Untaming Girlhoods

<p>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. </p><p>The success of franchises such as <i>The Hunger Games</i>, <i>Twilight</i> and <i>Divergence</i> 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, <i>Untaming Girlhoods</i> 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.</p><p>This will be a useful and enlightening text for students and researchers in Girlhood Studies, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture and Media Studies.</p> <p>By Way of Introduction: Girl(hood)s in Context</p><p>Girlhood in Context</p><p>Storytelling Girlhoods</p><p>PART I Fairy Tales and Emerging Girlhoods in the 20th and 21st Centuries</p><p>1: Towards (Un)taming Girlhood: Fairy Tales, Popular Culture, and the Cultural Imaginary</p><p>2: Forging New Pathways through the Forest: Red Riding Hood and New Becomings</p><p>The Journey through the Woods</p><p>Embracing the Wolf (Within): Red Riding Hood, Self-Knowledge, and Selfhood </p><p>The Huntsman with No Damsel in Distress to Save</p><p>3: Before They Were Evil, Before They Were Queens: Trauma, Female Rivalry and (Be)coming (into) Self</p><p>"It is not power that corrupts; it is powerlessness": How the Queen Becomes a Villain</p><p>Complicit and Compliant: Intergenerational Trauma and Female Relationships</p><p>Recovering Female Communitas: Kissing Old Stereotypes Good-bye?</p><p>PART II Unruly Girls: Warriors and Witches</p><p>4: Killer Girls: Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and Girl (Em)power(ed)</p><p>A Bloody Mess: Red Riding Hood, Werewolves, and Menstruation</p><p>Killer Girls Take (Back) Control: Red Riding Hood in <em>Hard Candy </em>and<em> Freeway</em></p><p>5: This Princess Wears Combat Boots: The Dystopia of Girl Warrior Heroes</p><p>Girlhood on Display: The Girl Warrior Hero</p><p>Taking (Back) Control: (Personal) Performance and (Politicized) Becoming</p><p>A "New" Kind of Female Hero: The Fairy-Tale Princess Gets a Makeover</p><p>6: Beyond the Fairy-Tale Witch: Contemporary Girl(hood)s in <i>The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina</i> </p><p>Sabrina: Rebooting Mortal and Witch Girlhoods</p><p>Sisterhood and the Rise Against the Patriarchy</p><p>Conclusion</p>