Michelle Obama and Robert Iger jointly announce Disney's nutritional initiatives. Photo: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Disney recently announced new, stricter standards for food and beverage products advertised on its youth-centered TV channels, radio stations, and websites. Disney revealed its new initiatives in a Washington D.C. press conference alongside First Lady Michelle Obama, who’s been campaigning for healthier eating habits since her move to the White House.

The announcement builds on other healthy-eating initiatives by the Mouse House, including a 2006 effort to curtail its character licensing on products high in sugar, salt or fat, ending the partnership with McDonalds that pulled Toy Story characters from Happy Meals. Disney’s latest nutrition standards mean that companies wishing to advertise on certain Disney-owned outlets will have to adhere to stricter limits on calories, sugars, and saturated fat in their products. Popular products like Lunchables and CapriSun wouldn’t make the cut for commercial time under the new criteria. Michelle Obama praised Disney’s move as significant change in the children’s media business, calling it a “game-changer” for childhood obesity in the U.S.: “…for years people told us that no matter what we did to get our kids to eat well and exercise, we would never solve our childhood obesity crisis until companies changed the way that they sell food to our children. We all know the conventional wisdom about that… today, Disney has turned that conventional wisdom on its head.”

Indeed, the move by Disney can be read as significant to children’s media culture. The food and beverage industry has long been the leading advertiser in kids’ TV, dating back to the earliest days of the medium–even before “children’s television” became synonymous with Saturday morning cartoons. Although the new criteria doesn’t go into effect until 2015 (because of existing agreements and contracts, per Disney), any pledge to turn away advertiser’s money in our commercial system is notable, especially from a the particular industry that’s historically been the bread-and-butter of kids’ television.

Disney, however, is in a particularly privileged position to launch such a program because of its diversified yet highly integrated business models. Unlike Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, or The Hub, Disney’s flagship kids channel isn’t ad-supported in the traditional sense (a holdover from its early days as a premium cable channel, where pricey subscription fees form most of the channel’s revenue). Ad-research firm Kanter Media estimated that spending for food and beverage products on Disney-owned children’s programming (on cable and ABC) totaled $7.2 million in 2011. But that figure is less than one-tenth of one percent of Disney’s total annual advertising sales ($7.6 billion across its networks in 2011); the figure becomes even less significant when you consider that all those ad sales make up less than half of the total $18.7 billion in revenue generated by Disney-owned Media Networks in 2011. Annual income from affiliate and subscriber fees ($8.8 billion) and sales/distribution of programming around the world ($2.3 billion) form the bulk of Disney Media Networks’ revenue, according to its 2011 annual report (p. 30). Still, though, this move by Disney may have larger, reverberating effects in the kids’ TV biz as a whole – the publicity Disney’s receiving for “banning junk food advertising” may force other channels/networks that are more ad-dependent to adopt similar restrictions on products advertised in kids’ media culture.

The "Mickey Check" logo indicates food that meets Disney's nutrition standards

But what’s getting less attention is perhaps the most interesting part of Disney’s announcement: the launch of the new “Mickey Check” logo. Products that meet Disney’s new health criteria are not only eligible to air their advertising on Disney’s outlets, but are also eligible to bear the “Mickey Check” logo on their consumer packaging. According to the White House press release, by the end of 2012, “the Mickey Check will appear on licensed foods products, on qualified recipes on Disney.com and Family.com, and on menus and select products at Disney’s Parks and Resorts.”

By appearing to limit food ads to kids with it’s new criteria, the Mouse House is on one hand “taking a stand” and “turning the conventional wisdom of selling food to our children on its head,” to use Michelle Obama’s words. On the other hand, putting a Mickey logo on food products sold via Disney outlets upholds some of the oldest conventions of marketing to kids. Using familiar characters or logos from kids’ favorite media to sell consumer goods is the oldest trick in the book; in fact, a form of this tactic (known as host-selling) was at one time banned by the FCC on television aimed at children. The green check mark and/or the phrase “good for you–and fun too!” hardly do anything to diminish the dominance of the familiar Mickey shape and Disney-lettered logo in the top left; one hardly has to stretch the imagination to see a child in a grocery cart excitedly ask their parents for “Mickey snacks,” regardless of the product. After all, by the age of two most children become quite skilled at brand recognition and logo identification, and struggle to understand the selling intent of commercials and branded merchandise well into their middle-school years (see Kunkel, 1987; Valkenburg & Cantor, 2001).

