Dr. Rebecca Hains is a professor of media and communication with an expertise in children's media culture, undertaken from an intersectional cultural studies perspective. Her research focuses on children’s reception of media and how children’s popular culture represents gender, race, and identity. She is frequently cited in the news media on these subjects, including interviews with the BBC, the Boston Globe, Fortune, NPR, The New York Post, and The New York Times.

Hains’ book The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Sourcebooks, 2014) critiques princess culture's consumerism and its stereotypical portrayals of gender, race, and beauty. Grounded in scholarly research on media and child development, media literacy, and parental mediation, The Princess Problem equips parents with proactive skills, such as setting limits on media use and coaching children to develop strong critical thinking and critical viewing skills. This accessible, general-audience book draws upon a wealth of qualitative data, including interviews with dozens of parents, educators, former Disney employees, birthday party princesses, and participatory and observation-based field research.

In Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood On Screen and in Everyday Life (Peter Lang Press, 2012), Hains presents a critical history of a precursor to princess culture: the girl power phenomenon. In Growing Up With Girl Power, Hains examines the meanings young girls derived from girl power's pop culture forms, from the riot grrrls to the Spice Girls to The Powerpuff Girls. Drawing upon more than a year of field work in public school and after-school child-care settings, as well as retrospective interviews with college women, Hains considers how girls have interpreted girl power's messages about female empowerment, girlhood, strength, femininity, race, and more. Hains' analysis suggests that commercialized girl power had both strengths and limitations surrounding issues of preadolescent body image, gender identity, sexism, and racism.

Hains has also published three edited collections on the subject of children’s culture. Relevant to her interest in princesses as a popular culture force, Hains co-edited an anthology called Princess Cultures: Mediating Girls’ Imaginations and Identities (Peter Lang Press, 2015, with Miriam Forman-Brunell), contributing a chapter exploring how women who participate in the performance and production of princess culture negotiate feminism, gender, and race as part of this labor.  

Then, building on her previous analyses of children’s engagement with media-oriented material culture, Hains recently co-edited two volumes on children’s toys and media. The first, Cultural Studies of LEGO: More Than Just Bricks (Palgrave, 2019, with Sharon Mazzarella), interrogates the LEGO brand’s myriad offerings, from movies to play sets and novelizations; to this volume, Hains contributed a chapter on how girls negotiate LEGO toys' gender-based marketing. The second, The Marketing of Children’s Toys: Critical Perspectives on Children’s Consumer Culture (2021, with Nancy Jennings), examines the marketing discourses surrounding a wide range of toys, brands, and product categories, including Hains' chapter on the emphasis on “Curvy” Barbie in Mattel’s Fashionista Barbie launch.

More information is available at RebeccaHains.com.