Participants
What Little Girls Are Really Made Of: The Powerpuff Girls, Citizenship,
and Quantum Mechanics
Lisa Hager
University of Florida
lhager@english.ufl.edu
From Powerpuff Girls, a show that was created by Cal Art film student Craig McCracken in his avoidance of actually going to film class, a vast array of merchandise, four seasons of episodes, and even a feature film have arisen. Among its viewers however, girls connect with the Powerpuff girls themselves the most. McCracken has even noticed girls identifying with a particular Powerpuff girl as their “type”: “‘I get a lot of girls say that they look up to them,’ said Mr. McCracken, who professes surprise at the reaction his show. ‘It has developed into a whole subculture. There are girls who say, ‘My best friend’s a Buttercup, but I’m a Bubbles.’ They identify with the different personalities’” (Loos 25). Thus these young superheroes function as role models for girls in a similar way to female comic book superheroes: “The female hero can rescript stereotypes about what it means to be a woman. Just by being she suggests that the male stranglehold on the heroic can be subverted. The woman hero serves as a bold new role model for women and girls” (Tough Girls 143). Here, however, I would like to problematize Inness’s lumping together of women and girls and argue that, despite the similarities in the problems that female comic book superheroes and the Powerpuff Girls face, the age difference between the two groups remains important because little girls are disenfranchised in a different way as girls. These role models cannot even claim the right to vote or many other rights accorded to women at least in theory. Thus their claim to citizenship through their position of superhero protectors requires the show to account for how little girls can occupy this position of power within the state.
Works Cited
Inness, Sherie. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Loos, Ted. “Breaking Through Animation's Boy Barrier: In the Footsteps of Lisa Simpson and the Powerpuffs, More Girls are Taking the Lead in Children's Cartoons." The New York Times 17 Sept 2000: Sec. 2, 25+.
