Monster High: Converging Imaginaries of Girlhood in Tweens’ Digital Doll Play

Abstract

This chapter examines the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media and shows that players also make use of the complexity that these entanglements produce to remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture normative media expectations. It analyzes the Monster High (MH) website, tracking its connected play spaces for repetitions and ruptures in both the content of the website and content of fan-produced media such as blog posts and videos. MH fanvid makeup tutorials converge fashionista and high school imaginaries with tweens' visions of their future adolescent selves. A corollary of the hypersexualization of the MH characters is the anticipation of imperfection as girls fail to achieve the deathly thin body shape of the MH dolls. Convergences among cultural imaginaries produce resonances when their associated identity texts repeat across imaginaries, amplifying a coherent message.