The awakening of female powers during their adolescence is a strong image in popular culture. First published in 1974, Stephen King's horror novel Carrie tells the story of a teenage girl whose growing telekinetic powers ultimately send her on a violent rampage during prom night at her local high school.

Mai the Psychic Girl, a long-running and widely read comic book series from the 1980s, recounts the adventures of a similarly gifted Japanese schoolgirl. More recently, the successful TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based on a 1992 teen horror movie of the same name, pitted a specially chosen high-school cheerleader against a supernatural world of occultism, demons and monsters.

Carrie White's powers, however, only manifest themselves after she experiences her first menstruation – something which her strict religious upbringing didn't prepared her for. Buffy Summers, more interested in boys and shopping than in fighting armies of vampires, finds that her supernatural mission makes her less popular with the other kids in her class. Mai Kuju discovers that her psychokinetic abilities have attracted the attentions of the sinister Wisdom Alliance, making life in school extremely difficult for her.

For all three, adolescence is an endless nightmare of loneliness and frustration. They become the objects of suspicion and ridicule, constantly challenged and tested by a world in which they no longer feel at home. At the same time, each girl's body is undergoing a profound transformation.

In their groundbreaking cultural study The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove examine how the change from girl to woman brings with it major shifts in power and status that frequently remain unacknowledged by the prevailing culture or society at large. Perhaps it is with this observation that a true study of the extraordinary powers displayed by young women can really begin.

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