In the weeks before Christmas the culture-blogs were all atwitter over a Toys'R'Us advertisement for a pink microscope that had less magnification power than the blue or black models featured on the same page. "Girls need less power?" the headlines asked. This week, another pink instrument caught the public's attention, by way of Fox News. This time it was Hasbro's pink Ouija board, a modernized version of the game it has been selling since the 1960's.

While the pink Ouija is relatively new, major toy makers have been selling talking boards as "games" for generations. So why the fuss over this one? Is there more to this story than conservative Christians up in arms about demon possession a la "The Exorcist"?

Talking boards were born in the late 19th century, when Spiritualists hoped to both speed up the process of dictating messages from spirit mediums as well as democratize the practice. Spiritualism centered around mediums, many of them young women and girls, who had started to receive messages from ghosts in the 1840's. (The Fox sisters, ages 6 and 8, are generally considered to have been the founding "mediums" of the movement.) Ouija boards have been produced and sold since the 1890's, quickly crossing over into the realm of "novelty" as the Spiritualist denomination dwindled in size. As a game and an object in popular film and television, the talking board remains a popular device through which Americans continue to pose serious and semi-serious questions.

Take for example a recent episode of CBS' drama The Ghost Whisperer (now in its fifth season), where a skeptical anthropologist (Margaret Cho) is haunted by a surprisingly animated Ouija board. The plot is formulaic and saccharine, so the episode's real draw centers around the Ouija board itself. What kind of communication does it allow? What is the quality of the connection? Who are we talking to? Cho, settling down with the board, candles lit, asks: "Is this a séance or a seduction?" Her desire to connect is kept in check by the series' "real" medium, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. She cautions Cho that Ouija boards are a faulty technology. There are a lot of "cranky ghosts" out there, and you never know to whom you're talking. So yes you can talk to a ghost, but the Ouija board affords little control.

Which brings us to the fact that Hasbro's pink Ouija board encapsulates and expands the tensions that continue to center on gendered and spiritual power in American culture. All gussied up for its slumber party, the new Ouija board packs a powerful mnemonic punch, reminding us of the Fox sisters, of the possessed girl in "The Exorcist" and the various other images that invest both girls and inanimate objects with serious power. These images reproduce old questions: How can they (spirits or girls) be controlled? Who can control them?

In our culture, young girls remain both objects and cauldrons of desire. They are hungry for secret knowledge and relations as well as connectivity of all kinds–spiritual, physical and intellectual. The pink Ouija board should thus likewise remind those of us who study and/or report on American religion that the tendrils of spiritual power can be found written into and wrapped up in various unexpected places– including narratives about children, gender and cultural power. We might end up agreeing with Hasbro that the Ouija board is "just a game," but that doesn't mean that we can ignore the powers that it conjures.  

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).