Interrogating Girl Power: Girlhood, Popular Media, and Postfeminism

This article investigates the discourse around a postfeminist investment of girl power, which earlier feminists have scrutinized and criticized for its seemingly celebratory attitudes toward patriarchal norms, including the uncritical pursuit of feminine beauty and commercially produced representations of sexuality and power. Using these criticisms as points of reference, this article offers a rationale for reinterpreting girl power, one in which the alternative forms and meanings of subversion to patriarchal norms are marked by contradiction. This approach underscores that the dominant discourse on girl power is still located in an essentialist frame of Western White hegemony. Instead, placed against a postfeminist theoretical landscape, a Korean immigrant girl’s written and visual narrative becomes both a manifesto of and an intervention in postfeminist girl power by appropriation, reinterpretation, and revision.