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What Are Little (Empowered) Girls Made Of?: The Discourse of Girl Power in Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture

Sibielski, Rosalind
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277091634

Abstract Details

2010, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies/Popular Culture.
Beginning in the late 1990s, U.S. popular culture has been inundated with messages promoting “girl power.” This dissertation examines representations of girl power in the mass media, as well as popular literature and advertising images, in order to interrogate the ways in which the discourse of girl power has shaped cultural understandings of girlhood in the past twenty years. It also examines the ways in which that discourse has functioned as both an extension of and a response to social concerns about the safety, health and emotional well-being of girls in the United States at the turn of the millennium. Girl power popular culture texts are often discussed by commentators, fans and their creators as attempts to use media narratives and images to empower girls, either by providing them with models for how to enact empowered femininity or by providing them with positive representations that make them feel good about themselves as girls. However, this project is arguably limited by the focus in girl power texts on girls’ individual (as opposed to their structural) empowerment, as well as the failure of these texts to conceive of the exercise of power outside of patriarchal models. Girl Power as it has been articulated in U.S. popular culture is full of contradictory messages about adolescent female empowerment, as well as girls’ places within U.S. society. This dissertation argues, however, that rather than trying to reconcile these contradictions, girl power must be understood in terms of the inconsistencies in and tensions between its varying articulations, all of which shape how we as a culture understand what it is and what it means to be an empowered girl at the present moment.
Ellen Berry (Committee Chair)
Cynthia Baron (Committee Member)
Kimberly Coates (Committee Member)
Lesa Lockford (Other)
362 p.
American Studies; Mass Media; Womens Studies
girl power; popular culture; mass media; feminism; film; television; feminism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sibielski, R. (2010). What Are Little (Empowered) Girls Made Of?: The Discourse of Girl Power in Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture [Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277091634

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sibielski, Rosalind. What Are Little (Empowered) Girls Made Of?: The Discourse of Girl Power in Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture. 2010. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277091634.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sibielski, Rosalind. "What Are Little (Empowered) Girls Made Of?: The Discourse of Girl Power in Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277091634

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.