Inventing the Teenage Girl: The Construction of Female Identity in Nickelodeon's<i>My Life as a Teenage Robot</i>

摘要

In recent years, depictions of strong but feminine girl heroes have become common in children's television programming. These girl power icons reflect changing cultural ideas about girlhood. Nickelodeon's My Life as a Teenage Robot is a cartoon popular among preadolescents, which follows the exploits of Jenny, a powerful, female-gendered robot who must save the world while also surviving the trials of high school. This article examines My Life as a Teenage Robot's discourse on girl power and the construction of identity. It focuses on a key theme that contradicts other texts about girl heroes: that strength, agency, and normative femininity cannot be embodied in the same individual. This article interrogates the ways in which the show's messages are simultaneously progressive and regressive, and it calls for further research on girls' reception of media texts.