The potential loss of advertising sales by the “banned” products seems far less risky (and admirable) when you consider the revenue possibilities of licensing the “Mickey Check” to products that do meet their criteria (especially if the Mickey Check becomes an add-on used to up-sell marketers on advertising time with Disney). At best, the new Mickey Check licensing is an obvious attempt to monetize the pseudo-goodwill of this announcement and extend the Disney brand; at worst, it’s a conscious continuation of marketing practices that exploit children’s cognitive development process of becoming educated consumers. Perhaps Robert Iger’s comments to The New York Times sum it up best: “companies in a position to help with solutions to childhood obesity should do just that,” but, he added, “this is not altruistic. This is about smart business.”

I was asked to contribute to this new column a piece about co-founding the Feminist Media Studies Collective here at UW-Madison, a reading/writing group that Mary Beltran and I started last spring.  Like every department experiences at one point or another, the Media & Cultural Studies program here at UW was in a stage of extended transition; just as we were hiring new faculty, others were announcing their departure – including Mary, my advisor. Amid this transition, the need for a consistent space to sustain scholarly attention to identity, gender, and media in our department became apparent. Mary and I decided to do more than just discuss the need for such a space – we created one.

We envisioned the UW Feminist Media Studies Collective as a reading group that could foster discussions about studying the intersectional nature of social power and negotiating such struggles in our own daily lives, including conversations about scholarship, teaching, and pedagogy. In addition, we wanted a place where members could share and receive feedback on each other’s work in a way that encouraged questions and new perspectives. With monthly meetings, the Feminist Media Studies Collective would provide an important supplementary space that could maintain the visibility of feminism in media studies. Our mission in starting such a group was more than just recognizing the place of feminism in media studies – our mission was also to enact the feminist practice of community building, consciousness raising, and claiming one’s space from which to speak.  In other words, starting a UW Feminist Media Studies Collective was not just about feminism “as an approach one might take,” as Levine said, but feminism “was kind of the point” all together.

Now in its first full year, the Collective is starting to get off the ground. We’ve met and discussed topics ranging from postfeminism to gendered labor practices in academia. Open to everyone in the department, our meetings have brought together a range of graduate students and department faculty. As well as valuable dialogue, the Collective has also enabled many beneficial moments of mentorship among peers. Although sometimes I admittedly worry that the Collective might unintentionally isolate feminist media studies as an approach, it’s certainly meeting Mary’s and my goals to ensure a space where it can continue to inform media studies as a whole.  So far, the Collective is functioning as an important space that reinvigorates a focus on identity and social power that we then take back to broader conversations, whether they are in coursework or at conferences.

In sharing my experience with the UW Feminist Media Studies Collective, I hope to share ideas and sentiment about the importance of feminism in media studies. I also share this experience to remind us that no matter who we are or where we are in our careers, we can each make a difference. In no way do I discount the existence of larger, structural inequalities and the need for wide-ranging change, but sometimes we forget that our immediate surroundings are important places where we can actually bring change to life.  Perhaps I am just a young idealist stubbornly maintaining hope in our ability to make a better world, but to me, there is just too much at stake for us to forget that even at some small level, each of us can do something.

I share this experience, too, to say that our field remains a powerful political site, even for those of us who maybe didn’t identify as a feminist first and a media scholar later, as Levine & Nina Huntemann put it. I was raised by a single, working mother who – as one of the few successful women able to carve out a career in the male-dominated field of hotel construction – served as a powerful role model for achievement and equality. But I didn’t identify as a feminist until my undergraduate years as a Radio-TV-Film major at UT-Austin, when I took my first feminist media studies class: the Senior Fellows honors course, “Women, Feminism, and Media,” taught by Sharon Marie Ross. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ross’s class changed my life; reading Angela McRobbie, Julie D’Acci, Patricia Hill Collins, and Judith Butler for the first time put so many familiar media experiences (watching Cagney & Lacey, Murphy Brown, & Designing Women with my mother, always imagining my future as woman who wore a suit, feeling totally inadequate reading Seventeen magazine) into a completely new perspective that made so much sense. It was like going to the optometrist when you thought your vision was fine, but putting your face on that machine and discovering there was a lens that made everything so much clearer. I had taken other media studies classes in the RTF major, but Ross’s class offered a crucial space for me to understand and develop my feminist sensibility, to take that lens and see the rest of my world through it.

