Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational ... · Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series Elizabeth Marshall Children's

Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhoodthrough the Nancy Drew Series

Elizabeth Marshall

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 2,Summer 2012, pp. 210-227 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/chq.2012.0018

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210 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series

Elizabeth Marshall

© 2012 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 210–227.

Elizabeth Marshall is Associate Professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. She is coeditor of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, and has published articles on the representation of North American girlhoods within children’s literature, popular culture, and women’s memoir.

Nancy Drew is often seen as emblematic of American girlhood as self-reliant and aspirational, within the parameters of middle-class, mid-century striving. Since the creation in the 1930s of “the titian-haired sleuth that all American girls love” (Kehe), the character herself, the mystery series, and associated products have crystallized as a durable brand of national identity, consumerism, and girlhood.1 Nancy Drew is an indelible character through whom the category of girlhood is consistently reproduced in relation to modernity and nation; but an indissoluble and underexamined aspect of her well-studied presence in the production of American girlhood is the global scale of the series. The ways in which the character of Nancy Drew continues to be revived globally constitute a key feature of the series’ circulation and success. Given that the Nancy Drew Mystery series “was first licensed for foreign editions in the 1930s” and that the mysteries “have been published in nineteen countries and translated for audiences in the Scandinavian countries, Malaysia, South Africa, Israel, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia” (Kismaric and Heiferman 112), Nancy Drew can also be considered a successful global brand marketed to and consumed by a range of reading publics in a variety of locations.

Just as the series travels across national borders, the character Nancy Drew travels transnationally. Of the fifty-six titles in the original series, Nancy travels outside the United States in thirteen, roughly a quarter of the total (Fox). The first transnational mystery takes place in 1935 in The Message in the Hollow Oak, when the teen sleuth goes to Canada; the last in the original series brings her to Japan in The Thirteenth Pearl (1979). In the newly rebranded Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ Papercutz graphic novels, the mysteries lead to Turkey and India. Beyond expanding the geographical scope of the girl sleuth’s activities, transnational travel emphasizes the brand’s focus on mobility and allows for

211Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series

contact between Nancy Drew and a series of “exotic global girl strangers” who need her assistance to solve a mystery. Nancy Drew’s interactions with such strangers frame a number of fantasies about racial difference within the series. In this article, I focus on three of these imaginings: the construction of girls from across the globe as a “global sisterhood”; the representation of Nancy Drew as benevolent global girl tourist; and Nancy’s desire and ability to masquerade as a girl of color. Through the figure of the exotic global girl stranger, a variety of racialized girlhoods are put up for consumption by characters in the series as well as by actual readers.

In what follows, I focus on the representations of girlhood within three ex-emplary titles, two from the original series, The Mysterious Mannequin (1970) and The Thirteenth Pearl, and one of the contemporary Papercutz graphic novels, The Girl Who Wasn’t There (2006).2 I choose these three texts as a way to historicize how travel and the figure of the exotic global girl stranger serve as essential elements of the Nancy Drew brand. Throughout, I seek to uncover a “politics of girlhood” that the figure of the exotic global girl stranger blots out within the series: namely, that Nancy Drew’s “feminism” or “girl power” is relational and relies on the imaginary and ultimately hierarchical representa-tions of racialized global girls from a range of non–North American, non-European locations. What is at stake here is how the imaginary representation and marketing of exotic global girl strangers to sell the Nancy Drew series relates to contemporary theorizations of North American girls as subjects who find empowerment by consuming or performing “Other” racial and/or ethnic identities.

Theorizing Girlhoods in the Nancy Drew SeriesThis analysis contributes to previous Nancy Drew scholarship,3 as well as to the interdisciplinary field of girls’ studies,4 by building on and adding to previous critical analyses of Nancy Drew that focus on race, gender, and nation within the context of postcoloniality.5 Specifically, I contextualize this paper within transnational girlhood studies.6 This strand of girls’ studies originates in trans-national feminist theoretical practices (Ahmed; Grewal), and is concerned with how “global capitalist and imperialist dynamics operate within the material practices and representations of ‘girlhood’ or ‘the girl child’” (Weems 179). Just as this approach delineates the differences between and among women, it also allows for an attention to hierarchical relationships between and among girls—often theorized in popular discourse as apolitical, vulnerable, and/or innocent subjects—within the context of globalization.

Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the figure of the stranger in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality structures my analysis of the visual and discursive representations of global girls within the series. The Nancy Drew materials demonstrate what Ahmed defines as “stranger fetishism”—a prac-tice through which the figure of the stranger is imbued with meaning. In the


Nancy Drew series, girls of color from a range of non–North American and non-European locales are fetishized as exotic global girl strangers who are just different enough from Nancy Drew to suggest that racial and cultural differ-ence can be bridged through consuming or passing as a racialized girl. Thus “Stranger fetishism is a fetishism of figures: it invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as it cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination” (Ahmed 5; italics in original). The series invests the figure of the exotic global girl stranger with meaning so that girlhood—rather than race, religion, ethnicity, and/or nationality––becomes the universal category that binds all girls together. In the process, larger histories of imperialism are denied in favor of a representation of Nancy Drew as benevolent (and politi-cally innocent) global girl.7

The representations of girlhood within the Nancy Drew series, then, are em-bedded within complicated global flows of goods and media depicting fictional representations of Other places. Ahmed writes that “[t]he flow of images and objects across border lines invites us to consider how identity is reconstituted in an intimate relationship to ‘the strange’ and the exotic” (116). The figure of the exotic global girl stranger in the Nancy Drew series offers consumers a “close encounter” with this exotic Other. Tracing the representation of the girl stranger from the original series through the recent graphic novels under-scores the ways in which difference is elided through the fetishism of the exotic global girl stranger. Thus this project adds to transnational girlhood studies as it attends to differences between and among girls, rather than the similarities between them, to make visible the limits of theorizing empowerment only in relationship to gender.

This is particularly important, because current efforts to market Nancy Drew rely on tapping discourses of “girl power” as a way to sell the series. About the girl sleuth, an author for USA Today writes: “An ultra-early icon of girl power, Nancy had the smarts and feistiness that made her an inspiration to teens and preteens in the 1930s” (Strauss). Nancy Drew as plucky American girl enters into larger cultural debates about girls as subjects in the public sphere through the ideological work of her branding. The series itself is a commodity, aimed at selling a particular idea about American girlhood as an identity that attends to the global.

Branding Nancy DrewNancy Drew remains a “best-selling literary franchise” (“Warner Bros.”). The original Nancy Drew mystery series, as well as the newly branded Nancy Drew, Girl Detective™ books and graphic novels, are authored and illustrated by multiple people. “Carolyn Keene” is a pseudonym for several authors, most famously Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. Nancy Drew was created by Edward Stratemeyer, tycoon of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s series fiction, and published by Grosset & Dunlap until 1979; since 1984, Nancy Drew’s image has been owned and controlled


by Simon & Schuster, a division of the multinational CBS and one of the four largest English-language publishers.

The Nancy Drew character has been licensed for products that include board games, television shows, films, and graphic novels. Simon & Schuster relies on savvy and zealous marketing to “expand Drew’s presence as a brand” (Strauss par. 8), aiming its products at “a core target group”: tween girls ages eight to twelve. Since the mid-1980s, Simon & Schuster has pursued an aggressive publishing program, offering several Nancy Drew lines designed for different ages and book outlets (Greenberg 67). These books are carefully designed, both visually and in terms of plot and character, to sell to the girls who read them.

In 2004, Simon & Schuster updated and rebranded Nancy Drew’s image for contemporary girls in the Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ series, in which Nancy speaks to the reader in the first rather than the third person and trades in her gas-guzzling roadster for a blue hybrid. In 2005, Simon & Schuster licensed Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ to appear in the Papercutz manga-style graphic novels. Papercutz president and founder Ted Nantier states:

We’re focusing on the tween market with Papercutz. This is truly a huge market. As you know, Nancy Drew was recently given a big re-launch by Simon & Schuster, with the introduction of an all-new Nancy Drew series, bringing the original girl detective into our modern world. It’s a major success—with the first book landing on the New York Times best-seller list. (“NBM’s Papercutz”)

The adventures in the Papercutz comics are also frequently linked to and/or marketed in tandem with best-selling computer games by Her Interactive, in which Nancy Drew solves mysteries.8 The Her Interactive Web site informs buyers that “Nancy Drew has engaged readers and served as a role model glob-ally for generations.” The overall marketing strategy thus emphasizes Nancy Drew as global girl and explicitly calls out to a larger tween market that exceeds national boundaries, and is instead tied to globalization and assumed access of youth to electronic media.

