Embracing the “Silly Teen Girl”: Perpetual Girlhood, Intergenerational Feminism, and the Twilight Renaissance

Abstract: This article discusses the current resurgence of Twilight fan content known as the Twilight Renaissance. Reading the Twilight novels alongside memes, TikToks, tweets, and Tumblr posts in Twilight fan communities, this article explores why Stephenie Meyer’s series has become a lasting site of community for women and girls. It offers the saga’s emphasis on taking teen girls’ emotions seriously as the thread that ties the original Twilight novels to the current resurgence of Twilight fan content. Meyer’s novels challenge adult–child hierarchies by taking girls seriously as self-determined beings in the present moment. Through their simultaneous love for the series and their critique of its engagement with Indigeneity and colonialism, sexuality, and age and childhood, fans expand on this embrace of girlhood and generate ideas that go far beyond the ideas of the original series. Reading fan communities’ validation of girls’ responses to Twilight as a model for the field of children’s literature studies, this article advocates taking girls’ affective responses to children’s literature seriously as sites of knowledge production that are just as worthy of analysis as children’s literature itself.