examine the cultural conditions under which certain types of clothing are made available and desirable to tween girls, mapping the social meanings that girls attach to their dressing practices. In examining the economic, social and cultural factors outside a popular culture paradigm, the next chapter offers a cultural

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perspective of tween girls’ dressing in Singapore and the meanings that are embedded in their clothes and dressing styles.

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Chapter 4

A Cultural Perspective of Tween Girls’ Dress

Introduction The previous chapter focused on a popular culture paradigm and how some YouTubers (re)produced narrow ideas of what a girl should look like according to the narratives of fashion, beauty and behaviour. However, it noted that the DIY ethos that YouTubers represent may also form a lexicon of empowerment that can explain why girls want to fashion themselves after adults. The previous chapter stressed that discussions surrounding tween girls’ dressing need to move away from the dominant idea that Western popular culture, and in particular, traditional media, has mainly negative impacts on girls. The present chapter aims to provide a cultural perspective of tween girls’ dress. A key issue here is that, while there may be elements present in YouTube videos that encourage tween girls to fashion themselves after adults, YouTube is only one of the ways that girls are exposed to and internalise messages about young femininity. I also noted in earlier chapters that discussions of girls’ adult-like dressing are often Western-centric, and fail to account for several specificities of girlhood. This chapter attends to this gap in scholarship, by showing how tween girls’ (adult-like) dressing in Singapore can be better understood in relation to the three themes of aspiration, allowance, and affiliation. The first part of this chapter examines how through a discussion of the type of clothes that they wore or would like to wear, the young girl participants revealed aspirations for some sense of ‘style’, which was emphasised as important to negotiate their sense of self and individualities. The first part of this chapter therefore examines how style was a form of expression, self-identification and agency (Pomerantz 2008) for the girls in the study. However, as primary school students, the girls only received nominal amounts of pocket money and usually did not have the economic resources to purchase clothing on their own. Their acquisition of clothing was therefore organised around what was usually allowed by their parents/adults. Further emphasising that it would be difficult to consider girls entirely as autonomous and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_4

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agentic individuals (Durham 2008; Jackson and Westrupp 2010), this chapter shows how girls’ aspirations of style operated within bounded realities whereby the young girl participants had to negotiate within what was defined as accepted and acceptable behaviour by the adults/parents. In the extended conversations with the tween girls about their desires for certain clothing and what their parents had usually allowed them to purchase, the girls revealed that their ideas of being ‘stylish’ and the clothes that they wanted were also strongly affiliated with ideas of affluence and social class in Singapore. It was mainly through clothing that the young girl participants made sense of class (what it means to be rich) and social mobility (to become rich and afford more clothes). Furthermore, in Singapore, children from affluent families have been framed as high achievers, with more of them qualifying for Integrated or Gifted Education Programmes (Teng 2016). Given such class-based outcomes, this chapter highlights how Singapore’s own “successful girls narrative” (Pomerantz and Raby 2011: 550) may not only be one where girls need to excel academically, but girls should also encompass the ‘right’ social class in order to access the ‘right’ kinds of clothing. As emphasised by Pomerantz and Raby (2017: 18) girls are often expected and told that they are “supposed to have it all.” In addition to the popular culture paradigm, this chapter shows how girls’ dressing and desires for adult-like clothing in Singapore are more likely to be informed by a variety of economic, social and cultural factors that are specific to Singapore, rather than reasons that have been be outlined in the Western discourse of sexualisation. Having examined how style is appropriated differently for different groups of youth, Hebdige (1979) noted the ways in which clothing can have a range of uses and meanings. Although rarely employed in studies of girlhood, girls’ style as bricolage is a useful concept to understand the deeper values and meanings that permeate young girls’ dressing. The term bricolage, frequently used in cultural studies, was derived from anthropologist Lèvi-Strauss (1966); Lèvi-Strauss (1966) found that primitive people made use of a range of ‘things’ such as superstition, sorcery and myth to make sense of their immediate environment. Hebdige (1979) later developed this concept in the context of subcultural style: having examined how style is appropriated differently for different groups of youth, Hebdige (1979) notes that style as bricolage acknowledges “the ways in which consumer goods [i.e. clothing] can be subject to a range of uses and meanings” (Russell and Tyler 2005: 222). Therefore, while tween girls have been depicted as easily influenced by consumer media in the discourse of sexualisation (Brooks 2008; Hamilton 2008), culminating in the need to buy more clothes that “comes primarily from a narrow definition of sexual attractiveness” (Lamb et al. 2016: 528), this chapter creates a space for thinking about how girls’ engagement with adult-like clothing in Singapore may contradict these wider assumptions. As the following discussion will show, instead of wearing adult-like clothing to emulate the lifestyles or looks of adults, such clothing can be used as a boundary marker to differentiate themselves as young female individuals with ‘style’, who are distinctively not adults. Boundary marking through clothing has been covered in Chua (2003) work on popular consumption in Singapore a decade ago (see Chap. 2). He mentioned that in the process of (re)emphasising their identities through fashion, adults have been

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puzzled as to why young people in Singapore often dress to ‘shock’ their elders. This may range from how the youth adorn themselves in American street fashion, to replicating what they might see in Western popular culture. Chua (2003: 26) highlighted that parents also often question their children’s clothing choices as their “claim to individuality”, stating that they are all adhering to a certain trend that is popular at one point of time, and are “thus conforming to a code rather than breaking out with individualising styles.” The following sections, therefore, also examine the meanings that the Singaporean girls in my study attached to style and clothing. It aims to erode some of the understanding that girls who are interested in how they look are engaging in something superficial (Miller 2010), which is harmful to their developmental growth (Zurbriggen et al. 2010). Instead of simply adopting the narrative that girls want to fashion themselves after the YouTubers that they frequently watched, the following section delves deeper to understand why certain clothing were made more desirable to these young participants, and what they were more likely to signify in girls’ social worlds.

Aspirations of Style Amidst the plethora of work done on girls’ dressing (see McRobbie 1991; Vares et al. 2011), Pomerantz (2008), in particular, has focused on the importance of clothing styles for girls. Although her research centres on older, teenage girls in North America, she makes an important point: “not only is clothing compulsory for girls”, its “careful deliberation is all but mandatory” (Pomerantz 2008: 2). As evident in the discussions below, the young girl participants carefully curated their own style in their own individual ways. More importantly, in theorising style to be a form of ‘social skin’, Pomerantz (2008: 18) argues that the clothes girls wear not only “carve out subject positions for themselves”, clothing also help them to make sense of how they relate to one another at school. As one of the key ways in which “meaning is granted to the body” (Pomerantz 2008: 18), what girls wear plays a crucial role in how they want to be seen and treated by others. Pomerantz (2008: 2) contends that “while style sits on the surface of girls’ bodies, it is anything but superficial.” Building on these conceptual ideas, the following section examines what constitutes ‘style’ for the girls and how style through one’s dressing comes to be necessitated in girls’ social worlds. Martens et al. (2004) similarly observed that children’s progressive and meaningful engagements with consumer items such as clothing have been downplayed in much of the literature. While the popular narrative in the discourse of sexualisation is that girls develop aspirations to fashion themselves after the young girls or women that they see on (Western) popular media, the following section delves deeper to understand what forms girls’ definition and aspirations of style, and how adult-like dressing or clothing are part of this process.

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Girls’ Definition of Style Although Pomerantz (2008) work serves as a useful point of reference for understanding the importance of clothing styles amongst young girls, there are several divergences from the cultural landscape of Singapore that should first be addressed. Apart from the differences in age (with Pomerantz focusing on older girls), it is mandatory for girls in the public education system in Singapore to wear school uniforms until the age of 18. This included all the girls that were recruited for this research. It was only after school that the tween girls were able to wear clothing of their choice, and had opportunities to observe what their friends wore outside their school uniforms. Despite the long hours spent in their school uniform, clothing and style were not of less significance. It may be the result of always being in their school uniforms that personal style and clothing gained value as a form of social currency in the tween girls’ lives. Indeed, “gossip” about what their friends or other girls wore besides their school uniforms was a prevalent theme across many of the focus groups: Interviewer: What do you guys talk about at school? Maddison: Shopping ... friends … Aria:YouTube. Latest gossip! Interviewer: Gossip about the people online or like your friends? Maddison: Both, both. Aria: Friends. Maddison: Especially Megan (classmate not present). Interviewer: As in, you gossip about Megan or Megan is the one who gossips? Aria and Maddison: Both. Interviewer: So what do you gossip about? Aria: Like girl, fashion stuff … Maddison: Like … What kind of clothes you wear, what’s in, what’s not … Aria: Uh huh (in agreement). Like Leonie (classmate not present) … Leonie has quite good fashion sense. Focus group I

While it was relatively straightforward for the girls in Pomerantz (2008) study to identify with and discuss clothing styles according to the well-established clothing categories of ‘preppy’, ‘goth’, ‘classy’ or ‘sporty’, the girls’ experiences and interactions with defined consumer clothing styles were less clear. The clothing types mentioned in Pomerantz’s (2008) work may also be difficult for the Singaporean girls to relate to, because such categories are Western subcultural constructions, crystallised over time by students who are able wear their own clothing to school.

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Kim (11 years old), for example, described what she wanted to wear as “stylish and uncomfortable”, and Charlotte (11 years old) questioned “it all depends on how you feel, right?” In describing her style in this manner, Kim more accurately meant that she did not mind compromising comfort for style: Interviewer: Do you wear whatever your mother buys for you? Gem: But then also need my style lah. Interviewer: What is your style? Kim: My style is very stylish and uncomfortable. Focus group A

Interviewer: So what is your own style, could you share it with me? Brie: Yes. Comfortable, beautiful ... Interviewer: Did you mean beautiful dresses? You were saying you like dresses ... Brie: Yah, but not like any normal kind of dress, you know? Need to have my style! Focus group L

Interviewer: Do you need to wear something that has your style? Ruien: Yes, of course (her emphasis). Charlotte: It all depends how you feel right? Ruien: Yeah, it just depends. Charlotte: For example … I’m Lola (friend in focus group). And I say, this is so Lola-ish, so I’m going to wear a cutie shirt. Lola: My god. I wouldn’t wear a cutie shirt! Focus group K

The difficulties that the girls experienced in defining their clothing style according to fixed consumer categories was also likely to be an outcome of what Pomerantz (2008: 93) found: girls’ clothing styles are often “fluid”. In order to dis/associate themselves from certain cliques at school, she found that the girls in her study always first altered what they wore. As an “aesthetic element” (Entwistle 2000: 48), the tween girl participants also attempted to explain style as both something individual and subjective. In the excerpts above, Charlotte (11 years old), for instance, mentioned that her friend Lola (11 years old) would wear something “Lola-ish”. Brie (10 years old) also pointed out she did not want to wear “any normal kind of dress”, and only wanted to wear one that encompassed her own ‘style’. The girls had situated ‘style’ within a “shifting system of signs” (Pomerantz 2008: 33) and more importantly, one that that was able to showcase their own individualities.

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Style as Necessity While the girls in the study were more likely to discuss style in subjective and at times ambiguous ways, style as a form of necessity can nevertheless be observed from how it is often seen by the tween girls as an important, taken-for-granted aspect of their own or their friends’ identities. McRobbie (1993, 2000) has similarly found that older teenage girls develop their own paradigms of style to claim independence from the structures and rules that are imposed on them at school, at home, and at times by structures of social class. Interviewer: Do you guys think you have your own style? Ruien: Yes, of course (her emphasis). Focus group K

Interviewer: So, you know other girls have told me like they have their own style ... Kira: Definitely (her emphasis). Focus group G

The ways in which style and clothing were highly valued in tween girls’ social worlds can be further discerned from Sophia (11 years old), who had refused to share the online clothing store that she bought her clothes from. She was wary of the other girls in the same focus group, whom she thought might emulate her personal style if they knew where she bought her clothes: Sophia: Sometimes, I go to this one particular online site [to buy clothes] ... Interviewer: Which one? Sophia: Er, I’m not gonna say. Interviewer: Why? Sophia: It’s like if I say a lot of people will go and get the same thing from that shop. Interviewer: Is it local? Is it like a blogshop?1 Or is it like a brand? Sophia: I’m not going to say anything! Focus group I

Driscoll (2002: 245) explains that while style is “subject to regulation (school rules and public laws, for example) and limitation (available finances, for example) […] it is also always an articulation of girls’ cultural identities.” In particular, this discussion with Sophia (11 years old) revealed how style was a crucial component because it 1

Blogshops are a highly popular e-commerce platform in Singapore. Abidin and Thompson (2012:467) defines blogshops as “online sites in which young women model and sell apparel via social media.” However, in this question, I more specifically referred to online clothing stores on blogging platforms (see Yeung & Ang 2016). These type of ‘blogshops’ have dominated the shopping scene in Singapore for a number of years.

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helped some of the tween girls portray themselves as unique individuals. Sophia’s assertion of how she did not want to share where she bought her clothes from because she did not want the other girls to wear the same things serves as an example of the way that some of the girls had valorised individual style and identity through clothing. Furthermore, style as a necessity was important in the context where girls had limited opportunities to present themselves outside their school uniforms. The girls in the study usually attended tuition classes straight after school and in their school uniforms. Unless they had sufficient time to return home for lunch or have a quick change of clothes (which happened only on occasion), they were all in their school uniforms until their parents or domestic helpers had picked them up from the tuition centres in the evening. While school uniforms serve to foster homogeneity in terms of dressing (Driscoll 2002), personal clothing and ‘style’ held more value amongst the tween girls because many of them did not have many opportunities to wear what they termed as “home clothes” or clothing of their choice in front of their friends. In making the point about how the girls in the study had limited opportunities to wear their own clothes, this section challenges existing understandings of girls’ adult-like dressing that often take the experiences of girlhood and young femininity as a “determinate and unitary phenomenon” (Smith 1988: 9). Extending the work of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, this section sheds light on what it means to ‘do’ girlhood in the Singaporean context, and how this is tangential to the understandings of girl/childhood in the discourse of sexualisation. According to Russell and Tyler (2005: 222) ‘doing’ acknowledges that girlhood is in a “perpetual process of ‘becoming’; performed, mediated and negotiated against a backdrop of contemporary consumer culture.” An extension of this, the above discussion provides a broader overview of the cultural landscape in which girls’ individual fashioned identities and adult-like clothing were deemed as important in their social worlds. Along a similar line of inquiry, Martens et al. (2004: 160) note that there is a tendency for children’s and girls’ desires for clothing to be “read off from production trends—a feature that has been criticised for resulting in inaccurate readings of the reasons why consumers engage with goods and services in the manner they do.” With a need to have ‘style’ in their dressing, the following section goes on to examine how style had helped the tween girls portray themselves as knowledgeable young female subjects, who are distinctively not adults. Such a discussion reveals that there is more to girls’ dressing than arguments that suggest that it is the marketers and retailers who are selling innumerable age-inappropriate clothing and clothing styles, capitalising on the lucrative tween market (Bailey 2011). Such understandings in the discourse of sexualisation situate girls as “cultural dupes” (Hall 1981 in Pomerantz 2008: 35), easily “taken advantage of by marketers and the global capitalist empire” (Pomerantz 2008: 35). These views reify the idea that style is “something that girls do unconsciously and without critical thought” (Pomerantz 2008: 25), which was not the case for many of the girls in the study.

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Style Through Boundary-Making Whilst most of the girls had difficulties explaining what their style was, their ideas of style can be better understood according to how they juxtaposed what they wanted to wear or were wearing against what adults thought that girls their age should wear. The following excerpts show the ways that style was framed as something that the adults in girls’ lives were unable to grasp: Interviewer: Why do you reject your parents’ clothes at times? Maddison: ‘Cause it’s just not nice. Aria: ‘Cause it just doesn’t look nice. Sophia: Yah. Aria: Like, you know ... no style. Maddison: Like baggy shirts. My mum will always buy baggy shirts for me. Interviewer: So all of you think your parents have no style? (laughs) Aria and Maddison: Yah! (laughs) Focus group I

Interviewer: When your mother chooses clothes for you, you are okay to wear whatever she chooses? Han: Not okay! She got no style! (her emphasis) Interviewer: She got no style? (laughs) Han: Yeah. Focus group E

Interviewer: If your mum dresses you in a way you don’t like, will you say something? Penny: Yes, I will. Interviewer: And what is it that you don’t like? Penny: Like not my style like that … Focus group B

Instead of alluding to mass-marketed clothing styles from the West, conversations like these more clearly depict how the girls’ ideas of style were at odds with what their parents thought girls their age should wear. This provides another perspective to what has been commonly outlined in the discourse of sexualisation, where the commercial and profit-motivated world of marketers or Western popular culture are believed to be prominent sources that encourage young girls to fashion themselves after adults (Bailey 2011; Durham 2008). Apart from the popular culture sources or advertisements on popular media, the girls in the study showed how clothing style

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was emphasised as some sort of ‘fashion sense’ that adults, and most prominently girls’ mothers, did not encompass. While authors like Grant and Stephen (2005) argue that parents have significant influences on girls’ fashion choices, with mothers able to determine what girls wear on special occasions, the conversations with these girls show how their clothing decisions were instead inversely related to their mothers’ or adults’ tastes in clothing. This highlights shortcomings in studies from the West that firmly situate parents at the heart of the issue. Scholars like Martens et al. (2004: 175) have pointed out that out that many scholars believe: how children ‘learn’ to consume, the life styles of their parents, the way that their parents reflexively engage with memories of their own childhood (or biography) and parental readings of material culture all lie at the heart of what can be understood as children’s consumption.

