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The Italian-made comics series W.I.T.C.H. and the homonymous magazine enjoyed global success. The series tells the story of five girls who discover they have magical powers and are called on to save the universe from evil forces. I investigate this transnational and transmedia series and explore how girls' empowerment is pursued through the trope of the teenage witch in the comics' storyline, revealing the hybridization of manga, European, and Disney graphic styles and themes, and in the magazine itself where the editors use techniques of engagement with readers (surveys and quizzes, problem pages and letters from readers, DIY pieces, and diary-like pages). This analysis involves scholarship on Girlhood and Cultural Studies and serves as a springboard for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academia and Industries are facing a problem of lack of diversity, precisely gender diversity. We investigated a review of extant literature and macro data on gender equality in both Academia and Industry. To reduce the gender gap an initiative must have been taken to encourage women in the involvement in the education field. The primary purpose of this bibliometric survey is to determine the scope of the literature available for women's empowerment through engineering education. The commemorative analysis is based on Scopus because it provides research databases from various fields and tools such as Sciencescape and Gephi. In the theoretical survey, we analyze the prominent publications of journals, conferences, and the majority from the United States. The set of data from the time series has begun since 2004 until today. Most research publications are in the field of social science scope, followed by engineering and computer science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses corresponding scenes from the Harry Potter books and films to assess how the character of Hermione Granger, one of the three protagonists in the Harry Potter universe, changed through the adaptation process from book to film. Our analysis uncovered three interrelated themes. The theme Emotional Hermione shows that the emotions displayed by Hermione shift from more feminine-coded in the books to more masculine-coded in the films. In the process, she becomes a more powerful and independent character. This is also the case in the theme Girl Power, which is not present in the books but appears in the films from the third instalment onwards. Hermione is awarded more opportunity in the films to display both her intellectual and physical strengths. Through the Reallocation of Lines she also becomes a more fully-fledged character. As she takes lines in the films that were allocated to Harry and Ron in the books, Hermione gains more of a voice, even though this voice is not authentically hers. These changes arguably occurred as the Hermione from the books was not seen as an appropriate representation of a girl in postfeminist Hollywood at a time where Girl Power had just gained ascendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study investigates subjective and objective interaction processes expressed in the series that can foster the construction of representations of girl power today. Methodological design: To do so, I conducted in-depth interviews with individuals who call themselves fans of the series and analyzed journalistic materials published in digital media vehicles that link the concept of girl power to the series' imaginary. Results: The results were interpreted in the light of intersectional feminism and critical marketing. I observed that the act of placing women at the center of narratives represents a shift in contemporary dramaturgy. Research limitations / implications: It is not possible to conclude that this series is feminist, as highlighted by some interviewees. This divergence arises due to conceptual mismatches between female empowerment; post-feminism; neoliberal appeals; the attitude of the characters; and those responsible for the construction of the series observed during the analysis of the study. Originality: The study unites theories from different theoretical heritages, thus stimulating different perspectives and interdisciplinary openings to understand contexts that connect marketing, consumer behavior, and consumption to feminist studies. Furthermore, it stimulates the development of critical thinking capable of impacting societies, organizations, institutions, and consumption focused on the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penelitian ini menganalisis novel berjudul The Devil Wears Prada karya Lauren Weisberger dengan menggunakan dekonstruksi Jacques Derrida. Melalui perspektif Derrida, penelitian ini berusaha untuk menjelaskan representasi girl power dan feminisme dalam novel. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode wacana kritis. Adapun hasil yang didapat pada penelitian ini adalah gambaran girl power seperti perempuan powerful yang dapat bebas bekerja di ranah publik, berintelektual, dan mandiri diposisikan sebagai logos sehingga menempatkan perempuan yang gigih namun tidak memiliki power sebagai pihak yang inferior. Melalui pembacaan ulang, ketergantungan Miranda kepada orang lain menggeser status powerfulnya menjadi seorang yang powerless. Karena ketergantungan tersebut, eksistensi Andrea yang semula anonim dan powerless berubah menjadi seorang yang powerful. Adapun aturan-aturan yang dibuat oleh Miranda dalam perusahaan bukan untuk membebaskan perempuan dari jerat patriarki namun hal tersebut semakin mengukuhkan intervensi patriarki. Kata kunci: Dekonstruksi, girl power, The Devil Wears Prada This study analyzes a novel entitled The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger using deconstruction by Jacques Derrida. Through Derrida's perspective, this study aims to reread and explain the representation of girl power and feminism in the novel. This research uses a critical discourse method. The result shows that strong women who work, are intellectual, independent, and active in public areas and place women who are persistent but do not have power as a lower party. Through Derrida's perspective, Miranda's dependence on others shifts her powerful status to a powerless person. Because of this dependency, Andrea's existence which was originally anonymous and powerless turned into a powerful person. The rules made by Miranda in the company are not to free women from the trappings of patriarchy but this will further strengthen patriarchal intervention. Keywords: Deconstruction, girl power, The Devil Wears Prada

Girls in Western societies are increasingly exposed to feminist ideas, often led by women celebrities. The current study explores how Israeli girls negotiate feminist concepts such as 'girl power' and 'feminine success' by examining their responses to Wonder Woman – a film that is part of this 'feminist zeitgeist' – and its Israeli actress, Gal Gadot. The paper documents the voices of hegemonic Israeli girls aged 13 to 15 in ten focus groups, and shows that girls take pride in the presence of a strong female character and an Israeli representative in Hollywood. The girls position themselves around a model of success represented by strong global and local feminine images. The global elements reflect neoliberal postfeminist discourse advocating authenticity as the ideal for self-actualisation. The local elements reflect a relational sentiment of loyalty to both the state and the family. We argue that the authenticity myth plays a key role in reinforcing the existing gender order and the conservative definition of good citizenship through the perception of a successful woman. We conclude that the local cultural features and national belonging are meaningful categories for studying girls' encounter with celebrities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider how girls are positioned in school by what we have chosen to call the discourse of drama. The widely held notion that Nordic girls have it all along with this drama discourse are seen to be the key narratives that reinforce a hegemonic form of girlhood. This ethnographic study focuses on the relations of students between the ages of 13 and 15 in the light of uninformed school staff-member practices. Our findings suggest that girls, despite living in what is seen to be a country that upholds gender equality, are silenced through this discourse of drama. We suggest that teacher education should lead to the facilitation of a gender-inclusive school environment free of stereotypical ideas of gender as a fixed binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most widely celebrated documentaries about female athletes to date, The Heart of the Game remains an important text to examine for the ways it represents female athletic experience and encourages audiences to consider gender issues in sport. Such an investigation is particularly apt, given how sports documentaries authenticate particular viewpoints while being understood by audiences as historical reflections of reality. Although the film is praiseworthy for exposing the cultural construction of gender as well as some ways gender ideologies hamper female athletic success, this essay argues that The Heart of the Game 's progressive agenda is ultimately undercut by its simultaneous reproduction of gender and racial ideologies that actually marginalize women and girls in sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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On March 14, 2008, the Center for Study of Women at UCLA sponsored a special talk at the Hammer Museum by curator Hiromi Nakamura on recent trends in “Girl Photography” from Japan. The talk was part of three days of events at UCLA looking at the growing influence of Japanese pop culture in the West. Later that same day, works by two of the artists featured in the talk, Mika Ninagawa and Mikiko Hara, were displayed at a reception at the Anderson School of Management. The show was the first time that the work of these two emerging women artists had been publicly shown on the West Coast.

This paper analyses the construction of two superheroines, one from the 1990s (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and one from the 2010s (Jessica Jones). I contend that popular feminism has changed between the 1990s and the present and that this is evident in the representation of televised superheroines. While in the 1990s superheroines were more conformist, today they are more transparent in their feminist intentions. I suggest that this is due to contemporary cultural trends in the United States.

