Powerpuff Girls Research Articles

The Powerpuff Girls: making it as early career academics in physical education

ABSTRACT Early career academics (ECAs) working in neoliberal universities have been recognized as a vulnerable group who experience anxiety, uncertainty, exhaustion, stress, frustration, insomnia, shame and guilt. These feelings are often intensified among academics from developing countries, such as Argentina. Using the theoretical ideas of liquid subjectivities, risk and uncertainty, this paper aims to explore what we experienced while transitioning from undergraduate students to ECAs in the field of Physical Education (PE). Collective biographies were used as a method for data collection, and three main themes were constructed from the data in relation to power relations, gender and liquid subjectivities from the transition from students to ECAs. The paper concludes by highlighting the positive side of working in academia with the hope that working conditions will be improved for the next generation of ECAs in PE.

Queer Representation Incorporated at “Him”, Character of “The Powerpuff Girls”

In audiovisual's history, minorities as LGBTQ+ people had been excluded or stereotyped, thus, this study has as a guiding question understanding “Him”, character of the classic cartoon series “The Powerpuff Girls”, produced between 1998 and 2005 by Cartoon Network - by the bias of the Queer Theory, which address the questions about non-heteronormative bodies that belong to marginalized groups whose rights are denied and their lives taken. For this, a documentary and exploratory methodology was used, based on the authors researches like: Guacira Louro, Judith Butler, Edgar Morin, besides the analysis of two episodes: Octil Evil and Bash Birthday. Thus, the problematizations arised here refer to: a) How the Queer is related to Him and its possible problems and b) The dialectic between the bodies discourses accepted and excluded from the heteronormative society. The argumentation of this research is sustained by homophobia and transphobia brazilian datas, which reveals the urge to approach matters about gender and sexuality representations.

Kids at heart?: Exploring the material cultures of adult fans of all-ages animated shows

Currently, the animated television series is a largely child-oriented medium, with occasional exceptions such as South Park (1997–present), Family Guy (1999–present) or the shows broadcast on Cartoon Network’s adultsonly programming block [adult swim]. Because of this, television animation merchandise is primarily aimed at children, with a plethora of toys, clothing and other items available for a variety of shows. For series such as the first iteration of The Powerpuff Girls (1998–2005) or, more recently, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010–19), producers and creators have been aware that adult audiences exist but floundered in creating adult-oriented merchandise. However, this attitude seems to be shifting: shows such as Adventure Time (2010–18) and Steven Universe (2013–present) have massive, multigenerational appeal and Cartoon Network has happily embraced the series’ adult fans, aiming a number of merchandising programmes specifically at them. This article will explore the material cultures of television through the adult fans’ relationship to the merchandise of their favourite animated shows, first by discussing what merchandise, if any, television networks create for adults, and going on to theorize that such merchandise is a significant outlet in adults’ persisting need for play.

The Girls and the Others: Racialized Anthropomorphism in the First Season of The Powerpuff Girls

The Powerpuff Girls (1998) chronicles the lives of three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were conceived in a laboratory by a scientist, Professor Utonium, out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” with an accidental spill of “Chemical X” which in turn gives the girls their superpowers to “fight the forces of evil.” As protectors of Townsville, the suburban community in which they reside, each episode shows the girls battling with various villains (usually men) who are established as outsiders to Townsville. The villains are represented as ethnic minorities through racialized anthropomorphism which associates their evilness to their ethnicity. The girls’ fight against “the forces of evil,” then, is a fight keep to maintain a society in which ethnic minorities are not welcome, conveying racist and classist messages. In this paper, I argue that Creator Craig McCracken produces a series in which places white male figures—Professor Utomium and the narrator—establish a white, middle-class, patriarchal society, or a “Townsvillian” society, that the girls must maintain. In a series that appears to pass as a girl power text, the stereotyped representations of the villains relate the series with problematic and less progressive messages, ultimately making it a non-feminist text.

Postfeminism and Popular Feminism

In the 1990s, as a feminist media studies scholar, I was reflecting on gender and popular culture and found myself intrigued by the various ways in which the rhetoric of “girl power” had found currency in so much of North America and Europe, from the Spice Girls to the Women's Soccer World Cup to television programs about self-confident, assertive, intelligent girls, for instance Nickelodeon's 1991 hit Clarissa Explains It All and the Cartoon Network's 1995 The Powerpuff Girls .1 “Girl power” practices and commodities were quickly becoming normative, and feminist and media scholars realized that these were not simply trends or fads, but part of an emerging culture: postfeminist culture. But postfeminism did not simply materialize within popular and commercial media. Like all political movements and practices, postfeminism has a history—not a linear one, to be sure—and its emergence as a normative frame for understanding gender relations is contingent on the struggles and contradictions of a broader feminist context. …

