The 'angelification' of girls: Winx Club as a neo-liberal Catholic project

Abstract

Abstract This article examines and contextualizes the socio-economic model and values system from which the transmedial, transnational text that we call the Winx Project derives and in which it is produced. The Winx Project centres on an animated television series for girls and tweens, Winx Club, produced in Italy and distributed in 150 countries worldwide, but includes spin-off television formats, films, live and interactive entertainments, an amusement park and merchandising and fashion to compose a multifaceted, multiple 'text'. This plural text is employed to measure the functionality of the Winx Club within a global and transnationalized discourse of neo-liberal economics on the one hand and, on the other, a local context that reaches deep into the regional character of Social Catholicism to purvey on a global scale its ethics and values system.