Selling Nancy Drew as Global Role ModelThe claim that Nancy Drew has global appeal and serves as a universal role model for all girls and women reflects a historically American fantasy of global sisterhood, as represented in the series itself. Nancy Drew’s iconic international status may have less to do with innate appeal than with the availability of the titles in the series and the ways in which they are transported across interna-tional borders through marketing and translations, as well as through the work of Christian missionaries and other charitable groups that donate such texts as part of their development work.9 Part of the Nancy Drew brand’s global appeal, then, is the result of explicit marketing as well as benevolent cultural imperi-alism, through which the books—and their particular ideas about American girlhood—are transported around the globe.


Radhika Parameswaran writes about this access to Nancy Drew books in India: “The British colonial history of English-language publishing in India, coupled with the lack of children’s books in English written by Indians, means that for many young urban Indians, imported series books and comics from the United Kingdom and the United States were staples of their childhood reading material” (“Reading” 186). Filipina scholar Melinda de Jesús offers a similar critique of the Nancy Drew series: “In our aspirations for a feminist role model in the girl sleuth, we were also forced to take in the cultural baggage of white supremacy inherent in the series’ depictions of American girlhood and its possibilities” (239–40).

Even though the series has been compellingly criticized for its imperialist elements and its limited representation of American girlhood, the character of Nancy Drew remains a touch point for contemporary discussions of feminism. As a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, Sonia Sotomayor proclaimed her childhood passion for Nancy Drew, which spurred columnists to write about the role the girl sleuth played in the coming-of-age stories of numerous successful (white) women, including Secretary of State Hillary Rod-ham Clinton and Diane Sawyer (Hoffman; Murphy). The Nancy Drew brand relies on key ideas of Western liberal feminisms—mobility, independence, and education as empowerment––and in the process allows for the fantasy (one that Parameswaran and others disrupt) of a sisterhood that centers exclusively on girlhood. For instance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who publicly rejected Islam and wrote the memoir Infidel, as well as codeveloped the controversial film Submission, attributes her adult politics to reading Nancy Drew as a teen. In an interview she says, “When I was 13, the detective Nancy Drew—as an icon of a feisty young woman sleuth––shut me off from my life of cooking and cleaning. It sowed the seeds of rebellion” (Chatterjee). For Ali, now a member of a conservative think tank in the United States, the character of Nancy Drew serves as shorthand for liberal feminisms and sustains an imaginary divide in which women in the West are more “empowered” than those in the East. Much like the representation of girls and women of color in the series, Ali serves as the safe exotic stranger who enthusiastically embraces Nancy Drew and all that she represents.

Global Girls In the Nancy Drew stories, the encounter with a stranger typically initiates the mystery to be solved. What is interesting about the titles organized around transnational travel is that the exotic global girl stranger is immediately recog-nized as a friend of Nancy Drew rather than as a villain. As Ahmed writes: “We need to consider how the stranger is an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities, including communities of living (dwelling and travel), as well as epistemic communities” (6). This acceptance of the exotic global girl stranger stands in contrast to other racialized bodies that are expelled from or are marked as out of place in River Heights, usually as villains or as menial


help (Jones; Romalov). Instead, she is embraced by Nancy, Bess, and George and incorporated into their world as a friend.10

The Nancy Drew texts offer a set of interchangeable exotic global girl strangers. Ruth Mayer defines the global girl as “a pointedly modern girl, a cosmopolitan traveler at home all over the world, although clearly socialized in a Western framework in the first place” (124). Global girls are not necessarily white; rather, their status and their ability to be recognized are marked through the Western values associated with them. The exotic strangers in the original series are girls of color who visit, perform, and/or study in the United States. Girls like Aisha Hatun from Turkey (Keene, Mannequin) reside temporarily in River Heights and return to live in their countries after Nancy Drew helps them solve a mystery. These exotic global girl strangers share Nancy’s characteristics; they are mobile, independent, and educated.

To be recognized as a friendly stranger, an exotic global girl must be just different enough from Nancy for the formula to work. These variations are defined in superficial ways that are tied to individual choice. Ahmed writes that “[d]ifferences are defined in terms of culture, and culture, as in the official discourses of multiculturalism, is restricted to the privatized and the expressive domain of ‘style’” (116). Thus, like the “pretty accent” that marks Aisha Hatun as exotic (Keene, Mannequin 96–97), clothes and style become a way to define difference as part of one’s individuality and uniqueness. While the series takes up discourses of multiculturalism in which characters adopt rather than reject the distinctiveness of the exotic global girl stranger, this representation works to “fetishize the stranger as the origin of difference” (Ahmed 113). The exotic global girl stranger draws attention away from larger national and racial his-tories in favor of a representation of difference as consumable, something that can be purchased through tourism or the acquisition of certain products. Each girl or woman has her own unique style, and her differences are highlighted throughout the novels. These contrasts are superficial and serve to highlight the representation of Nancy Drew as a cosmopolitan traveler who can easily navigate through a range of cultural contexts.

For instance, when Nancy and her friends travel, they may solve mysteries; however, they also spend time shopping for ethnic clothing. Clothes are often referred to as “costumes” in the series, emphasizing the ability of Nancy and her chums to try on and take off difference. These costumes are usually juxta-posed with the more acceptable Western style of dress and serve as occasions for gendered history lessons about primitivism and civilization. For instance, in the Mysterious Mannequin Nancy describes a young Turkish mannequin to her father:

“She wore pale-blue pantaloons and a long-sleeved cerise blouse. What interested me most was the big white veil that covered her whole head except her eyes and the upper part of her nose.” “That’s right,” her father agreed. “Women in Turkey were required to wear that type of costume before the country became a republic in 1923. But nowadays most of them wear Western-style dress.” (3)


Difference, especially in the texts in which transnational travel organizes the plot, is about a knowable and consumable cultural Other.

The positive representations of the Nancy-like exotic global girl strangers are juxtaposed with the girls and women of color living in non–North American, non-European countries. When Nancy and her friends arrive in Turkey in The Mysterious Mannequin, they catch a taxi, driven by a man who speaks “fluent English” and is “a student at the University of Istanbul” (145). The Western visitors, along with Aisha, get a guided tour of the city:

“I notice there is a preponderance of men,” Nancy remarked. “Also that some of the peasant women wear traditional long black skirts and head scarves drawn over their faces.”

Aisha informs Nancy that:

While Turkey is now western in its thinking, and has adopted the clothes, and business and banking methods of Europe, many of the old customs remain. One of these is that married women stay in their homes a great part of the time. (145)

Fashion and choice—the decision whether to wear Western clothes or tradi-tional ones—defines who is a friendly stranger to be accepted. As with their ability to travel, through dress global girls exhibit their empowerment. Later in the text, the Turkish peasant women are compared again to the more mod-ern friends of Aisha, with whom Nancy Drew stays in Turkey. The friends are described as wearing “simple Western-style day-time clothes” (146). An atten-tion to style, the ability to travel internationally, and the resources to purchase unique goods define global–girl status.

Nancy Drew, TouristThe inclusion of exotic global girl strangers in the series necessitates fictional representations of Other places and offers readers the fantasy of traveling to a strange location. As Ahmed points out, “[t]he strange encounters that produce the figure of the stranger do not necessarily involve the immediacy of the face to face. The subject does not have to travel to meet the one who is apparently from another place” (148). Nancy Drew drives cars, rides trains, boards ships, and flies on planes; it is through her perspective that readers travel to different locales. She moves about without constraints, crosses borders without difficulty, and allies herself with authorities in each country. Neither an immigrant nor a displaced person, Nancy holds an American passport that allows her to travel freely, especially because her travel is defined in terms of benevolence (she never accepts payment for her sleuthing). In this way, Nancy Drew might be best defined as a tourist, who travels for adventure, sightseeing, shopping, and freedom from the constraints of everyday work. This tourism allows the reader to experience these environments as strange—to learn the codes of fashionable difference––through the adventures of the teen sleuth.


Although not officially travel writing, the marketing of the series relies on the tropes of travel to sell the mysteries––adventure, contact with other cul-tures, and discovery. 11 The description of The Mysterious Mannequin in the front matter of the book reads:

Tracking down the intricate trail of clues takes Nancy and her friends Bess and George, Ned, Burt and Dave to Turkey. Their sleuthing leads them to the Grand Bazaar in the exotic city of Istanbul, where Bess mysteriously disappears. Events move swiftly as Nancy and her friends try to solve this challenging mystery, and lead to an exciting climax that will delight and thrill all admirers of America’s favorite girl detective. (N. pag.)

The books are not only mystery narratives, but also travelogues that provide imaginary descriptions of other people and places.

Tales of Nancy Drew’s travels alongside her exotic global girlfriends allow readers to feel as if they, too, have visited a different place. This description of a Turkish bazaar in The Mysterious Mannequin serves as an exemplary passage:

The din was deafening! Bells jangled. Hawkers called out their wares, ranging from copper cooking utensils to leather luggage. Crowds of people, mostly Turkish men and tourists, milled along the narrow streets. Dogs roamed at will. The whole area was well-lighted by un-shaded electric bulbs in many of the open-front shops, particularly where men were urging passers-by to purchase their jewelry. There were markets with cuts of lamb and dried fish hanging up, and bakeries with baklava and other pastries. (150)

The narration highlights for the reader the sights and sounds, unique goods for sale, as well as the culturally specific foods such as baklava.

Nancy Drew has access to other cultures that the girl strangers in the series do not. The exotic global girl strangers therefore become objects of knowledge for Nancy, and for her readers. Trips allow the reader to learn about the stranger as Nancy travels through, learns from, but is never absorbed into other cultures. She anchors the reader in Western notions of travel for educational purposes, but also reaffirms the US-centric norm against which difference is assessed. The stability of perspective despite the appearance of cultural exchange underlies the dynamics of racial masquerade that Nancy and her friends perform in the course of playing detective.

Playing RaceIn the original series, Nancy and her girlfriends sometimes pass as girls of color. According to Ahmed, “The very techniques of consuming, becoming and passing are informed by access to cultural capital and knowledges embedded in colonial and class privilege which give the dominant subject the ability to move and in which ‘the stranger’ is assumed to be knowable, seeable and hence be-able (133; original italics). In the Nancy Drew series, this becoming is “visu-ally coded” through dress-up (121). It is important to note that while the girl


sleuth can know the Other by dressing up as a girl of color, the racialized girls and women in the series cannot disguise themselves as Nancy Drew.

In The Thirteenth Pearl, Nancy Drew goes to Japan with her father to help locate a stolen pearl necklace. Here, her strange encounter with Otherness includes masquerading as a girl of color; she is invited to disguise herself as a Japanese girl at the suggestion of her hostess, Mrs. Mise. The narrator describes Nancy’s transformation:

First she rubbed white salve on Nancy’s face and covered it with powder to lighten her suntanned skin. Then she darkened and upturned Nancy’s eyebrows and put a black wig on her head. It had a tiny lotus blossom on one side. She was given a rosebud-type-mouth. Finally Mrs. Mise brought out a pretty but subdued kimono, an obi, a pair of white stockings, and sandals. (47)

The disguise allows Nancy to accompany her father to Mr. Kampura’s office.

Nancy bowed low when she was introduced, but on purpose her name was so slurred that no one could understand it. (48)

Nancy Drew is able to temporarily be an exotic global girl stranger as she dons different fashions, hairstyles, and cosmetics. This embodiment offers a fantasy of proximity to the Other.

Through imaginary travel and disguise, the series constructs difference for its readers as a cloak or a mask to be taken off and exchanged. While one reading of Nancy Drew’s transformation might be that race is destabilized within the text, Sara Ahmed suggests that this kind of passing represents “the violence of translation” (73). The experience of race is translated through visual image and narrative description in ways that depoliticize racial differences between girls. As Nancy Drew becomes a strange girl, she “goes ethnic” for a moment in the name of benevolence. This representation of the girl sleuth may have briefly destabilized ideas about race; however, her character is never morally, ethically, socially, or psychologically changed by the experience. Thus the racial masquer-ade only amplifies how difference is taken up as something to consume.12 The promotional blurb in The Thirteenth Pearl underscores the consumption of difference as it suggests that “readers will love accompanying Nancy, disguised as a Japanese girl, in this adventure in Tokyo” (n. pag.). Through the fetish-ism of the exotic global girl stranger, the narrative focuses on Nancy Drew’s benevolence as she becomes the Other; at the same time, it elides the violent history in which Japanese girls, as well as adults, were racialized and expelled as strangers even within American borders.

This racial masquerade could also be read as an embrace of racial differ-ence; however, Nancy’s ability to pass as a Japanese girl stands in contrast to her usual representation as mobile, free, and outspoken. In the illustration, Nancy Drew leans forward in deference to the man in front of her; her body is tightly encased in the kimono; her rosebud lips sealed so that she mumbles rather than


talks back (figure 1). This embodiment of difference allows the reader a false proximity to the strange or exotic. Nancy may pass as Japanese girl, but it is with relief that she returns to her more empowered state—knowing the kinds of freedoms she possesses that stand in stark contrast to what she has experienced.

Some might argue that this analysis of the Nancy Drew series is unfairly critical—that the original mystery series represents a particular moment in US history, and subsequently, dated ideas about race. While it might be true that the books stand as historical artifacts, it is also the case that these texts remain in high circulation around the globe. In addition, these discourses around racialized girlhood have not disappeared. In the next section, I focus on one exemplary title from the recent best-selling graphic novels to make clear that contact with racialized global girls through international travel is key to the branding of Nancy Drew as empowered subject.

Repackaging Nancy Drew The recent best-selling Papercutz graphic novels demonstrate how imperial discourses remain Nancy’s constant traveling companions. The books, based on the original series, are written by Stefan Petrucha and illustrated by Sho Murase. These texts have been advertised as hipper versions of Nancy Drew

Figure 1.


marketed to tween girls interested especially in manga. In 2004, graphic novels were “one of the fastest-expanding areas in book publishing,” and as a reporter for USA Today points out, “[s]ales of graphic novels have been soaring in the USA and Canada, up from $165 million in 2003 to $207 million a year ago” (Memmott). The biggest consumers of those texts were tween and teen girls (Johnson). In particular, shojo manga—manga explicitly for girls––was a hot seller. A reporter for the St. Petersburg Times writes that “[e]xperts say tween and teen girls buying shojo manga are largely fueling that growth. Indeed, the bestselling manga titles in the United States are shojo titles” (Johnson). While these texts are marketed as progressive formats to encourage reading, they demonstrate Leona Fisher’s claim that the Nancy Drew mysteries will “never lose their relentlessly imperialist attitudes” (70). The fourth text in the series, The Girl Who Wasn’t There, provides another instantiation of the importance of travel and contact with an exotic global girl stranger within the larger his-tory of the Nancy Drew brand.

While rebranded as a “cooler than ever” Nancy Drew, the marketing strategy for this graphic novel is strikingly similar to earlier attempts to sell books through exotic transnational travel. The advertising copy on the back of the text reads:

Nancy Drew in India? Leave it to Nancy Drew to call technical support to fix her computer to befriend a girl. But when Nancy gets a call from her new friend, Kalpana, one night, it’s not for tech support! As soon as the line goes dead, Nancy is determined to solve this new mystery—even if it means traveling to India.

In the earlier series, contact with the stranger happened when girls traveled to River Heights; in this contemporary example, Nancy Drew makes contact through technology. The girl sleuth can now meet the exotic global girl stranger through tech support, e-mail, and other twenty-first-century technologies. Whereas in the past she drove her blue roadster across the dirt roads outside of River Heights, traveled aboard boats, and flew in planes, Nancy Drew (and her consumers) now travel globally on the information superhighway.

