Can a socially progressive male critic use the term “girlie” without getting lynched? Conscience and propriety suggest not, yet there is an aesthetic emerging on the contemporary art scene cries that out for just this word.

Show after show of young artists, it seems, feature Barbie-like stick figures in delicate, often saccharin colors. A willfully adolescent touch and hyperbolic feyness collides an inner child with a post-feminist sensibility. Whether the imagery is diaristic, narrative, or postmodern jumble, the exemplar for the girlie generation, perversely enough, seems to be the wacky, tortured visionary Henry Darger: Young women artists are as devoted to the Chicago janitor as he was to the Vivian Girls of his magnum opus.

Amy Wilson is an extreme example of this. Her show Bellwether at the Gallery, closing this weekend, betrays an artistic split personality: Psychological intensity keeps company with total drippiness; the aesthetic is somewhere between medievalism and fifth grade. And several other exhibitions currently on display share this charged collision of the obsessive and the ditsy. Just to prove there is nothing “essentialist” in the girlie aesthetic, one of these shows is even by a man.

At the front room at Feigen Contemporary, Elizabeth Huey’s intense, involved Symbolist narratives – often starring angels, little girls, and deer (a favored motif of the girlie generation) – are set in primal forests, where intricately rendered Tudor mansions or oppressively bland institutional or utilitarian buildings lurk. A recent Yale M.F.A. graduate, Ms. Huey made a strong debut at Michael Steinberg last year. Ms. Huey’s paint-handling veers from masterful confidence to mousy feebleness, lyricism to quiet angst. She combines folkloristic, religious, scientific, and historical imagery, and her subject matter and artistic language pit naivete and sophistication against one other.

The same dichotomy exists in her own interestingly split intentions. A monumental diptych dominates her show: “The Cyclothymic Forest” (2005). The figure of a young woman in a stylish, slightly retro dress repeats in mirror form at the joining edges, suggesting she is the “Girl, Interrupted” of the psychological disorder referenced in the title. But the two canvases fail to divide along bipolar lines; degrees of elation and enervation permeate both halves.

The heroine is lost in her forest of signs. Washed-out gray sheep meander along pathways. Men in green jackets empty seemingly toxic contents of a bucket down a manhole. A dominatrix with a blanked-out face struts around. Illustration-book twin girls with spindly legs, one dressed in Indian feathers and a bandit mask, look on. The figures seem pasted in, oblivious of one another, their costumes appropriated from different epochs and unrelated dramas.

Yet this is far from a flattened-out, arbitrary decorative scheme: The elements are held together by a narrative urge, albeit a purposely ambiguous and unresolved one. If Ms. Huey’s brand of incongruity lacks the menace and humor of the Surrealists, or the cynicism of such image anarchists as David Salle or Sigmar Polke, it is because she aspires to a thoughtful mode of narrative.

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Hilary Harkness’s narrative energy in is a higher gear than Ms. Huey’s. Her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages, and riots are unrelenting. A typical Harkness is crowded to bursting with legions of near identical figures – willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing one another and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice.

Yet her cloned cast is a herd of loners, and they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of Old Master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be Old Masterly, too, but in her case the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper comes to mind: Paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

Less than a year ago, Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: Three relatively small panels were each given a wall of her Chelsea barn. Now a less precious display – an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings – is offered at the uptown gallery.

Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shootout amid back-to-the-future skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room. As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-over-ness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents, in cutaway cross-section, the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical.

If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless shows the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawings, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draftsman John Flaxman. Perhaps if Flaxman had honed his skills to de Sade, rather than Dante, art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

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“Pardon me if I seem lost in a world like a girl in a dream,” exclaims the bubble above the head of one of Thomas Trosch’s protagonists, a middle-aged lady presiding over a suburban salon. Mr. Trosch’s paintings are a risque satire of modern art and bourgeois femininity. His absurdly camp style has often been compared with Florine Stettheimer in terms of whimsicality, naivite, and jolly palette. But Stettheimer’s subject was her own high-powered interaction with the pioneers of American modernism; her language, however fey, was one of personal intensity.

Mr. Trosch offers a different edge in his collision of subject and style. Almost recognizable Abstract Expressionist masters, or at least their spinoffs, blend with his rococo touch and girlie palette, sending up the supposed machismo of these heroic masters. But Mr. Trosch is demonstrably more than a mere satirist: Within the histrionics of his own tongue-in-cheek style, he is concerned with the same formal issues as his mid-century artistic victims. This despite his efforts to seem as blase about them as his “ladies who lunch” fashion victims.

Elizabeth Huey through May 28 (535 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-0500). Prices: $3,000-$18,000.

Hilary Harkness through June 25 (745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-752-2929). Prices: $10,000-$25,000.

Thomas Trosch through June 10 (504 W. 22nd Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-633-6555). Prices: $2,500-$15,000.