Though I spent five years working in the advertising and communications industry after college, that feminist lens is what brought me back to graduate school.  This lens isn’t something I can take on or off – it informs my entire worldview. It’s a worldview that values social, political, and economic equality for all people; a worldview that believes in consciousness-raising and community building, that believes in the power of everyday life as an activist space and the need to enact agency and take up spaces from which marginalized voices can be heard. I wholeheartedly agree with Levine that choosing a career focused on the study of media as a site of cultural struggle is itself a feminist act. I often look to my research and teaching as the ways I put my politics into practice, but “practicing feminist politics” can be more than just research and writing. Finding the feminism in media studies can sometimes also mean finding feminism in ourselves and enacting our own agency to make change, no matter how small it may seem.

One of sports’ biggest superstars, LeBron James, made waves this summer with his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to join fellow All-Stars Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat, an announcement he made with a one-hour hype machine on ESPN. James faced a wide range of criticism after the announcement in July:  the Cavaliers owner likened James to Benedict Arnold; Charles Barkley called the announcement a “punk move” and said the move to Miami will change James’ legacy; Michael Jordan said it’s something he never would have done. During the NBA season opener last week, as “King James” made his on court debut in a Heat uniform, Nike aired this 90-second spot for LeBron (below). According to Nike’s agency, the spot allows James to “address his off-season controversy head-on.”

Releasing commercials prior to an athlete’s return to sports for image rehabilitation is a familiar tactic for Nike, evidenced by the Tiger Woods ad featuring the voice of his dead father that aired the day before Woods returned to professional golf. But in both cases, Nike comes months late to the game. Waiting to “address off-season controversy” until the day the season (or golf tournament) actually starts only reconstitutes the very discussion Nike is trying to move beyond. Sure, the problems with Woods’ and James’ image are not quite comparable, and sure, both spots resulted in viral video buzz for Nike, but when it comes to the task of recuperating the tarnished image of a sports superstar, I’m not sure either of these ads get the job done.

This brings up a host of questions that I’ve been mulling over recently: first, is there even a need for Nike to actively rehabilitate either star’s image with television ads? And why these athletes and not others? Many sports columnists, commentators, and advertising industry execs are of the opinion that the negative impact of both Woods’ and James’ controversies would blow over once they returned to their respective sport, relying on the assumption that their athletic skill would outweigh their off-the-court misgivings. After all, Kobe Bryant returned to endorsement deals less than a year after being accused of rape with only a statement by Nike touting his athletic skill and basketball ability, not major image management efforts. What about Ben Roethlesberger, Serena Williams, or Brett Favre? What does this say about the specific contexts of sport stardom and our expectations (or lack of) for professional athletes as opposed to other celebrities? How do gender and race play into these narratives and/or athletes’ ability to play the villain, anti-hero, or underdog?

Second, if Nike’s ads don’t really work to rehabilitate the tarnished image of sports superstars, then what do they do? Certainly the ads contribute to the discourse about each star’s persona, which like any star text, give us a way to talk about the world around us. As Richard Dyer notes, stars serve as an important discursive space for the construction, narration, and negotiation of cultural meaning and social hierarchies. The James ad, in particular, comments on the way stars and star personas are inherently open for interpretation and unmoored from concrete meaning. Featuring James looking directly to the camera and asking, “What should I do?” followed by a host of somewhat playfully rhetorical follow up questions (“Should I admit I ruined my legacy?” “Should I just sell shoes?”), the spot takes a self-reflexive stance on the very precariousness of sports stardom. Asking “Should I be who YOU want me to be?” acknowledges this complexity and opens up a space for the viewer to ponder just what meaning they assign to James as a person, as an athlete, and as a star. But ultimately, these spots seek to fix the star text as a branded commodity. The complexity in LeBron’s question of “What should I do?” is of course neatly answered with Nike’s “Just Do It,” signaling a desperate attempt to cling to the sports star as a complex but coherent symbol of American capitalism. Thus, rather than rehabilitating James’ controversial image, Nike’s latest spot works hard to rehabilitate the very investment in sports stardom itself.

