Princess Cultures

Miriam Forman-Brunell is Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood (1993/8). Her recent publications include Babysitters: An American History (2009) and The Girls' History and Culture Readers (2011).
Rebecca C. Hains is Associate Professor of Communications and Assistant Director of the Center for Childhood and Youth Studies at Salem State University. She is the author of Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life (2012) and The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (2015).

Princesses today are significant figures in girls' culture in the United States and around the world. Although the reign of girls' princess culture has generated intense debate, this anthology is the first to bring together international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the multitude of princess cultures, continuously redrawn and recast by grownups and girls from the Ancien Régime to the New Millennium. Essays critically examine the gendered, racialized, classed, and ethnic meanings of royal figures and fairytale and pop culture princesses inscribed in folk tales, movies, cartoons, video games, dolls, and imitated in play and performance. Focusing on the representation and reception of the princess, this collection sheds new light on the position of princess cultures mediating the lives, imaginations, and identities of girls from toddlers to teenagers - and beyond.

Focusing on the representation and reception of the princess, this collection sheds new light on the position of princess cultures mediating the lives, imaginations, and identities of girls from toddlers to teenagers - and beyond.

Contents: lana Nash: The Princess and the Teen Witch: Fantasies of the Essential Self - Megan Condis: Applying for the Position of Princess: Race, Labor, and the Privileging of Whiteness in the Disney Princess Line - Guillermo Avila-Saavedra: Ghetto Princes, Pretty Boys, and Handsome Slackers: Masculinity, Race and the Disney Princes - Sara M. Grimes: Rescue the Princess: The Videogame Princess as Prize, Parody, and Protagonist - Karen Wohlwend: Playing to Belong: Princesses and Peer Cultures in Preschool - Diana Natasia/Charu Uppal: Mono- or Multi-Culturalism: Girls around the World Interpret Non-Western Disney Princesses - Kirsten Pike: Princess Culture in Qatar: Exploring Princess Media Narratives in the Lives of Arab Female Youth - Diana Anselmo-Sequeira: Blue Bloods, Movie Queens, and Jane Does: Or How Princess Culture, American Film, and Girl Fandom Came Together in the 1910s - Rebecca Starkman: JAPpy: Portraits of Canadian Girls Mediating the Jewish American Princess and Identity - Rebecca C. Hains: If I Were a Belle: Performers' Negotiations of Feminism, Gender, and Race in Princess Culture - Phyllis S. Zrzavy/Helfried C. Zrzavy: Princess Sissi of Austria: Image, Reality, and Transformation - Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario: Dedicated to Princesses: The Marriage Market and the Royal Revelations of Ancien Régime Fairy Tales.