Full Description
This is an interdisciplinary examination of depictions of girlhoods through a comparative study of foundational fairy tales revised and reimagined in popular narrative, film, and television adaptations.
The success of franchises such as The Hunger Games, Twilight and Divergence have re-presented the young heroine as an empowered female, and often a warrior hero in her own right. Through a selection of popular culture touchstones this empowerment is questioned as a manipulation of feminist ideals of equality and a continuation of the traditional vision of female awakening centering on issues of personal choice, agency, physical violence, purity, and beauty. By investigating re-occurring storytelling frameworks and archetypes, Untaming Girlhoods examines different portrayals of girlhoods in the 20th- and 21st-century Anglo-American cultural imaginary that configure modern girlhoods, beyond the fairy-tale princess or the damsel in distress, into refigurations that venture away from the well-trodden path for a new breakaway path to authentic selfhood.
This will be a useful and enlightening text for students and researchers in Girlhood Studies, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture and Media Studies.
Contents
By Way of Introduction: Girl(hood)s in Context
Girlhood in Context
Storytelling Girlhoods
PART I Fairy Tales and Emerging Girlhoods in the 20th and 21st Centuries
1: Towards (Un)taming Girlhood: Fairy Tales, Popular Culture, and the Cultural Imaginary
2: Forging New Pathways through the Forest: Red Riding Hood and New Becomings
The Journey through the Woods
Embracing the Wolf (Within): Red Riding Hood, Self-Knowledge, and Selfhood
The Huntsman with No Damsel in Distress to Save
3: Before They Were Evil, Before They Were Queens: Trauma, Female Rivalry and (Be)coming (into) Self
"It is not power that corrupts; it is powerlessness": How the Queen Becomes a Villain
Complicit and Compliant: Intergenerational Trauma and Female Relationships
Recovering Female Communitas: Kissing Old Stereotypes Good-bye?
PART II Unruly Girls: Warriors and Witches
4: Killer Girls: Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and Girl (Em)power(ed)
A Bloody Mess: Red Riding Hood, Werewolves, and Menstruation
Killer Girls Take (Back) Control: Red Riding Hood in Hard Candy and Freeway
5: This Princess Wears Combat Boots: The Dystopia of Girl Warrior Heroes
Girlhood on Display: The Girl Warrior Hero
Taking (Back) Control: (Personal) Performance and (Politicized) Becoming
A "New" Kind of Female Hero: The Fairy-Tale Princess Gets a Makeover
6: Beyond the Fairy-Tale Witch: Contemporary Girl(hood)s in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Sabrina: Rebooting Mortal and Witch Girlhoods
Sisterhood and the Rise Against the Patriarchy
Conclusion