Girl Cartoons Second Wave: Transforming the Genre

The US girl cartoon genre began in the 1980s with the Federal Communication Commission’s deregulation of television, allowing the programming of toy-based cartoons. The toy industry’s gender binary of girl toys vs boy toys was translated into the definitive split of girl cartoons and boy cartoons. This first wave of girl cartoons defined the gender normative parameters that would identifiably label a cartoon program as a girl cartoon: rainbow unicorns and star sparkles in friendship communities with motivational girl leaders that displayed confidence, determination and savvy while processing emotions and solving conflicts through communication. These characters were young girls, not teenagers or young adults with developed bodies. It is rarely addressed that these cartoon characters presented an empowered girl media product in popular culture a decade before the nomenclature ‘Girl Power’, and did so sans sexualization. In this article, the author discusses the second wave of girl cartoons that came about with US television’s cartoon renaissance in the 1990s. This research explores the ways that lead girl characters were newly portrayed and how they evolved from the girl cartoon representations in the first wave era. Along with the representation of empowered girl characters, this research identified a feminine triptych. In character settings with more than one girl lead, the feminine portrayals were represented in the triptych of the beauty, the brains and the brawns. This research also revealed a persistent glitch to the empowerment of girl cartoon protagonists in the form of secondary characters, identified as mean girls and misogyny boys or no-homo boys. Another shortcoming is identified as boobs and boyfriends, to demonstrate the compulsion to give characters above the age of 12 sexualized bodies and heteronormative relationships. Several cartoon episodes of The Powerpuff Girls, Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Dora the Explorer, Ni Hao- Kai Lan, Franny’s Feet, Lilo and Stitch: The Series, Maya & Miguel, Word Girl and Mighty B! are textually analyzed to document both verbal and visual gender cues.

Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology (review)

Reviewed by: Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology. By Carol Colatrella. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+246. $46.95. Toys and Tools in Pink is based on the author’s previously published essays on obstacles to recruiting women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Carol Colatrella asserts that “This book applies critical theories elaborated by feminist critics, narratologists, and social studies of science scholars to identify particular constellations of narrative reference of gender, science, and technology” (p. 25), mainly through an analysis of novels and films. She describes her objective on page 6: “Analyzing texts about women, science and technology prepares women for working in fields traditionally dominated by men and could help reduce bias and negative attitudes toward women.” No evidence is adduced in support of this hypothesis. Of the 188 pages of text, 141 are devoted to plot summaries of books, movies, and television shows, which range from classics of Western literature by Ovid, Balzac, Zola, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, and Melville to children’s cartoons, with sparse representation in between. No author can be expected to survey all of Western literature and film, even that subset which could be construed as representing women’s interactions with science and technology. Still, if there is some guiding principle behind Colatrella’s choice of examples, it entirely escaped this reviewer. Colatrella says that she is excluding most science fiction from her analysis (p. 5), but then goes on to devote nine pages (63–72) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). There is no mention of other nineteenth-century portrayals such as Margaret Oliphant’s feisty and resourceful seamstress in Kirsteen (1890), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866), with its gas-poisoner arch-villainess, or Charlotte Yonge’s aspiring young doctor Janet Carey in Magnum Bonum (1879). Similarly, female characters in the television series iCarly, Grey’s Anatomy, and Power-puff Girls are discussed and analyzed, but the evolution of women’s roles in the Star Trek series from the 1960s to the 1990s is mentioned briefly only twice in the text (pp. 162 and 187). Colatrella calls our attention to a 1991 film, Eve of Destruction, in which a robot created by a woman scientist goes on a rampage, enabled by its lack of an “off” switch (pp. 162–63), but does not mention Data’s daughter Lal in Star Trek: the Next Generation, who, unlike human children, could be stopped in her tracks with a switch on her neck. Inexplicably, the female robot in the iconic film Metropolis (1927) is not mentioned, nor is the cyborg Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. The examples chosen for the “Babe Scientist” chapter (pp. 108–37) do not include any Star Trek or [End Page 513] Battlestar Galactica characters. “Max,” the female cyborg of Dark Angel, is also among those missing from this chapter, as is the nefarious neuroscientist Rachel Palmquist in Richard Dooling’s 1998 novel Brain Storm. The most irritating aspect of Colatrella’s work to a historian of technology, however, is that while women in science and technology are her theme, neither “science” nor “technology” is defined, even in very loose terms. Anything containing computer chips appears to be “technology” in this author’s world, and refrigerators, typewriters, and cameras are included, but sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, food processors, automobiles, and even firearms are not so privileged. Women control “technology” when they fly aircraft, build robots, look through telescopes, or make telephone calls, but not when they cook, drive cars, carry guns, make films, or write books. Another missing definition undermines Colatrella’s central message that analysis of negative gender stereotypes in popular culture will somehow help repair the “leaky pipeline” of young women in STEM careers (pp. 1, 14, 27). What exactly is a “negative gender stereotype”? If popular culture is a major culprit in keeping women out of science, we must then explain why two centuries of negative stereotypes of male scientists, engineers, and doctors have failed to discourage young men from entering these professions. Apparently, the ambition of boys to enter the...