Nancy embarks with her father and her friends upon a transnational trip to India to save Kalpana. Sahadev, a villain who serves as an international example of the bad racialized outsiders who populated the original mystery series, is a smuggler who has kidnapped Kalpana. When Nancy arrives to save her, Kalpana says:

Oh, Nancy! I can’t believe you came to help me . . . I wasn’t even sure who I could trust among the police or my own neighbors, so I called you, my friend. And you came. How can I thank you? (N. pag.; original emphasis)

The visual image accompanying the text shows Kalpana in a halter top and pants, a “modern” outfit that emphasize her status as exotic global girl stranger (figure 2). With a bare arm, Nancy Drew reaches through the bars that keep Kalpana captive and takes her hand.


Figure 2.


The next image features a group of strangers who do not share Kalpana’s “West-ern” style, visually underscoring the similarities between Nancy and Kalpana as cosmopolitan global girls. Like the representations in the original Nancy Drew mysteries such as The Mysterious Mannequin, strangers in the exotic global girl’s home country are represented as “traditional” in their dress and values.

The exotic global girl stranger as catalyst for travel to an international lo-cation (and consumption of the artifacts of cultural difference—food, dress, and so on) is a formula lifted from the earlier books in the series. Nancy Drew discovers that Sahadev is dealing in pirated DVDs. She tells the reader, “To ap-preciate how BIG this was, you’d have to know India’s film industry—named BOLLYWOOD, after . . . well, Hollywood—is one of the largest in the world.” Nancy gets an opportunity to save Kalpana again, but at one point they are both captured by Sahadev, who states, “I know Ms. Nancy Drew has a reputa-tion back home, but this is not her home!” (n. pag.; original emphasis). The villain’s ignorance of Nancy Drew’s global girl status is quickly made clear as Kalpana’s father, a police detective masquerading as Sahadev’s right-hand man, saves the girls soon after this threat.

The graphic novel rehearses the earlier formula in additional ways. The tourism elements remain key as the narrative provides facts about India; in the final scene, Kalpana shows Nancy, Bess, and George around New Delhi and they experience India as cosmopolitan global girl tourists. The focus on dress as a marker of difference that one can put on and take off is captured visually, as Bess wears a pink floral headscarf and a purple sari throughout the book (figure 3).

Mainstream reviews of the rebranded Nancy Drew focus upon whether or not Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ will speak to the needs of contemporary girls who grew up with “girl power.” This question ignores a larger “politics of girlhood” in which girl power is associated with a history of exclusions. That is, discourses of girl power are intimately tied to ideas about adult women and their political agency (Gilmore and Marshall). In addition, girl power ignores the ways in which Western liberal feminisms are not necessarily liberating for everyone. As Inderpal Grewal points out, “For many Euro-American feminist

Figure 3.


critics the need to see Western feminism as anti-imperialist in the face of much evidence to the contrary comes out of the denial of such collaborations and the desire to see feminism as wholly oppositional and existing outside of particular ideological formations” (Harem 12). When Nancy Drew is defined as feminist or as an empowered global girl, these definitions ignore the imperialist and hierarchical relationships that are reproduced in the series through the figure of the exotic global girl stranger.

In addition, while travel enables contact with other girls, and a freedom that Nancy could not otherwise have due to her lack of mobility as a depen-dent minor girl, the series continues to imagine adventure extending Nancy’s sphere in a gender-permissible mode: she’s allowed to travel if she’s helping other girls/women as the benevolent global girl. The contemporary Nancy Drew branding, then, recycles across time the image of the exotic global girl stranger as a key element of the series. This fits into contemporary marketing trends in which corporate-sponsored visions of North American girl power collude with the representation of racialized girls and women as essential to, but ultimately excluded from, the presumed benefits of that girl power—after all, it is Nancy Drew who benevolently saves the exotic global girl stranger, and not the other way around.

A Politics of GirlhoodThe stranger fetishism of the figure of the exotic global girl offers a fantasy that repositions girls as apolitical subjects, unaffected by the diverse material conditions in which girlhood is lived. As Ahmed writes, “We need to consider, then, what are the social relationships (involving both fantasy and materiality) that are concealed in stranger fetishism” (5). The Nancy Drew series relies on marketing strategies of contemporary globalization that have co-opted global diversities into a marketplace of multiculturalism, aimed at selling the idea of the global girl as the empowered American girl who finds her cosmopolitanism by consuming the right products.13 Representations of global girlhood—exotic or North American––within the original and newly rebranded series come in the form of helping rather than working; shopping rather than being politically active; superficial sisterhood rather than the politics of difference.

