Youth culture in global cinema

the international girl hero 203
duce particular versions of authenticity, timelessness, consumability, universality,
abstract globalism, and feminism in relation to each other in ways
that thereby produce a more knowing, more evolved stance for the U.S. audience
in relation both to U.S. girls and to other cultures, in this case Maori of
New Zealand and Sikh of London. The result is the denigration of U.S. girls
and the exoticization of the films’ main characters and the actors who portray
them. This is all produced through a collective voice that yells, ‘‘we’re
better feminists than feminists!’’ and ‘‘we’re so comfortable with racial and
national difference that we can appreciate these films!’’
Certainly, this discourse of ‘‘saving Other women from Other men’’ is not
new; this discourse of other cultures as authentic, timeless, and exotic is not
new; and, this discourse of claiming the present of U.S. popular culture as
having evolved past the need for feminism—in other words, as postfeminist
—is not new: hence, the suggestion in my title that this press coverage is unremarkable.
Nevertheless, these discourses emerge in the context of what I
describe in the introduction to this essay as an incitement to discourse about
girls in contemporary U.S. popular culture. Thus, my goal here has been to
reveal the racial and national dimensions of this historical moment of worship,
fear, and regulation of girls, as well as of what it means—in the United
States—to be ‘‘a girl.’’
notes
1. As one Nickelodeon executive put it in an interview with Ellen Seiter and Vicki
Mayer, ‘‘There aren’t any more girl protagonists than boy protagonists [on Nickelodeon].
It just feels like a lot because we have some. We care less about gender in our
programs and more about kids. Our demographic research shows that boys will watch
programs with girls protagonists, so we’ve shattered that myth’’ (125).
2. As of January 2005, Teen Vogue absorbed the older YM, http://www.adrants
.com/2004/10/conde-nast-sucks-ym-into-teen-vogue.php. Accessed November 4,
2004.
3. Anita Harris uses Foucault’s concept of ‘‘incitement to discourse’’ slightly differently
from how I am drawing on it here. She suggests that all the public anxiety
about girls leads to an incitement to discourse from them: ‘‘Young women’s thoughts,
emotions, bodies, voices, and private spaces are all invited into the public arena, and
this display is linked to successful living. ...[This is] a time ...whensurveillance
regimes take the form of incitement to speak’’ (149–150).
4. For related overviews of girls in contemporary popular culture, also see Meenakshi
Gigi Durham, ‘‘The Girling of America: Critical Reflections on Gender and Popular
Communication,’’ and Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance’s introduction to
their anthology, Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood.