This blog is for anybody looking for smart, critical analysis about the cultural significance of teen and YA heroines in popular culture. Our goal is twofold. First, every author who contributes to this blog hopes to facilitate conversations about characters they are fascinated by, characters we are all drawn to for whatever reason.  Second, this blog serves as a digital archive of “the new heroines” in popular culture. Sometimes, our favorite characters are overlooked or forgotten. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The idea of “the new heroine” is developed in The New Heroines: Female Embodiment and Technology in 21st Century Popular Culture by Katheryn Wright. This book outlines a new coveroriginalunderstanding of the heroic emerging within the context of late modernity. New heroism as a narrative structure is nonlinear, its stories drawn primarily from stories about teenage girls in young adult fiction such as Katniss or Tris. It’s history is rooted in the contested and contradicting terrains of feminism, the eugenics movement, and cybernetics. As a model of posthuman subjectivity, he figure of the New Heroine is drawn from a constellation of five core concepts: potential, assessment, connection, the interface, and feedback. These concepts offer a way into understanding the contours of privilege and position as they play out in 21st century popular culture.