Feminist Looking Glass

I saw an article in today’s Washington Post about the movie The Princess and the Frog.  It included a list of five movies that Lyn Mikel Brown, author of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes,” considered to be “positive role models for girls.”  Here is the list, along with short descriptions.  I’ve seen all of them except Spirited Away and I would say that Whale Rider would have to be at the top of the list.  But Miss Congeniality?  Does anyone think that Sandra Bullock’s character is a positive role model for girls?

– A League of Their Own (1992): Geena Davis, Lori Petty and Tom Hanks star in the movie about a winning team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II.

– Fly Away Home (1996): Anna Paquin plays a 13-year-old girl who, with her father’s help, teaches a flock of orphaned Canada geese to fly so they can migrate south for the winter.

– Miss Congeniality (2000): Sandra Bullock is an FBI agent who must go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant.

– Spirited Away (2001): The Japanese animated film follows a 10-year-old girl, Chihiro, as she moves to a new town with her family and encounters spirits and monsters along the way.

– Whale Rider (2002): Keisha Castle-Hughes plays an 11-year-old girl fighting patriarchal tradition to become chief of the Whangara people in New Zealand.

Filed under: Pop Culture Tagged: | Lyn Mikel Brown