Inventing the Teenage Girl: The Construction of Female Identity in Nickelodeon's My Life as a Teenage Robot

Abstract

In recent years, depictions of strong but feminine girl heroes have become common in children's television programming. These girl power icons reflect changing cultural ideas about girlhood. Nickelodeon's My Life as a Teenage Robot is a cartoon popular among preadolescents, which follows the exploits of Jenny, a powerful, female-gendered robot who must save the world while also surviving the trials of high school. This article examines My Life as a Teenage Robot's discourse on girl power and the construction of identity. It focuses on a key theme that contradicts other texts about girl heroes: that strength, agency, and normative femininity cannot be embodied in the same individual. This article interrogates the ways in which the show's messages are simultaneously progressive and regressive, and it calls for further research on girls' reception of media texts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge the following sources for granting permission to reproduce song lyrics in this article:

“My Life as a Teenage Robot”

from the Nickelodeon Television Show MY LIFE AS A TEENAGE ROBOT

Words and Music by Peter A. Lurye Copyright © 2003 by Music by

Nickelodeon, Inc.

All Rights Administered by Ensign Music LLC

International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved“

Something To Sing About”

from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

Words and Music by Joss Whedon

Copyright © 2001 T C F Music Publishing, Inc.

All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

Notes

¹My transcription of the complete lyrics is as follows:

Five o'clock, got a call to go blading at the skate park down by the mall,

But my mom says I've got to prevent some aliens from annihilating us all.

With the strength of a million and seventy men, I guess I really shouldn't complain.

Still, I wish I could go for a walk without rusting in the rain.

It's enough to fry my brain.

So welcome to my life as a teenage robot.

A teenage robot life!

²Nick.com and Nicksplat.com, the Web site for Nickelodeon's Asia Pacific market, both offer this description of the show:

When you're metal on the outside and teenager on the inside, sometimes life seems so unfair. XJ9 (or Jenny as she likes to be called), is tired of defending the Earth. She'd rather do something exciting like obsess about pop stars, teen magazines and hanging out with her friends, Brad and Tuck. If you think life as a human teenager is hard, try being 6-feet-tall and made of metal. Will Jenny find time to save the world and still get to go to the prom?

In a similar vein, Nick.co.uk—Nickelodeon UK's online presence—states:

Jenny is a super-powered robot with a super sensitive teenage heart. Her primary function is protecting the planet from any and all disasters. But, like all teenagers, she has her own ideas about how she would like to live. Defending the Earth has become a mundane chore; she's bored with being a super hero and wants to do something really exciting, like go to high school! Her ultimate dream is to hang out with teenagers of the non-metallic variety. Imagine every effort to mingle with normal teens mangled by your mechanical nature. Imagine being responsible for the world's safety but forbidden from driving the family car. It's enough to make a kid blow a circuit!

³ My Life as a Teenage Robot is a spin-off of Nickelodeon's Oh Yeah Cartoons, a television cartoon anthology series on which it originally aired as a short called “My Neighbor is a Teenage Robot” (“Meet the Nicktoons Family,” n.d., My Life as a Teenage Robot section, ¶ 2).

⁴Rated TV Y-7, My Life as a Teenage Robot targets children ages 7 to 11.

⁵The time in which the show is set is not specified. However, according to the My Life as a Teenage Robot page on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com; “My Life as a Teenage Robot,” n.d.), one can deduce that the show is set in 2081.

⁶As of 2006, members of the Academy may submit up to two entries to the Emmy Awards at no cost. Additional entries require payment of a fee ranging from $200-$800, depending on the type of award and the number of team members involved (Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005, p. 2–3). However, the Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation award is a juried category, which does not have nominations (“Castanella hits…,” 2004). According to the 2005–2006 Rules and Procedures, nominees for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation who are background designers are “responsible for designing and drawing key production backgrounds for the submitted single episode of a series or special” (p. 20). Hong's award in this category in 2004 was for the 2003 My Life as a Teenage Robot episode entitled “The Wonderful World of Wizzley” (“Emmy Awards: 2004,” n.d.).

⁷Nickelodeon's global reach is impressive. According to Nickelodeon's official international Web site (“Nick International,” n.d.), Nickelodeon “reaches a total of 287.6 million households in 162 territories worldwide via 28 channels, 22 branded program blocks, and two broadband services across Africa, Asia and the Pacific Rim, CIS/Baltic Republics, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Programming is also aired on third party broadcasters in major territories around the world, increasing Nickelodeon's exposure to 673.6 million households” (¶ 1).

⁸This PVD can only be played on Hasbro's VideoNow XP Interactive Video System, a handheld video viewing system for children.

⁹Epigraphs quoting girls have been culled from my fieldwork in which I conducted long-term group interviews with over thirty 8- to 11-year-old girl informants of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. During our meetings, we screened and discussed a variety of girl power shows, including My Life as a Teenage Robot. In quoting these girls in this paper, I have changed their names to ensure their anonymity.

¹⁰Each half-hour episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot contains two 15-minute segments.

¹¹Girl power's denaturalization of gendered binaries can be understood as part of the third wave feminist project.

¹²Thanks to Tom Polcari for suggesting consideration of this point.

¹³Jenny's use of magazines to construct her teenage identity is in discourse with the broader cultural construction of the teenage girl through magazines, as described by scholars such as Driscoll (1995), Mazzarella (1999), McRobbie (1994, 1997, 2000), and Schrum (1998). The themes within teenage girls' magazines have much in common with the themes prevalent in girl power texts, especially in their emphasis on the performance of normative femininity, their bias towards representations of slender, White, privileged girls, often to the exclusion of others, and the idea that other girls may be untrustworthy, which divisively promotes heteronormative boy-girl relationships over female solidarity.

¹⁴The fact that she rejected the rhetoric due to her individual relationship with Brad is problematic, and it echoes second-wave feminist critiques that the third wave—of which girl power is a part—is insufficiently collective and overly individual.

¹⁵This echoes Sherrie Inness's criqitue of the female action heroes in the 1970s series, Charlie's Angels. Inness (1999) writes, “Only the Angels are tough enough to handle the problems they encounter; other women appear hopelessly weak and inept. In this fashion, the Angels' toughness is highlighted by suggesting the helplessness of most women, revealing that the Angels are the exception, not the rule” (p. 45).