Girls are not peripheral: Time to kill the ‘Smurfette principle’

[Neoma]

In her classic 1991 article, “The Smurfette Principle,” Katha Pollitt argued that in the majority of media “The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.”

Or, as Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous Feminine, might put it, males are the norm, the central heroes in media narratives, while females and femininity are made monstrous.

As I prepared to attend Comic-Con to promote my new book, I though a lot about female characters and the roles they play in the type of narratives Comic-Con features. In what follows, I offer some thoughts on three very well known Comic-Con-esque characters: Hermione Granger, Sookie Stackhouse, and Bella Swan.

Thankfully, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 girls are not a variation nor are they singled out as girls or monsters, rather, they are equally as vital, as strong, as smart, and, sometimes, as evil. As noted at This Girl on Girls, this is in keeping with the spirit of the books, wherein “JKR did not go out of her way to make women seem stronger and superior to men in the book, but rather wrote a series that showed men and women as equals – they can be equally evil, equally smart, and equally brave.”

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Okay, okay. So I might have posted this because I'm a fan of Harry Potter.