This analysis provides only one example of the ways in which global girl-hood is used as a marketing tool that delineates and continues to play out the imperialistic binary of first world/third world. Kellie Burns asks, “in imagining herself as adequately ‘global,’ how does the girl-citizen participate in certain political and cultural economies that allow her to consume experiences of non-White, Third World and Indigenous ‘others,’ and how is this consumption validated as part of her broader entrepreneurial agenda of global self-making?” (354). The Nancy Drew materials allow readers to consume “Other” girlhoods; in this way, girl readers find their empowerment by reading about the exotic global girl stranger whom they can consume through dress-up and purchase


through books and other media. Selling Nancy Drew as a global role model relies on dominant imperial scripts that deny that relationships between and among girls could be anything but innocent and friendly, or focused on shop-ping and helping. Nancy Drew as girl-power icon is made possible through a stranger fetishism that collapses difference and imperial histories in favor of a fantastical global sisterhood.

AcknowledgmentsThank you to Leona Fisher, who provided insightful feedback on this work when I presented it at the 2010 CHLA conference. I appreciate the critical readings provided by Leigh Gilmore, Özlem Sensoy, and Lisa Weems at various stages in the writing of this article. I also thank Kate Capshaw Smith and the two anonymous readers at Children’s Literature Association Quarterly for their critical comments on the manuscript.

Notes

1. Stephanie Foote also reads Nancy Drew as a brand.

2. This article is part of a larger research project in which I read each of the 13 novels in which Nancy travels internationally. I then narrowed down the sample to include the mysteries that take place in non-North American, non-European contexts, including The Mystery of the Fire Dragon, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher, The Spider Sapphire Mystery, The Mysterious Mannequin, and The Thirteenth Pearl. Each book was coded for emergent and recurring textual strategies through which girlhood difference was constructed in relation to discourses of multiculturalism, imperialism, and global travel. Discursive categories included “playing race,” “helper/helpless,” “travel references,” and “marking cultural difference.” The three texts discussed are exemplary of the strategies used within the original and contemporary series.

3. See Benjamin Lefebvre’s blog entry “Scholarship” for a comprehensive overview of Nancy Drew scholarship.

4. See, for example, Driscoll; Harris; Helgren and Vasconcellos; Inness; and McRobbie. For a recent overview of girls studies in a US context, see Kearney.

5. See, for example, de Jesús; Eng; Fisher; and Parameswaran. For research about the translation of Nancy Drew into languages other than English, see Gregg; and Skjønsberg.

6. See, for example, Grewal, Transnational; Jiwani, Steenbergen, and Mitchell; Sensoy and Marshall; and Weems.

7. See Grewal, “Traveling Barbie: Indian Transnationalities and the Global Consumer,” in Transnational America for an exemplary reading of the complex relationships between global girl consumers, imperialism, and transnationalism.

8. In 2008 The Haunting of Castle Malloy held a spot in the top twenty PC games sold in the United States.

9. See, for example, <http://www.scarlettlion.com/2009/02/nancy-drew-in-monrovia-2.html>; and <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/34713>.


10. See Romalov for an analysis of the unfriendly stranger in the figure of the gypsy woman in The Clue in the Old Album (Keene). She argues that Nancy’s freedoms hinge on these derogatory and exotic images of gypsy women: “Nancy stands in contrast to the third-world, underclass, gypsy women, whose narrative function it is to help define the parameters and superiority of white culture” (34).

11. For Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, travel as a way to teach readers was an important part of the Nancy Drew franchise. As Melanie Rehak points out, the books that Adams wrote in “the 1960s and ’70s were full of the tidbits of educational information and good manners that she loved” (256).

12. In another example, George dresses up and passes as a Chinese girl in The Mystery of the Fire Dragon.

13. Nancy Drew is only one brand aimed at contemporary tween girls in which the fantasy of travel allows girls to imagine themselves as global subjects. Others include the Cheetah Girl franchise and Karito Kids dolls.

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Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational ... · Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series Elizabeth Marshall Children's