The foundations of our argument here were sketched in our essay, ‘Glass and Game: The Speculative Girl Hero’, published in New Directions in Popular Fiction (Gelder 2016). We also draw on Alexandra’s doctoral thesis – Renegotiating the Heroine: Postfeminism on the Speculative Screen (2015) – and on some of Catherine’s earlier work, including Girls (2002) and Teen Film (2011).
We want to first acknowledge the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, an environment that has helped shape our work. This book is also indebted to the efforts of Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, editors of this series on youth and cinema. Yannis and Siân set out to build a cohort of scholars interested in youth on screen around the world, and their achievement has helped us all. We also want to thank Ken Gelder, for his editorial work on the rambling draft of an essay that always wanted to be a book, Deborah Heatwole, who assisted with proof-reading, and our colleagues in the International Girls Studies Association who have helped create a scholarly space for approaching girl culture with the multidisciplinary seriousness it demands.
We also have some more personal thanks to offer. Catherine: Thanks, as always, to my family and friends for continual support, especially Sean Fuller and Dawn Moore, who shared more of these movies with me than they could have wanted. For my part, however, this book is dedicated to Ruth Talbot-Stokes – beloved sister, faithful ally, and fellow fantasy fan. Alexandra: Thanks particularly to Deborah and Sam Heatwole for their support, both practical and otherwise, and for giving me the books in the first place. Thanks also to Amanda Cuthbert and Gabriel Gilbert for being my fellow film watchers, and to Megan, and Lucy and Charlotte, two generations of girls on fire. For my part, this book is dedicated to my grandparents, Norma and Jim Fairfield, whose imagination and storytelling inspired a lifelong love of all things fantastic.