However, when it comes to what they wanted to wear, the narratives gathered from these Singaporean girls revealed that their ideas of ‘style’ were far removed from any influence of or control by adults. These girls did not want to wear clothes chosen by their parents, because they were apprehensive towards adults’ tastes. Brie (10 years old) explained how she only “takes advice” from her mother, but never lets her parents decide what she should wear. Fee (12 years old) also mentioned that she has full control over what she puts on, but many times her parents “just want to interfere”. While there are studies that suggest that children ultimately valued parental opinions even though generational strains were apparent in clothing decisions (Brock et al. 2010; Grant and Stephen 2005), a number of girls in the study had deliberately rejected adults’ clothing choices. Contrary to the belief that girls inherit dressing styles from their mothers (Brock et al. 2010) or the older girls/women that they see on popular media, the focus group discussions with the tween girls revealed that their clothing styles although ‘shaped’ by adults in their daily lives did not take place in a conventional manner, whereby children “learned the way forward” from adults (Hamilton 2008: 3). Style amongst the tween girls was instead developed by establishing clear boundaries between adults’ preferences for certain clothing and what the girls thought was stylish. There were girls in the study who had intentionally disregarded adults’ perspectives, because they did not see adults as encompassing style: Penny: Sometimes when I wear not ‘matching’ one right, my mother will be like ‘Go change leh, not matching, not nice’. [But] I don’t care about what she says, ‘cause I think it’s nice. Gem: My mum sometimes is also like that. Kim: Sometimes I want to wear very short […] Then sometimes when my mother ask me to wear those dresses … I say no. Focus group A

As subtle acts of resistance to what adults thought girls their age should be wearing, there were a number of girls in the study who had conveniently hid the clothing that were bought or given to them by adults, so that they could wear the clothes that they had preferred or had chosen to buy. In these practices, style was to be

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achieved by first segregating and hiding the clothes that were given to them by their parents/adults; they also had to do so discreetly for the fear of being questioned by their mothers. The girls usually hid their clothes until they outgrew them, and only expressed willingness to take them out when it was a suitable time for them to be re-gifted: Interviewer: If you actually get clothes that you don’t like what would you do? Maddison: If she (her mother) bought it already, and I don’t want to wear it, I’ll stuff it at the back of my closet. Aria: Or, I’ll hide it under my bed. Sophia: Like I’ll say “Oh, okay, thanks.” And I’ll put it in my drawer and I stuff it at the bottom and never wear it. Aria: Yup! That’s what happened to mine … Sophie: And I just wait until it gets passed down to my sister. Aria: I’ll give it away eventually. Focus group I

Sophie: I will say I don’t want to wear. Brie: Then we’ll put it in our cupboard. Sophie: Then we can give it away to our auntie [who will be re-gifting this to other girls]. Focus group L

A number of girls admitted that they received new clothes very often. Aria (12 years old), for instance, mentioned that she gets new clothing as gifts from church friends, sisters, “clothes from people in general”. However, many of the girls made a distinction between how they only received clothes that were of their choice on rare occasion, on an average of “once every 6 months”. And although parents or other family members bought new clothes for them, many of them did not see this clothing as stylish, ‘in trend’ or wearable. Clothing from adults was often seen as contradictory to what they liked, or what was in style for girls their age. The girls’ active cultivation of what they thought was stylish fractures the strongly held belief in developmental psychology that parents and especially mothers are key influences during girlhood, and that mothers show girls a feminine world, how to deal with female problems and have the power to socialise them into typical gender roles (Gadamska-Kyrcz and Gorczyca 2021). For many of these girls, young female YouTubers may have more power when it comes to defining their clothing choices and it was the adult family members who did not have the right understanding of what girls their age were wearing.

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Style as a Youthful Practice In addition to resisting what adults thought girls their age should wear, style was also developed through an open commentary about what other girls, and more importantly, what the adults wore. During the focus groups, there were girls who bonded over comments about their parents’ and especially their mothers’ dressing. In fact, some of the girls had added that their parents’ sense of style had gradually improved as a result of their evaluations. Aria (12 years old) expressed that: “My mother has improved over the years. My mum dresses nicer [than before].” As seen in the excerpt below, girls like Penny (11 years old) and Nicole (10 years old) both shared about the comments that they made about each of their mother’s dressing, which have led to Penny’s mother rethinking her own clothing decisions: Penny: I usually comment on my mother’s shirt. Sometimes when she wears [a particular piece of clothing], I will say ‘Eh, mummy why did you wear this? So ugly.’ Nicole: Today I just commented on my mother. Interviewer: What did you say? Nicole: ‘Why always wear this? The same old pattern (way of dressing).’ Interviewer: What did your mum say? Penny: She usually say[s] ‘Not nice meh?’ (‘Is it not nice?’) Interviewer: Then, what does she usually do? Penny: She changes [her clothes]! Sometimes she asks me if what she wears is okay … then sometimes she never asks, but I say what she wears is very ugly. Then she look at herself already, and finds that it is actually quite ugly, then she changes. Focus group A

Statements such as these illustrate how girls’ practices of style had mirrored the tutorials on beauty, fashion and behaviour that they frequently watched on YouTube; girls saw their parents’ styles as evolving from their surveillance and expert guidance. However, the girls had enjoyed these practices because clothing style has become a youthful domain in which traditional power dynamics are subverted. Adults have been theorised by James et al. (1998: 144) as having “strategic advantages” in “exercising power over children in an adult-centred world”, whereby usually “children are either not taken into account at all or views are given on their behalf by adults who claim the right to know what is in children’s interest.” However, through clothing style and their youthful femininities, these Singaporean girls were able to position themselves as ‘experts’, with the knowledge and taste in clothing that the adults were able to learn something from. Parents in Asia are known to have authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles (Lim 2020) and an acceptance of parental authority is common for children growing up in this context (Chao and Tseng 2002). However, it is through ‘style’ that these girls were not only seen and heard in school (forming

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the topic of gossip at times), but were able to assert themselves at home. Through the focus group discussions, the adults were also often portrayed as disconnected from the realities of what was on trend amongst the girls. This resonates with Hamilton (2008: 3) who argued that there is no longer a clear link between one generation and the next, because popular culture and new technologies have left adults behind. As a result [our] girls feel isolated.

However, rather than girls feeling ‘isolated’, the girls in the study had deliberately ‘insulated’ themselves from adults’ opinions in order to cultivate a stylish identity. They actively sought to establish a space that was free from the gaze of adults. As highlighted by James et al. (1998: 55) a child’s “domestic space is [usually] policed by parents, paralleling the surveillance of the school and the street by the adult world.” This may be even more common in Asian families, where parents intervention may stretch into adolescence and even adulthood (Chua 2011; Gorman 1998; Lowinger and Kwok 2001). However, it was through their practices of style that the girls were able to actively establish a space that was privy to them, enabling them to effectively develop and negotiate their own individualities and identities. Thus far, the sections above have identified how ‘style’ was an important element that guided the girls’ fashion choices and the way they wanted to fashion themselves. From the discussions, it involved a “constant and complex negotiation of a range of social and cultural identities” (Russell and Tyler 2005: 227), both at home and in school. Girls took on a role similar to YouTubers, as ‘experts’ in style and dressing in their everyday lives. Accordingly, the above section illuminated the extent to which girls were active social agents in an ongoing curation of their own style and dressing. While it is often portrayed in the discourse of sexualisation that girls are “pressurised and impressionable individuals” (Martens et al. 2004: 159), easily brainwashed by sexualising messages in the media, such an understanding not only drains girls’ style of “substance”, but also situates clothing style as an “empty signifier” that “denies girls’ uses of style as a cultural practice infused with power” (Pomerantz 2008: 36). The discussion above outlined how ‘style’ was imbued with meaning and agency as the girls actively resisted what their parents or adults thought they should wear, using ‘style’ to also portray themselves as knowledgeable young female subjects. Nonetheless, it is not the point of this discussion to suggest that girls’ adult-like dressing takes place as an outcome of solely girls’ personal choices (a postfeminist argument). Rather, this section seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which Singaporean tween girls “come to view some things as must-haves and some experiences as must-dos” (Pugh 2009: xii), and how style and adult-like clothing may be an important part of this process. This section does not aim to deflect “attention from corporate actors, tactics, and ethics” (Pugh 2009: xii) and the commercial landscape in Singapore. Rather, this section sought to understand the modalities of girls’ desires for adult-like clothing “after advertising has laid out the menu” (Pugh 2009: xi).

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The next section more clearly discusses how girls’ aspirations of style is at the nexus of socio-cultural factors in Singapore, shaped by what they were allowed to buy or wear. While this section charted the various ways through which girls made sense of style and how adult-like clothing might be part of it, the latter half of the chapter addresses how the girls’ access to certain clothing mainly operated within the boundaries of accepted and acceptable behaviour determined by the adults. This closely reflects Mayall’s (1995) argument that while girls are able to develop individual tastes in clothing, it is impossible to consider children as a cultural group with entirely independent concepts and ideas. It neglects the “empirical reality” (James et al. 1998: 82) that children’s lives are lived out within a broader social context, and girlhood and girls’ dressing in Singapore should not be examined in isolation.

Allowances If style is vital to girls, then the ways in which they are able to gain access to clothing is worthy of inquiry. As primary school students, girls did not usually have the financial resources to purchase clothing on their own. Primary school students in Singapore receive only nominal amounts of pocket money, of about SGD$1 to SGD$5 daily (Unantenne 2015). This meant that their ability to buy clothes was mostly bound by what their parents were willing to spend. Therefore, despite recognising that forms of agency and individuality are present in girls’ aspirations of style, this following section on allowance further examines how girls’ acquisition of clothes was still highly contingent on the adults/parents, even though they had earlier disagreed with the clothing that their parents had bought for them. While this section casts light on the brands of clothing that the girls preferred, it also illuminates how girls’ preferences for certain clothing were also shaped by the socio-cultural domain in which they were raised. Further emphasising that it would be difficult to consider girls entirely as autonomous, agentic individuals (Durham 2008; Jackson and Westrupp 2010), this section highlights how girls’ dressing operated within bounded realities, whereby the tween girl participants had to negotiate within what was considered to be accepted and acceptable behaviours defined by the adults/parents.

Girls and Brands Shopping has been described as a “national pastime” (Straits Times 18 August 1996, cited in Chua 2003: 41) for Singaporeans. It was not surprising to find that the tween girls’ lives were also organised around a culture of consumption. Chapter 2 acknowledges the international luxury brands such as Burberry, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Armani Junior that have a huge presence amongst Singaporeans, and are known to sell expensive, scaled-down versions of clothing for young girls. Further, adults, who are likely to be parents of children, have been suggested to be class-conscious

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shoppers. Authors like Coclanis (2009: 2) mention that the adults in Singapore particularly tend to favour high-end boutiques as a class marker of wealth. This dovetails with the work of Schor (2004), who highlights that it is the result of the preadolescent consumer culture that children may now believe that clothes and brands define who they are. She suggests that “children’s social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming, as brands and products have come to determine who is ‘in’ or ‘out’, who is hot or not, who deserves to have friends, or a social status” (Schor 2004: 11). The preteen girls in her study were also found to display considerably more brand affinity than any other age groups. While the girls in the study did not have the money to purchase their own clothing, many of them showed an affinity towards brands. All of them responded to my question of where they usually bought their clothes from according to the brands of the clothing that they preferred. Initially, I anticipated that the girls’ replies would point towards certain shopping districts (and hence type of clothes) that I as an adult researcher might be unaware of. Chan’s (2011) dissertation, for instance, recognises the growing popularity of flea market shopping in Singapore. Flea market shopping is also more closely aligned with the DIY ethos that girls looked up to in their favourite YouTubers. However, the girls in the study showed that they were both brand-savvy and oriented through their mentions of various labels of clothing that they desired or already owned. Some of the girls were also aware of the brands for tween/teenage girls that were not available in Singapore (i.e. Target in America). Mirroring Schor’s (2004: 25) argument of children being increasingly “bonded to brands”, brands were a crucial factor that guided the young girl participants’ clothing preferences: Interviewer: So, where do you get your clothes at? Maddison: Uniqlo. Usually, I get my clothes from Cotton On also. Aria: If I get new clothes, it is usually from Cotton On, H&M ... Sophia: I wish I could shop at Target. Interviewer: Is there a Target in Singapore? Maddison: No, online. Focus group I

Interviewer: I want to know what do you guys usually wear outside school? Ruien: Usually, er … I get my clothes from H&M. You know all the popular ones like Uniqlo … Cotton On! By Free! (her emphasis) Charlotte: I like Uniqlo, but there are other brands … Focus group K

Interviewer: Where is your favourite place to shop at? Kim: Esprit! Penny: Fox.

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Kim: Sometimes, I also shop at GAP. Penny: Cotton On! Gem: H&M. Focus group A

In contrast to the tweens in Schor (2004: 26) work who were described as having proclivities for “designer duds and luxury items” such as the Tommy Hilfiger and Donna Karan labels, the brands of clothing that these girls wanted were more likely to be fast fashion labels. Fast fashion is derived by certain trends that move quickly from the runway to the mass market (Brooks 2015). Whilst inspired by high fashion, the manufacturing of fast fashion is low cost, which means “consumers can easily take advantage of affordable collections in shops like Gap, H&M and Zara” (Brooks 2015: 8), brands similarly brought up by these girls. Many of the girls in the study desired clothing that were deemed by the larger cultural landscape as popular and trendy, keeping in mind that they were also more cost-friendly. Shopping was described by the girls as one of their major lifestyle activities that took place with their parents every weekend. The girls were exposed to and had desires for the brands of fast fashion clothing because they had frequented the heartland malls that were located within their respective neighbourhoods with their parents. Luxury brands are mostly located in the main shopping area in the central part of Singapore, and the girls had only occasionally visited this area with their parents. Girls thus possessed a good knowledge of fast fashion brands because such clothing was made easily available and accessible to them. There were a number of malls within their respective neighbourhoods that they frequented, and in fact, reports in Singapore’s mainstream media have noted that shopping along Orchard Road has been in decline (Boon 2015a; b), facing competition from these “heartland malls” (Seah et al. 2016: n.p.). Girls’ brand affinity reflects what Martens et al. (2004: 166) emphasised, that parents “not only act as gatekeepers regarding what can be consumed, but also actively engage in [their] ways of consuming.” Girls’ knowledge of clothing brands were facilitated by the adults or their parents and the frequency in which they had visited the malls created many proximate opportunities for them to consume various images of adult-like clothing and femininities. This is as Chua (2003: 5) described: there has been a “globalisation of commodities”, with malls being built all over Singapore. For many girls, the trips to the malls also acted as a meaningful catalogue for them to know what clothing were “in style” for young girls and women. During these trips, some of the girls shared that they took careful stock of the clothing that they saw and wanted to wear. Sophie (8 years old) kept a picture book, where she drew images of outfits from certain brands so that she could remember the clothes that she had seen during these shopping trips. She mentioned that she not only sketched the clothing that were being sold at the malls, but also what she saw the other girls wearing. More importantly, Sophie’s efforts not only emphasised how ‘style’ as a crucial aspect of girls’ young femininities, but it also exhibited the efforts girls make in order to

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stay sartorially relevant. There were consolidated efforts to be in ‘style’, where as elaborated above, a number of the girls had also discreetly separated and hid the clothes that adults or their parents had bought for them, so that they could wear the clothes that they had chosen to buy in the first place.

Purchasing New Clothing While the young girl participants may be initiated into a world of fast fashion labels as a result of the frequent shopping trips with their parents, they were not always allowed to buy the clothes that they wanted. This is similar to what Smart (2007: 28) contends: that it is difficult to argue that the tween is an “autonomous individual who makes free choices and exercises unfettered agency.” Therefore, while girls’ agency and individualities have been acknowledged through their aspirations of style, their actual consumption of clothing has to be understood in relation to the boundaries shaped or constructed by adults. Aria (12 years old), for instance, expressed that every time she shops with her mother, they would “just do window shopping.” She complained that after every shopping trip and seeing the clothes that she would like to have, “then I’ll just dream about it”. There were many ways that adults negotiated what the girls were allowed to buy, as seen from Aria’s (12 years old) description of her shopping experience with her mother: Aria: I was at H&M the other day, we were looking at like ‘hobo’ (loose-fitting) pants, so my mum is like “No! I can sew it for you.” Focus group I

Charlotte (11 years old) also related her experience of how the clothes she wanted had to go through an ‘approval process’ by her aunt: Interviewer: If you really like a piece of clothing, will your mum buy it? Charlotte: She will … talk with her sister. Like … “Should I really buy this?” And then she’ll take a photo. And then, a lot of times we’re not allowed to take photos, and we get chased out of the shop. Focus group K

Similarly, Sophie (8 years old) mentioned that on shopping trips, she receives constant “nagging” from her mother that she has “a lot of clothes”. Adults were generally described by girls as having a firm hand on not wanting to spend more money on new clothing. Although it was common for parents to turn down girls’ requests for more clothing, most of the girls asserted that they did not spend large amounts of money on clothes in comparison to their peers. Many of them claimed that they knew of other (wealthier) girls at school who were spending more on clothing. Some girls were also exasperated that shopping trips were being constantly monitored by adults. Ray (8 years old) strongly expressed this sentiment:

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Ray: Sometimes I hate it. Interviewer: Oh, you hate going shopping? Ray: Because, it’s like, I’m sick of it. Every time, my mum is going to be choosing my clothes. Forever like that! I’ve been waiting a lot of times for her to choose my clothes, and you know cannot shop for your own clothing! (her emphasis) Focus group H

While girls could be seen and heard at home and at school for their knowledge and cultivation of ‘style’, the activity of shopping for some of these girls had the opposite effect. Han and Eve (both 8 years old) lamented that they disliked going to shop with their parents because they did not have their opinions validated: Interviewer: If you see a dress that you like would you tell your mum that you want to buy it? Eve: Yeah … Han: Yeah, but she will say cannot (her emphasis). Eve: Yeah, my mother will always say not nice. Interviewer: Why? Why does she say not nice? Han: She say too expensive, too … don’t know what, what, what, wait for sale, then by that time, when we come here again, then it’s gone already. Eve: I tell my mummy I like this piece of clothing, she will say “Wah,2 too expensive, cannot lah, next time.” Focus group E

In addition to the youth in Singapore being described as having a proclivity to shop and their consumption practices being seen as too spendthrift (Chua 2003), girls’ access to clothing were found to be rigidly controlled by their parents or the adults in their everyday life. This had led some of the girls to also express disinterest in shopping with their parents: Charlotte: I avoid shopping with my mother at all costs. Interviewer: Why? Charlotte: Because it’s boring. Jeez, I … nevermind (laughs). Lola: High five, Charlotte. Interviewer: So both of you don’t like shopping with your parents? Charlotte (mimicking her mother): “Charlotte, try on this! Charlotte why don’t you try on this? This looks lovely. Oh, this looks wonderful. Oh, this might go.” And it’s not what I want! (her emphasis) You know, that kind of thing. Focus group K

2

Singlish expression of shock.

