If you grew up as a girl watching TV and digesting cartoons and advertisements, and now, as a young adult, you dig Bitch Magazine and still get a kick from comics, anime and horror movies; or if you’re just another feminist intellectual by day and a non-confessed TV junkie at night, you will definitely enjoy this book. Published by Sumach Press (www.sumachpress.com), Canadian “publishers of dynamic feminist writing with a critical perspective,” and edited by Toronto based writer and artist Emily Pohl-Weary, this anthology is inspired by DIY ( “do it yourself”) urban feminist culture and it brings a refreshing perspective to feminist issues such as gender representations, cultural practices, and power relations.

Pohl-Weary asked a group of female writers and artists born from the early seventies on, to help her create “a book I would have loved to read as a teenager and that my friends and I would like to read now” (22). The diversity of responses that constitute the exciting thirty six essays of this book, sometimes accompanied by graphics and in a variety of formats, make this book a dynamic, lively text. It even ends up inviting readers to participate in the forum of the book's website www.girlswhobiteback.com, where you can follow up on some of the artists' work and get various interesting links to related issues, organizations, and people. The contributors to this collection range from young feminist scholars to activist and artists from all walks of life.

Girls Who Bite Back explores representations of female fantasy characters with superpowers: how they offer alternate sites for identification to generations of young women, and how different characters can function as metaphors to promote self-confidence, power and self-control. Some of the essays make an effort to look at the complexities of the female characters that have been represented since the 1940s, also providing a critical look at the exploitation of “girl power culture.” One of the contributors, Susan Bustos, also dares to offer scientific evidence that explains female superpowers at a molecular level. Her account, entitled “Report on Five Case Studies of Females with Enhanced Characteristics: Molecular Basis and Treatment Strategies,” is cheekily labeled as a “classified document.”

The diversity of contributions to this collection is thrilling, ranging from academic articles that analyze the dynamics of race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the perspective of cultural studies (“‘Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First’: Dynamics of Race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” by Candra K. Gill), to articles that consist as a series of drawings or are formatted like a comic strip, to a short piece of fictionalized autobiography and even a conversation through instant messages. Some of the essay highlights include: “How to Be Your Own Superhero: A Chronicle of Experimentation And Fascination” by Carly Stasko; “Suffragettes, Vigilantes and Superheroes. One Girl’s Guide to Chicks in Comics” by Elizabeth Walker; and “Divine Secrets of the Yaga Sisterhood: The Journey from Supervirgin to Supermom to Supergoddess” by Sandra Kasturi. In the non-written format, the contributions of artists Lisa Smolkin’s “Miniature Coloured Marshmallows,” Eliza Griffiths’ “Karate Girls,” and Sharyl Boyle’s “The Left Hand of God” are outstanding.

The most valuable contribution of Girls Who Bite Back is that it recontextualizes these cultural products through a feminist analysis that understands the complexities and contradictions of representation itself. For a long time, Western hegemonic feminism, particularly the denominated “second-wave,” rejected the mainstream representation of women and girls under the assumption of a universal oppression that was expressed in different fields, especially popular culture. For instance, the tendency of “traditional feminists” to reject the term “girl” as a feminist identification, and to consider these representations as intrinsically negative, has now been challenged by others feminists such as Lisa Soccio:

In this way, the authors take up a dimension frequently overlooked by feminist scholars – popular culture – refusing to fall into easy second-wave feminism interpretations of absolute subjugation-victimization or power-versus-freedom when it comes to women, and showing how power operates in much more complex ways. In this sense, this book exhales pure Foucauldian feminism: instead of judging these popular representations in moralist terms, it seeks to “critique and celebrate these constructions of the imagination” (Pohl-Weary 21).