Children's Literature Association Quarterly

In The Powerpuff Girls, little girls take center stage as action heroes exactly because they are both little girls and superheroes, and, just as adult female action figures are challenging gender stereotypes, the Powerpuffs are revising definitions of girlhood within mainstream American popular culture. Significantly, the challenges faced by these superheroic animated girls frame current competing and often contradictory discourses about twentieth-century American girlhood in popular culture, revealing the transformational and yet deeply conservative character of American notions of feminine strength, sexuality, and agency.