Prom Dreams and Prom Reality: Girls Negotiating “Perfection” at the High School Prom*

Abstract

Adolescent girls are often assumed to be extremely vulnerable to media influences; however, this study argues that girls actually negotiate meaning from media texts. Content analysis of teen prom magazines is combined with ethnography to explore how magazine texts operate within their readers’ worlds. This article argues against two commonly accepted dictates. First, I propose that popular magazines for adolescent girls are more complicated than previously acknowledged and do not rely on a singular message of perfection derived from beauty and heterosexual romance. And second, how girls engage with the magazines is more complicated than prior research has argued; girls use “strategic selectivity” (a term proposed to explain how girls make meaning of cultural texts) to negotiate the dominant meanings found in prom magazines and other cultural texts.

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