Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series

Nancy Drew is often seen as emblematic of American girlhood as self-reliant and aspirational, within the parameters of middle-class, mid-century striving. Since the creation in the 1930s of “the titian-haired sleuth that all American girls love” (Kehe), the character herself, the mystery series, and associated products have crystallized as a durable brand of national identity, consumerism, and girlhood.¹ Nancy Drew is an indelible character through whom the category of girlhood is consistently reproduced in relation to modernity and nation; but an indissoluble and underexamined aspect of her well-studied presence in the production of American girlhood is the global scale of the series. The ways in which the character of Nancy Drew continues to be revived globally constitute a key feature of the series’ circulation and success. Given that the Nancy Drew Mystery series “was first licensed for foreign editions in the 1930s” and that the mysteries “have been published in nineteen countries and translated for audiences in the Scandinavian countries, Malaysia, South Africa, Israel, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia” (Kismaric and Heiferman 112), Nancy Drew can also be considered a successful global brand marketed to and consumed by a range of reading publics in a variety of locations.

Just as the series travels across national borders, the character Nancy Drew travels transnationally. Of the fifty-six titles in the original series, Nancy travels outside the United States in thirteen, roughly a quarter of the total (Fox). The first transnational mystery takes place in 1935 in The Message in the Hollow Oak, when the teen sleuth goes to Canada; the last in the original series brings her to Japan in The Thirteenth Pearl (1979). In the newly rebranded Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ Papercutz graphic novels, the mysteries lead to Turkey and India. Beyond expanding the geographical scope of the girl sleuth’s activities, transnational travel emphasizes the brand’s focus on mobility and allows for contact between Nancy Drew and a series of “exotic global girl strangers” who need her assistance to solve a mystery. Nancy Drew’s interactions with such strangers frame a number of fantasies about racial difference within the series. In this article, I focus on three of these imaginings: the construction of girls from across the globe as a “global sisterhood”; the representation of Nancy Drew as benevolent global girl tourist; and Nancy’s desire and ability to masquerade as a girl of color. Through the figure of the exotic global girl stranger, a variety of racialized girlhoods are put up for consumption by characters in the series as well as by actual readers.

In what follows, I focus on the representations of girlhood within three exemplary titles, two from the original series, The Mysterious Mannequin (1970) and The Thirteenth Pearl, and one of the contemporary Papercutz graphic novels, The Girl Who Wasn’t There (2006).² I choose these three texts as a way to historicize how travel and the figure of the exotic global girl stranger serve as essential elements of the Nancy Drew brand. Throughout, I seek to uncover a “politics of girlhood” that the figure of the exotic global girl stranger blots out within the series: namely, that Nancy Drew’s “feminism” or “girl power” is relational and relies on the imaginary and ultimately hierarchical representations of racialized global girls from a range of non–North American, non-European locations. What is at stake here is how the imaginary representation and marketing of exotic global girl strangers to sell the Nancy Drew series relates to contemporary theorizations of North American girls as subjects who find empowerment by consuming or performing “Other” racial and/or ethnic identities.

Theorizing Girlhoods in the Nancy Drew Series

This analysis contributes to previous Nancy Drew scholarship,³ as well as to the interdisciplinary field of girls’ studies,⁴ by building on and adding to previous critical analyses of Nancy Drew that focus on race, gender, and nation within the context of postcoloniality.⁵ Specifically, I contextualize this paper within transnational girlhood studies.⁶ This strand of girls’ studies originates in transnational feminist theoretical practices (Ahmed...