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  • From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media, and Moral Panic in the United States, 1905–2010 by Shayla Thiel-Stern
  • Cheryl Williams
From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media, and Moral Panic in the United States, 1905–2010.
By Shayla Thiel-Stern.
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 203 pp. Paper $22.95.

In Gender Troubles (1990), Judith Butler teaches that society punishes girls who don’t properly perform femininity based on dominant cultural ideologies and expectations. In From the Dance Hall to Facebook, Shayla Thiel-Stern highlights the particular threat posed by teen girls who emerge from the safety of the domestic space to partake in public leisure. Instead of highlighting teen girls’ [End Page 334] civic participation or cultural production, Thiel-Stern argues that media have consistently and disproportionately represented teen girls in public spaces as either victims or whores. Whether dancing to ragtime music, screaming at Elvis, playing in punk bands, or posting selfies online, the timeless, overarching narrative constructed by media is one that suggests: “girls could become prostitutes or juvenile delinquents, enter a life of promiscuity and violence, become lesbians, lose their ability to marry and reproduce, or be murdered or sold into slavery” (7).

The argument develops chronologically, by presenting individual snapshots of teen girls’ public leisure activities over the last century. The intent of the research is not to uncover historical facts about girls’ leisure, but to analyze media coverage of these activities. Chapter 1 presents a lively analysis of public dance halls, when sensationalized reports of the “dance hall evil” focused on the dangers of drinking, smoking, swearing, fighting, and inappropriate touching late into the night. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to sports and recreation associations designed to provide suitable leisure activities for lower-class, immigrant, and African American youth in the interwar period. Despite the many positive health and social benefits of sports, media reports focused on the unladylike effects of running and sweating while playing up female athletes’ “tomboy” appearance. The third and fourth chapters examine two moral panics that emerged out of the crisis fueled by rock and roll music—Elvis Presley and punk rock. These two chapters are less robust, and they don’t pack the punch delivered by chapters 1 and 2. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of these two cultural moments illustrates the linked crises of hyper-sexuality (Elvis fans) and asexuality (punk rockers) circulated by media. Chapter 5 examines the media’s disproportionate focus on the naiveté of girls who post provocative photos online and inevitably fall victim to bullies, predators, and pedophiles.

While key texts on teen subculture focus primarily on teen boys and treat girls as ancillary or peripheral to their boyfriends’ activities, Thiel-Stern’s research is grounded in the cultural studies approach developed by Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture (1991), which places girls’ experiences at the center. Girls’ studies has moved away from portraying girls as “victims” of the media, and Thiel-Stern expertly exposes the victim narrative as one that is a media construct and not the lived reality of actual teen girls. From Facebook posts to body piercings, the research gestures to cultural artifacts, diaries, girl bands, photos, clothing, and hairstyles as forms of girls’ cultural production that actively resist dominant cultural expectations.

The primary research draws mainly from news reports and is supplemented by a variety of popular and private sources including magazines, television shows, diaries, letters, oral histories, and personal interviews. Thiel-Stern acknowledges [End Page 335] that the majority of these media are created by and targeted at a white, middle- to upper-class audience, and so they are not representative of society as a whole. In each chapter, she contributes an original analysis of the African American press and its contrasting coverage of teen girls’ leisure, which focused more on the benefits of exercise and music over the evils of dance and public display.

The overarching narrative of Thiel-Stern’s argument is one typical to investigations of moral panics: that panics have always, and will always, ensue as new technologies and cultural practices develop. This can be seen as a “presentist” viewpoint that mocks the absurdity...

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