Dolly Fictions: Teen Romance Down Under

Author
Publication year
1993
Pages
69-86
Comment

Here's a description from the introduction:

In the foregoing chapters femininity and desire appear as fluid yet anchored in the traditional discourses of romance. Pam Gilbert takes this analysis of textural difference and similarity one step further in her analysis of a new teen romance series which appeared in Australia in 1988. The development of Dolly Fiction demonstrates one publisher's negotiation of the changing parameters of femininity and desire. [...] Gilbert argues that audiences for teen romance fiction are always already positioned within 'reading formations'. In this instance the positioning occurs through the popular teen magazine, Dolly, roughly comparable to the American magazine Seventeen. Dolly Fiction readers are also Dolly magazine readers. [...] Dolly situates readers within available discourses of femininity characterized by interest in boys and marked disinterest in schooling, feminisms, and politics. Gilbert argues that gender relations in Dolly Fiction are the outcome of publishers' accommodation to and reshaping of changes in gender relations. Her analysis of series' novels published during the first two years of the series provides a compelling glimpse of the dynamic quality of teen romance fiction. Topics such as ecology, teenage sexual intercourse, adult women in the workforce, male violence, and less than happy endings, represent the publisher's incorporation in books published in 1988 of available contemporary discourses and issues. The female characters in the 1990 novels are more assertive and independent, representing a slight reframing of subjectivity. However, these changes coexist with traditional gender discourses in which boys remain the centre of young women's lives and their objects of desire. Gilbert concludes that current Dolly Fiction represents a 'superficial accommodation to temporary social shifts' in femininity. Gilbert attributes this to the generic nature of the texts which limit rather than expand the representation of femininity. (5)