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In April 10, 1996, Jessica Dubroff began a flight across the United States as the primary pilot of a private four-seat airplane. If she had completed her journey, at age seven she would have been the youngest person ever to pilot a transcontinental flight. Instead, her plane crashed just after takeoff on the second day of her flight, killing her, her father (Lloyd Dubroff), and her flight instructor (Joe Reid, who was the pilot legally responsible for the plane, according to Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] rules). Not surprisingly, substantial media coverage followed her death, coverage that functioned as what Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz call a "media spectacle" of "'real' politics and `real life" (1993, x-xi), which is made spectacular by the media themselves as they report on their own coverage as much as on the event itself Within this mediated context, as a girl pilot who did not remain within the expected boundaries of feminine childhood, Dubroff created "trouble" for the media. Her materiality as a dead girl pilot challenged the representational systems of media culture as the media struggled to position her in relation to their own assumptions about girls' gender, race, and sexuality I argue here that through this process the media used Dubroff's death as a site at which to protect and articulate the (violated) boundaries of feminine childhood, the fragility of the white middle-class family, and the gendered body's relationship to technology.
The Dubroff story is not the only recent one about the role of girls in contemporary U.S. culture. In fact, a spate of discourses on the subject continues to emerge, including, for example, girls in beauty pageants (e.g., JonBenet Ramsey), girls in the Olympics (e.g., Dominique Moceanu), girl tennis phenoms (e.g., Martina Hingis and Venus Williams), girls on television (e.g., Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and self-help books such as Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Pipher 1994).1 All of these discourses suggest a general intrigue with girls, their roles, and their bodies within contemporary culture, and they offer an opportunity to explore how representations of these various girls play out broader cultural interests and anxieties. The spot that Reviving Ophelia continues to...