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The complexities in the ability for girls’ to purchase more clothing contradicts a number of studies from the West, where children have been described as having immense pester power, posing problems for parents who want to be seen as good providers (Bailey 2011). There is little effect of “kid-fluence” (Schor 2004: 23), or children’s say in parental purchases for the girls in the study. While it was through the act of buying that many parents in the West were also found to be able to acknowledge the continuities between their own and their children’s childhoods, reminiscing about how at a certain time in their childhoods they too had wanted to be grown up and had desires for adult clothing (Bragg and Buckingham 2012), the idea of good parenting in Singapore may be disparate. As mentioned in the earlier chapters, given Singapore’s earlier years of economic underdevelopment and the prevalence of an East/West discourse, parents in Singapore may be more concerned about inculcating an Asian value of thrift (Chua 2003) in their children, thereby making sure that they do not simply spend on what the girls had requested. Indeed, being controlling and setting strict rules for children tend to be seen as a form of care and an expression of love for many parents in Asia (Pomerantz and Wang 2009; Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1991). Conversely, parents who do not strictly regulate or control the behaviours of their children are seem as ill-equipped or uncaring. As seen in the excerpts above, this has led to shopping being an unenjoyable activity for a number of these girls. There were girls like Maddison (12 years old), who also mentioned that she had a few ill-fitting clothing that were purchased without her consent as her mother often buys clothes that are a size larger than what she usually wears, so that she can wear them for a longer period of time.

Girls as Reflexive and ‘Sensible’ Consumers Although parents often turned down their requests for more clothing, most of the girls stressed that they did not spend large amounts of money on clothes. Most of them explained this by stating that they knew of other (wealthier) girls at school who were spending more. The excerpt below more clearly highlights the way that two of the girls Eva (12 years old) and Ashley (9 years old) disagreed that they were shopping too much: Interviewer: Do you think you spend a lot of money on clothes actually? Do you think you shop too much? Ashley: No! Not at all! Nope! (her emphasis) Eva: (shakes head) If only I could sell away my clothes ... Interviewer: If only you could sell away your clothes, then like, you can buy some more? Eva: (nods) Focus group G

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Nonetheless, as a response to how their parents or the adults had strictly restricted their purchase of new clothes, the girls showed that they were able to become adaptive and reflexive consumers of clothing. Besides Eva (12 years old) who wanted to sell her old clothes to get more money to buy new ones, a number of girls showed that they were ‘sensible’ consumers, who understood that they had to work within a price range. Unlike the girls in other studies from the West who strongly disagreed with the limitations that their parents set for them (see Brock et al. 2010), many of the girls articulated a level of responsibility in ensuring that the clothing they wanted were not “overpriced”: Interviewer: Do your mums actually end up buying a particular piece that you like? Maddison: No! Interviewer: Why? Why do you think that? Aria: I won’t even bother asking her. Like sometimes, clothes can be quite overpriced. Focus group I

The above example clearly reflects one of the ways in which the girls have internalised ‘adult’ considerations that are involved in the purchase of clothing. There were other girls like Kim (11 years old) who disclosed that her clothes needed to be “cheap cheap, good good”. In order to negotiate the boundaries that have been constructed around the clothing that they were usually allowed, the girls in the focus groups had devised comprehensive strategies to convince their parents to buy for them the clothes that they wanted: Nicole: I only go to Malaysia to buy clothes. Gem: I buy those only on discount one … Victoria: I go to Batam.3 My mother says if I want, go to Batam then buy. Cheaper. Gem: She (referring to Victoria) always goes to Batam. Victoria: ‘Cause it’s very cheap. Focus group A

Many girls in the study understood that in proactively choosing cheaper clothing, it would make it more difficult for parents to turn them down on the basis of the clothes being too expensive. Driscoll (2002) has similarly found that although it was important for girls articulate their individualities through fashion and clothing, they 3

Batam is a nearby island of Indonesia. Accessible by a 45-min ferry ride, it is a popular place for Singaporeans for cheap golf, massages, and shopping day-trips.

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are also willing subjects to the sanctions and regulations that organised style. This discussion between Gem (11 years old), Victoria (10 years old) and Nicole (10 years old) showed that in order to convince parents to buy for them the clothing that they wanted, they came up with strategies to choose the clothes that were on sale, or those that were significantly cheaper than what is being sold in Singapore. Penny (11 years old) explained, that “usually they (parents) see price first lah”. Many girls added that this was regardless whether the clothing suited them or if they found a suitable size. Eva (12 years old) and Ashley’s (9 years old) discussion of their experiences of shopping with their mothers were typical of many girls in the study: Interviewer: And, so like when you guys shop, and you walk past a shop and you see something that you like, and you tell your mum like ‘Oh, I like this.’? Eva: Yah. Interviewer: And she’ll go in and let you try it on? Ashley and Eva: She often says no! Eva: Like especially when there’s no sale ... Focus group I

Recognising how their access to and acquisition of clothing were highly contingent on price, most of the girls in the study devised a price limit that was used decide whether their parents would buy for them a certain piece of clothing. A common identifier of SGD$20 was often used to evaluate what would be considered too expensive for adults. This amount was usually a week’s worth of pocket money for the girls. They explained that the further a particular piece of clothing had surpassed the SGD$20 mark, the less likely it was for their parents to purchase the item for them. Kim: My clothes are cheap cheap, good good. Interviewer: How cheap is cheap? Kim: Like under $19 can already lah. Gem: Like one shirt right, cannot be over $20. Focus group A Interviewer: But what is expensive to your parents? Like $50 for a dress? Lola: Er … it’s not that bad lah. Charlotte: In my opinion, $20 and up is very expensive. Ruien: Me too, me too. Focus group K

In describing how SGD$50 for a piece of clothing can be “bad”, these Singaporean girls showed that their ideas of style were guided by the boundaries of accepted and

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acceptable consumer behaviour as defined by adults. Nevertheless, this section on allowance highlights the possibility of value being created for other, more expensive, adult-like clothing. Economist Hirsch (1976) similarly advanced the concept of a positional good, whereby the value and desirability of certain items are dependent on its scarcity, absolute or social (Schneider 2007). If certain types of clothing are considered cheap(er) and more easily accessible, then it is possible to think about what becomes more expensive, desirable and aspirational for tween girls. This is especially when the girls’ ability to have new clothes was organised around ‘special occasions’ that their parents defined as birthdays, Chinese New Year, or Christmas. Additionally, some of the girls in the study mentioned that their parents would reward them with clothing of their choice, regardless of price, if they scored well in a particular exam. Girls’ desires and the values placed on more expensive, adult-like clothing may thus be developed through the social scripts that were attached to their clothing purchases. Furthermore, the girls had used a well-to-do background to explain why certain friends were able to dress better than them.

Affiliation This final section examines the ways that clothing and clothing style often come together to signify a set of ideas about social class and mobility for the girls in the study. It raises deeper questions about belonging and affiliation, especially where peer approval and what the other girls wore also constituted a significant component of the girls’ ideas of style. Above, Sophie (8 years old) mentioned that the sketches in her photobook were not only inspired by the clothes sold at the malls, but those that she saw other girls wearing. Hamilton (2008: 43) similarly underscores the “pack mentality” when it comes to girls’ consumption. As much as clothes were an expression of individuality, it was crucial for the girls in the study to also dress like what the other girls were wearing (Hamilton 2008). This shows that while retailers and marketers have the power to influence what young girls ‘should wear’, girl culture should also be viewed as more ‘insular’. In the excerpts below, the girls in the study commonly looked towards what the other girls were wearing. Although this might overlap with what is being popularly marketed to them, Pomerantz (2008: 48) argued that girls are able to “influence marketers by refusing trends, by demanding different kinds of attention and styles, and by acting in contradictory and inexplicable ways that make market research far from scientific.” In finding a need to wear what their friends were, this section also examines how clothing was found to be affiliated with ideas of class and social mobility in girls’ social worlds. As Skeggs (1997: 90) have found, the clothed body is a common site for girls to “prove themselves [and their class position], through every object, every aesthetic display, every appearance.”

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Class, Social Mobility and Adult-Like Clothing In many of the focus groups, discussions about what the girls usually wore and would like to wear often ended in a conversation about the clothes that their friends already had, but they knew they could not afford. It was common for the girls in the study to have aspirations to want to dress like the friends whom they thought wore more expensive clothing: Eva: Sometimes I’ll be jealous … Interviewer: You’ll be jealous? Eva: Of their (her classmates’) clothing ... Interviewer: Why are you jealous? Eva: [Because] I don’t know where they buy their clothes from. Usually it’s from the American stores ... I don’t even know how they (her friends) got them. Interviewer: What do you think about how your classmates dress like outside school though? Eva: Er ... sometimes, it’s just like sometimes when you wear the like normal T-shirt ... you don’t see them wearing it. They wear all those branded stuff. Interviewer: But do you know if they chose it themselves? It could be their parents who buy these things … Eva: They choose it by themselves. Focus group G

While jealousy has been framed as a natural outcome of the “emotional landscape” that drives consumption (Pugh 2009: 7), in this excerpt Eva (12 years old) expresses feelings of inadequacy not because she was not wearing what her friends wore, but because she was aware of the more expensive, “branded stuff” that her friends owned. She described the clothes she owned as “normal”, as compared to her classmates who had more, and more specifically branded clothing. This conversation with Eva (12 years old) elucidates how ‘style’ for some of these girls may not only depend on the right type of clothes, but also the right brands, which most of them knew their parents would be unwilling to pay for. Maddison (12 years old) similarly complained that she would not be able to buy anything from the Target online store in America (which was in a haul video by her favourite YouTuber, Bethany Mota) because it required her mother’s credit card and “it would never happen”. Given the perimeters around what they could or could not buy, it was common for clothing style to be understood as part of a certain affluent lifestyle or social class, which these girls equated to having more liberty to afford more and more expensive clothing: Interviewer: Have you ever had any very fashionable classmates? Brie: Yes.

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Interviewer: How does she dress like? Brie: Everybody thought (thinks) she was (is) rich. Interviewer: How you know she’s rich? Brie: I just have a feeling that she is rich. She always has new clothes, then she always boasts about her clothes at home. Focus group L

Interviewer: So how do you think your classmates dress? Have you seen them outside of school? Ruien: Yah, I have seen one of my friend. Interviewer: What did you think? Ruien: Shoes … you know, all those shirts, shorts, skirts, high pony tail. Because mostly … it’s mostly … my friends are mostly rich. Yah, from rich families. Interviewer: So … their clothes are nice because they are rich? Ruien: Yah. And then their shoes are quite, you know, modern. Focus group K

Distinctive in these excerpts were how girls who were considered to be more stylish or fashionable were also “rich”. Often, the girls in the study brought up a well-todo family background to explain how certain classmates were able to have certain clothing and achieve ‘style’. Such an emphasis contradicts Western theories that ascribe adult-like dressing and sexualised clothes for young girls as ‘poor taste’ and predominantly a problem of the working class (Egan 2013). Ringrose (2013: 50), for instance, notes that “historically dangerous, licentious sexuality has been constructed as the purview of working class women.” However, in the context of Singapore, it is ultimately the girls from affluent families who were more likely to have more and more adult-like clothing, and could afford to dress in whatever ways they wanted. This shows how young girls’ adult-like dressing can be classed in very different ways. Moving beyond scholars who articulate some worry over tween girls defining themselves according to clothes (Zurbriggen et al. 2010) and consuming according to brands (Hamilton 2008; Schor 2004), the findings showed that clothing style was not only important for distinguishing peer groups, it also served as one of the visible markers of affluence and upward social mobility for the girls in the study. This is despite most of the girls in the study being middle-class and whose families had the resources to send them to after-school tuition. I met some of the girls like Eva (12 years old) after their ballet classes, and there were others like Lola (11 years old) who mentioned that sailing was her hobby. Charlotte (11 years old) similarly claimed that she enjoyed skiing and snowboarding. These are all expensive activities for Singaporeans, but the girls in the study mainly saw clothing and clothing style as an important cultural component that awarded them certain status, with more stylish clothing mainly attainable with relevant economic capital. These ways of

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understanding strongly mirror PuruShotam (1998) earlier work on women and the middle-class way of life in Singapore. She elaborates that Singaporean women are often driven to “appropriate the label ‘middle class’ and work hard to reproduce an associated way of life for themselves and their families” (PuruShotam 1998: 107). In Singapore, this “pursuit of betterment” (PuruShotam 1998: 109) is often tied to the acquisition of material goods. The girls in the study exhibited similarities to this mindset, when they explained that there were other girls at school who were able to have more expensive or adultlike clothing because they belonged to a certain class of families. While this demonstrates how clothing and style can be means of social reproduction and class differentiation (Bourdieu and Nice 1984), how girls view and understand clothing also shows how “meaning is shaped by the properties of material goods and the social worlds in which they are put to use” (Martens et al. 2004: 173). For the girls in the study, clothing was one of the main ways that they made sense of class (what it means to be rich) and social mobility (to become rich and afford more clothes). Under these conditions, there is a need to consider how girls’ aspirations of style and desires for adult-like clothing may also form part of a larger pursuit to affiliate with a certain social class in Singapore. Hamilton (2008) found that apart from being famous, 80 percent of the 11–12 year olds also wanted to be rich. Vestiges of such attitudes were observed from the girls such as Kim (11 years old) who remarked in one of the focus groups: “What’s the use of toys? Toys are so un-useful. Just save your money, you can buy a 3.9 million [dollar] house, can buy clothes, can buy delicious food.” Furthermore, children from affluent families in Singapore have been framed as high achievers, with more of them qualifying for Integrated or Gifted Education Programmes (Teng 2016). This shows how Singapore’s own “successful girls narrative” (Pomerantz and Raby 2011: 550) may not only be one where girls need to excel academically, but girls should also encompass the ‘right’ social class in order to access the ‘right’ kinds of clothing. As emphasised in Raby and Pomerantz’s (2017: 18) book on Smart Girls, girls are often expected and told that they are “supposed to have it all.” In a similar vein, PuruShotam (1998: 109) makes the argument that in Singapore, the ability to buy or wear certain clothing “involves ideational choices, the potent idea of mobility as an increasing sense of control over one’s life.” This dovetails with Harris’s (2004) work on the can-do girl, where girls are expected to actively make the right choices in an era where they now have a multitude of opportunities to be who they want to be. In using social class or a rich family background to explain why some of their peers were able to appear more stylish and had more adult-like clothing, the girls in the study also showed that they understood that class was an integral element that would provide them more agency and choices, thereby having access to a different experience of girlhood.

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Conclusion This chapter examined how tween girls’ adult-like dressing in Singapore can be better understood according to the themes of aspiration, allowance and affiliation. The first part of the chapter addressed how girls fashioning themselves after adults was more likely to be an aspiration of style. Although the girls did not engage in a discussion according to the fixed clothing styles marketed to tween girls (Pomerantz 2008), ‘style’ was emphasised as a vital part of their young femininities. This part of the chapter also acknowledged that in their negotiations for some sense of ‘style’, the girls sought to gain some form of agency and individuality over their fashioned identities. While style was emphasised as a way through which girls could present themselves as knowledgeable, autonomous individuals, the two themes of allowance and affiliation show that girls’ ideas of style were more likely to be bounded. I used the term ‘allowance’ to conceptualise girls’ access to clothing, because their acquisition of clothes was organised around what was usually facilitated or allowed by their parents or adults. Due to their lack of financial resources, girls’ access to clothing was contingent on what they were usually allowed to buy. Such a discussion highlights the possibility of value being created for certain groups of clothing, as if certain types of clothing are cheap(er) and more easily accessible, then there is a need to recognise what is deemed as more expensive and valuable for tween girls. This may include adult-like clothing, which has been reflected to be expensive and growing in popularity in Singapore (Lim 2000; Ong 1994, 1995). The final section discussed how girls’ ideas of being ‘stylish’ were also found to be intertwined with ideas of affluence and social class. Girls showed that they were aware of the social positionings deeply implicated in consumption, and used this knowledge to reflect on what they wore and had hoped to wear. This part of the chapter illuminated how adult-like clothing for young girls in Singapore may become desirable, because such clothing is mainly afforded with the right social class and mobility. It was ultimately the girls from affluent families who were more likely to have adult-like clothing, and could afford to dress in whatever ways they wanted. In this sense, adult-like clothing may also form part of Singapore’s own “successful girls narrative” (Pomerantz and Raby 2011: 550), where girls not only need to be smart, but they also need to have the ‘right’ social class and economic capital to have the ‘right’ kinds of (stylish) clothing. In conclusion, this chapter showed how girls’ adult-like dressing is more likely to be influenced by the socio-cultural domain in which the girls were raised in rather than by overarching explanations of a sexualisation of culture (Kehily 2012), or the postfeminist approach. This chapter showed how girls’ dressing is the result of an amalgamation of social, economic and cultural factors that are unique to Singapore, that has more relevance in tween girls’ social worlds. Nonetheless, following Pomerantz (2008), this chapter does not offer any pronouncements on whether young Singaporean girls should dress in a particular way, or whether certain dressing styles are better than others. There are scholars who have stressed the need to refrain

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from reproducing knowledge about girls’ dressing in a way that incites moral panic. Arguments contributing to a moral panic also often overlook the array of complex negotiations that form part of girls’ clothing choices. Further, in contrast to the narratives that frame girls as passive recipients of an adult culture when they fashion themselves after adults, this chapter sheds light on the importance of clothing and clothing style in these girls’ everyday lives in Singapore. It highlights the ways in which dressing style is not only an important and conscientious decision that helps tween girls understand themselves, but also the social world in which they exist. As Zaslow (2009: 86) has emphasised, “[s]tyle is a cultural practice through which girls are not only objects of surveillance but through which girls are subjects, policing themselves and negotiating social locations and relationships. […] [Style] is not only the enactment of individual taste, but also a mechanism through which social difference, power, and economic inequalities are sustained.” Such complexities have not been examined in much of the extant literature (Martens et al. 2004), where the sexualisation-of-girls discourse prevails in discussions of tween girls who fashion themselves after adults. As mentioned in the earlier chapters, girls’ adult-like dressing is often taken to be both a process and an outcome of “improper sexualisation” (Hawkes and Egan 2008: 198), which exposes the young girl subject, an ‘unknowing’ victim, to a range of risks. Girls who fashion themselves after adults have also been taken to be a damaging and “unwanted consequence of the ‘modern [consumerist] world’”, which cannot be avoided (Hawkes and Egan 2008: 193) (Chap. 1). This chapter showed that there is a need for more careful thinking about how young femininities intersect at the individual, social and cultural level, rather than situating adult-like dressing for young girls as harmful (as in the discourse of sexualisation) or emancipatory (as in some celebratory postfeminist readings). This chapter moved beyond this dichotomy to show how “goods and experiences come alive with very particular, local meanings” (Pugh 2009: xi), and that girls’ adult-like dressing exist beyond the act of girls simply wanting to emulate certain adult lifestyles. In fact, in negotiating some sense of ‘style’ in their dressing, the girls were establishing this space that was privy to them and free from the gaze of adults. In the next chapter, I examine girls’ interpretive repertoires of adult-like clothing and what it means for girls their age to fashion themselves after adults. The next chapter will show how the young girl participants moved in and out of “‘older’ sexualities” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) when critically discussing what it means to dress as a tween-aged girl, further showing that it may be limiting to categorise girls as either knowing or passive recipients of an adult culture, or adultification as either harmful or empowering. The girls in the study often incorporated both opposing views when examining their own dressing, and what girls their age should be allowed to wear.

