Thank Heavens for Little Girls: The Sexualisation of ‘The Child,’ in Contemporary Women’s Fashion Magazines

This dissertation tackles the idea of the sexualisation of ‘the child,’ in women’s fashion magazines. As such it deals with imagery and ideas around the representation of adult women and of little girls, as the important point is how ‘the child,’ as well as traits symbols of childhood and youth are being used as an element of sexualisation in images in women’s fashion magazines. The dissertation begins with a discussion of gender roles in order to establish how women are portrayed in these images, the dissertation will then discuss ‘function ranking,’ and the chapter will culminate in a discussion of the infantilisation of women. Following this chapter two will discuss the sexualisation of the children which appear in these magazines, and the glamorisation of ‘child pornography aesthetics.’ Through these ideas we try to form a deeper understanding for the popularity of this type of imagery in fashion magazines, which will then be applied to a discussion of products in the market, their popularity, and the way they are advertised, to investigate the similarities in visual language to those in fashion magazines.