American entertainment often presents heroines who still conform to the confining stereotypes of passivity, docility, sexual objectification, and ultimate dependence on the hero, offering patriarchal narratives in popular culture. This thesis investigates American girlhood entertainment - a subset of popular culture - in comparison to the newly popular genre of Japanese comics, shojo manga, which also targets a girl audience. By focusing on gender issues - power distribution, agency, and gender roles - and utilizing a mixed methodology of rhetorical and quantitative analysis, my research explores the rhetorical devices and narrative structures that empower or constrain heroines, structure power distributions, and assign gender roles. To better understand shojo's recent popularity among teenage girls, this research provides 1) a close critical analysis of shojo texts to examine the messages and rhetorical devices featured in these narratives, and 2) an analysis of audience reception through a participant survey and an analysis of audience-generated message boards. This research participates in Girlhood Studies, Intercultural Studies, and Narrative Criticism as I analyze narratives that target an American girl audience and enact entertainment globalization. My analysis suggests that shojo develops from feminist motives, encourages a pro-feminist reality, and successfully markets itself to an audience of American girls, who form parasocial relationships and wishfully identify with the heroines because of their empowered characteristics and the portrayal of equality within romantic relationships.

The Disney Princess Brand includes 11 Disney Princess films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Brave (2012). The goal of this campaign is for audiences to be entertained by the narratives while encouraging identification with the princesses in the films (Do Rozario, 2004; Orenstein, 2006). Scholars have suggested possible media effects of representations and messages depicted related to gender roles (England, Descartes, and Collier-Meek, 2011) and romantic relationships (Segrin and Nabi, 2002). No studies to date have examined the potential correlation between media effects of all 11 Disney Princess films and viewers' expectations regarding romantic relationships with a theoretical background in cultivation theory, social cognitive theory, wishful identification, and uses and gratification theory. The purpose of this thesis was to explore the relationship between potential media effects due to watching Disney Princess films and expectations of romantic relationships. An online cross-sectional survey was administered to female undergraduate students enrolled at Virginia Tech (N = 110). Bivariate correlation analyses were computed to measure the data. Results did not support hypotheses related to motivations for watching Disney Princess films, cultivated ideologies due to exposure of all films, and perceived similarity to princesses in relation to idealistic beliefs of romantic relationships. Wishful identification with the princesses was significantly correlated with participants' idealistic beliefs of romantic relationships. Possible implications are that participants in late adolescence (18 - 23 years of age) wish to be like the Disney princesses and to have similar romantic relationships that are represented in the films. / Master of Arts