With some incredible musical numbers, including a touching rendition of “To Sir with Love” and a return to Journey songs that helped launch the show’s initial success last fall, the finale included some of Glee‘s signature (if uneasy) aspects of spectacle, emotional appeal, and snarky self-awareness. But like many good television shows, the reactions and take-aways vary dramatically.

Kelly Kessler: “OH NO THEY DIDN’T!”  Oh yes they did.  Oh yes!  They totally went there.  I just want to say that I can name that tune in 2 notes.  I believe Lulu’s “To Sir with Love” officially trumped “Jessie’s Girl” as making my season through fabulous song choice.  The hyper-emotion connected to the musical genre came full force in the total cheesiness of this number.  So much crying!  Kurt’s voice was oh so high.  Everyone was saved by Shu (and “black guy” and “other Asian” even got to talk).  As I sit here crying during my second viewing of that number, I contemplate my inadvertent Antenna role as the defender of the powers that Glee.  Well, I’m okay with that, and I swear I’m not on the take.  Was it ridiculous?  Hell yes it was ridiculous.  Am I annoyed by that or do I feel led astray?  Hmm…no.  I really found this season finale to be the best of what Glee and the musical do (even if those things are at times ridiculous).  It gave me drama, fabulous (and at times forgotten) music, love, redemption, and dance, dance, dance.  I’ll forgive it for continuing to marginalize its secondary players, and I will continue to look forward to how it develops from here.  Season 2, I wait for you with bated breath.

Amanda Ann Klein: Much like Lost, the Glee finale left me with many questions: Have “the black kid” and “Other Asian” really made it through an entire season without names? How can Rachel claim that Jesse has “no soul” after hearing his kickass rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody”? How were the Glee kids able to stay for the duration of Quinn’s labor and delivery and still make it to the awards ceremony? Why did Quinn give birth to a 5-month-old baby? And should I be happy that Shelby Corcoran doesn’t want a relationship with her biological daughter but does want a relationship with someone else’s biological daughter? Am I to believe that Finn loves Rachel? Puck loves Quinn? Quinn loves Mercedes? Santana loves Glee club? And why did this nonsensical finale make me cry three different times–when New Directions performed their Journey medley, when Quinn first held her baby, and when Will and Puck performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?

Sharon Ross: Like almost every episode, last night’s finale featured great one-liners and touching moments riddled with an equal amount of drawbacks.  Sue came through with the snappy zinger, saying to Will after discovering he parked his car near hers:  “I don’t want to catch poor.”  The entire “To Sir, With Love” scene was touching and full of heart, while the worst moment in regards emotional realism was certainly Shelby adopting Quinn’s baby (read: adoption is easy!). Accordingly, the worst moment of the episode in regards to physical realism was Quinn’s return (read: you can go back to classes right after giving birth!). However, giving birth really is a lot like listening to/singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over AND OVER again (especially if one has had an epidural). Overall, it was a solid finale with good setup for next season, despite the fact that the duet-heavy medley was a tiresome return to Finn and Rachel (and honestly a bit of a yawn compared to past episodes’ performances).

LeiLani Nishime: The season finale encapsulated many of the things I enjoy about Glee and many of the reasons why I often walk away from the show feeling like I ate an entire bag of over-processed Cheetos. I loved the simultaneously campy and moving “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “To Sir with Love” productions, and the way the show completely undercut any lasting belief that competitions are based on a meritocracy. But the last fifteen minutes had me squirming. The showdown that wasn’t and the hideously mawkish final song made it much easier to say good bye to end of the season. And I hate to be too one-note about this, but minority representation, once again, came up short.

