Power Shortage

ILlustration by KYZANDRHA ZARATE/The Times-Union

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 By HEATHER LOVEJOY

The Times-Union

Superheroes will flood the streets this Halloween, but don’t expect a lot of superheroines. Instead, look for princesses and witches. There will be plenty of those.

For the past five Halloweens, “princess” has easily been the most popular costume for girls, followed by witches, according to the National Retail Federation. This season, the federation expects 4.5 million princesses and 2 million witches.

So forget “trick or treat” some feminists say. For girls, the real message is vulnerable or evil.

Sure, a Wonder Woman or two may knock on your door. But there won’t be many other little girls defending your neighborhood.

Our society isn’t ready for that, say some culture experts.

Carole Stabile, director of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, said that in our culture “it’s not womanly to be powerful.” She suggests we look at our own responses to girls’ costumes.

“[Girls] get so much positive reinforcement for falling into princess roles,” she said. “Think about the difference [in responses] if a girl’s costume is something else.”

In Stabile’s recent article “Sweetheart, This Ain’t Gender Studies: Sexism and Superheroes” in the academic journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, she writes that “only men are understood to be protectors in U.S. culture and only men have the [guts] to lead.”

“There’s an inability to imagine women as being powerful,” she said.

But if all those little princesses are waiting for princes to come, they might be disappointed. “Prince” is not a top costume choice for boys at Halloween, so a princess under the spell of one of those evil witches will have to settle for being rescued by Spider-Man. In recent years, that’s been the most popular costume for boys, along with Batman, the retail federation says.

In general, superheroes and superheroines come from the pages of American comic books and movies, especially from Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Most superheroes are regular people who suddenly discover they have amazing powers č sometimes through a mutation č and decide to use those powers for good purposes. Primarily, they want to make the world a better, safer place. (Manga and anime are separate genres that hail mostly from Japan and Korea.)

The most popular superheroes are men. Think Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man. There are superheroines, but many of them are either female versions of male characters, like Supergirl and Batgirl, or have secondary roles in the comics universe.

Conventional wisdom says the reason girls don’t dress as superheroines at Halloween is because they aren’t interested in comic books.

But Chitra Ganesh, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist, says that is “absolutely not true č at least from what I’ve seen.”

Earlier this year, Ganesh organized and taught “Drawing in Color: Empowering Girls Through Comics Performances” for the nonprofit American Asian Writers’ Workshop. It was a small, extracurricular class held on Saturdays for high school girls. The students were so enthusiastic, the six-week course wasn’t long enough for them, so they convinced Ganesh to extend it to eight weeks.

Along with discussing stere-otypes of women in comics, her students created ’zines, developing their own characters and story lines. Ganesh said their characters tended to be defined by their culture, and they created characters less like superheroines and more like everyday heroines.

Ganesh pointed out that girls have more access to comics in the digital age, so they don’t have to go into a comic book store that makes them feel “intimidated or separate.” They can get it online.

Mike Madrid, author of “The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines,” points out that there are quite a few superheroines in American comics. But they tend to be teammates or girlfriends of superheroes because “traditionally, male readers don’t buy comic books titles with superheroines,” he said by e-mail.

“I think girl readers are looking for something else in terms of reading rather than just action and slugfests,” he said. “They like more complex, character driven stories that they can relate to.”

Madrid said Japanese manga has attracted girl readers because it offers a variety of genres and characters, and not just princesses, heroes and villains. This year, DC Comics came out with a “kid-friendly” version of Supergirl, but more efforts to appeal to girls could be made, Madrid said.

However, he said he doesn’t think changes in the industry alone will make a difference.

“It doesn’t seem as though things will start to change,” he said, “until little girls are taught that it’s OK for them to be strong, powerful protectors, and not just pretty but docile princesses.”

heather.lovejoy@jacksonville.com,
(904) 359-4539