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Supergirl scorned: lessons about young femininity in an Australian television satire

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17508487.2010.508803

1750-8495

Claire Charles,

Gender Roles and Identity Studies

Abstract In this paper I explore the popular Australian television character of Ja'mie King – a teenage private school girl created and performed by male comedian Chris Lilley. I conceptualise Lilley's satire as a public pedagogy of young femininity. My reading of his satire responds to recent feminist scholarship around young femininities and ‘girl power’, which explores representations of young femininity in popular culture in Western nations. Drawing primarily on the 2005 television mockumentary We can be heroes, I explore how King can be read in terms of exaggerated ‘girl power’ subjectivity. I examine the relationships, fashioned through the character of King, between ‘sexuality’ and global citizenship activity. I consider the extent to which King's character teaches that young women can ‘have it all’. I explore the extent to which her character teaches that they can be ‘beautiful’ and ‘brainy’, ‘self-determined’ and ‘sexy’ at the same time. Keywords: girl powerpedagogypopular culturesexualitysubjectivityyoung femininity Acknowledgements I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper. Notes 1. The schools and organisations (including Global Vision) named in both series are fictional. 2. The TV Week Logie Awards are the Australian television industry awards, which are presented annually. 3. The terms ‘cultural pedagogy’ (Steinberg & Kincheloe, Citation1997) and ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux, Citation2008) have both been used in order to theorise the way various aspects of consumer media culture can be understood to be educative. I do not have the scope in this paper to enter a debate about the possible differences and nuances of these terms. For the purposes of this paper, they are used interchangeably. 4. The latin term ‘dux’, meaning ‘leader’, is an annual title won by the student who achieves the highest academic and sporting results in their year level. It is comparable with the American term ‘valedictorian’.