Girls' Hairstories

Resilience and Sparkle in Contemporary Screen Cultures

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by Fiona Handyside

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

women, sociology

Publishing date

2025 (February 28, 2025)

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 224 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-3995-0693-9

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Book Presentation:
Examines how girls' hairstyles have become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures

• Studies a range of girlhood films including Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013), The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012), and Bande de filles/Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)
• Studies girl celebrities including JoJo Siwa, Malala Yousafzai and Emma Watson
• Contributes a new dimension to the study of film costume through a focus on hair and hairstyles
• Features interviews with on-set hairdressers and CGI animation engineers
• Examines the gendered nature of neoliberal austerity cultures and their construction of girlhood as site of sparkle and resilience

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times?

Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, this book shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls’ hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction.

It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.

About the Author:
Fiona Handyside is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (2017) and the co-editor of International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2016). She has also written Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Cinema (2014) and edited Eric Rohmer: Interviews (2013).

Press Reviews:
This fascinating book examines the significance of girls’ hair styles within the context of gendered, class-based, and racialised identities on screen (and off). Arguing for the importance of the apparently trivial, Handyside’s analysis offers new insights for film/media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. A sparkling contribution to scholarship.– Elizabeth Ezra, Professor of Cinema and Culture, The University of Stirling

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press