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Chapter 5

Girls’ Interpretive Repertoires

Introduction Having examined how girls’ desires for clothing can be better understood according to the three themes of aspiration, allowance, and affiliation, this chapter focuses on the girls’ interpretive repertoires (Wetherell and Potter 1992) of adultification (i.e. what it means for young girls to fashion themselves after adults) and adult-like clothing. As the earlier chapters pointed out, what can be understood as girls’ adultification has tended to be studied in proxy: through an analysis of the apparel being marketed to tween girls or the proliferation of sexualised images on popular media. Research on children’s consumption also often fails to look at “children themselves, whether by talking with them, [or] through observation of their negotiations in commercial space” (Martens et al. 2004: 159). There has been a “ménage of crisis discourses” (Ringrose 2013: 45) and girls’ inclinations towards adult-like clothing have been commonly taken to be the result of premature sexualisation. However, girls’ views on what it means for them to fashion themselves after adults are lacking in scholarship. This chapter further seeks to narrow this gap by prioritising young Singaporean girls’ perspectives and the values and meanings that they attach to their fashioned identities and adult-like dressing. The first part of this chapter presents an alternative view to the claims that girls are fashioning themselves after adults primarily as a result of the exposure to consumer media or from the clothes that are being sold to them (Bailey 2011; Rush and La Nauze 2006b). Often situated as a group of prolific consumers with the need to keep up with clothing trends, most of the girls in the study, instead, adopted a confidence narrative and stated that they did not want to make any changes to what they wore. There are complexities to girls’ confidence narrative and a number of the girls stressed that they should make constant efforts not only to achieve some form of clothing style, but a ‘style’ that they were able to feel confident in. As part of their confidence narrative, girls were expected to take control over their production of self and to assume more responsibility over what they wore. According to some of the girls, there was a need © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_5

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for girls to put in more effort into what they wore if they did not like how they dressed, so that they could embody a confidence narrative. Nonetheless, girls’ confidence narrative should not be confused with contentment. While not wanting to make any changes to their dressing, girls constantly pushed boundaries and questioned what they wore and were allowed to wear. Apart from clothing, many girls revealed that they had wanted to incorporate accoutrement, which shows how girls’ dressing and sense of style can extend beyond the clothes they wear. The commonly mentioned accoutrement included nail polish, high-heeled shoes or to have dyed or more adult-like hairstyles (i.e. perms). Besides the attitudes that girls were expected to have towards their own dressing, this chapter identifies how a number of girls in the study had also deliberately avoided discourses of sexualisation when they talked about their own clothing. The girls in the study often situated adultification as something extrinsic, and that it was always the other girls or young female celebrities (but never themselves) who fashioned themselves after adults. This ‘othering’ highlights the complexity and contradiction in girls’ perceptions of adult-like dressing. While girls stressed on the importance of crafting a dressing style that they could feel confident in, many frowned upon the display of an out-of-control femininity, citing ‘trainwreck’ celebrities like Miley Cyrus. While personal style and clothing was an important part of their young female identities (Chap. 4), the girls tended to criticise other girls and women whom they thought were dressed more sexily or’ Western’ than what is culturally accepted by Singapore standards. There are studies on girls in the West that similarly suggest that girls make sense of what they should be wear by engaging with popular debates about ‘age-appropriate’ dressing (see Blanchard-Emmerson 2021). Most prominently, this chapter seeks to illuminate the “diversity, complexity and contradiction” (Vares et al. 2011: 139) in the way young Singaporean girls made sense of adult-like dressing and reconfigured ideas of adultification. The girls understood and made sense of adult-like dressing in ways that both support and resist dominant discourses of femininity, showing how it can be counterproductive to make sense of girls’ dressing in binary ways, as either knowing or passive recipients of an adult culture, or adult-like dressing for young girls as either harmful or empowering. In examining the various ways that the young girl participants had reframed and repositioned what it means to fashion themselves after adults, this chapter illuminates how the girls’ identification of adultification as something extrinsic is likely an outcome of their occupation of a liminal space: as young and female, inbetween childhood and teenhood, with endless possibilities to be what they want (Harris 2004; Pomerantz and Raby 2017), yet having to negotiate the tensions of what this means for young girls growing up in the context of Singapore.

A Confidence Narrative The previous chapter outlined how the girls described adults as strictly controlling their desires for new clothing. A number of them had wished for more freedom and resources to cultivate their own clothing styles. Having acknowledged the bounded

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realities of their consumption, this section interrogates the possibilities of girls’ dissatisfaction with their own dressing. Girls’ outward and upward looking aspirations of style have been often framed as part of the manipulation by media messages, where they are “simply ‘imitating’ the sexual behaviour they see in popular culture” (Vares et al. 2011: 142). From a developmental perspective, tween girls have been argued to be especially at risk because they exist in a critical period of time where their cognitive skills have yet to be “fully developed” (Gruber and Grube 2000: 211). This limits their ability to discern sexualising messages found in a number of media sources. That said, that there are a set of discourses within celebratory postfeminist scholarship that argues girls should be granted greater choice, independence, and agency in the way that they want to fashion themselves. Scholars belonging to this school of thinking have claimed that girls are not always passive recipients of a sexualised, hyper-feminised culture (Duschinsky 2013). Furthermore, this is supported by the argument that in allowing them to select their clothing in an unfiltered world of “girlie products”, girls will be more likely to emerge as “powerful citizens” because they learn to make more “empowered choices” (Jackson et al. 2013: 145). While not mutually acknowledged, both lines of argument are however premised on how it has become the norm for girls within the current socio-cultural landscape to have desires to fashion themselves after adults. Hawkes and Egan (2008: 193) similarly underscore that almost universally, girls who want to fashion themselves after adults have been taken to be a damaging and “unwanted consequence of the ‘modern world’”, which cannot be avoided. Other authors have also suggested that preteen girls today cannot be understood apart from their existing role as consumers. Harris (2005: 212), for instance, emphasise that the “tween world” has two significant characteristics: it is a predominantly girl space, and a space of consumption. Nonetheless, in contrast to the discussions that suggest that certain images of girls and women in the media were able to incentivise young girls to want to change the way they looked (Faludi 1991; O’Reilly-Scanlon and Dwyer 2005; Pomerantz 2008; Vares et al. 2011), many of the girls in the study were found to exude confidence in their discussions of dressing. When asked if they liked the way they currently dressed, a majority of the girls in my study stated that they would not trade any aspect of how they dressed for anything else. Initially, I expected the young girl participants to mirror much of the research from the West and provide a range of ideas on how they could ‘improve’ what they wore (Hamilton 2008; Pomerantz 2008). This assumption was also informed by how the girls spoke about their friends who were able to afford more ‘branded stuff’ (Chap. 4). Eva (12 years old), one of the girls who loved the way her favourite YouTuber dressed, was jealous of the more ‘popular’ clothes that her classmates owned. However, from the responses below, there was no clear desire for many of the young girl participants to change the way they dressed:

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Interviewer: Do you like the way you dress now? Together: Yes! (emphasis) Interviewer: Is there anything you’d like to change? Sophie: No. Definitely not! Focus group L

Interviewer: Do all of you like the way you are dressing now? Charlotte: I love the way I dress. Lola: Highly! Yes! Focus group K

Most of the girls emphasised that they were comfortable with and loved how they were currently dressed. However, it should not be assumed that this was because these girls were already fashioned after their favourite celebrities or YouTubers. As I discuss later, a distinction can be made between girls’ confidence and contentment. More importantly here, girls’ rejection towards changing aspects of their dress conflicts with how tween girls have been depicted in the discourse of sexualisation. Tween girls have been framed as being easily influenced by consumer media, wanting to buy more clothes that “comes primarily from a narrow definition of sexual attractiveness” (Lamb et al. 2016: 528). In her book entitled Born to Buy, Schor (2004) highlights the “explosion of youth spending”, noting how girls are increasingly becoming shoppers at earlier ages. Pugh (2009: 4) similarly outlines how “many moments of childhood now involve the act of buying, from daily experiences to symbolic rituals, from transportation to lunches to birthdays.” Her work on an “economy of dignity” (Pugh 2009: 6–10) further complicates this, as she notes how girls may find a need to purchase certain things (that may include adult-like clothing) in order to fit in school. The confidence narrative and attitudes of not wanting to change what they wore highlight the need to be more attentive to the complexities and nuances, especially in the discussions surrounding girls’ dressing. In elucidating how the girls in the study resisted changing the way they dressed, this section showed that while Singapore may be one of the more Westernised countries within the region, it should not be assumed that girls’ adult-like dressing and its implications will ‘unfold’ in the same manner as what has been discussed in the discourse of sexualisation. Rather than the commercial or media landscape having limited impact on the acculturation of young femininities in Singapore, explaining why there may be less desire for girls to change what they wore, there is a need to acknowledge that there are demands of a confidence narrative in girls’ social lives and their discussion of clothing.

Effort in the Production of Self While the girls had commonly communicated a confidence narrative when discussing their own dressing, a vital part of this narrative involved effort to define a dressing

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style that they could feel confident about. Michelle and Ray (both 8 years old) did not know each other prior to the focus group interview. However, upon hearing that Ray was able to choose the clothes she wore, yet hated what she wore, Michelle exclaimed that then Ray should be making an effort to choose the clothing that she liked: Interviewer: Do you like how you dress now? Ray: Nope. I don’t want to wear this skirt. I hate my clothes. I just anyhow choose what to wear one. Interviewer: And you? (redirecting question to Michelle) Michelle: Yes! I like the clothes I wear! Ray: Every day I just anyhow choose! I hate my clothes! Interviewer: You choose or your parents choose? Ray: I choose. Michelle: Then, you should choose the clothes that you like! (her emphasis) Focus group H

A number of studies have underscored the significance of peer feedback in the construction of girls’ cultures and young femininities (see Paddock and Bell 2021). Such an interaction also reveals how effort, not only to achieve some form of clothing style but a style that girls can be confident in, was a taken-for-granted aspect of girlhood and girls’ young femininities for some of these girls. This coheres with what Harris (2004: 16) theorised, that “the idea that good choices, effort, and ambition alone are responsible for success that has come to separate the can-dos from the at-risks.” Harris (2004) underscores that two types of girlhood now dominate our understandings; the can-do girl is “confident, resilient and empowered”, while the at-risk girl “lacks self-esteem” (Projansky 2014: 2). Projansky (2014: 3) elaborates: The can-do girl is a successful athlete. The at-risk girl is a pregnant teen. […] The can-do girl is beautiful and fit. The at-risk girl is hyper-sexualised at too young an age. […] The can-do girl has girl power. The at-risk girl lacks resources.

I have argued earlier that the “successful girls narrative” (Pomerantz and Raby 2011: 550) in Singapore does not only include excelling academically, it was also important to have the ‘right’ social class to access the ‘right’ kinds of clothing. Similarly, making the ‘right’ effort in one’s dressing may form part of the trajectory that can reify one’s ‘can-do’ status. Furthermore, the interaction between Ray and Michelle also demonstrates how responsibility over one’s dressing and the need for girls to craft an identity through dressing are crucial aspects of girlhood. Ray was expected by a peer to take more responsibility over and put in more effort into what she wore if she did not like how she dressed. The conversation between Ray and Michelle highlights that there are expectations for girls within their social worlds that are not easily observable to adults, and are enforced by the tween girls themselves. This type of scrutiny not only focuses on dressing, but the responsibility over the production of one’s self and to feel confident in the clothes used to perform a tween girl identity. It speaks to ideas

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of agency and choices that are now available to girls, which the girls themselves feel should be taken up and used appropriately. Harris’s (2004: 1) positioning of young women as the “vanguard of new subjectivity” is similarly premised on girls’ own lives as “a personal project” (Harris 2004: 8) that they should invest utmost effort in. In a similar vein, Gill and Orgad (2015: 324) acknowledge “how confidence has become a technology of self” for girls and women. In noticing that the “cult(ture) of confidence” (Gill and Orgad 2015: 325) is highly gendered, demanding self-work and regulation especially amongst young girls and women, this section highlighted the ways that some of the tween girls in the study were reminded by their peers to put more effort into their dressing and that it was important to feel confident about the way they looked.

Confidence and Not Contentment That said, there are complexities in the young girls’ confidence narrative, and the girls were reflective about this narrative that they needed to embody. One of the girls, Kira (11 years old), elaborated on this by explaining that although it was common for girls to “love” the way that they are currently dressed, being confident in one’s own clothing style was an ongoing project for girls. A confidence narrative does not mean that girls’ styles would be static: Kira: Okay, everyone loves the way they dress in that current moment, that’s for sure. But eventually, you’re gonna get over it. And you’re gonna look back at it and be like “Why did I dress that way?” Like I used to have an obsession with pink, and now I have all these pink clothes and I’m just thinking, shoot, no. I wore so much pink ... Focus group G

Kira’s excerpt demonstrates that while there were girls who were confident and did not want to alter any part of their dressing, girls still acknowledged that they existed in a social world that they needed to be part of; in the case of Kira, one where it was no longer acceptable for girls her age to ‘wear pink’. Indeed, the rejection of pink or pink clothing has been underscored by Gleeson and Frith (2004) to be a rejection of old forms of childish femininity, and a move towards more mature forms of femininity. More clearly, Kira’s excerpt shows that while stating that they were confident in how they were dressed in the current moment, girls’ confidence should not be confused with contentment. It was common for girls to ultimately question or alter what they wore in order to fit in or keep up with was popular. There were girls like Maddison (12 years old) and Kim (11 years old) who had expressed confidence in the way they dressed, but had explained that if they could, they would like to incorporate more crop tops in their daily outfits:

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Interviewer: Do you like the way you dress now? Aria and Maddison: Of course! Interviewer: Is there anything you really want to wear? Sophia: I’m comfortable with my dressing. As long as it is my choice, I can wear it. Maddison: Not really. Perhaps to wear more crop tops, that’s all. Focus group I

Interviewer: Do you like the clothes you are wearing now? Kim: Yes! But I want to wear those tops that will have a gap here (pointing at her midriff). Interviewer: Crop tops? Victoria: Yes, yes, yes! Focus group A

At the time of writing, crop tops were a popular apparel choice amongst the girls in the study, young female YouTubers and celebrities. On her blog post 10 Favourite Items In My Wardrobe, popular YouTuber Zoella mentioned that she has a “rose and bird” patterned crop top from popular label Topshop that she frequently wears (Zoella 2010). A brief search also revealed that there were trending topics like #zoella #croptop on social media and the Internet, where girls and young women gathered to share about the crop tops that Zoella had worn in her videos. While a number of girls emphasised that they did not want to change any aspects of their dressing, conversations like the above show that girls were still to some extent influenced by popular trends and the older girls and women that they may have seen on YouTube. Despite having confidence in what they were wearing, there were girls like Maddison (12 years old) and Kim (11 years old) who had simultaneously reflected on and challenged the boundaries of what they were usually allowed to wear. The tensions between confidence, contentment and ‘self-improvement’ have not been sufficiently represented in extant scholarship on tween girls’ dressing, and how effort in the production of self can be part of hegemonic girlhood (Harris 2004; Gonick 2001). While it is important to understand the broader socio-cultural landscape or ‘external factors’ in which girls’ adult-like clothing is popularised and made desirable, there is a need to take into account the contradictions and complexities in the way that girls interact with such clothing and the tensions that may arise, as Entwistle (2001) argues: [d]ress does not simply merely serve to protect our modesty and does not simply reflect a natural body or, for that matter, a given identity; it embellishes the body, the materials commonly used adding a whole array of meanings to the body that would otherwise not be there. (Entwistle 2001:33).

Besides advancing the work done in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, this section on girls’ confidence narrative emphasised Projansky’s (2014) point of view, where writing about girlhood should prioritise girls’ unique (and at times, contradictory) viewpoints and presence. As the following section will show, despite asserting a

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confidence narrative and not wanting to change what they wore, almost all the girls had wanted to incorporate a range of accoutrement to perform what they envisaged as an ideal young female identity.

