DC Super Hero Girls (DCSHG) is a trans-media franchise that includes not just screen media texts but a wide array of themed merchandise aimed at a multi-generational market. I argue here that key components of the franchise present a queered version of girlhood that critiques femininity as a gender role while presenting femaleness as encompassing a variety of signifiers, acts, and presentations that can be read as queer (particularly by the so-called big girls in the audience). This is evident in the representation of queer relationships that exist in the sexualized zone of the canonical material, allowing the DCSHG characters to inhabit a liminal proto-queer space between homosocial/gender non-conforming and lesbian that is considered more appropriate for young girls. I examine the way in which the DC Super Hero Girls franchise rejects and reforms familiar elements of comics, super heroism, and princess culture to create that space for girls.
In Girlhood Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 66–81 (16 total)
Affective Anachronisms, Fateful Becomings
Otaku Movement and the Joan of Arc Effect in Type-Moon’s Transhistorical Anime Ecology
David John Boyd
This article examines the temporal and phenomenological philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paolo Virno, specifically in relation to the transmedia franchises of the Japanese game studio, Type-Moon. Against linear, national, and majoritarian grand narratives of the historical, the otaku artists, writers, and developers responsible for the Fate series postulate whether it is possible to harness the intense and affective forces described by Jay Lampert as “the Joan of Arc effect” in the blink of an eye or in the palm of your hand. Through a philosophical and formal analysis of three spinoff series from the Fate franchise, this article investigates how Type-Moon’s deployment of the “anime machine” encourages its viewers and users to see and feel the abundance of flowing “nomadic memories” or counter-historical visions from the perspective of minor populations. Through this highly embodied and tactile experience of transhistorical (un)becomings, Type-Moon’s series offer a deterritorialized, post-national world-image of the otaku database which mediates between the overloading affects of becoming-woman and the digitally encoded logic of transversal through the frames, windows, interfaces, devices, platforms, and bodies that constitute Type-Moon’s vibrant anime ecology.
Lise Tannahill, Eliza Bourque Dandridge, and Rachel Mizsei Ward
Blair Davis , Movie Comics: Page to Screen / Screen to Page (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017). 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7225-3 ($27.95) Transmedia is often assumed to be a modern phenomenon created by film franchises such as Star
Jessica Bay, Alaina Schempp, Daniela Schlütz, and R. Colin Tait
manuscript that accomplishes its goal of discussing the narrative differences between and within serial media in the current entertainment industries. While most recent research on the entertainment industries, and transmedia properties in particular, tends
Ekaterina Tikhonyuk and Mark McKinney
journal's content within the framework of transmedia theory. The scholar argues that this critical approach shows that Krokodil' s staff felt empowered to extend the boundaries of its creativity beyond the journal itself. What is more, Krokodil' s
A Wolf’s Eye View of London
Dracula, Penny Dreadful, and the Logic of Repetition
Dragoş Manea
iconic depictions). It is little wonder then that such characters have come to dominate our media landscape in recent years. As we have moved towards an age of transmedia franchises, riddled with competing reboots, remakes, and reimaginings, iconic
Fifty Years of Drama on Israeli Children’s Television
From Teaching to Competing
Yuval Gozansky
the creation of many and diverse branded spin-off works: book series, full-length movies, and live musical shows. The later serials increasingly created ‘transmedia storytelling’ ( Jenkins 2006 ) for second and third online screens. Now accessible from
In Israel Studies Review
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 123–147 (25 total)
Laurence Grove
scheduled papers keynotes from Charles Forsdick, Paul Gravett, Isabel Greenberg, Laurence Grove, Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds theme of ‘Storyworlds and Transmedia Universes’ included ‘There's No Bus Map for Dementia’ and Laydeez Do Comix events
In European Comic Art
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (20 total)
Victorian London Redux
Adapting the Gothic Metropolis
Chris Louttit
transmediated as the world of Marvel Comics’. 31 Penny Dreadful and Dracula seem very much of this decentred, transmedia moment, in the way that they reference popular film classics and place the monsters of nineteenth-century fiction in the same fictional
Authenticity and Aspiration
Exploring the CBBC Television Tween
Sarah Godfrey
transmedia in form, creating what Anita Harris describes as a “total system” of girlhood that does “not differ significantly across national boundaries” (2009: 211). Certainly, it could be argued that the trans-cultural dominance of North American tween