Girls Bedrooms As Sites Of Cultural Production By Kearney Mary Celeste

Critical Media Review
Name
Institution
“Productive spaces: Girls' bedrooms as sites of cultural production” by Kearney Mary Celeste
The article “Productive spaces: Girls' bedrooms as sites of cultural production” by Kearney Mary Celeste was published online on 20th June 2007. The article is a “Journal of Children and Media” that focuses on critiquing “McRobbie and Garber’s theory of bedroom culture” (2007, 126) and determining how it can be applied in recreating the experiences that girls from other generations can have. The article is written as an essay using the APA format.
Kearney looks at the first essay by McRobbie and Garber (1976) on the bedroom culture for teens and how the research impacted subsequent works. The goal of the author is to compare the works and criticize them accordingly. The author wants to show that while the essays by McRobbie and Garber were important in turning the attention of people into the bedroom culture for young girls and its importance, the two essays have weaknesses and their applicability today must be questioned. She supports this by pointing at shortcomings in the essays. For example on p. 128, the author notes that McRobbie and Garber never “examine the recreational activities of middle-and upper-class girls.” Throughout the essay, the author finds points to support the arguments made by McRobbie and Garber and areas to criticize their work. She compares the findings of McRobbie and Garber with the works by the recent researchers to support her view that McRobbie and Garber’s essay might not be applicable to today’s society. For example, the author notes that McRobbie and Garber implied that the bedroom culture was only applicable to preteens; however, citing the essay by Sian Lincoln (2004) (p. 131), the author notes that Sian proved that the bedroom culture could be applied to the adolescent girls too.
The author discusses the theory by McRobbie and Garber on the “bedroom culture”, a reconsideration of the bedroom culture to enrich it, how the bedroom culture has changed in terms of media practices, historical perspective of McRobbie and Garbers’s “bedroom culture, and the current role of technology, especially PCs, on the domestic sphere. The article fully focuses on comparing the works by McRobbie and Garber with what is happening today and current research initiatives. While the work by McRobbie and Garber were based on the cultural practices in the 1970’s and 1990’s, the author does not consider this time gap and the fact that cultural practices might have changed with time. It would be wrong to consider the works by McRobbie and Garber as invalid while they were valid depending on the cultural practices at the time. While it is also important to recognize that the works by McRobbie and Garber focused on teen-poppers, especially with the male celebrities, it is wrong to criticize the works for not considering the role of women celebrities in the bedroom culture by teens. Perhaps a better comparison would have been...