Da menina meiga à heroína superpoderosa: infância, gênero e poder nas cenas da ficção e da vida

Este artigo pretende discutir o desenho animado As meninas superpoderosas como um texto midiático que traz à tona a imagem da criança como herói. Analisamos os modos como crianças de uma turma de educação infantil interpretam episódios do desenho animado e, a partir dessas referências simbólicas, produzem sentidos sobre ser criança na contemporaneidade. Com base no diálogo entre os discursos das crianças e aqueles que compõem a narrativa da animação, discutimos os novos mapeamentos das fronteiras entre infância e vida adulta e das experiências masculina e feminina. Destacamos, também, os modos como as meninas produzem uma cultura lúdica, atravessada por referências advindas de outros textos midiáticos, nos quais a imagem da menina poderosa aparece associada à sedução. Por fim, refletimos sobre as contradições da infância contemporânea, situadas entre a desconstrução da imagem da criança frágil e inocente e outras formas de controle adultas, circunscritas pela cultura do consumo.

Perfect Little Feminists?

Girls' studies has emerged as a dynamic area of scholarship that examines the cultural construction of girlhood, the role that girls play in society, their identity formation, and their representation in media. This paper extends previous research by interviewing young girls aged 6 to 12 years old about their interactions with each other as they view animated cartoons. Expanding claims that Girl Power media empower young viewers, I showed clips from The Powerpuff Girls and other cartoons during the interviews to elicit girls' interpretations of popular culture, explore their views on gender equity, and examine the role of female friendships in their lives. Results from my interviews suggest that the middle-class girls I talked with simultaneously embrace both gender-role differences and gender equality.

The Politics of Powerpuff: Putting the ‘Girl’ into ‘Girl Power’

This article examines the politics of The Powerpuff Girls. It situates the series’ three super-powered heroines within the 1990s popular discourse of ‘Girl Power’, presenting empowered images of young femininity. The narrative premise of child characters triumphing over adults also engages with a generational politics with some precedence in television for children. However, an assessment of the limitations of the politics of this ‘Girl Power’ series reveals the marginalization and vilification of certain identity formations outside the white middle-class heterosexual girlhood represented by the show’s protagonists.

Da ficção ao brinquedo: enunciados plásticos em As Meninas Superpoderosas

This works presents an examination of the significant processes formed between television and the character-toys from the animation Meninas Superpoderosas ( The Powerpuff Girls ). This analysis aims to recognize the contemporary toy as a communication object capable of translating social-cultural facts contextualized in the contemporary mediatic society by using the significant systems and the mechanisms of articulated senses by discursive semiotic and the relation between the levels of content and expression, according to the basis of Plastic Semiotic Theory.

"Saving the World Before Bedtime": The Powerpuff Girls, Citizenship, and the Little Girl Superhero

In The Powerpuff Girls , little girls take center stage as action heroes exactly because they are both little girls and superheroes, and, just as adult female action figures are challenging gender stereotypes, the Powerpuffs are revising definitions of girlhood within mainstream American popular culture. Significantly, the challenges faced by these superheroic animated girls frame current competing and often contradictory discourses about twentieth-century American girlhood in popular culture, revealing the transformational and yet deeply conservative character of American notions of feminine strength, sexuality, and agency.

