CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER FIVE Playing to Belong: Princesses and Peer Cultures in Preschool KAREN WOHLWEND Children’s extensive engagements with princess culture have sparked controversy over the potential identity-shaping effects of popular media on young girls, evident in high levels of public debate in social media spheres around recent mass-market books, including, My Princess Boy (Kilodavis and DeSimone 2010) and Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Orenstein 2011). Educational research in the past decade shows benefits to lit- eracy learning when teachers build upon young children’s diverse strengths and popular media interests that show up so often in their play (Dyson 2003; Marsh et al. 2005). For young preschool girls today, these literary repertoires often con- nect to their deep knowledge of princess characters and stories in popular culture (Sekeres 2009; Wohlwend 2009). At the same time, literacy studies have alerted us to the gendered and consumerist ideological messages in these identity-shaping princess texts (Mackey 2010; Marshall and Sensoy 2011; Saltmarsh 2009). Yet we know little about the ways that the target consumers—very young girls—actually enact princess media messages during play. What happens when girls play to- gether in classrooms where teachers provide princess dolls and encourage children to remake the princess stories into versions of their own? In this chapter, I share findings from a year-long study of critical media literacy in preschool and pri- mary classrooms that suggest when children collaborate during play, storytelling, and media production at school, they work out issues of belonging in friendships, Wohlwend, K. E. (2015). Playing to belong: Princesses and peer cultures in preschool. In R. Hains & M. Forman-Brunell (Eds.), Princess cultures: Mediating girls’ imaginations and identities (pp. 91-114). New York: Peter Lang.