Ben Aslinger: Next Tuesday, my dentist will replace the permanent crowns on two of my front teeth because someone in the eighth grade pushed me into a chain-length fence for being different, unleashing a cycle of oral surgeries and braces as well as the root canals and crown replacements that I will have (and have to pay for) for the rest of my life.  While I recognize how Glee creatively uses music and encourages fan appropriations, I can’t stomach Glee, perhaps because the brutality and humiliations of the show hit too close to home.  Near the beginning of Paradise, Toni Morrison refers to high school as cruelty “decked out in juvenile glee,” and it is precisely this cruelty in Glee that makes this viewer’s attitude less gleeful.  The question then emerges as to whether (and why) those of us who experienced such cruelty would want to watch it represented on television in such a depoliticized and fantastical way.

Mary Beltrán: It dawned on me in the first minutes of the episode that New Directions of course could not win at regionals.  Because, post-PC humor aside, that¹s not what the narrative is about.  In my opinion it’s about losing, and doing it with heart (mentioned many times in the last few episodes) and scrappy style.  And what a better metaphor for these things than song and dance? One of my chief pleasures in watching Glee‘s last episodes also has been seeing the cast demonstrating more of their talent as their glee club counterparts are believably catching up to them, which has me looking forward, glee-fully, to next season. On another note, it was notable that much of the non-white characters’ development of the last half of the season was cast aside in the return to the Rachel and Finn subplot and duet emphasis in the competition.   Are the non-white characters destined always to be pushed back to the background when the going gets rough?

—

Ranging from sheer joy to exhausted disappointment, reactions to the season finale bring forth some of the issues that make Glee so complex and contentious.  How do we navigate the simultaneous pleasures and limitations of such post-modern performance, reinvention and representation?

Earlier this week, E! Online unveiled the video for Miley Cyrus’ new single, “Can’t Be Tamed,” a track from her upcoming album Robot. In it, as a rare breed of something called an Aves Cyrus (which E! explains as a “sexy dancing pop star bird”), Miley spreads her wings and steps out of her cage, proclaiming she can’t be tamed.  For the 17-year-old Disney Channel star, the metaphor couldn’t be more obvious – or strategic.

The fourth and final season of her hit show Hannah Montana is set to air later this year, and after the season three finale, “Is Miley Saying Goodbye?” the transition out of her role as childish tween star has been on its way for some time. After several Hannah Montana soundtracks, Cyrus released a cross-over pop album, aptly titled Breakout, under her own name on Disney’s Hollywood Records in 2008 and starred in the feature film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ love story, The Last Song (from Disney’s Touchstone) in March of this year. But despite the conglomerate’s best efforts at built-in transitions (ahem, the Best of Both Worlds), the move away from her kid TV moniker hasn’t been easy. Between candid photos of her exposed bra, news of her 20-year-old underwear model boyfriend moving in with her family, and the outcry over her photos in Vanity Fair, Cyrus’ star image signals just how much American culture values the discursive construct of childhood innocence and the denial of young female sexuality. Her Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana, may be a prime example of “girl power” pop feminism or Angela McRobbie’s concept of post-feminist masquerade (as Morgan Blue has insightfully written about), but Cyrus’ own struggles to be taken seriously as something other than young innocent girl signals the complexities of such configurations. She at once upholds the good girl/bad girl binary while also trying desperately to negotiate beyond it.

“Can’t Be Tamed,” then, is a significant rhetorical contribution to Cyrus’ cross-over star persona. As part Lady Gaga meets Night at the Museum, part “the Couple in the Cage” meets Britney Spears’ Circus, the video uses extensive costuming, make-up, and metaphor to add another angle to Cyrus’ image. And it seems to be working (for the most part) as a transitioning mechanism. Entertainment Weekly hails the video as the official “death to Hannah Montana,” reminding readers that Cyrus is, in fact, almost 18 years old;  AOL’s entertainment blog PopEater sums it up as a “move that she had to make,” and even Perez Hilton, who frequently refers to her with the nickname “Slutty Cyrus,” seems to like the video, saying that it “screams Britney circa her golden years, and we’re not mad! …It’s hot, hot, hot.” Directed by Robert Hales (who’s also worked with Nine Inch Nails, Gnarls Barkley, Janet Jackson, and of course, Britney Spears), the video’s sets, costumes, and loads of eye-shadow certainly construct a vivid, contemporary aesthetic, but the actual song is mediocre, and even the best costumes can’t hide the fact that Miley can’t really dance that well.

