_o 5* BY ELIZABETH A. ALLEN e need some super- heroines now more than ever. We need witches. mutants. slayers and freaks to fight for us and along side us. Maybe Girls Who Bite Back, edited by Emily Pohl- Weary (Sumach Press. 2004), will help us find some. Half the authors in GWBB think Bujfv the Vampire Slayer epitomizes girl power. Let's ask her. Hey. skinny blonde teenager. you star in your own TV show. You karate-chop through vamps and demons the way that a chef juliennes car- rots! You're strong, smart and always witty. You're the coolest thing since Wonder Bread, right? On second thought, maybe not. You see. Buffy, you ARE Wonder Bread. You're per- fectly white. just like all your friends. As Candra Gill points out in her essay "Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First: Dynamics of Race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." any characters of color on the show are either subservient. dead. minor. or sev- eral of the above. Buffy. you're supposed to be an Everygirl. but you aren’t. Your bourgeois, homogenous world isn't as rich and as multi-colored as ours. You can't be our superhero. You're too boring. We'll get off the tube, then. and look into fiction. GWBB enthusiastically turns the pages of classics, looking for feminist inspiration. Catherine Stinson’s essay “Red-Headed Orphans Rule" directs us to a trio of feisty literary carrot-tops: Annie, Anne of Green Gables, and Pippi Longstocking. They might be what we're looking for. Hi there, Annie, cute comic-strip orphan. You over- come the squalor of an alcohol- soaked orphanage to win love and parental guidance in the fonn of Daddy Warbucks. That's 131095 an Superheroism sounds an awful lot like finding what you’re good at and what makes you happy, then striving, no matter what, to do good. We can do that! kick-ass. Could you be our hero? Wait a minute. Stinson points out that you ARE just playing out the ol' Cinderella myth, Annie. You get rescued by this prince/daddy figure, who, disturbingly enough, capitalizes on war bucks. We don't want to say this, Annie, but you have this unnerving passivity. You're, like, colluding with the patri- archy. And Anne of Green Gables unfortunately, you're pretty much the same. You're smart and imaginative; you show independence in attending college and becoming a teacher. But then you settle with child- hood crush Gilbert. Sony. Anne, but you're clinging to that man and breakin‘ our heart. Our superhero could be Pippi Longstocking, from Astrid Lindgren's children's books. How about it, Pippi? You lift cir- cus strongmen over your head, laugh at policemen and merrily shock squares everywhere. To Stinson, you're a perfect femi- nist icon. But not to us, not real- ly. You're amusing and enter- taining, but you’re too far—out, with your pet monkey and your cannibal-king father. to be rele- vant. We like you, but, like Buffy, you're not a superhero for us in this world. If we can't find a super- hero among current examples. GWBB gives us another option. We can make our own! We'll create a superhero of color: Gilla in Nalo Hopkinson's “The Smile on the Face." She's just an aver- age teenaged girl who says no to the sexual harassment of one guy and yes to her gentle boyfriend wannabe. Gilla, we know how hard it is to speak one word, to spell out what you want. In this world, THAT'S a superpower. We'll make superheroes that we can identify with, like Shem in Tija's rotinded. as_vm- metrical "Sluinp_vheroes." We'll have agoraphobic. fragile abuse sun ixors. like in Rose Bianchini's "li\er)da_\ Superhero," For her. each da_v's living takes strength and exem- plar)’ courage. ()nce _\ou think about it. the ordinar_v acts of sur- viving and thriving are true superpowers. ()ur superheroes exist beyond the bounds of revisionist feminist fiction. They're all around us. In fact. they wrote GWBB! Marc Ngui and Magda . Wojtyra. you shall be our super- heroes. ln your clever comic “Crisis Girl in Spring Rolls!" you point out that making nifty hors d'oeuvres quickly should be considered a superpower. And Sophie Levy. you're super too. With your trenchant essay. “.\lanit‘esto for the Bitten." you analyze our ambivalence toward the seductive and threatening figures of aliens. vampires and cyborgs. You (IWHII contribu- tors. _\ou're lieroic. pushing for- ward your pms er, shoxsing us how “C can (lo it too. So the superheroes aren't otit there. 'l'lie_\ "re in here -- inside us. even. ('ar|y Stasko's essay. the best and truest of the lot, tells you “How to lie Your Own Superhero." In her words. superheroism sounds an awful lot like finding what you're good at and what makes you happy. then striving. no matter what, to do good. We can do that! I mean. God knows it ain't easy. You have to be super. You have to he heroic. But if you look everywhere and can't find superheroes, then you must rise to the challenge your.self. V Sit/ier woman If/izuhel/I A. Allen _/ilitls /tt'r.\'('I_/'.\'urromI(/t'