ABSTRACT
Famous girls have often dominated media industries as marketable stars in music, film, television, and digital spaces. As important cultural lightning rods, trend setters, barrier breakers, and content creators, girl celebrities are understandably the focus of rigorous scholarship in Girls’ Studies and in celebrity studies. In this chapter, I foreground scholarship that bridges these two distinct yet complementary interdisciplinary academic areas to develop complex conceptualizations of girlhoods, fame, and identity. Further, this chapter examines the attention that Girls’ Studies and celebrity studies scholars have turned toward analyzing the roles and representations of famous girls in neoliberal media industries in tension with the power that girl audiences can wield. Finally, I offer examples of contemporary discourse, controversies and conversations about celebrity girls, aspirational audiences, and cultural reckonings that both exemplify the converging concerns of Girls’ Studies and celebrity studies and may warrant deeper future interdisciplinary study.