Accoutrement Pomerantz (2008: 3) defines accoutrement as “iPods, head-phones, cell phones, discmen, cigarettes, and even books and CDs that are carried around” to be used as part of girls’ style. However, this chapter takes on a broader definition and assumes accoutrement to be any object outside girls’ dress that aids in their portrayal of style. In the earlier chapters, I noted that in Singapore, youth is often “a window for unlimited consumption for and on the self, constrained only by one’s own financial circumstances” (Chua 2003: 25). Unlike adults and unable to afford “big ticket” items such as cars, homes, or holidays, the body for the youth becomes a “primary locus of consumption” (Chua 2003: 25). Items of fashion and adult-like clothing are usually appropriated, because “body adornment” (Chua 2003: 25) is the cheapest and most prominent way for the young to express and assert their own identity (Chua 2003). This same understanding can be extended to girls’ desires for and use of accoutrement. Accoutrement such as nail polish were popular because it is significantly cheaper than clothing and had helped the girls display their young femininities in subtle ways within school grounds. When I pointed out to the girls that their desires to incorporate accoutrement contradicted with how they did not want to make any changes to their dressing, the girls explained that these accoutrement were meant to complement what they wore and not revolutionise their dressing. This showed how the girls were not unsure about their confidence and their bodies were not “inadequate and in need of constant improvement” (Vares et al. 2011: 146)—they saw accoutrement as a way that enabled them to become a more ‘stylish’ version of themselves. Across the different age groups, the common accoutrement brought up by the tween girls included highheeled shoes, nail polish, more ‘adult-like’ hairstyles (i.e. highlight and perms) and makeup, which showed how dressing and style for the tween girls extended beyond the clothing that they wore.

Girls and Nail Polish While it is compulsory for Singaporean students in the public education system to wear school uniforms up until the age of 18, the girls were likely to favour accoutrement such as nail polish because it helped them display their young femininities in subtle ways within the school grounds. Nail polish was a popular accoutrement amongst the tween girls also because it is more affordable than clothing. In using nail polish as an accoutrement, the girls were able to express their individualities at school, although it was against the school rules to wear nail polish. The excerpts

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below illuminate how two groups of girls talked about nail polish and when they usually had the chance to wear it. The girls also discussed the ways that they could avoid being penalised for wearing nail polish to school, following what their friends have done: Ashley: I wear nail polish, during holidays. School holidays. My parents are fine with it. Eva: Yeah, I do it (nail polish), like, during holidays. Ashley: During the long holidays, like June and December. Kira: ‘Cause our schools don’t allow it. Interviewer: Right, I would think that. Kira: I love to do all the designs, like flowers on my nails. Focus group I

Penny: I love to buy nail polish. Interviewer: Oh, nail polish only? Penny: I never ask for … Gem: Makeup. It’s like, not good for you. Interviewer: But you buy nail polish? Do you paint your toenails? Or fingernails? Penny: I paint both. Interviewer: Do you know how to remove nail polish? Can you all wear that (nail polish) to school? Gem: Cannot. Penny: No. I, I paint on my toes then I wear the … I wear socks over it. So no one knows, but I know. Interviewer: Do any of your friends wear nail polish to school? Penny: A lot. After like Chinese New Year, then they will wear. I did it too … Gem: Yah, like they ‘forgot’ to … remove. Penny: I [did] not forget, I purposely don’t want remove. I pretended I forgot. Gem: Some of them also use top coat, all the time. Interviewer: Oh that’s like the clear one. The one that you cannot see any colour, but you can see that it is shiny right? Gem: Yah. Interviewer: Do your teachers say anything? Gem: Sometimes they will check. So many people doing the same thing. Focus group B

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While “non-normative” (White 2015: 196) and creative forms of nail art were frequently adopted by the young female bloggers studied by White (2015), the tween girls in the study still used nail polish in heteronormative ways. Their usage of nail polish were rarely “counter aesthetic” (White 2015: 196), unlike the bloggers whom White (2015: 196) had examined, who had used their own DIY nail polish and had “googly Cyclopean” eyes meticulously attached to the centre of each nail. White (2015: 196) notes that most of the time, ‘monstrous’ nail art for these bloggers had little or no relation to making their nails or themselves “traditionally pretty.” She argues that rather than nails being “bodily properties” (White 2015: 194), nail polish enables a certain group of women to craft themselves as individuals, establishing a space in which they can subvert patriarchal ideas of beauty. As opposed to being “frivolous and self-involved” (White 2015: 194), White (2015: 194) supports Hampson (2013) argument that nail art can constitute a “silent, powerful voice of unapologetic femininity.” While the tween girls in my study had neither the knowledge nor skills to use nail polish in the same ways as the bloggers in White’s (2015) study, it would be incorrect to assume that the girls, in using nail polish, were prematurely sexualised or had been socialised into ideas of adult beauty. Gem (11 years old), for instance, mentioned that there were girls at school who had only used clear-coloured nail polish. There were girls like Penny (11 years old) who had also painted her toenails despite knowing that they would be covered by socks. Such engagements show that girls’ uses of nail polish were more likely to be an avid participation in forms of young femininity that were popular amongst tween girls in Singapore. This way of understanding aligns more closely with McRobbie’s (1991) exposition of the teeny bopper culture—rather than a mere gazing of their favourite male idols, McRobbie (1991) suggests that as consumers of popular culture, girls are making statements about themselves and negotiate a different leisure and personal space. Instead of viewing girls’ uses of nail polish as conformity and passivity to what “hands should look like” (White 2015: 202), the girls’ engagements with nail polish were more likely to be fuelled by desires to participate in forms of youthful femininity that were of significance in their social worlds. While the way they used nail polish can be read as girls trying to avoid any disciplinary action, these methods of using nail polish should also be viewed as an effort to partake in a popular feminine activity that has little to no relevance to adult ideas of beauty. Furthermore, the girls showed that they were highly aware of adult beauty ideals and the lengths that women go through in order live up to the standards of beauty, which they more clearly addressed in their discussions of hair and high heels, and finally in their discussions of makeup.

Hair and Heels—Diversity, Complexity and Contradiction In addition to nail polish as an accoutrement, the girls in my study mentioned that they wanted to wear high heels and have “nicer hair”. The girls who wanted nicer hairstyles were mainly interested in perming, highlighting or dyeing their tresses:

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Charlotte: I think what I wear is fine now ... but if I could (her emphasis), I wouldn’t have hair like that. Interviewer: So ideally how would your hair be like? Charlotte: Like Emma Watson’s! (laughs) The long, wavy one! Ruien: Me too, if there is any thing I’d like to change it’s my hair … I’ll say it’s my hair. Focus group K

Interviewer: So apart from your dressing, is there anything you’d like to change? Aria and Maddison: Hair! Maddison: Her (YouTuber Bethany Mota) hair is like wavy, but then sometimes she like straightens ... Aria: I want to colour my hair. Interviewer: You want to dye your hair? Aria: Yes! (her emphasis) Maddison: Purple. Aria: I wanna dye it dark blue like Jade. Interviewer: Jade who? Aria: Jade Thirlwall. She is from Little Mix. Maddison: Fifth Harmony also. Aria: Yah, it’s a band. It’s a girl band. It’s like One Direction but girl version. But yah, I want to dye my hair that’s the main thing. My older sister has dyed her hair like bazillion times. She did like half red and half brown. And then when she plaits her hair right, you can see it’s like a very nice colour. Interviewer: How old is your sister? Aria: She is 10 years older than me. Focus group I

In describing the kind of hairstyles that they wanted, the girls made clear references to the young adult female celebrities or older girls that they knew of. The hairstyles that they wanted have similarly been covered by many of the beauty YouTubers that the tween girls follow. Bethany Mota, for instance, has tutorials on how young girls can achieve long, wavy hair from the comforts of their own home. More specifically, she attributes this look to Victoria’s Secret models (Macbarbie07 2011). In addition to the hopes of making changes to their hair, which were usually against the school rules, many girls also expressed that they enjoyed wearing high heels:

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Interviewer: Do you own high heels? Ashley and Kira: Yah! Kira: Confirm. Like our mum lets us buy heels! Ashley: Heels are awesome! (her emphasis) Kira: When I was her age (referring to Ashley), I had an obsession with heels and my mum was like okay, you can buy it, so ... yah. I really love high heels. Focus group G

Interviewer: Do you all like shoes? Do you all have high-heeled shoes? Together: Yes! Sophie: We wear it all the time and [wore] it here (focus group interview). Focus group L

High-heeled shoes were once items of fashion that belonged solely to the sphere of adults. In tracing the emergence of the term ‘tween’ as a consumer label, Cook and Kaiser (2004) highlight that it was in the 1990s that clothing makers and entrepreneurs began capitalising on the tween market. They argued that retailers exploited preadolescent “sartorial and bodily practices” (Cook and Kaiser 2004: 204), demanding and defining a space in the market for preteen-aged products. Certain scholars have predicted a loss of childhood for children who do not differ significantly from adults in terms of dressing and hence, sexuality (Postman 1994). Nevertheless, the girls’ responses towards hair and high-heeled shoes were diverse. While wanting to have nicer hair and expressing that they liked wearing high-heeled shoes, there were girls who did not agree with their friends who had dyed their hair, and there were others who expressed that young girls should not be wearing high heels with their daily outfits. Eva (12 years old), upon listening to the other girls in the focus group speak enthusiastically about high-heeled shoes, said “Actually, heels are kind of uncomfortable.” In the excerpt below, both Penny and Gem (both 11 years old) also identified other girls in school whom they thought had dyed or highlighted their hair: Penny: I got one friend right, her hair [is] very brown. Then my teacher asked why your hair so … become so brown. Then she’s like “It’s natural one … I just woke up like that.” Gem: My friend’s hair … is also very weird. One strand of her hair is like yellow colour. Then, sometimes will change colour (referring to highlights). Interviewer: Your teacher never says anything? Gem: Because she uses her natural hair to cover up. Interviewer: Really? Gem: Yah. Really. Sometimes like Halloween, she changes it to orange leh. Penny: She confirm dyed it one (I’m sure she dyed it)! Focus group B

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While the excerpt above could be read as personal discontentment with classmates who had lied about dyeing their hair, there were girls in the study who showed that they were highly aware of the perils of the ‘adult’ practice of hair colouring. Penny and Gem (both 11 years old) both went on to discuss the intensive dyeing sessions that young pop singer Ariana Grande puts herself through, which they saw as undesirable for young women and girls their age. They explained that this had resulted in Grande having to use hair extensions and tying her hair up most of the time, to hide her bad hair quality. They supported their claims by showing me Grande’s different hairstyles and hair colours throughout her career from their mobile phones: Penny: I show you ... (proceeds to use her phone to search for Ariana Grande’s photos) Gem: Every time she ties her hair like very high. Because right, that time, she dyed [her hair] for the … like the … how do I say … like a movie. The movie is called Sam and Cat ... and she dyed her hair bright red, and then ... after that her (Grande’s) hair all drop [out]. Penny: Really. I read that too. It’s not good for your hair. Gem: Then she (Grande) needed to put the [hair] extensions, so she need[ed] to tie [her hair up] to cover up. Focus group B

Such knowledgeable and in-depth discussions of young adult women’s beauty rituals show that girls were well aware of the extent that certain women go through to subscribe to beauty ideals. The girls in the study did not always approve of adult women’s beauty trends and as I will show in the following section, this was even clearer when all of them had disapproved of the use of makeup as an accoutrement for girls their age. Such sentiments reemphasise how certain practices of beauty and femininity while engaged by the tween girls can be distinct from that of adults; girls were not always passive followers of adult beautification practices, going against some of the concerns laid out in the discourse of sexualisation. While girls have aspirations to beautify themselves, the way that they understood or engaged with certain beauty trends, clothing or products may be different from that of adult women. As I underscored in Chap. 4, girl culture should be seen as more ‘insular’. Pomerantz (2008: 48) similarly argued that girls are able to “influence marketers by refusing trends, by demanding different kinds of attention and styles, and by acting in contradictory and inexplicable ways that make market research far from scientific.”

Makeup as Accoutrement: “No, No. Just Don’t Wear Makeup” While the girls had mixed responses towards beautifying their hair or wearing highheeled shoes, all the girls viewed makeup as something that only adults and older

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women needed, that they did not and should not need to use. They explained that, unless absolutely necessary, girls their age should not wear makeup as part of their daily routines. Eva (12 years old) was the only girl who expressed that she wanted to make changes to her looks so that she could be “perfect”. Her idea of looking perfect was closely aligned with her favourite YouTuber: Eva: Actually, I’m ok with my dressing. Just that the way I look ... I don’t find myself ... Good looking enough? By whatever that standard means … Interviewer: So if you had a chance to change, what would you change? Eva: I would just like ... be perfect. Interviewer: Who is perfect to you? Like maybe anyone from the magazines, or like ... Taylor Swift? Eva: No ... I don’t really like her that much. Interviewer: Ariana Grande? Eva: (shakes head) Interviewer: What do you think is perfect to you? Do you have an ideal? Eva: MyLifeAsEva (popular American YouTuber). Focus group G

However, in sharing about how her favourite YouTuber looked ‘perfect’, Eva (12 years old) showed that she was not a passive viewer of the videos on YouTube. She explained that she knew YouTuber MyLifeAsEva’s looks were aided through significant makeup. Girls like Eva pose a challenge to the narrative about ‘unknowing’ young girls, who grow up wanting to look like adults as a result of media or consumer influences (Rush and La Nauze 2006a, b; Zurbriggen et al. 2010). In fact, Eva (12 years old) identified certain girls at school whom she thought bought into the ideology of beautifying themselves. She mentioned that she had friends who had blindly followed celebrities’ and YouTubers’ makeup trends. The other girls in the same focus group, Ashley and Kira chimed in to disapprove Eva’s friends use of makeup: Eva: My friend is very crazy about it (makeup). Interviewer: Is your friend your age? Eva: (nods) Interviewer: What does she buy? Eva: She buys all the good brands. Like M.A.C … Whatever you can find at Sephora I think. Interviewer: Does she wear it all the time though? Eva: She wears it for like, occasions. Interviewer: Do you actually see her on a normal day outside wearing makeup? Eva: (nods) Whenever she got the chance lor. Ashley: Nope! Cannot! Kira: No, no. This is not right. Just don’t wear makeup. Focus group G

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The disapproving attitudes of Ashley (9 years old) and Kira (12 years old) were similarly observed in the other focus groups. In the excerpts below, two groups of girls talked about the prevalence makeup in girls’ and women’s everyday lives. Both groups of girls discussed the propensity of older women to “cake on” makeup, which they saw as unnecessary and “not good” for girls their age: Gem: A lot of xiˇao mèi mèi (Mandarin for ‘little girls’) doing makeup these days … Interviewer: Do you follow? Do you ever ask your parents for makeup? Penny: I never ask before, ‘cause I don’t like makeup. Why do I need makeup? Gem: Makeup is like, not good for … like for very small kids. Some adults right, like those women hor, they wear until like very ‘hiao hiao’ (colloquial slang for overly vain), then they … the makeup … they put like very super crazy, the eyeliner until so thick one ... Penny: Ah, like Xiaxue (Singaporean female blogger). Focus group B

Aria: Girls should only be using light make up if they really need to. Interviewer: What is light make up? Sophia: Lip gloss. Aria: It’s like edible lip gloss. It’s like the best thing they ever invented. Sophia: The flavoured ones! Flavoured lip gloss. Because I lick it off and it tastes nice. Aria: There are people who literally cake on [makeup] ... Maddison: My mum! Aria: Like frost[ing] on their face ... Maddison: Yea, my mum! Aria: Layers of foundation and blush and don’t know what else they put on their face. Sophia: My grandma does that. And whenever I wear makeup I feel like really uncomfortable. Aria: Yah. It’s like caking on stuff. Next time, girls (addressing the focus group), don’t put on too heavy makeup. Focus group I

In these conversations, makeup for tween girls was conceptualised in two main ways. First, it was seen as a contradiction to their young femininities, and second, as overly sexualised for girls their age. Because girls’ young femininities were seen as something prized, they used words like hiao hiao, a local slang commonly used to describe women who appear overly vain, to express how they saw makeup as an accoutrement that was age-inappropriate and overly sexualised for girls their age. As a juxtaposition to the women who “literally cake on” makeup, Maddison (12 years old) emphasised that girls their age should not be worried about using makeup such as foundation. When asked why, she explained that foundation is usually used to “cover up wrinkles” and young girls “obviously” do not have any.

