Power, Work, Domesticity, Disguise: Magical Young Women on TV from the Cold War Through the War on Terror

This paper tracks a type of episodic televised narrative from the United States and Canada: situation comedies and dramas whose protagonists are young women with secret magical powers. In the early 1960s, situation comedies like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie found humor in the tension between the near-infinite power of the protagonists and their willing confinement in mundane domesticity. By the mid-1970s, the eponymous heroine of Wonder Woman could use her near-infinite powers in defense of the nation, but only so long as she renounced heterosexual domesticity. Shows like these relied on the gender logic of the Cold War, fetishizing gender difference and identifying the containment of women’s powers with the containment of the nuclear threat.

Immediately after the Cold War, Buffy the Vampire Slayer rejected this logic. Allowing its magical protagonist to exercise her powers and enjoy her sexuality without disguising her identity, it offered viewers a more hopeful form of television. Television from the War on Terror, however, returned to Cold War narrative tropes. In Fringe, Homeland, and Orphan Black, young women protagonists used their supernatural abilities to defend the world from religious fanatics and vaguely identified “terrorists.”  Once again, magical women on television had to disguise their identities and deny their powers.  However, on these shows the women who deferred to male authority and stayed at home were the Muslim enemy, while the heroes appeared to espouse gender equality. The War on Terror can be seen as inverting the televised gender logic of the Cold War.