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Matthew Diebler

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

As VH-1, American Apparel, and the return of the Mohawk have shown us, the 80s were a special time in America's cultural consciousness, and our recent aesthetic of nostalgia has brought a number of 80s cultural icons full circle (most immediately visible through the popular revival of such 80s franchises as Die Hard and Transformers). Caught in this wave of 80s nostalgic bliss, I found myself reminiscing about how much I loved Cheetara from the ThunderCats when I was a boy. I remember running with my hands open as though the mimicking of her running style would grant me a fraction of her supersonic speed. It never did. But during this nostalgic conversation, I became convinced that my love of Cheetara had granted me one thing: a feminist bent. I postulated to my friend that the token females of these early 80s animated action teams offered my impressionable young mind models of empowered women, models that eventually led to a true appreciation of strong-willed, powerful, and capable women. I was adamant that these cartoons and their bastions of female power advanced feminist thought and agendas for an entire generation. My friend told me I was full of it. In my ever-present quest to prove myself right, I began to research the subject and came to some interesting conclusions: by examining the token female characters of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ThunderCats, and G.I. Joe (perhaps the three most popular animated mixed gender dramatic action series of the era), we can see the beginning of a trend in American popular culture toward the creation of women with militaristic power, but one wrought with tension and backpedaling in the hypermasculine cultural climate of the post-Vietnam sense of symbolic emasculation.

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