In Pursuit of Feminist Postfeminism and the Blessings of Buttercup

In Pursuit of Feminist Postfeminism and the Blessings of Buttercup Teresa Hubel (bio) I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that the term "postfem-inism" is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically slots the critic into the role of the relic, the leftover women's libber still fighting battles that no longer need to be fought. And who among us, standing in front of our students or our colleagues, wants to be seen to be so pathetically tilting at windmills? Only the bravest. Or the least self-conscious. Because this form of postfeminism works to keep women quiet about their structural complaints and teaches them to interpret those complaints as being of individual rather than collective origin, it works as another new face of patriarchy. To publicly and proudly claim feminism, then, is to do what our female feminist forerunners have done for us and for decades: it is to combat patriarchy. As Rudyard Kipling suggested in his famous [End Page 17] patrilineal legacy to his son, it is an act of courage to "keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you" (578). I wish it were this simple. Raised in a world where individualist and masculine models like this one were valued, I've been conditioned to hunger after this role of the lone male hero fighting against great odds. I may have been born a female, but I want to die as Clint Eastwood or maybe Bruce Willis (or if not die at least ride off solitary and strong into the sunset). I tell my students to pay attention to this cross-culturally ubiquitous chosen-boy story, which has been reiterated so many times that it has become invisible as a narrative, some of its latest incarnations in the western world being found in the American film The Matrix and the English public-school adventures of Harry Potter. Strange how we never seem to get tired of certain stories and interpretations, while others, such as feminist understandings of the way the world works, are rendered tiresome after only a few renditions. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact, stunningly realized in the 1970s as the result of studies into mixed-sex and same-sex conversations, that, from certain male-centred perspectives, any talk from women is too much talk.1 When I was a younger feminist, I used to think that all I needed to do to free myself of patriarchal dictates was to stay vigilant and be aware of how such dictates were delivered, through which narratives, codes of normality, sets of values. Now I'm not as confident about any individual's capacity, including my own, to rescue herself from entrenched systems of oppression, and I'm far more respectful of their tenacity. So I'm prepared to forgive myself for lapsing into such a weirdly hybrid fantasy as this one about being a lone feminist yet still masculine hero. And, by the same token, I try to be patient when my students, particularly the women, make it clear that feminism is something they no longer need, given that the war's over and we've won, and now we're entering this new triumphant [End Page 18] stage of human history called postfeminism. I try not to be irritated or angry. Though I am. Often. I have a secret identity. It's Buttercup from the Power Puff Girls, the one with blazing green eyes whose image stares out at me from the coffee cup I'm holding as I write this. Her perpetual anger occasionally makes her misuse her power, smashing buildings and such instead of...

Dealing with World Domination: Lessons from The Powerpuff Girls and Friends

How did the world change on September 11, 2001? While the events of that day may be more the product of shifting geopolitical formations than the cause, September 11 brings into focus the political functions of global media networks and their potential as conduits of world domination. In this context, Cartoon Network provides some insights and challenges for both media theory and the politics of the twenty-first century. World domination is a recurring theme on Cartoon Network in anime products such as Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing, in post-feminist products such as The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory, and in cross-over work such as Samurai Jack and, most intriguingly, Pinky and the Brain, where a super-smart lab rat and his stupid friend are constantly plotting to take over the world. The failure — on Cartoon Network at least — of all plans for world domination invites us to consider means of resistance to aspirational politics on a global scale.

Prime-time animation: television animation and American culture

Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Images Introduction - Prime Time Animation: An Overview Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison Part 1: Institutions: 1. 'Smarter than the Average Art Form': Animation in the Television Era Paul Wells 2. The Great Saturday Morning Exile: Scheduling Cartoons on Television's Periphery in the 1960s Jason Mittell 3. Re-Drawing the Bottom Line Allen Larson 4. Flintstones to Futurama: Networks and Prime Time Animation David T. McMahan and Wendy Hilton-Morrow 5. Synergy Nirvana: Brand Equity, Television Animation, and Cartoon Network Kevin Sandler 6. The Digital Turn: Animation in the Age of Information Technologies Alice Crawford Part 2: Readings: 7. Back to the Drawing Board: The Family in Animated Television Comedy Michael Tueth 8. From Fred and Wilma to Ren and Stimpy: What Makes a Cartoon Prime Time ? Rebecca Farley 9. 'We Hardly Watch that Rude, Crude Show:' Class and Taste in The Simpsons 10. Misery Chick: Irony, Alienation, and Animation in MTV's Daria Kathy Newman 11. 'What Are Those Little Girls Made Of?' The Power Puff Girls and Consumer Culture 12. 'Oh My God, They Digitized Kenny!' Travels in the South Park Cybercommunity V4.0 List of Contributors

Harry Potter, Inc.

Harry Potter, Inc.

Channeling Girl Power: Positive Female Media Images in “The Powerpuff Girls”

Using information from web site reviews as well as interviews with preschool, elementary, undergraduate, and graduate students, this article argues that the television show “The Powerpuff Girls,” despite its violent nature, appeals to the vast majority of its viewers because it provides positive female media images that are not based on sex appeal. In addition, viewer comments reveal that the show is viewed as empowering for both girls and boys because children are depicted as saviors to adults.

Perceptions of two television cartoons: Powerpuff girls and Johnny Bravo

“Powerpuff Girls” (PPG) and “Johnny Bravo” (JB) are two recent additions to cartoon programming on the Cartoon Network. In Study 1 over three‐fourths of 187 elementary school children indicated that they had watched JB and PPG. These children perceived PPG to be significantly more aggressive than JB. In Study 2 two trained, independent raters scored JB, compared to PPG, as more likely to make appearance‐enhancing actions and more likely to use come‐ons while the PPG were more aggressive and more likely to giggle/laugh. Johnny was more likely to be the recipient of aggressive behaviors, rather than be aggressive himself.