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The usage of the colloquial term hiao hiao by the girls also hints that it was part of the role of respectable girls to actively resist wearing makeup. Ideas of respectability, where intersections of class, race and gender come into play, have been discussed by Skeggs (1997). Historically, Skeggs (1997) notes that respectability mainly belonged to upper class white English women, forming a standard to which other women should aspire. Excerpts like the above demonstrate how girls carefully labelled certain displays of femininity as less respectable (i.e. makeup, excessively dyeing one’s hair), in order to experience their own as ‘correct’ or respectable. This is similar to Weekes’s (2002) study, where young Black women would denigrate their peers’ sexual activities to portray themselves as sexually respectable. Younger girls like Ashley (9 years old) claimed that unless absolutely necessary (giving the example of graduation or performances), all makeup should be avoided. Older girls like Aria (12 years old) rationalised that girls should only be using “light makeup” if they really needed to. Such statements emphasise that there was a need for ‘respectable’ girls to be aware and resist the proliferation of age-inappropriate products such as makeup in their daily lives. It was only when there were special occasions that they could adopt the behaviour of the adults and engage in what the girls defined as “light makeup”, that according to them usually only consisted of edible lip gloss for children. In sum, this section on accoutrement underscored how the young girl participants wanted and appropriated items of beautification in a multitude of ways, while asserting that they did not want to make any changes to their dressing. Girls’ desires for certain accoutrement further exemplified how girls’ confidence narrative should not be confused with contentment. The way that the girls discussed accoutrement also showed that although they were initiated into the “sphere of feminine consumption” (McRobbie 2000: 109), girls’ adult-like dressing is not a uniform process, and the sexualisation-of-girls discourse may only be one dimension of the “girlhood experience” (Kehily 2012: 266). Girls were more likely to be participating in forms of femininity that were popular amongst themselves when they used accoutrement such as nail polish, and this may have little to no relevance to adult ideas of beauty. The girls showed that they were aware of adult beauty practices and were not passive followers of ‘adult’ beauty standards as not all of them wanted to have permed hair or to wear high heels. Further, all of the girls had disagreed with young girls using makeup. Even when discussing “light makeup”, the girls in the study were found to enjoy products such as edible lip gloss rather than more ‘adult’ makeup such as foundation. This section on accoutrement points out the inaccuracies of simply equating girls’ adultification with sexualisation. While wanting certain items to embellish the clothing that they felt confident in, there were girls who actively resisted items of accoutrement that they considered hiao hiao or age-inappropriate in order to perform what they imagined as the ‘right’ kind of femininity. Blanchard-Emmerson (2017) doctoral thesis similarly found that dressing too mature for one’s age is seen as an undesirable activity, and there was a fine line between dressing ‘girly’ or ‘too girly’ amongst preteen girls in the UK. Most prominently, such findings conflict

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with existing accounts in the discourse of sexualisation where girls are framed as “cultural dupes” (Hall 1981 in Pomerantz 2008: 35), easily “taken advantage of by marketers and the global capitalist empire” (Pomerantz 2008: 35). Rather than looking at ‘adult’ aspects of girlhood as an embodiment of or aspiration to become more ‘adult-like’, this section showed how “the conscious picking and choosing that occurs in girls’ construction of self through fashion and style commodities is ripe with definitive possibilities for experimentation and self-invention” (Malik 2005: 270). As mentioned above, rather than the girls buying into adult beauty ideals, their usage of nail polish should also be seen as part of the tween girl culture in Singapore. At the same time, the discussion thus far also shows how the young girl participants were strongly indoctrinated into discourses about what girls and children in Singapore ‘should look like’ that may overlap with ideas of traditional femininity. Most of the girls frowned upon young girls’ use of makeup and there were some girls who disagreed with certain classmates who were claimed to be buying into beauty trends. There are scholars like Kho (2013: 213) who underscores that traditional femininity in Singapore is often propped up by the local education system, where “traditional patriarchal values and a domestic feminine construct [has] dominated the school curriculum for a long time.” Kho (2013) notes how girls’ uniforms in Singapore are usually in the clothing style of blouses, skirts and pinafores and “acceptable hairstyles, hair lengths, skirt lengths, hair accessories, and jewellery” at school all support a traditionally feminine appearance (Kho 2013: 211). It is rare for trousers or pants to be part of girls’ school uniforms in Singapore. Kho (2013: 214) further argues the education system in Singapore may also explain why “gender ideology held by most [Singaporean] women has remained relatively conservative.” Given these discussions, the following section aims to illuminate the ways that the girls made sense of adult-like dressing for young girls. There were girls like Ray (8 years old) who had strongly disagreed with her mother that she was “too young” to be fashioning herself after a teenager: Interviewer: What would you like to wear then? Ray: Teenagers. Interviewer: Teenagers dressing? Ray: Yup, yup. Interviewer: Like what? Ray: I will try to wear short denim pants, sometimes I even wear short skirts by myself (my own choosing). Interviewer: Like what older girls wear? Ray: Yah, like teenagers, but my mum says I’m too young! How can I wait until so long to dress up! I wish I was gonna be a teenager [soon], but my mother say cannot [dress like them]. Focus group H

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While being aware of the type of clothes and femininities that are now made available and accessible to them, the following section aims to understand how the girls situated themselves in relation to various, and at times, opposing discourses on what it means for young girls to fashion themselves after adults, given their confidence narrative and desires to incorporate accoutrement. The following section delves further into the ways that the girls in the study had conveniently avoided ideas of adultification when discussing their own dressing, yet strategically engaging with such discourses when discussing what other girls or young female celebrities have worn.

Adultification as Something Extrinsic: “They Dress Too Old” In addressing how the girls often positioned adultification as something external, easily observable through their peers or celebrities but never themselves, this section underscores another dimension to girls’ adult-like dressing that has traditionally been divided (Ringrose 2011). Girls have typically been argued to be either unknowing, passive consumers of an adult culture, or confident and agentic individuals who can be sexually-knowing and desiring. The findings in this section moves away from these binary discussions to show that while the Singaporean girls were able to critically identify and evaluate what it means for girls to fashion themselves after adults, they often positioned adultification or adult-like dressing as something extrinsic. Kim’s (11 years old) response to the question of how she thought girls her age were dressed aptly encapsulates this view: Interviewer: How do you think girls your age dress? Kim: They dress too old. Focus group A

Although Kim expressed earlier that she wanted to wear more crop tops, she felt that it was girls around her who were dressing beyond their age. For many girls in the study, it was always the other girls, but never themselves, who were prematurely fashioning themselves after adults. This ‘othering’ highlights the complexity and contradiction in girls’ perceptions of adult-like dressing. Although the girls stressed on the importance of feeling confident in the clothes that they put on, they had simultaneously frowned

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upon the practice of other girls or women (but never themselves) whom they thought were dressed age-inappropriately. There were also girls like Ray (8 years old) and Brie (10 years old) who had expressed that they wanted to have more clothing with lower necklines, but did not make any allusions to how this clothing is usually seen on and worn by adults. Instances of othering have been briefly observed in Chap. 3, where girls deliberately labelled certain popular culture material as “ang moh”, a colloquial othering term for Western or Caucasian in Singapore. This term was strategically used by the tween girls to contrast their consumption of other East Asian popular culture material.

Critical Readings of Celebrities’ Dressing It was through questions about how girls today should dress and whether it was important to dress according to one’s age that the young girl participants readily referenced friends or Western celebrities whom they thought were dressing much older than they should. In the excerpt below, Kira (11 years old) brought up singer Miley Cyrus as an example of a girl becoming an adult too soon. She explains how Cyrus had gone against “regulatory discourses of girlhood sexuality and femininity” (Jackson et al. 2016: 1), by dressing “extremely badly”, “not wearing anything at all”: Kira: I watch all Taylor Swift’s music videos but I don’t watch other music videos because they usually dress extremely badly. Interviewer: What do you mean by badly? Eva: Bikini? Kira: They just wear ... too revealing ... or they’re not wearing anything at all... Interviewer: Who is not wearing anything at all? Kira: Definitely Miley Cyrus. Interviewer: So all of you don’t like Miley Cyrus now? Together: No. Interviewer: Why? Kira: I liked her when she was innocent! And like [with] brown hair ... Eva: Because she has like short hair [now] ... Kira: Her hair cut and her blonde ... and like she dyed it blonde at the top ... And then she ... like the first time I saw the haircut, she was like, like wearing a bikini and doing this (sticking out her tongue), and sticking out her tongue. I just looked at it and hated it. ‘Cause she looked so ... she doesn’t look right, she doesn’t look innocent enough. I would never dress like Miley Cyrus, ever. Focus group G

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The girls in this focus group agreed that Cyrus seemed to have lost her “innocence” after her performance at the 2013 Music Video Awards. As outlined in Jackson et al.’s (2016: 548) article, this performance “evoked scrutiny, chastisement and, sometimes, affectively charged expression of outrage and disgust” from many different groups in society. Since then, Cyrus has established herself as a ‘trainwreck’ by displaying characteristics of an “undesirable, out of control, over-sexualised femininity” (Jackson et al. 2016: 549). Young female celebrities who portray similar forms of femininity have been accordingly typified as “out of control ‘trainwrecks’” (Jackson et al. 2016: 555–556). The disapproval towards an out-of-control femininity were prevalent in the statements made by Kira (11 years old). She claimed that she no longer liked Cyrus who now dressed “too revealing”, “sticking out her tongue” whenever she was on the media. Kira elaborated that such actions did not “look right” or “innocent enough”, presumably for a young Singaporean girl. While the girls in this focus group did not define what an ideal femininity was for young Singaporean girls, they used Cyrus as an example of what transgressions to this identity might look like. The girls in the corresponding focus group criticised the revealing outfits Cyrus wore in her music videos and as Kira (11 years old) claimed, she would “never ever” dress like Cyrus. However, these girls did not go so far as to “slut-shame” (Papp et al. 2015: 60) young female celebrities like Cyrus who displayed an out of control femininity. Rather, a good girl femininity (i.e. brown-haired Cyrus on Hannah Montana) was often emphasised and used as a point of reference in their discussions. As a more respectable and ‘correct’ way of conducting girlhood, a ‘good girl femininity’ (Walkerdine 1990) was prevalent in ways that the girls had positioned themselves in relation to the young female celebrities or friends whom they thought were dressing a lot older than they should.

Critical Readings of Other Girls’ Dressing Scholars like Mercer (2013: 1) argue that the celebrity is always “invested in and connected to wider debates around sex and sexuality” and “expose complicated and contradictory attitudes to sex and sexuality that exist across cultures.” In addition to the young female celebrities whom they thought were dressing too sexy, more respectable forms of femininity that the tween girls believed that they possessed was also emphasised in relation to the peers whom the girls thought were dressing “a lot older”, and like the celebrities, looked “very wrong”:

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Charlotte: My friend who dresses a lot older than she is … sometimes she looks very wrong. Interviewer: Why is it wrong? Charlotte: ‘Cause she actually wears high heeled boots. She … just like … walks down the street like ‘I’m so fabulous baby.’ Interviewer: Do you think that’s wrong? Charlotte: No. Just that she is very proud about them. Anyway, they are up to here (pointing at her knee), you know, and they are black leather. Interviewer: Isn’t that very warm for Singapore? Charlotte: But if she’s hot, she doesn’t show it. And she wears a black leather jacket. Focus group K

Lola (11 years old), another girl in the same focus group highlighted that her friends were dressed more “revealing” than they should. She emphasised that they looked “terrible” for girls their age: Interviewer: How do your friends dress outside school? Lola: It’s very revealing. Interviewer: Revealing, as in what sense? Lola: Like er … the neck part is too … Interviewer: Low? Lola: Very far down (her emphasis). It looks terrible. They’re the low, low cut people. Focus group K

While these excerpts can be interpreted as girls’ individual opinions about dressing, intrinsically woven into these conversations was a divide between girls like themselves, who knew what it means to be dressed respectably, versus the other girls who were dressed age-inappropriately (“They’re the low, low cut people”). Charlotte (11 years old), for instance, disagreed with her friend’s sense of pride by dressing like an adult with knee-high leather jacket and boots. While the discussions thus far show that the young girl participants were able to critically identify when young girls fashion themselves adults and were not passive consumers of age-inappropriate clothing, they also showed how tween girls’ femininities and sexualities continue to be closely examined and regulated by girls themselves (Griffin 2005). It was in the process of evaluating their peers who were dressed like adults that the girls in the study could also be understood to construct their own moral frameworks with respect to dressing. In the excerpts below, girls shared about the kind of clothes that they thought girls their age should wear:

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Interviewer: So how do you think girls today should dress? Girls your age. Aria: Conservative but nice. Maddison: Yah. Aria: Not too flashy. Interviewer: What is flashy? Sophia: Like really short shorts. They (young girls) shouldn’t wear that. Aria: Oh, you mean like the short, short ones until like just here? (pointing just below her bum) Sophia: Yah. Focus group I

Interviewer: How do you think girls your age should dress? Kim: They should dress like young things lah, fashionable lah! Make sure they don’t be ugly lah. Penny: As long as they like it, but cannot be hiao hiao one. Gem: It’s better for them to wear casual … Like dress, like cute and all that lor. Penny: I don’t like hiao hiao women. Like they wear already, then other people see them, will say they siao (colloquial term for crazy) one. Focus group A

In the process of identifying friends or other girls who dressed according to what they thought was age-inappropriate, the young girl participants inevitably positioned themselves as having the knowledge of knowing how to dress respectably or ‘correctly’. Discourses of ‘safety’ often accompanied the conversations about friends or celebrities whom the girls thought had fashioned themselves “wrongly”. There were many girls like Lola (11 years old), who explained that it was “terrible” that the other girls her age wanted to wear low-cut tops by focusing also on the negative consequences that girls would encounter if they fashioned themselves after adults. ‘Disadvantages’ of being sexy were similarly articulated by the participants in Lamb et al. (2016) research with adolescent girls. In their study, girls “linked sexiness to risk regarding sexual assault and rape” (Lamb et al. 2016: 537), which could be observed in the excerpts below: Michelle: I think it’s not ok [that girls dress older]. Interviewer: Why? Michelle: Maybe she’s (girls in general) too young. Interviewer: So do you think it is important to dress according to your age? Ray: Yes ... [If not] People will think that you wanna be pretty all the time. Michelle: All boys like in school will see her like so sexy, and want to marry her, then chase (go after) after her all ... Focus group H

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Gem: Don’t wear (dress) too crazy, later people think you siao (colloquial term for crazy). Victoria: Too sexy is not good! Interviewer: What is ‘sexy’? Who is sexy? Victoria: Sometimes the back ... Gem: Got one hole (referring to a bare back dress), then the boys see, then they will look! Victoria: We (girls in general) cannot anyhow dress … if we are too sexy, boys will molest your butt! Focus group A

Sophie: They will get kidnapped. Interviewer: They will get kidnapped? Brie: (laughs) Sophie: Because later, like, you dress beautiful, then will get kidnapped. Brie: Rape you, not kidnap you! I think if you can wear those ‘kind’ of dress to whatever wedding party and then when you came back alone and it’s very late at night, I think you should just wear a jacket and cover it up. Sophie: Or, when you reach the destination then you open it (your jacket) up. Brie: Or you should change your clothing only when you reach the place. Interviewer: So it is okay to dress whatever you want, but you must know how to be safe? Brie: Yah. Focus group L

Implied in these strong cautionary accounts provided by the girls was that a girl’s sexy, adult-like dressing will bring her “unwanted attention” (Lamb et al. 2016: 537). Also underpinning this was that the girl who chose to fashion herself after an adult is to blame for any form of physical or sexual harm that might occur. Lamb et al. (2016: 537) argue that such ideas articulated is reminiscent of the “rape myth”, whereby girls accept blame for any sexual exploitation, harassment or violence that they might encounter for dressing ‘inappropriately’. This also shows how the girls in my study had at times reproduced highly conservative and traditional ideas about femininity and sexuality, emphasising a point I made earlier about the limitations of applying a celebratory postfeminist discourse to girls’ dressing in Singapore. Martin et al. (2013) highlight that women in Singapore, despite notions of individuality and individualisation, are still found to be strongly socialised into traditional female stereotypes. The excerpts in this section reveal that there are limitations to the girl power rhetoric in Singapore, especially when the young girl participants did not condemn the boys/men who would “kidnap” or “molest” them if they dressed ageinappropriately. Instead, girls chose to modify their own behaviour (“I think you should just wear a jacket and cover it up”) to cope with these potential dangers. None of the girls mentioned that regardless of what they wore, it was wrong for boys to prey on them.

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In the demarcation of what was considered age-inappropriate dressing and the dangers that the tween girls might encounter, what has been discussed thus far shows how the young girl participants made sense of adultification as something that was mainly distinguishable outside themselves. They easily identified hiao hiao clothing that their friends or celebrities wore, which they suggested was highly unsuitable for girls their age. However, even with the proclaimed dangers that surrounded girls’ adult-like dressing, there were girls in the study who expressed that girls like themselves should ultimately have the freedom to dress the way they wanted. This shows how in the process of identifying other girls or young adult women who dressed age-inappropriately, the young girl participants had positioned themselves as having the knowledge of how to dress respectably or ‘correctly’. The young girl participants had moved in and out of “‘older’ sexualities” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) when examining their own young feminine subjectivities and what girls their age should wear. Renold and Ringrose (2011: 402) similarly highlight that there are many ways in which girls engage with and negotiate the presence of adult-like clothing that can lie outside the “binary logic of sexual victim/sexual empowerment and sexual innocence/sexual excess.”

