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While television are common, young girl superheroes have been generally absent from print and screen fiction.1 Writers and animators have focused primarily on the maturing bodies of adolescent girls who are discovering their superpowers and their sexualities.2 However, in the genre of children's animated series, girls have recently taken on the central and active roles usually reserved for boys. The most popular and culturally pervasive of these new girl superheroes are the Powerpuff Girls.3 This Cartoon Network series depicts Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup protecting their city while attending kindergarten, playing dress-up, and having slumber parties-"saving the world before bedtime," as their slogan goes. In The Powerpuff Girls, little girls take center stage as action heroes exactly because they are both little girls and superheroes, and, just as adult female action figures challenge gender stereotypes, the Powerpuffs revise definitions of girlhood within mainstream American popular culture.4 Significantly, the challenges faced by these superheroic animated girls frame current competing and often contradictory discourses about twentieth-century American girlhood in popular culture, revealing the transformational and yet deeply conservative character of American ideals of feminine strength, sexuality, and agency.
The nature of the Powerpuffs Girls' challenge to notions of femininity must be understood in terms of the specific ways in which these little girls are disenfranchised as girls rather than women. These young superheroes function as role models for girls in much the same manner of female comic book superheroes, and, much like adult female action heroes, the girls both inhabit and challenge stereotypical notions of gender. The Powerpuff Girls encourages identification with not just one but three different types of girls. Craig McCracken, creator of the show, comments on this phenomenon: "'I get a lot of girls saying that they look up to them . . . .There are girls who say, 'My best friend's a Buttercup, but I'm a Bubbles.' They identify with the different personalities'" (Loos 25). Although they are superheroes, they inhabit a fairly conventional style of girlhood with their cute dresses and Mary Jane-style shoes, all-girl slumber parties, and pastel-colored bedroom. Also like real-life children, they are subjected to the authority of adults, as they are required to do chores, go to school, and abide by a bedtime. Since the Powerpuff Girls are both...