The phrase "girl power" is commonly attributed to the mid to late 1990s pop sensation the Spice Girls. However, the pink, peppy, and consumer-happy version of the term was itself an appropriation of the an earlier version of the term "Grrrl Power" made popular by the feminist informed Riot Grrrl movement, which was very subversive and political in nature. In our girlhoods studies class we learned about how the term Girl Power as commonly used is a commodified version of the once feminist term, that has been stripped of its subversive messages to become an empty cultural trope used to imbue products with a sense of dynamism, rebellion, freshness, and youthful femininity.
Several girlhood theorists, such as Angela McRobbie, Dawn Currie, and Elline Lipkin, link the contemporary term "Girl Power" with both postfeminism, which is a notion prevalent in popular culture today that gender equality has been achieved and thereby positions feminist struggles as irrelevant, passe, and longer necessary, and also with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology that promotes privatization, cutting social programs, and deregulation. Currie explains that "girl power" positions girls as ambitious, success bound, and independent, and this celebrates both youthful feminity and individualism. She writes that "in the current neoliberal social and economic order, young women are being constructed to signal freedom, personal choice, and self-improvement with little to no attention being paid to persistent gender and other inequalities" (p.42). Lipkin (2009) argues that in unpacking constructs of "girl power" today, what we are left with is "the power to shop and to excite men, the power to serve capital and patriarchy" (p. 134). McRobbie explains how postfeminist notions of girl power present images of equality, individual success and self-achievement which serve consumer culture and hence, neoliberalism. At the heart of neoliberalism is the neoliberal subject, the rational, autonomous, competitive, entrepreneurial, consuming subject who is responsible for his /her own well-being. McRobbie asks us to pay attention to how postfeminism supplements the neoliberal agenda. She explains how popular representations of girls in media which celebrate female freedom and gender equality through appropriating quasi-feminist vocabulary is very dangerous because it diverts attention away from, even masks, the very real conditions of patriarchy that continue to shape girls lives.
Upon learning this history, we decided to 'resignify' the term "Girl Power", as Judith Butler would say, and give it a different meaning from the one commonly held in popular culture. Our term Girl Power 3.0 has many layers of meaning. We are playing on the literal meaning of the word "power" by using it in reference to girls engaging with electrically powered technologies, we are updating the term to its third version following the riot grrrls and spice girls, giving it a technological reference twist by calling it 3.0, and we are resignifying the term Girl Power to refer to the power girls have by creating their own media, music, film, entertainment, information, etc., and sharing it amongst themselves. Not only does creating our own media disrupt consumerism, it also disrupts patriarchy by promoting what Kearney refers to as a "Girls Gaze", media made by girls for girls, and also by entering into a technological domain that has been naturalized as a 'no-go zone' for girls for generations.
We realize that the riot grrrls movement was largely dominated by white girls, and that most representations of pop "girl power" also idealize whiteness, as well as heterosexuality. We at Girl Power 3.0 are aware that race, sexuality, ability, and other identities can never be separated from gender; we must be careful not to homogenize anyone's experiences of girlhood because each of us experiences our intersecting identities differently in different situations. We believe that the internet and technological fields opens a space for girls of different backgrounds to come together and collaborate around our shared sensibilities of resistance, of hope, of despair, of power. We realize that we are all historical subjects and it is important to know our histories as we work together and not to erase or conflate our differences. Because there is no essence of "girl", we encourage each and every one of you reading to ask for yourself what Girl Power 3.0 might mean to you.... ;)
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