Reframing Adult-Like Dressing While outlining the dangers that young girls might encounter when they fashion themselves after adults, some of the girls in the study made the argument that they should be allowed to wear what they wanted because the lines between adult and girls’ dressing have been blurred. They felt that it was the adult women who ‘infantilised’ themselves and were dressing younger – girls, in fact, were dressing as they normally would. There are popular reports in the media that similarly address how adults are increasingly embracing what children would usually wear (Russon 2017), and most recently, there are reports of Chinese women who are putting on children’s clothing to appear slim (Yip 2021). Grace (10 years old) described her encounters with young female teachers whom she thought were dressed more like a girl than a woman. In the discussion below, she suggested that adults like her teachers were instead obscuring the difference between adult women and girls’ dressing. Such a viewpoint offers an alternative view of adult-like dressing, that requires a shift in focus away from girls themselves to what adult women were wearing: Grace: It is my teacher who always like to wear sexy sexy one … Like xi˘ao meì meì (Mandarin for ‘little girl’) … Ribbon lah, hairclip lah … Winnie: (laughs) That’s very funny. Grace: And then talk in the high high xi˘ao meì meì voice. Winnie: What are they even doing? (laughs) Focus group J

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Relatedly, both Maddison and Aria (both 12 years old) argued that girls like themselves should be able to dress what they want, because unlike girls who were preoccupied with dressing older, they were able to strike a balance between what it means to dress like an adult vis-à-vis a girl their age. Maddison (12 years old) explained that it was acceptable for girls to wear clothes for “18 year olds”, so as long as they remembered to “look 12”: Interviewer: Do you think it is important to dress according to your age? Aria: Yah, you don’t want to wear grandma clothes ... Actually, it depends. Maddison: Yah, it depends. Aria: Girls your (our) age sometimes they will go for like, you know like, long, long dresses? Or they’ll go for like [something] trendy. But they must ... you know ... still remember to look your age. Maddison: Yah but not like the clothes that are ... aunty (colloquial term for older unfashionable women). For example, you are wearing clothes for like 18-year-olds but you must still look 12. Aria: Yah. Interviewer: I’m confused … Is this wrong or right? Aria and Maddison: This is right! Aria: You can wear them (adult-like clothing) ... but you must look your age. That’s the key thing. Focus group I

This discussion with Aria and Maddison (both 12 years old) illuminates that an important element of girls’ dressing was to embody and embrace what it means to be a girl their age. Putting it in the context of this chapter, this may include transferring effort into one’s dressing and actively resisting the use of makeup. Further, in emphasising the need for girls to “look 12” even as they wore more mature outfits, Aria and Maddison showed how the girls themselves had simultaneously adhered to and reproduced discourses of traditional femininity of what girls ‘should look like’. However, the excerpts above not only show the importance of ‘age-appropriate’ dressing for tween girls, these standards were also extended to the adult women in Singapore. Grace (10 years old) indirectly defined what adult women should wear when she stated that she knew of teachers dressed ‘too young’ for their age. This offers a new way of looking at adult-like dressing, where according to the girls, should have more focus on what adult women wore; there were girls who felt that it was the older women who were infringing on what young girls would usually wear (therefore, it was not the girls who were dressing more adult, but vice versa). There were girls who also made the argument that they should have the freedom to dress as they pleased because they understood what it meant to dress like “18-year-

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olds” and “look 12”. Incorporating this further into what it meant for young girls to dress ‘respectably’, girls could fashion themselves after adults so as long as they remembered to look their age, stayed away from makeup and not dress like young female celebrities like Miley Cyrus. Girls were also expected to embody confidence in what they wore, and make constant efforts in what they wore if they were not satisfied with how they were dressed. Where Western ideals are not only a “discourse of value difference, but of value conflict” (Chua 2003: 23), the way the girls had externalised adultification may also be an outcome through which they learn to manage the cultural tensions between East and West in Singapore. There has always been an “ideological/moral discourse” about the better and “more wholesome” Asian cultural values that Singaporeans should encompass, versus the bad and more decadent Western values that the youth are exposed to (Chua 2003: 6). Hudson (2013: 16) similarly notes that “the constitution of the other [the West] as racialized and sexualised has long been a feature of Singapore society.” Girls also receive constant reminders for them to ‘return’ and live up to the Asian, gender-conservative norm of what girlhood and femininity should be like. As young cultural citizens, girls’ ideas of adultification could thus be mirrored along these contradictory lines. As much as the girls wanted to perm their hair or to wear high heels, they stressed the importance for girls their age to dress age-appropriately, situating adult-like dressing as something that mainly took place outside of themselves. Although the girls in the study emphasised that personal style through clothing was an important part of their young identities, they too criticised other girls and women whom they thought were dressed more sexily and ‘Western’ (citing celebrities like Miley Cyrus) than what is culturally accepted by Singapore standards.

Conclusion This chapter began by highlighting how current scholarship attending to tween girls’ dressing often leaves out girls’ own experiences and how girls situate themselves in relation to the types of clothing and dressing made available to them. Girls’ adult-like dressing has been largely studied through the clothing that are sold to them or the proliferation of sexualised images on popular media. In order to narrow this gap in scholarship, this chapter centred on girls’ perspectives and understandings on what it means for young girls like themselves to fashion themselves after adults. This chapter shed light on the “diversity, complexity and contradiction” (Vares et al. 2011: 139) in the way girls made sense of their own dressing and how they situated themselves in relation to discussions about girls’ adultification. Situated as a group of prolific consumers in the discourse of sexualisation, tween girls have often been assumed to be easily influenced by consumer media, wanting to buy more clothes that “comes primarily from a narrow definition of sexual attractiveness” (Lamb et al. 2016: 528). However, a contrasting narrative emerged from the conversations with these Singaporean girls. A majority of the girls asserted that

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they would not trade any aspect of how they dressed for anything else. In particular, the confidence narrative highlights the need to be more attentive to the nuances in girls’ views towards their own dressing, showing that while Singapore may be one of the more Westernised countries in the region, it should not be assumed that girls’ adult-like dressing or perspectives towards clothing coincide with what has been outlined in the sexualisation-of-girls discourse. The girls in the study were not ‘unknowing’ consumers of adult-like clothing and were aware of the beauty ideals that some girls/women put themselves through. However, girls’ confidence in the way they were dressed should not be confused with contentment. Despite insisting that they would not change the way that they are currently dressed, the girls had desires for a range of accoutrement. Across the focus groups, the most commonly mentioned accoutrement included high-heeled shoes, nail polish, more adult hairstyles and makeup. However, the young girl participants were not always unified in their responses. There were girls who did not agree with their friends who had dyed their hair and there were others who did not want to wear high-heeled shoes. More specifically, this section on accoutrement illuminates how girls’ adult-like dressing should not be simply equated with sexualisation, especially when all the girls in the study viewed makeup as something age-inappropriate for their young femininities and overly sexualised for girls their age. Girls used words like hiao hiao—a local slang commonly used to describe women who appear overly vain—to discuss the proliferation of makeup in their daily lives. They showed that they were not “cultural dupes” (Hall 1981 in Pomerantz 2008: 35), who simply bought into the products and beauty ideals popularised by adult women. In noticing how the girls in the study refrained from a discourse of sexualisation/adultification when discussing their own clothing or accoutrement, the last part of the chapter focused on the ways in which girls made sense of adultification or ageinappropriate dressing as something external, easily observable through their peers, adult women or celebrities. As a phenomenon that mainly occurred outside themselves, the findings discussed in the final section of the chapter adds another dimension to the current discussions of girls’ adult-like dressing. While there are scholars like Dobson (2012) who argue that as adults, we should not reinforce the traditional binaries of ‘good girls’ and ‘tramps’ in the discussion of girls’ dressing, this chapter showed how the girls themselves had reproduced this dialectical discourse within their social worlds. The girls had often situated themselves as having the knowledge to take part in more respectable forms of femininity unlike their classmates, other girls or adult women who were dressed age-inappropriately and were unaware of the dangers in doing so. At the same time, this chapter also reveals how young Singaporean girls’ understandings of dressing both support and resist traditional discourses of femininity and sexuality. While this chapter showed how girls can be “capable and responsible agents” (Duits and van Zoonen 2006: 115) who are able to make informed choices with regards to their clothing and accoutrement, their ideas about adult-like dressing, sexuality and femininity were still highly influenced by their roles as young cultural citizens in Singapore. Apart from adhering to and reproducing discourses of traditional femininity, the young girl participants had moved in and out of “‘older’

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sexualities” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) when critically discussing what girls their age should or should not be allowed to wear. There were girls who expressed that that they could fashion themselves adults so as long as they did not go ‘overboard’, and there were others who had maintained that it was the adult women who were dressing ‘age-inappropriately’, encroaching on what girls would usually wear. In the words of Projansky (2014: 6), this chapter avoided a “spectacularization” of girls’ adult-like dressing that is prevalent in current scholarship, taking a step back to listen to girls’ often complex and contradictory perspectives on what it means to fashion themselves after adults. Young girls’ contradictory perspectives towards the “beauty mandate” (Jackson and Vares 2015b: 347) have similarly been discussed by scholars Jackson et al. (2013) and Jackson and Vares (2015b). This chapter shows that rather than categorising girls as either knowing or passive recipients of an adult culture, or their adultification as either harmful or empowering, tween girls’ desires for adult-like clothing and ideas of adultification should be better understood as a constant negotiation and interplay of factors.

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Pomerantz S, Raby R. ‘Oh, she’s so smart’: girls’ complex engagements with post/feminist narratives of academic success. Gend Educ. 2011;23(5):549–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2010. 538014. Pomerantz S, Raby R. Smart girls: success, school, and the myth of post-feminism. 2017. Postman N, The Disappearance of Childhood. Vintage Books; 1994. Projansky S. Spectacular girls: media fascination and celebrity culture. 2014. Pugh AJ. Longing and belonging: parents, children, and consumer culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2009. Renold E, Ringrose J. Schizoid subjectivities? J Sociol. 2011;47(4):389–409. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1440783311420792. Ringrose J. Are you sexy, flirty or a slut?. In: New femininities: postfeminism, neoliberalism, and subjectivity. In: Gill R, Scharff C, editors. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2011. p. 99–116. Ringrose J. Postfeminist education?: Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. London; New York, NY: Routledge; 2013. Rush E, La Nauze A. Letting children be children stopping the sexualisation of children in Australia. Congress. 2006a. http://www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP93.pdf. Rush E, La Nauze A. Corporate paedophilia. Congress. 2006b. http://www.tai.org.au/documents/ dp_fulltext/DP90.pdf. Russon M-A. Why are grown-ups embracing children’s fashions?. 2017. https://www.bbc.com/ news/business-41287750. Schor J. Born to buy: the commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner; 2004. Skeggs B. Formations of class and gender: becoming respectable. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE; 1997. Vares T, Jackson S, Gill R. Preteen girls read “tween” popular culture: diversity, complexity and contradiction. Int J Media Cult Polit. 2011;7(2):139–54. https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.7.2.139_1. Walkerdine V. Schoolgirl fictions. London; New York: Verso; 1990. Weekes D. Get your freak on: how black girls sexualise identity. Sex Educ. 2002;2(3):251–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468181022000025802. Wetherell M, Potter J. Mapping the language of racism: discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf; 1992. White M. Producing women: the internet, traditional femininity, queerness, and creativity. 2015. Yip W. China’s latest online skinny fad sparks concern. 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/worldasia-china-56343081. Zoella. 10 favourite items in my wardrobe. Blog post; 2010. Zurbriggen EL, Collins RL, Lamb S, Roberts T, Tolman DL, Ward ML, Blake J. APA Task force on the sexualisation of girls. 2010. http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf. Accessed 20 Apr 2014. Macbarbie07. Victoria’s secret model hair & makeup! Shhh!...", YouTube video. 2011. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=4DonmqPtcok. Accessed 2 Jan 2016.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Through focus group discussions with 29 Singaporean girls aged eight to 12, this book provided a comprehensive and robust account of tween girls’ adult-like dressing. As the discourse of sexualisation is a dominant way that tween girls’ adult-like dressing has been conceptualised, the findings in this book were inevitably situated and discussed in relation to a plethora of work from the West, that suggests girls fashioning themselves after adults is a process and outcome of premature sexualisation. The early chapters of this book provided an in-depth discussion of the literature from various disciplines that linked girls’ adult-like dressing to the ills of premature sexualisation. Chapter 1, in particular, illuminated how in the discourse of sexualisation tween girls are argued to be offered a range of ideas from Western popular culture, the raunchy celebrity culture and tween consumer culture on how to dress. However, this book also attended to how the discourse of sexualisation as a primary lens through which to understand girls’ adult-like dressing is problematic and conceptually flawed. Most prominently, it raised questions about the definition of the term sexualisation, the innocent child as a social construct and the classedlines upon which the discourse of sexualisation is built, also taking into consideration the postfeminist viewpoint on girls’ adult-like dressing. Notably, in contrast to the discourse of sexualisation, what could be broadly described as a celebratory postfeminist approach to understanding girls’ dressing suggests that tween girls should be granted greater choice, independence and agency in the way they fashion themselves. Nonetheless, this book also underscored that a postfeminist approach is limited for understanding tween girls’ dressing in contexts such as Singapore. Accordingly, a number of chapters in this book suggested the need for discussions on girls’ adult-like dressing “go beyond seeing girls as ‘disadvantaged’ and socialised within oppressive patriarchal structures” (Jones 1993: 157). Following Jackson et al.’s (2013: 143–144) suggestion that “the [current] challenge for feminisms and feminists is to find ways to research and work with/for girls that will open up spaces to explore meanings of femininity that escape limiting, repressive boundaries”, this book has shown how a girl-centred approach embedded in the © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_6

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‘new’ sociology of childhood is critical for understanding girls’ adult-like dressing in Singapore, where research on girlhood and girls’ cultural identities is scarce. Instead of subscribing to the binary arguments of girls as either knowing or passive recipients of an adult culture, or adult-like dressing as either harmful or empowering, this book establishes a space for girls as active (rather than passive) social agents, who have their own unique cultures awaiting to be explored. Recognising that the discussions over girls and girls’ dressing tends to be Westerncentric, this book also traced the meanings of girl/childhood, consumption and femininity in Singapore, showing how young Singaporean girls are a group of social actors who encompass a unique set of experiences and circumstances. As Matthews (2007) points out, it is spurious to write about children, and by extension, girlhood and girls’ dressing, as if all children experience the same kind of childhood regardless of location and social context. Further, as the discourse of sexualisation depends on Western dominant accounts of childhood and girls are thought to be compromising some form of innocence when they fashion themselves after adults, this book shows that the emphasis on youth/children was never uniform for Singapore and the experiences of child/girlhood within this context are disparate from Western dominant accounts. At a point of time in Singapore’s history, children were seen as a liabilities for young couples and families. It was only with the shifting ideology of children/childhood in Singapore that there was a “sacredisation of the economically worthless” (Straughan 2008: 62–64), and childhood had transformed into a crucial stage of life worthy of investment and care. Furthermore, where there are multiple forms of femininity that are being circulated on popular television programmes in Singapore, this book points out that not much is known about girls who consume various (and at times, conflicting) images of what it means to be and dress as a girl and why they may want to fashion themselves after adults. While not discounting the popularity of Western popular culture, readings of the fashion and beauty shows aired in Singapore elucidate the conflicting messages that women and by extension girls receive; while young girls and women were encouraged to develop their individualities through their dressing, there was a constant reminder for them to return and live up to the ‘Asian (gender-conservative) norm’ of what woman is supposed to be like. Accordingly, this line of understanding also illuminated the difficulties of applying a celebratory postfeminist approach to tween girls adult-like dressing in Singapore. While there are a range of femininities offered to young Singaporean girls via the tween consumer market and Western popular culture, and girls are encouraged to develop themselves as empowered, individual subjects, young women and girls in Singapore are simultaneously reminded that their aspirations have to be confined to traditional Asian feminine stereotypes. As a ‘stage’ before postfeminism, feminism in Singapore has also been described by authors such as Lyons (2004) and Purushotam (1998) to be in a state of ambivalence, with issues pertaining to race, class and sexuality conveniently omitted. Scholars like Gwynne (2013: 328) have also questioned if Singapore has entered a “post-feminist epoch.”

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‘Slowing Down’ Overall, in examining girls’ dressing outside the West and the meanings and values that the young girl participants from Singapore attach to their dressing, this book takes the lead from Dobson’s (2015) work on girls and young women’s digital cultures. In her book, she highlights the need to slow down when evaluating girls and young women’s presence on digital media. By calling upon readers and scholars to ‘slow down’ when it comes to assessing emerging digital cultures, Dobson (2015) stresses the need to carefully survey the terrain on political, social, and psychological levels in which young girls and women are encouraged to participate in mediated cultures. Further, she underscores that the meanings that girls and young women ascribe to their digital practices might not always necessarily be those observable to adult social actors or researchers. Essentially, Dobson (2015) puts forth the argument that [w]e need to be extra slow and careful in our evaluations when practices of representing, and thus producing/constituting, a female self in some way appear to be new, potentially dangerous, and of “urgent concern.” That is, we need to be slow when we are effectively heat up. (Dobson 2015: 7)

Applying this need to slow down when it comes to an “affective wave of public anxiety over child [and more importantly girls’] ‘sexualisation’” (Ringrose 2013: 42), this book first and foremost highlights the importance of a minority group perspective to approaching the topic of tween girls’ dressing in Singapore. The minority group approach reinforces and extends the work done in the ‘new’ sociology of childhood (James and Prout 1997), situating children as “active agents in the creation of meaning through their interactions with adults and other children” (Prout 2011: 4). In adopting this approach, the book also highlights the need to incorporate Singaporean tween girls’ voices in scholarship. In taking seriously the importance of research with children rather than on children, this book highlights the need for a productive space for young Singaporean girls’ voices, echoing scholars like Jackson et al. (2013: 146) who note that studies on the sexualising effects of the media often draw conclusions from “theory, research with women and older teens and supposition”, failing to incorporate the useful narratives of young girls. Given that girls’ adult-like dressing has been predominantly framed and understood through the Western discourse of sexualisation, there is significant knowledge to be gained when girls’ dressing is understood from their own unique perspectives in Singapore. Furthermore, where “moral panics [about the girl] seem to have become a goal” in recent scholarship (McRobbie and Thornton 1995: 180), the girl-centred approach adopted in the book also poses critical questions about the taken-for-granted implications of adult-like dressing for girls. In recognising that the discourse of sexualisation is predominantly a Western framework and girls in Singapore somewhat fall outside a “narrow definition of conventional [Western] girlhood” (Projansky 2014: 1), the findings in this book sought to answer three main research questions, namely: (1)

What are the social meanings and interpretations that Singaporean tween girls attach to their dressing;

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(2)

What are the social factors that influence Singaporean tween girls to fashion themselves after adults; and Is there anything unique about adultification processes and practices within the context of Singapore that demands a culturally-specific approach?

