Girls Who Bite Back

...A study of popular culture, this book is not a hard read… The writing is clear and arguments easy to understand and not buried in academia… Pohl-Weary did a good job of making this book lively and readable...

...What I like most about this book is that it is edited by a comic book geek who has all the classical university training and insight required of academia, while having a passion for Alias and Buffy The Vampire Slayer...

"Absolute power is coveted most by the powerless, and in our culture, that includes girls... [G]irls have a desperate need to identify women who can overcome obstacles," Emily Pohl-Weary writes in the introduction and first essay of Girls Who Bite Back, about women's early fascination with female superhero images in mainstream media. Even as adults, women are infatuated with "indestructible superchicks."

Just ask any of the 35 writers and artists who contributed short stories, comic strips, drawings, personal and cultural essays, and other category-defying creative fiction to Girls Who Bite Back. With their help, editor/mastermind Pohl-Weary has created a unique anthology about pop culture superheroines that's definitely worth sinking your teeth into.

In the essays, contributors trained their perceptive, analytical and sometimes irreverent eyes on a variety of topics, from the evolution of girl heroes in mainstream media to the value of today's female superheroes as feminist role models for girls and women. The pieces are insightful, thought-provoking, and persuasively argued. Some are downright entertaining and inspiring too.

Read Candra K. Gill's compelling essay on racial representation in "Buffy," and it will be hard not to notice that the superheroines who have dominated our movie or TV screens have almost always been white. Not to mention young, thin, beautiful, uncomplicated and often scantily clad — as noted in several essays, including Lisa Rundle's investigation of girl power as a product of male fantasies and corporate interest. But beyond the criticisms, Gill's essay inspires readers to become vigilant fans challenging oppression (like racism or sexism) in their favourite shows, while Rundle' cultural critique encourages them to demand better female superhero roles in mainstream media.

In her piece, Carly Stasko offers an empowering solution to the scarcity of superheroines in pop culture to whom most women can actually relate (i.e. heroines who look like them or whose powers are rooted in something other than sex and violence), and that is to become your own superhero — for which she provides a how-to guide. Of course, the superheroines who really count, as the contributors agree, are the everyday superheroines around us: women who, despite being flawed human beings, overcome daily obstacles like poverty, discrimination or depression.

Where the essays identify a lack of strong feminist role models, many of the well-written and enjoyable stories fill in this void by creating alternative female heroes. In "Act of Grace" by Judy MacDonald, the hero is a middle-aged homeless woman; in Pohl-Weary's "Diamond Dame," she's an aging superhero past her prime. The protagonist in Hiromi Goto's lovely and eloquent "Stinky Girl" describes herself as fat, coloured and stinky. She narrates her woes in detail and constantly derides her physical features. Yet, she meets life's daily adversities with grace and inner strength.

New and reinvented superheroes are also depicted in the artwork. One memorable example is Sherwin Tija's "Slumpyheroes," in which four popular female characters from TV and film are portrayed as women with less-than-the-ideal proportions. There is subversive humour and irony in the drawings, as what you see clashes with what you would expect as a result of cultural conditioning. More than that, the drawings also explore the idea of the everyday superheroine.

Maybe what we really need is not a fantasy, but a reality in which all girls who bite back and the best superhero role model for girls and women is within themselves. Perhaps the best way to kick-start the revolution is to place a copy of this book in the hands of every girl, both young and old, and boy (who has the potential to make a good sidekick).

Where have all of the female heroes gone? Yes, 'heroes', not 'heroines', because the word 'heroes' conjures up images of power, independence and self-sufficiency which is what the book Girls Who Bite Back is about. A number of Canadian artists explore modern female role models who break with tradition. They investigate the avant-garde world of pop culture to find their female heroes and focus on television, comics and books.

The contributors agree that pop culture influences youth much more than real-life women who may seem too daunting to young women, whereas pop culture heroes appeal to the imagination, offering possibilities not yet evident in reality. Fantasy is untrammeled by the limitations that real life can impose. They argue that very little girls begin their imaginative journey with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty but soon graduate to a more independent role model such as Wonder Woman. By the time girls enter their teens, even Wonder Woman is not strong enough. They want a different kind of strength which can be found in characters such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is more complex than Wonder Woman, for she has moments of self-doubt. Yet, she overcomes them and rises to the occasion no matter what the stakes are...

This book is also a call to women of all ages to unleash their imaginations, to strive for the best in themselves and to make an effort to create their own female heroes. All of the contributors lament the sorry fact that most of the characters under discussion are the products of men, not women. They agree that female heroes have improved since Wonder Woman's debut several decades ago and cite Buffy as proof of this, but would ask women to demand more, or better yet, be the creators themselves...

Emily Pohl-Weary has orchestrated the book's material into a finely tuned cohesive whole that is delightful, funny, entertaining and thought-provoking. Because it is not a re-hash of 'women's lib' but is instead a look into the future, it should appeal to both men and women of all ages.