Girl Friday Power

Chloe Sullivan and the Hacker Sidekicks of

Twenty-First Century Teen Television
TARA K. PARMITER

Sometimes heroes cant do it all on their own, Chloethats why they

need sidekicks.Lois Lane, Metallo (2009)

Ladies, get out your boxing gloves and bustiers, Jennifer Steinhauer
proclaims in Pow! Slam! Thank You, Maam, a New York Times piece on the
proliferation of tough female action stars in the popular media of the early
twenty-rst century.1 With Buffy, Xena, and Dark Angel, among others, slapping, immolating and kickboxing their way through life, Steinhauer sees
women and girls charging into a formerly male-dominated arena: sheer physical prowess. Since the turn of the century, these new heroines have rallied
under the banner of girl power and deftly stomped on old stereotypes that relegated women to romantic interests and damsels-in-distress. As Sherrie Inness
notes in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, not
only have these tough women heroes taken on heroic roles formerly reserved
for men, but they do not require men to help them, a shift that removes women
from their stereotypical role as mens helpers.2 These superwomen embrace
their roles as leaders in a brave new world, refusing to be the second sex any
longer.
Whereas the action chick rules with brute force, the hacker diva rules
with her intellect, her high-tech gadgets, and her incredibly fast typing skills.
Perhaps as prominent a pop cultural phenomenon as the physically empowered
heroines, female hackers of the turn-of-the-twenty-rst century run the gamut
from the sexy Acid Burn of Hackers (1995) and Trinity of The Matrix (1999),
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