Untaming Girlhoods: Storytelling Female Adolescence

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.

The success of franchises such as The Hunger Games, Twilight and Divergence 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, Untaming Girlhoods 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.

This will be a useful and enlightening text for students and researchers in Girlhood Studies, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture and Media Studies.

Cristina Santos is an Associate Professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies. Her work focuses on sexuality and gender studies from an intersectional feminist perspective in the construct of ＂monstrous women＂ from an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural approach as seen in literature, film, television, popular culture and mythology. She also investigates the construct of political and social deviance and trauma in life narratives as the construction of a personal and communal sense of identity that challenges official history and patriarchy. She is the author of Unbecoming Female Monsters: Witches, Vampires, and Virgins.