What does Cyrus herself have to say about the video? She told Ryan Seacrest recently that “yes, it’s a sexy video. But it’s also about explaining the song and living the lyrics…it’s about I don’t want to be in a cage, I want to be free and do what I love…and make the movies or the music that I want.” But even if “Can’t Be Tamed” allows Cyrus to step outside the cage in which her star image was once contained and claim the performance of her sexuality, issues of agency and spectacle of course still remain. Many young (white) female stars go through similar moments of overt sexual performativity to transition from child/teen to adult star – Britney became a Slave, Christina Aguilera got “Dirrty,” Jessica Biel Gear-ed up, Elizabeth Berkley became a Showgirl … but while many young male stars experience hardships growing up in Hollywood, significantly fewer wrestle with having to at once claim ownership of and put on display their sexual identity (exceptions always exist, though. See: Daniel Radcliffe in Equus). To put it another way, regardless, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the Jonas Brothers or Zac Efron don a $25,000 corset with giant black wings and sing about breaking out of a cage to advance their star image. Although that would be cool. I think.

One thing’s for sure, though – the music video is alive and well. Between E! Online, YouTube/Vevo, and being embedded in blogs like this one, “Can’t Be Tamed” is another  example of how music videos are continuing their relevance in pop culture discourses. With significant distribution and buzz building on the internet – like “Telephone” – “Can’t Be Tamed” puts Miley Cyrus in the same sentence with Lady Gaga, a surprising feat unto itself, and one that opens up a plethora of other issues, ones you’re welcome to bring up in the comments. Now, if only GaGa could make it onto the Disney Channel…

Ryan Murphy (Glee‘s showrunner) has said that Madonna was like “the soundtrack of [his] life,” her music something he’s always found empowering. And that discourse of empowerment was somewhat central to the episode, even if the musical numbers weren’t incredibly central to the show’s overall narrative. Sue admits she is a Madonna fan; her lifelong dream is to pay homage to Madonna, a dream she begins to realize by choreographing a Cheerios routine to “Ray of Light” – on stilts. Will overhears the girls in glee club talking about guy problems, and worries that “teenage girls feel like they have no power.” His solution, in John Fiske-ian fashion, is to assign the glee club to sing Madonna songs, to find such characteristics as “strength,” “independence,” “quality,” and “confidence” in her music and in themselves.

Other than an umbrella-theme of empowerment, though, most of the songs in this episode served very little narrative or character-building purposes that the musical numbers often do in Glee. In fact, not much happened to move the narrative along too far at all this week (aside from Will and Emma deciding to call it off and Jesse moving to McKinley High, of course). But for me, like Mary and many Antenna readers, the story of the show is mostly secondary to the musical performances and overall fun and joy those bring to each episode.

Glee cast performing "Express Yourself"

Some numbers were better than others; I really wanted to love the “Express Yourself” set, featuring all female cast members trying to prove the boys wrong in their assumption that Madonna was “only for chicks.” But the empty stage and almost move-for-move choreography from the original Madonna video just made the scene fall flat. (The costuming, with each girl in a different color silk top, reminded me of Hannah Hamad’s great new article on FlowTV about color coding femininities in media culture). Similarly, the shot-for-shot remake of “Vogue” with Jane Lynch felt a little too restrained. I mean, this is Jane Lynch. She’s funny. Let her be funny! There’s certainly something cool and respectful about a shot-for-shot remake, but I think Lynch could really have knocked this out of the park if only she had been let loose to be a little more creative.

However, the “Open Your Heart” number brought a smile to my face with the various Madonna look alikes from different eras passing through the hallway. And the “Like a Virgin” sequence, which I thought might be ruefully cheesy with three (!) different couples on the brink of intimacy, was superbly produced and ended up being one of my favorite numbers of the night. (Will’s line to Emma that “you took ownership of your body when you said you weren’t ready” was probably one of my favorite Will lines ever.) The closing “Like a Prayer” sequence gave me outright goosebumps with Lea Michele’s stunning voice, incredible solos by Amber Riley and Chris Colfer, and the unbridled energy of the gospel choir.

