ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Anni Abbruzzese's image of the girl with the butterfly on her shirt and the boy wearing his Nikes, and recognizes immediate association of symbols. In the way the boy's shoes identify her, the butterfly seems to identify the boy—a butterfly with a broken wing. In an overt way, the image empowers a girl and disempowers a boy. Until Disney truly catches up to this concept, the image will retain a primary power for blatantly contradicting the still-prevailing stereotype of an empowered boy and disempowered girl. Allegations of using child labor in sweatshops to produce the famed shoe brand have gained traction in recent years; they have become another inescapable aspect of this photograph, least of all because a sad child is wearing shoes that may have been made by another sad child, albeit their sadness exists for very different reasons.