The United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up campaign has been criticised by many feminists for perpetuating patronising discourses that see girls and women in the Global North as the saviours of their counterparts in the South, while doing little to challenge underlying global inequalities. This article draws on focus group data with Girl Up club members in the UK, USA and Malawi, and explores how they are adapting the aims of the campaign to better fit their own vision of empowerment. From girls in New York attending women’s marches together to girls in a township of Lilongwe marching to their friends’ parents’ houses to demand that they send their daughters to school, the girls have shown courage and creativity, their actions rejecting discourses of empowered Northern saviours and passive Southern girls in need of rescue. This article explores the agency with which girls negotiate discourses emerging from powerful international institutions, and puts forward the argument that these girls deserve recognition as feminist activists who are adapting campaigns, such as Girl Up, in order to challenge the many and complex injustices that they face in their own communities and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of women in the waves of feminism swifts into more empowered women in the era of post feminism. Chick lit as subgenre of postfeminist fiction depicts female protagonists who enjoy freedom and feminity. It is a genre that highlighted girl power. This paper analysed the represented identity of female sleuths and the aspect of girl power portrayed in the chick lit novels of Maya Calica's Undercover TaiTai and Gemma Halliday's Killer in High Heels. It was found out that female protagonists represent women who are tough, wear social masquerade, amateur sleuths, and celebrate feminity to influence others. They used their individual power, beauty and sexual attractiveness power to achieve their goals in life personally and professionally. The representations of girl power in these chick lit novels give space for women to celebrate their femininity and gain their power at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'FeminEast' is a feminist club that was founded by students at Wellington East Girls' College in 2013. At the time of writing, the club's popularity is growing and has attracted attention from national media. This paper reports on a pilot study based on conversations with FeminEast co-founder Jess Dellabarca and analysis of media texts by and about the club. The author contextualises FeminEast in a neoliberal climate, focussing on the neoliberal discourse usually called 'postfeminism', the widespread belief that feminism is no longer needed because we have achieved gender equality. This paper foregrounds efforts by FeminEast's leaders to mobilise feminist anger and contend with contemporary gender norms and postfeminist discourse. These efforts are discussed particularly in relation to the 2013-2014 'Roast Busters' scandal. FeminEast members adeptly navigate postfeminist social dynamics; ultimately, they succeed in developing and disseminating their view that the Roast Busters are a product of persistent and pernicious rape culture, a key weapon of contemporary patriarchy. This paper shows that girls can and do engage activistic practices that are more worthy of scholarly attention than the dearth of recent research on girls' activism would suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay focuses on the intersections between Girl Power media discourses and literature which has thus far been scrutinized mainly in relation to the chick lit genre. Caitlin Moran's novel How to Build a Girl is analyzed as an example of the influence of Girl Power discourse on another literary genre, the coming-of-age novel. The protagonist's process of growing up is read in the context of two contrasting narratives about postfeminist girlhood and also in the context of the Bildungsroman tradition. Moran's heroine appears both as a fusion of the can-do girl and at-risk girl versions of Girl Power, and also as a postmillennial variation of the classic female Bildungsroman heroine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the compelling intersections of gender, age, and nation in human rights and development discourse aimed at empowering girls in the global South. We show how the concepts of vulnerability and precarity travel transnationally via development discourse and trouble the prominent deployment of adolescent female exceptionalism as the "key" to eradicating global poverty and realizing girls' human rights. It is our contention that even as adolescent girls are today hypervisible as ideal subjects o f neoliberal development, they are also illegible as normative subjects of human rights. Based on our experiences as scholars, activists, and artists in Sub-Saharan Africa and the halls of the United Nations, we examine how Kenyan, Ethiopian, and North American girls experience local and transnational expectations animated by the "turn to the girl" for development with differential and sometimes (dis)empowering effects. We ask, What does it mean when members of the world's "most vulnerable" population are also positioned as the "saviors of humanity"! What does it mean for girls' rights policy! What about for girls themselves! Taken together, our work suggests girls' (in)visibility requires feminists working in transnational spaces to recalibrate our politics and epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]