(3)

Together, these research questions and answers to them served to fill a prominent gap in scholarship, where tween girls’ young femininities and adult-like dressing has been presented as an issue of concern in mainly the West. In answering the first research question, this book showed that rather than girls simply adopting an adult culture and fashioning themselves after adults, girls’ young femininity may have little to no relevance to adult ideas of beauty. Through an understanding of their interpretive repertoires and what adult-like clothing meant for them, the girls in the study had strategically positioned adultification as a process that mainly took place outside themselves—there was always an ‘othering’ in the sense that it was always the other girls or celebrities, but never themselves, who were prematurely fashioning themselves after adults. While this was a strategy for girls to reflect upon and situate their own dressing as ‘correct’ or respectable, this also revealed the underpinning of a narrow, more ‘normative’ and respectable way of conducting girlhood. In Singapore, this particular way of conducting girlhood aligns with what several scholars have identified as ‘hegemonic femininity’ that is not only heteronormative, but those who engage in forms of femininity outside this are situated as deviant and accordingly attributed a stigmatised status (Schipper 2007; Velding 2017). Furthermore, it was the girls themselves who were reinforcing these standards. Accordingly, in addressing the second research question, this book showed how girls’ proclivities to fashion themselves after adults in Singapore must also factor in the growing popularity of YouTube in tween girls’ lives. Much of the previous work on girls’ dressing has focused on traditional popular media, such as tween books, magazines and television programmes. However, traditional popular culture sources are no longer tween girls’ first point of access to mainstream media and YouTube has become a more important site for girls’ popular culture consumption. The book made the argument that academic discourse concerned with tween girls’ dressing should not be dismissing this community of YouTubers whom tween girls are familiar with, especially when YouTubers have “soft power” (Chua 2012: 119) over the way that some of the girls wanted to fashion themselves. Videos on fashion, beauty and behaviour on YouTube can influence tween girls to fashion themselves after adults, as YouTubers were seen as more authentic and relatable in the tween girls’ everyday lives. Furthermore, the DIY ethos that was present on YouTube may also form a lexicon of empowerment for the girls in the study. As opposed to what has been addressed in the discourse of sexualisation, girls may be fashioning themselves as adults in order to present themselves as “self-taught” (Lange 2014: 189–215), embodying the DIY ethic that they saw as important in their favourite YouTube stars. Lastly, girls’ adult-like dressing in Singapore must also be understood according to the themes of aspiration, allowance and affiliation, themes that are more culturally significant within the Singaporean context. The emphasis on the cultural perspectives of tween girls’ dressing in this book showed how the girls in the study were

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not simply modelling themselves after the girls or young women that they saw on popular media, and that their desires for certain clothing intersected with several socio-cultural factors, such as ideas of social class, and a reward for good academic performance in Singapore. YouTube is only one of the ways that girls develop desires or learn to fashion themselves after adults, and in order to embody Singapore’s own “successful girls narrative” (Pomerantz and Raby 2011: 550), girls not only need to do well at school (Raby and Pomerantz 2017), but they also need to have the ‘right’ social class to access the ‘right’ brands and type of clothing in order to dress stylishly. As emphasised in Pomerantz and Raby (2017: 18) book on Smart Girls, girls are told that they are “supposed to have it all” to be considered successful. Rather than overarching explanations of a sexualisation of culture (Kehily 2012), or postfeminist female emancipation, the answers to these three research questions in this book aimed to provide a better understanding of what adult-like clothing meant to tween girls in Singapore and how their desires were also part of a larger ecosystem derived from social, cultural and economic factors that intersected with pre-existing notions of traditional femininity, popular and peer culture and national population and education policies, amongst other things. In ‘slowing down’ the ‘heated up’ discussions over tween girls’ adult dressing and in recognising that girls’ dressing interacts with several local factors (see MacDonald 2016), this book shows how it is counterproductive to categorise girls as either knowing or passive recipients of an adult culture, or girls’ adult-like dressing as either harmful or empowering. There were “multiple pushes and pull” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) that should be all considered when girls fashion themselves after adults. While authors such as Ringrose (2011) highlight the frequent polarisation of arguments when it comes to the tween girls’ adult-like dressing, this book illuminates that the girls themselves both supported and resisted hegemonic discourses about young femininity and sexuality when reflecting on their own outfits and it was common for girls to utilise both sides of the argument when they deliberated what girls their age should wear. The meanings that the tween girls attached to their dressing and the desires of what they want to wear were also more complex than what has been outlined in the “strict dichotomization of feminine versus feminist discourses” (Harris 2004: 221). There were girls in the study who suggested that they should have the freedom to dress how they wanted because they knew what it meant to “dress like 18 year olds”, but still knew how to “look 12”. Girls’ confidence narrative also should not be confused with contentment; while the girls did not want to make any changes to their dressing, there were girls who mentioned that it was common for girls to ultimately question or alter what they wore in order to fit in or keep up with was popular. There are multiple layers to girls’ clothing decisions that were at times in conflict with or contradicted each other, but these tensions made perfect sense to the tween girls within their social worlds—the girls in the study always incorporated both sides of the argument when they contemplated what girls their age should or should not be allowed to wear. Nonetheless, in ‘slowing down’ and evaluating the dichotomous debates and moral panic over tween girls’ dressing, this book does not argue for a need to conceptualise adultification and sexualisation as completely distinct concepts. Rather, in delineating the complexities and contradictions in tween girls’ dress, this book aims to refine

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the way that certain scholars and adults have thought about and embedded girls’ adult-like dressing primarily within the discourse of sexualisation or the postfeminist perspective. For the girls, there is always an ongoing dialectical relationship between what girls ‘should be like’ and what they should be allowed to wear, which was an outcome of being situated inbetween. Cultural theorists like Shildrick (2002) and Hall (1981, 1989: 16) point out, that “there is [often] no identity without the dialogic relationship to the other” and when it comes to dressing, the “multiple pushes and pull” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) and appendage of constantly being inbetween should all be considered as part of girls’ condition of becoming.

Existing Inbetween A better way of understanding tween girls’ dressing and the complexities and contentions that are frequently engendered would be to first acknowledge the liminal space that tween girls frequently occupy. Scholars like Velding (2017: 506) have elaborated “[not] quite old enough to be considered teenagers, but perhaps a little too old to be called children, tweens are caught between two very different life stages.” Rather than an age designation or a consumer-media label (Macdonald 2014), being a tween girl is to also be at the centre of discourses not limited to childhood, girlhood, popular culture, consumption and ideas of respectability. The condition of perpetual “inbetweenness” (Cook and Kaiser 2004: 223) and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from being seen and perceived as girls inbetween thus follow much of tween girls’ positionalities. In early literature, tween girls’ young femininities, dressing and sexualities have become more visible and highly debated about because girls this age are thought to be in a vulnerable stage, situated inbetween childhood and teenhood (Renold and Ringrose 2011). From a developmental perspective, girls from this age group have also received more focus, because they are thought to lack the capacity to critically analyse a number of sexualising messages that they might receive (Gruber and Grube 2000; Zurbriggen et al. 2010). While the frequent polarisation of arguments when it comes to the tween girls’ adult-like dressing has been highlighted by a number of scholars (Ringrose 2011), this book attended to how the girls had both supported and resisted hegemonic discussions about femininity and sexuality and had moved in and out of “‘older’ [more mature] sexualities” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 392) when discussing what they should be allowed to wear. Being situated at the “vanguard of new subjectivity” (Harris 2004: 8), with endless possibilities to be what they want, scholars like Harris (2004: 29) note that girls are also “taught that while girlpower is about being confident and assertive, it should not be taken too far.” Throughout this book, the young girl participants had also revealed that their ideas of style had operated within the boundaries of accepted and acceptable behaviour as defined by their parents or adults, even though they had consistently sought to renegotiate these boundaries for themselves. There were a number of girls who mentioned that discourses of adult-like dressing required a shift away from the

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girls themselves. There were girls who felt that it was the adult women who ‘infantilised’ themselves and were dressing younger — girls, in fact, were dressing as they normally would. In a similar vein, Gonick (2001: 171) points out that we [as researchers] need to rethink our sense of certainty about having ‘gotten it right’ once and for all. We need to find forms of our work with girls that produce a multiplicity of discourses, including some that allow for the investments girls might have in conventional expressions of femininity.

Being seen as inbetween childhood and teenhood, and a group of social actors who are often taken less seriously than adults, advocates of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood James et al. (1998: 145) underscore that children and hence, tween girls can “slip between the spaces of competing claims to knowledge.” There is thus a need to create a space for a myriad of girls’ voices and understand that for them, what they want to wear and why girls may have desires to fashion themselves after adults may not be a straightforward process whereby girls are simply learning the ropes of dressing up as an adult at earlier ages. As young cultural citizens, girls’ identities, ideas of femininities and sexualities are constantly being reworked along contradictory lines. As seen in the earlier chapters, girls consistently find themselves caught inbetween conflicting positions as they navigate what girls their age should be wearing, standards of ‘age-appropriate’ dressing and what their peers were wearing at any given point of time. At the same time, the girls’ defined personal style and clothing as crucial elements for them to negotiate their agency, sense of self and unique individualities. Girls’ everyday understanding, desires and interactions with adult-like clothing are not as clearly defined as the agentic individual/victim dichotomy that exists in current literature and as Driscoll (2002) notes, the relationship between girls and girls’ clothing style is complex and there is always a tension between agency and complicity; for the tween girls in the study, there was always an ongoing debate between what girls ‘should be like’ and what they can be/wear, acknowledging their bounded agency as well as limited financial resources.

Asia as Method While the idea of tween girls as inbetween, with multiple becomings “experienced in ways that complicate the binary logic of sexual victim/sexual empowerment and sexual innocence/sexual excess” (Renold and Ringrose 2011: 402) is not new (Gonick 2003; Renold and Ringrose 2011), this book further aimed to show how studies of girlhood and girls’ dressing outside the West can contribute to and advance the current state of knowledge about girls’ lives. This book highlights how a move toward Asia, or any context outside the West, may be “a possible way of shifting points of reference” (Chen 2010: 216), in order to break away from the active-passive binary, or the sexualisation-of-girls discourse that has dictated much of the understandings of girls’ adult-like dressing. Gonick (2001: 167) notes that “reconstructing femininity in

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new ways is [always] difficult because it involves not only deconstructing dominant ideologies, but also confronting investments in normative discourses of femininity.” Given the emphasis on ‘de-westernising’ knowledge production especially in “media and cultural studies, due to the rise of East Asian media cultures and their transnational circulation” (Iwabuchi 2014: 44), this book is of value and utility to future studies that also wish to focus on similar themes in Singapore, or in the wider context of Asia. Besides moving beyond Western understandings and accounts of girlhood, ‘Inter-Asian referencing’ (Iwabuchi 2014) is a “self-critical, strategic call to activate dialogue among previously internationally unattended scholarly works of Asian regions” (Iwabuchi 2014: 47). As Chen (2010: xv) underscores, “using Asia as an imaginary anchoring point can allow societies in Asia to become one another’s reference points, so that the understanding of the self can be transformed and subjectivity rebuilt.” While writing this book, there has continued to be a significant gap in Asia on girlhood or the way girls’ construct their cultural identities and young femininities. Much of the work on tween girls within this region has focused on girls’ identities at school or as students, perhaps as a result of girls’ time spent in these social settings. However, what this book has shown is that girls have cultural and fashioned identities outside their roles as students, and clothing is not superficial within their social worlds (Miller 2010). The young Singaporean girls in this book were not partaking in something frivolous when they wanted to choose their own clothing, develop their own clothing styles or fashion themselves after adults. While clothes may lie on the surface, this book illuminated how conversations with friends about clothing and what they saw their classmates wearing after school were important elements in the way the participants developed their sense of self and identity. It was common in the discussions with girls about what they wore and would like to wear, to lead to a conversation about the clothes that their friends already had. What girls were able to wear after school was also deemed to be a more authentic representation of their bodies and identities, because they were no longer bound by school rules and could dress in any way they chose to. Clothing constituted an important way for the girls to make sense of the qualities that mattered outside the domain of school and in the wider Singaporean context. Many girls in the study understood ‘style’ as a social currency that awarded girls a certain status, with adult-like clothing mainly attainable with relevant economic capital—scholars like PuruShotam (1998) have similarly noted that women in Singapore are driven to “appropriate the label ‘middle class’” (PuruShotam 1998: 107), where the “pursuit of betterment” (PuruShotam 1998: 109) is intrinsically tied to what they are able to buy. This book shows how such ideologies that tend to be specific to women in Singapore may have trickled down to the next generation of girls over the years. While this book still operates largely within the ‘West/Rest paradigm’ (Iwabuchi 2014), it serves as a springboard for “promoting dialogue among diverse voices and perspectives derived and developed in Asian contexts” (Iwabuchi 2014: 47). In the West, scholars who subscribe to the discourse of sexualisation have articulated concern over how girls’ adult-like dressing is brought about or accelerated when girls equate appearance and physical attractiveness with social success. They worry that

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young girls may be drawn away from developing other facets of their lives, such as opportunities for sports or academic development, when there is a tendency for girls to focus on dressing. However, cultural anthropologists like Miller (2010: 13) point out that the problem with viewing clothing as the surface that represents, or fails to represent, the inner core of true being is that we are then inclined to consider people who take clothes seriously as themselves superficial.

This book shows how there are culturally-specific dimensions to girls’ dressing that will be overlooked if the point of reference for studies on girlhood is continually placed on the West. While there are more contemporary studies like Yoon’s (2007) that addresses girlhood in Asia, girls’ young femininities tends to be relegated to the confines of school or by prioritising adults’ viewpoints of girlhood, or in Yoon’s (2007) case, by indirectly evaluating the kindergarten setting, curriculum, guidelines and teachers. This book shows how constructions of girlhood and what is of value within their social worlds is a topic worthy of study, especially for contexts outside the West. By adopting a girl-centred approach, this book on girls’ dressing and young femininities in Singapore offers a starting point in which more discussions on girlhood in and within Asia can take place. Overall, this book does not offer any judgement about whether young Singaporean girls are inculcated into ‘wrong’ values that may explain why they fashion themselves after adults, or whether certain dressing styles are more appropriate than others. This book outlined how adult-like clothes may mean different things to the Singaporean young girl participants, which may be of little relation to what has been discussed in the discourse of sexualisation. As Rentschler and Mitchell (2016) emphasise, there are specificities to the meaning of the girl, citing Cresswell (2014: 38) that girlhood is also experienced “in place.” Mirroring Dobson’s (2015: 8) argument that “scholars and other stakeholders need to approach girls’ and young women’s cultures with a view to learning something about their lives within particular social, cultural, geographical, and political contexts”, this book shows that in culturallyspecific contexts like Singapore, there is immense value and contribution to girls’ studies by understanding girls’ dressing in-situ. This book serves as an extension of Gonick’s (2001: 170) emphasis on “the irresolvable contradictions inherent in discourse of femininity structuring the lives of girls, and challenges [to] the notion of an unambivalent acceptance of authoritative discourses of femininity.” As this book has shown, the sexualisation-of-girls argument is only one aspect that may explain why girls want to fashion themselves after adults. Girls’ dressing in Singapore intersects with ideas of social class, upward social mobility, Singapore’s own successful girl narrative, parental delimitations (which in turn create value), and a culture of YouTube, factors that may not have been considered elsewhere. MacDonald (2016) similarly argues that while there is a glittery and sparkly world presented to girls through consumer-media, it is important to remember that girls still lead ordinary lives. MacDonald’s (2016) way of conceptualising the ‘ordinary’ reminds both readers and scholars on girlhood to avoid a ‘spectacularisation’ (Projansky 2014) of girls’ young femininities and that it is difficult to argue that consumer-media fully

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accounts for girls’ proclivities to consume, with it being more significant than the local social and cultural contexts that they grow up in.

Girls’ Feminism and Postfeminism in Singapore While I have mentioned that it is the aim of this book to make a contribution to girlhood studies outside the cultural West and within the context of Asia, this book also makes an important contribution to the discussions in the related fields of feminism and postfeminism for young girls. In spite of the archetype of the high-achieving girl, having it all, also heralded by popular media as “the face of the future” (Pomerantz and Raby 2017: 4), this research on tween girls in Singapore shows that while wanting to fashion themselves after adults, there are still girls who are unable to be seen as functioning in a ‘postfeminist world’. While recognising that there are a multitude of positions that they can achieve or roles that they can take up, there were still social norms and expectations about ‘being a girl’ that the young girl participants in the study felt they needed to live up to. Many of the girls in the study had frowned upon the use of makeup, stating that it was incompatible with their young femininities. Kho (2013) has mentioned that the inculcation of traditional femininity starts young and through the domains of formal education for many girls in Singapore. According to her, the education system “perpetuates both gender and class inequality as schools socialise girls by transmitting messages about appropriate roles and activities for girls” (Kho 2013: 12). Pomerantz and Raby’s (2017) work on Smart Girls similarly highlights some of the problems of the overarching narrative of postfeminism and the notion that girls can and are able to be anything they want. As Pomerantz and Raby (2017: 48–49) recount, the girls in their “study who came closest to the media construction of the supergirl were all able-bodied, native English speakers, and white. Most also came from financially secure families.” In other words, this book further contributes to how the postfeminist viewpoint of tween girls’ dressing may be inevitably classed, racialised (i.e. white), and a privileged Western construct. In paying more attention to the nuances in girls’ narratives and their everyday negotiations of being a girl, this book avoids making broad statements about girls, especially through the sexualisation-of-girls argument or the narrative that girls are now free to pursue what they want (a postfeminist viewpoint). According to Pomerantz and Raby (2017: 7), binary arguments such as the discourse of sexualisation visà-vis postfeminism fuel “a common story that has led to both excitement and panic.” Similar to Pomerantz’s (2008: 160) study on girls’ clothing style in an urban, multicultural high school in Vancouver, this book made sure not to reduce the complexity of young girls’ lives “to simple or linear accounts, but rather made that complexity the focus of the story itself.” In adopting this line of inquiry, this book takes a small step towards what Shohat (2006) refers to as a more polycentric or multicultural type of feminism, which requires “looking at multiple and diverse representations from many perspectives—regardless (or because) of the dominance of white, middle-class,

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heterosexual girls in the foreground of the cultural landscape” (Projansky 2014: 17). It extends the work done on the ‘tween’, that is almost always used to discuss the Western young girl subject who might be growing up too much, too young, or too fast.

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Correction to: Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore

Correction to: B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7 In the original version of the book cover, the following belated corrections have been incorporated: The non-series book cover has been changed to a series cover template updated with the volume number. The book has been updated with the change.

The updated version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 B. Loh, Tween Girls’ Dressing and Young Femininity in Singapore, Perspectives on Children and Young People 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9511-7_7

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