Tina Belcher, holding up the self-authored tome Erotic Friend Fiction: Buttloose

Bob’s Burgers begins its third season in September. While its viewership is competitive with the other programs on FOX’s Animation Domination Sunday night line-up, Bob’s Burgers has the trappings of a cult hit. The program was created by Loren Bouchard of Home Movies. He developed the project with Jim Dauterive, who made a name for himself as a writer and executive producer on King of the Hill. Both shows’ investment in character detail, deadpan comedy, and flights of surrealism is evident in Bob’s Burgers. It also features the formidable talent of contemporary improv and alt-comedians. The main cast includes H. Jon Benjamin, Eugene Mirman, and Kristen Schaal. Sarah Silverman, Megan Mullally, and Mr. Show alum Jay Johnston voice recurring characters. Amy Sedaris, Paul F. Tompkins, Aziz Ansari, and Patton Oswalt made guest appearances. Yet Bob Belcher’s thirteen-year-old daughter Tina is arguably the program’s breakout character and has the potential to be one of American broadcast television’s most subversive girl characters.

At first, Tina seems like yet another socially inept teenage nerd, a late bloomer in the mold of Freaks and Geeks‘ Bill Haverchuck and King‘s Bobby Hill. Yet what I find refreshing about those two characters is what they share with Tina, who holds her weirdness with dignified self-possession. Nowhere is this more evident than in her sexuality. For many pubescent girl characters on American television–King‘s Connie Souphanousinphone, The Cosby Show‘s Rudy Huxtable–menstruation defines female sexuality. Tina met this milestone with little comment before the series began. Some characters explore their sexuality in other ways. For example, Mad Men‘s Sally Draper masturbated at a slumber party (her friend Glen Bishop has articulated his desire in other ways). Older girls test the choppy waters of romance and sex, usually with their male counterparts. Often, these journeys of self-discovery are the focus of an episode or a character arc. But Tina’s active, idiosyncratic fantasy life–filled with zombies, mating insects, her dentist, Garfield and 60 Minutes fan-fic, most of her class, and especially the son of her father’s business rival–is a running joke on Bob’s Burgers. Refreshingly, her family doesn’t panic or ignore her desires. They acknowledge them and sometimes voice their discomfort, but never make her feel ashamed. Thus, the joke comes from the novelty of Tina’s matter-of-fact delivery, not her family’s response. Unfortunately, a girl who confidently articulates her desires is still novel for American television.

It’s worth considering if the show gets away with giving voice to Tina’s hormonal impulses by using Daniel Mintz’s monotone to articulate them. In the original pilot, Tina’s character was a boy with the same name as the actor portraying him. Apart from sex and gender differences, they were basically the same awkward, withdrawn, frank character. Such voice casting is more common for women playing pubescent male characters whose voices haven’t dropped, a conceit whose queer potential King exploited to the hilt by having Pamela Adlon breathe life into Bobby, a kid whose flamboyant, effeminate tendencies bemuse and terrify his good ol’ boy father.

Tina’s ability to challenge normative girlhood cannot be championed without an interrogation of white privilege. Although Tina seems to be an equal-opportunity fetishist, her fixation on a Brazilian capoeira instructor, a Cuban minor league baseball player, and the family’s Asian American dentist suggests a potentially problematic longing for the Other. Furthermore, Tina’s dialogue could be considered in conversation with Lena Dunham’s Girls, an HBO dramedy heralded for its artless depictions of human sexuality that fails to consider the desires and needs of women of color. Who gets to be candid?

While Tina is a fan, she is also the product of fan-fic culture. A quick Google search opens up a hellmouth of Tina-inspired pornography. In my research (which I won’t share here), I noticed particular focus on her bare, post-training-bra chest. She is also rendered in a number of graphic scenarios and positions that makes any reminder of her age and lack of evident consent all the more troubling. Tamer examples demonstrate fans’ quickness to sexualize Tina by making her older and more stylish by shaping her bob, shortening her skirts, and lengthening her knee-high socks. This mirrors similar fan and Hollywood makeovers for nerdy girls like Ghost World‘s Enid Coleslaw and Scooby Doo‘s Velma Dinkley and potentially minimizes the actors’ radical potential.

I don’t want to suggest that Tina is subversive because she’s not conventionally pretty. However, having Tina fit into an animated storyworld where no one is particularly attractive takes emphasis away from her appearance is important. Tina is thirteen, an age when most girls are accustomed to critique and objectification and diminish themselves in the process. That the Belcher family loves Tina without fretting too much about her looks or proclivities is a decent attempt at raising a healthy, self-actualized human being. The Simpsons couldn’t accomplish this without entering Lisa in beauty pageants and getting Marge in Playboy. The ways in which Family Guy confirms Meg Griffin’s dowdiness for an easy laugh is cruel and dispiriting. Through Tina, Bob’s Burgers demonstrates animation’s ability to destabilize and redefine girl characters’ relationship to their bodies and desires. However, animation is also vulnerable to fanboy exploitation, initiating a process of negotiation that must always keep girl characters from being more than the whim of someone else’s fantasies.