In the end, after she doesn’t go through with the make-over at the hands of Kurt and Mercedes, Sue declares that she’ll “just leave the constant reinvention to Madonna.” In a way, it’s Glee, too, for whom constant reinvention is key to success. Many have marveled at the success of a musical in prime time, especially one that doesn’t come up with completely new and original music. But for Glee, it’s the re-invention that’s important – it works largely because it uses songs we already know and love to sing, and constantly reworks them in a way that is at once familiar and new. This episode serves as a prime example of the fun that can come from such reinvention, including teenage boys singing “What It Feels Like for a Girl.”

Other favorite moments: Kurt and Mercedes speaking up about not getting enough solos, and Brittany’s admission that “When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist.” An excellent follow up line to last week’s insight about dolphins.

Glee cast, "Like a Prayer"

On the one hand…
It’s a tween girl kicking ass. Hit Girl adds a welcome complication to a representation category full of kid sister supporting roles, pop star princesses, and mallrat mean girls. Disney executives once referred to Hannah Montana as their version of

"I can't see through walls, but I can kick your ass."

a super hero for girls; someone who was normal by day but extraordinary by night. Hit Girl is in so many ways a much cooler female superhero. Why should boys be the only ones for whom “superhero” means physical action and beating up bad guys?  Clearly Hit Girl isn’t necessarily meant for young girls, given her language and the film’s R rating (among other things),  but Hit Girl is definitely in the running to become my favorite tween. Sill, the comments section on sites like Cinematical or FirstShowing.net that debuted the Hit Girl trailer in December are filled with people claiming they “can’t wait to take their daughter to see it.” So , Kick-Ass might have the potential for cool father-(older) daughter time in certain families.  In addition, though, I also kind of like that it plays with notions of an idealized childhood and grays the line between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ in entertainment. Some critics have already come out to sound the alarm about blurring these lines, raising the familiar concern about  kids and violence in media, but to me, that points to our increased tendency to think that if a media text features a child of any kind, we often automatically think it should be child- or family-friendly fare, and should thus be safely contained in carefully constructed norms of saccharine representations and prosocial narratives. But the irony and shock factor in the image of a foul-mouthed tween girl assassin can be fun for adults, and that’s part of the appeal.

On the other hand…
While watching a fictional 12 year-old girl cussing and killing villains can be ironic and fun in destabilizing the innocence of childhood, I’m troubled as to larger questions of what we may or may not gain from destabilizing it and our privilege to do so. Hit Girl feels awesome because she’s a young, white middle-class girl in America, a group often pressured to be pure, innocent, and powerless. But in other parts of the world, kids with guns are a truly distressed class of child soldiers, where the loss of childhood innocence is a serious tragedy.

Additionally, I’m troubled by the fact that there are certainly some serious dangers of exploitation in Hit Girl. The slow motion action shots focus our gaze on her body, which is also the real-life body of a 12-year-old actress, Chloe Moretz. There are similar struggles in other female action heroes, like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, or Halle Berry as Catwoman, and there are many young (looking) girls in comics and anime who don’t wear much and kill things.  But as a live action movie with a real 12-year-old actress, I find it much more problematic, and I’m wrestling with identifying and articulating reasons why, beyond just the seemingly obvious “she’s young, female and vulnerable.”  Is it because she’s young and supposedly without the sexuality that Angelina or Halle might command and thus enjoy in those characters? It’s certainly unsettling to think about the target audience of 18 – 34-year-old men gazing at Moretz and the uneven power dynamic at play there. In the trailer, we see her in a colorful wig and purple super hero suit, but she also appears in the film in the classic plaid skirt schoolgirl outfit, which by now is practically shorthand for fetishized young girl. I don’t want to say that she is already necessarily a victim, though, because denying the burgeoning sexuality of t(w)een girls is itself a problem that creates troublesome double standards and neurotic expectations for young women. That said, the fetishization of the young female body for display in Kick-Ass is undeniably exploitative. (I mean, really. The school-girl outfit? Ugh.)

So, I’m troubled by the potential exploitation in Hit Girl. At the same time, there are ways that she works against our cultural notions of kids as innocent and girls as passive victims. And that’s definitely fun. In the end, I don’t think either take can necessarily win out over another; after all, there’s no such thing as a perfect representation. But I’m fascinated by Hit Girl and what we can learn about childhood and gender in working through our reactions to this character.

