Maiden USA:
Girl Icons Come of Age
Since the early 90s we’ve witnessed an utterly new consciousness about teenage girls in American popular culture. They are powerful, they are protagonists, they are sex goddesses. Slaying demons, casting magic spells, vanquishing all forms of evil, girls are no longer sidekicks to the narrative. Their central character status in print, film and television is no longer the token Dorothy of celluloid history Oz. Gone are the boy-crazy innocents hanging around the edges of exclusionary boys’ clubs, begging for inclusion. They are the It Girls and they are clearly here to stay. Maiden USA is a book about Made In America Icons that have come of age as undeniable representational forces over the past fifteen years. Maiden USA traces the visual history of these multi-faceted Teenage Girl Icons and explores their impact on the shaping of real girl identities. Despite bestselling accounts of America as “girl destroying place” and the bi-polarized Mean Girls of millennial Hollywood, American popular culture has actually given rise in recent years to an unprecedented array of Girl Power icons. A shift has occurred in the representational universe. The teen girl media pantheon has evolved beyond Gidget and Marcia Brady to include Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Sabrina the Teenage Witch; Hermione Granger of The Harry Potter series; Rogue of “X-Men;” Carmen Cortes of “SpyKids;” animated characters like Violet Incredible and Kim Possible; and a host of brave girls in young adult novels. Despite concerns that girls are troubled or in trouble, the master of the current popular narrative appears to be a Maiden, fully armed with powers beyond our wildest imagining. Maiden USA explores the evolution of girl icons in American popular culture since the 90s with a discussion of filmmaking and photography as identity developing strategies for teenage girls navigating a visual landscape over-saturated by celebrity media.
Maiden USA: The Lectures |