The National Communication Association had such a tremendous number of interesting panels over the conferences five days that it would be impossible to truly capture anything like an accurate image of the event in a few hundred words. Instead, I want to provide a glimpse of one small segment of the conference, a sampling of feminist and girlhood panels. Several of the panels were organized by Sarah Projansky and brought some new faces to NCA for the first time. The first panel I attended from this grouping was entitled, Girls’ Voices in and Through Media and looked at particular feminist issues in girl studies. Sharon Ross presented a paper entitled “OMG, LOL: Urban Teen’s Thoughts on Media” that provided some fascinating early data about how different demographic groupings of teens, particularly divided by race and class, conceptualized and consumed media. Not only did Ross observe important differences in what these different groups of teens watched but she also found some key differences in the way these teens claimed to use or understand the media they watched. Jessalynn Keller presented her project “Talking Back to Seventeen: Girls’ Media Activism, Feminism, and the Blogosphere” exploring how a particular girl blogger entered into a complicated discourse with Seventeen magazine and its messages through “The Seventeen Magazine Project”  and what this case study may say about the potential for feminist girl activism on the web. UW-Madison’s very own Nora Seitz also presented on this panel, performing a fascinating analysis of the ABC Family program Huge and how the series’ representation of overweight teens deviated from the Alloy brand in core ways that reflected its specific authorship and industrial contexts. Sarah Projansky finished the panel with a particularly deep analysis of the media coverage of Venus Williams in her late teen years and the unspoken racism that emerged surrounding discussion of the beads that she kept in her hair and the differing approaches to this style taken by the news and tennis officials at different points in her career.

Later in the day, I attended a workshop titled “The Politics of Doing Feminist Girls’ Media Studies” featuring a variety of scholars in differing phases of their careers. Beretta Smith Shomade from Tulane University explored in depth the role of the teacher/activist/scholar in incorporating community activism and involvement in their scholarship and provided a particularly powerful example from her own work with students and media literacy education projects. More experienced scholars on the panel explored in depth the complex relationship between scholarship, activism and pleasure that often circulates around the media. Ruth Nicole Brown discussed an activist centered project on Soul Hot that explored how the Soul Hot phenomenon allowed the voices of black girlhood to be audible and to counter narratives that were “about us but never by us.” Angharad N. Valdivia, also an intersectional scholar, emphasized the ways in which we have to think about girls as not only consumers of media but as producers of media and culture. She explains the importance of being immersed in these kinds of media, of, as a parent, consuming media with kids. Valdivia argued that it is important to explore how, sometimes problematic, mainstream media may open up a space for certain kinds of subjectivities and recognition for young people. Younger scholars, like Lindsay H. Garrison and Jessalynn Keller discussed the challenges that they encountered with trying to find materials associated with girl’s media in traditional archives because of the ways in which girls work and girls media has historically been undervalued, as well as the challenges they encountered with reconciling feminist politics with the methodologies that they used in their interviews.

A more historical perspective on feminism could be seen in the panel: “Feminist Generations and Finding a Voice: Exploring Different Generations of Feminism’s Voices”. Cindy Koenig Richards began the panel by looking at the Washington Women’s Cookbook that was produced by Washington Women’s Suffrage Movement to expand its reach and its descendent Pots and Politics. She explained that while some dismissed these publications as too conservative and domestic that they also provided opportunities for women to be published for the first time and helped these women develop a public presence. Julia Wood provided a concise overview of the second wave and the departure that the third wave takes from it, in her view, surrounding issues of difference. She expressed concern about the need to assure that the third wave finds a way to engage more effectively in making their voices heard in key venues while addressing structural issue. Bonnie Dow brought up similar questions in her work, while discussing how postfeminism has to be reconceptualized in relationship to a particular life stage. She discussed her own experience with postfeminism through the prism of Sarah Palin, who is from the same generation. She argues that postfeminism has to be thought of as an authentic subject position in order to interrogate the new momism that she argues is having something of a backlash effect as part of this postfeminist position. Finally Natalie N Fixmer-Oraiz provided a fascinating case study of the third wave organization the Reproductive Justice Network which she argues eschews models of the wave that emphasized difference rather than those that emphasizes continuity. She explains how the Reproductive Justice Network privileges youth, intersectionality, and engages with young motherhood and queer and trans women.

The final panel that I attended along these lines was my own: The Girl and the Franchise. Morgan Blue began the panel with her paper “‘At least I know how to be a girl!’: Postfeminist ‘Girlification’ on Disney Channel” which explores how the a kind of sexualized young feminine girlfriend is privileged for both young girls and adult women. She argues that this dispersed cultural phenomenon is a “sensibility” and infantilizes women of all ages and illustrated this phenomenon with case studies from Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place. Derek Johnson explored the complexities of gender and fandom by looking at the case of a little girl Katie who was teased for being a fan of Star Wars in his paper “The Force is with you, Katie’: Media Franchising and the Confinement of Girls Through Multiplied Production”. He explained the activist response to the event and the media phenomenon that followed in support of Katie that attempted to frame Star Wars as “for girls” too. He explains the complex rhetoric of this response that both frames Star Wars as inclusive while also carving out individual iterations of the franchise that are clearly gendered  and funnel fans into ghettoized niches. The panel also included Taylor Nygaard’s paper “From Clothes to New Media: Alloy Inc. and the Colonization of Contemporary Girl Culture” which detailed the growing role the Alloy company has in various forms of teen media in particular television and forays into web series. She explored how the imperatives of Alloy, which run on particularly consumption oriented commercial lines,  inflect the massive amount of content that Alloy distributes for teens today. What about my paper? That is for another post.

As I hope the reader can see, a tremendous amount of different approaches to girlhood, feminism ad media are available in only a few brief panels. Yet the panels I detailed here represent only a small snapshot of the tremendous work done at the conference. What was your NCA experience? Let us know in the comments section so we can paint a bigger picture.