The introduction of a new network to the 14-and-under cable market is certainly a big development, but what catches my attention most about the news is the way that Hasbro and Discovery are choosing to brand the new channel.  Questions of branding for networks/channels (terms I’m using interchangeably here) seem even more complex in our current media climate, where the proliferation of channels seems to necessitate cohesive, strong brands, but the unmooring of television texts from the actual channel into their own contained identities (DVD box sets, DVR items, online downloads) can undermine or make unnecessary those same network/channel brands. Nevertheless, brands are still important – TNT knows drama, USA loves characters, and NBC wants to be more colorful. Brands are especially important in the kids cable game, where you have to please both children and parents – Disney’s legacy mantra of fun and childhood magic appeals to kids and keeps parents’ trust,  while Nickelodeon espouses education for the adults and autonomy for the young (kids rule!).

Hasbro and Discovery’s new joint venture, though, is trying to do that and more. The press release last month revealed the new channel’s name and logo – The Hub.  Talk about aiming for convergence.

The rhetoric in the release talks mostly about The Hub as a convergence of two other brands as opposed to a variety of media platforms (the spiral logo “symbolizes a catalyst of action and imagination,” the result of bringing together  Hasbro’s core tenet of play and Discovery Kids’ core tenet of curiosity, so says the presser), but the new brand clearly lends itself to notions of changing media experiences. It at once recognizes the mobility of both television texts and viewers, while offering a shared location for both. In this way, ‘The Hub’ has the potential to be quite successful, both as a network and a brand.

But with a name like ‘The Hub,’ I can’t help but think back to the mid-late 1990s, when we all thought hubs/portals were the way we’d conceive of space the internet, and what a failure it turned out to be for all those companies not named Google or Yahoo!. (I’m looking at you, Disney and Go.com.)  And of course, Hasbro and Discovery aren’t the first ones to try a sense of mobility in a television brand – ABC’s “Start Here” concept has been hard at work since 2007. It’s not exactly clear just how well The Hub will make use of its franchises across platforms – its website, hubworld.com, is just a landing page for now. Even so, Hasbro and Discovery are laying a notable foundation in the brand. Could The Hub actually live up to its goal of “reimagining the future of children’s entertainment”? Who knows. But I’ll be watching (and clicking. and downloading) when the channel goes live this fall.

In reading about/watching the coverage of the New Moon premiere, I find myself increasingly conflicted. On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see young girls and women recognized as an audience and a significant economic force. Advance ticket sales are breaking records at sites like Fandango, and reports of these sales are quick to point out that New Moon tops sales figures for The Dark Knight and movies from both the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises.

But on the other hand, I struggle with the fact that so much coverage depicts Twilight fans as swarming, screaming, unruly mobs of girls that are othered in some way.  Matt Lauer warned Meredith to “keep the smelling salts on hand for this pandemonium” as Robert Pattinson made an appearance on this morning’s Today Show. Variety‘s coverage of the Hollywood premiere ends with Kevin Smith claiming his daughter’s love for the franchise is totally foreign:  “I was watching it with my 10-year-old daughter, and it made no sense to me whatsoever. It was as inscrutable as an Israeli film. I just don’t understand the politics of the region.”

It’s an image that persists over the last 50 years, since the days of Beatlemania – screaming girls possessed, crazy, and constructed as a complete misfit engaging in behavior no one understands. From New Kids on the Block concerts, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus events, Jonas Brothers appearances, and even new-comer Justin Bieber’s recent performances, the young female fan is continually constructed as a psychotic, mysterious other. In decades of increasing awareness of the complexities of girlhood, have we really come very far from the “threat” of Beatlemania?

To be sure, some coverage has increasingly given a nod to Twilight fans including more than just teen girls, but also middle-aged women. Many of my friends are fans of the franchise looking forward to New Moon. But even their Facebook statuses or tweets reveal qualifications like “is that wierd?” or “hanging my head in shame” along with their announcements to attend the premiere. While some of my feminist friends pin their embarrassment on the franchise’s arguably anti-feminist characteristics, I can’t help but think how some of my other friends’ shame in liking or seeing New Moon emphasizes just how much young female fandom is devalued in American culture. It’s a devaluation that just continues through these images and coverage of screaming, ‘swarming’  Twilight fans.