American Girl(hood): Gender Performance, Tween Media, and Social Media Content

The American Girl brand of eighteen-inch dolls presents narratives of young girls throughout historical and contemporary settings, as well as manufacturing a line of dolls designed to look “just like you.” Despite the company’s commitment to female empowerment, these narratives still fall into certain tropes of societal expectations for women and are not inclusive of all girls’ experiences. Young American Girl fans and teen collectors on YouTube then take these narratives to create their own original video content, often in stop-motion animated format. These animations typically consist of original stories and characters, which both reinforce the narratives presented by the doll brand and expand on what the brand does not usually represent. This research project consists of a short content analysis of five stop-motion animations created by teen fans of the doll brand, which then influenced the creation of an original stop-motion animation. Drawing from gender schema theory, the looking-glass self, impression management, and dramaturgy, this thesis applies the common narratives found in American Girl’s primary texts and fan-made creations online to create a new stop-motion film that challenges what it means to be an American girl. This short film, titled American Girlhood, follows a transgender high schooler running for prom queen, examining the concept of gender as a performance and challenging the lack of positive representation of transgender people in both American Girl media and popular media overall.