Disruptive Divas
eBook - ePub

Disruptive Divas

Feminism, Identity and Popular Music

Lori Burns, Melisse Lafrance

Share book
  1. 238 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Disruptive Divas

Feminism, Identity and Popular Music

Lori Burns, Melisse Lafrance

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegéocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Disruptive Divas an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Disruptive Divas by Lori Burns, Melisse Lafrance in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Music. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135698812
Subtopic
Music
Edition
1
1
A Cultural Studies Approach to Women and Popular Music
MĂ©lisse Lafrance
This book represents an effort to make sense of the multitudinous mechanisms through which four women have contested the discursive regimes of sex, gender, and race organizing late-twentieth-century mass culture. The at once profoundly compelling and fiercely insurgent narratives of artists Tori Amos, Me’Shell NdegĂ©ocello, Courtney Love, and P.J. Harvey appear to dispute the claim made by some critical and postmodern theorists “that all expression, even the most rebellious forms, is tamed and made completely inauthentic by its ‘incorporation’... into multinational corporate capitalism” (Nehring 1997, xi).1 In fact, these musicians agitate, destabilize, and, at times, appall prevailing cultural politics in incisive and powerful ways.
This first chapter endeavors to communicate the spirit in and through which this book was actualized. To do so, I will explicitly introduce a number of the theoretical concepts and epistemological positions organizing my critical approach. This introduction will thus be broken down into four parts. First, I will address the title of the book itself and the conceptual sensibilities structuring it. More specifically, I will discuss what I understand by the phrase disruptive divas, and how such an understanding logically invites the employment of feminist frameworks informed by contemporary theories of identity. Second, I will describe the methodological approach employed in this book. I will strive to outline the fundamental tenets of a cultural studies approach to the popular , as well as to illustrate how I have drawn and borrowed from these approaches to apply them to the study of women and popular music. Third, I will elaborate the processes through which I have made sense of the creative works in question through a critical discussion of the problematics of interpretation. That is, I will bring into relief the theoretical strategies that have allowed me to analyze these works, and to figure them in the oppositional politics of signification and representation. And fourth, I will close this chapter with some remarks on the links that can be forged between cultural studies and musicology.
DISRUPTIVE DIVAS, FEMINISM, AND IDENTITY: PRIMARY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
Disruption
The musicians included in this book were selected according to the extent to which they disrupted mass musical culture. The extent of their disruption has been gauged by several practical and theoretical criteria. Though arbitrary in nature, these criteria have served to delimit what, for Lori and myself, “counts” as disruption in popular culture and who enacts and personifies it in engaging ways. All of the disruptive divas included in our analysis have, at some point during the 1990s, disrupted the musical expectations placed upon them by the mainstream media and the conventional listener. We chose to structure the book as a “snapshot” of the 1990s not only for methodological efficacy, but also because we hope to show that social relations are not fixed relations between statuses but, as Dorothy Smith writes, “an organization of actual sequences of action in time” (1990, 160).
The first and foremost constituent of disruptive musical expression present in all of the works included in this volume involves the creative interrogation of dominant normative systems on the part of the artist through a range of musical techniques (that is, lyrical and sonic). All of the artists were selected because, in our view, they adopt marginal, countercultural positions in and through their creative work. The second requisite to be considered a disruptive musical presence is that the artist’s music disquiet and unsettle the listener. For instance, Tori Amos’s complicated and often obscure symbolic incursions into the regulatory technologies of Christianity and male supremacy tend to make her music disconcerting. We argue that the troubled quality of an engaged listener’s response to Amos’s work (and indeed all the work of those profiled herein) is produced by the artist’s articulation of allegedly private and largely silent (and indeed silenced) gynocentered traumas. The widespread discomfort produced by Amos’s articulation of such traumas indicates that they assume a meaningful systemic and “public” quality, rather than merely an individualistic and “private” one. In brief, then, the female musicians selected for this volume were chosen because they tend to make their audiences uncomfortable.2 This book represents an attempt to understand the significance of such discomfort from sociocultural and musicological perspectives.
The third constituent of disruptive musical expression pertains to the artist’s manipulations of conventions and styles, which play on the listener’s expecations and understanding of established codes. For instance, unexpected instrumental and/or vocal strategies, or a failure to resolve tensions or expectations in the musical or narrative structure, can function to disrupt musical and narrative norms, ultimately destabilizing the conventional listening experience. Lori will discuss such potential musical disruption at length in chapter 2.
The fourth constituent of disruptive musical expression relates to the technical and creative operations of music making. All of these female musicians were (and in some cases still are) among the most important creative actors in their experiences of musical production. While many female musicians remain excluded from the myriad production processes that culminate in an album, the music produced by our selection of artists is, I believe, a closer expression and reflection of their own concern, frustration, and rage, as they were actively involved in the music’s realization. These musicians’ seizure of both the creative and productive reins, as it were, constitutes a formidable and formerly inaccessible vehicle of gynocentered self-expression and is thus an important consideration in any reflection on the autobiographical “female voice” as it is disseminated in popular culture.
As regards the female voice in popular culture, I concur with Elspeth Probyn when she writes that “the use of the autobiographical can be made to question implicitly the relation of self to experience, researcher to researched, and the production of knowledge itself” (1993, 105). Moreover, I agree with her when she posits, “a feminist cultural studies approach to the autobiographical reveals the voice as strategy” (120). It is precisely the diverse dimensions of such vocal (that is, narrative, discursive ) strategies that are explored in the present volume. Nonetheless, in the following chapters, the notion of the female voice is explicitly and implicitly challenged through many different argumentative mechanisms. These mechanisms include, for instance, reflections on the mediated nature of the subject and the text, ruminations on the conceptions of subjectivity inscribed through autobiographical texts, and complications of the “truths” produced through autobiographical narrative. In my view, such explorations and problematizations of the female voice in popular music will show that “if worked upon and worked over, these personal voices can be articulated as strategies, as ways of going on theorizing” (120).
Finally, all of these female musicians were selected because they have assumed, and in many cases continue to assume, an important presence in popular music. Although there are many feminist and lesbian rock and punk groups that are arguably more subversive than the artists we selected (for example, the Riot Grrrls, Babes in Toyland, and others), we remain most interested in how mass culture either wittingly or unwittingly produces, negotiates, and mystifies popular artists who seemingly undermine it. An analysis of the more culturally marginal feminist and lesbian music scenes is an essential academic task,3 but it is not included here due to our interest in the musical destabilization and disruption of dominant popular culture.
Feminism
To assess the disruptive value of admittedly exceptional female musicians requires a theoretical framework attuned to the manifold sociocultural relations of domination and subordination, marginalization, and social differentiation currently organizing contemporary popular culture. In addition, this theoretical framework must be sensitive to the complex machinations of power in and along all axes of individual and collective difference, such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and creed. Finally, it must offer interpretative strategies that posit neither unrestricted agential voluntarism nor complete subjective determinism on the part of the female musicians in question—a framework that enables and restores a fundamental belief in human agency while remaining alive to the fissures and contradictions of such agency.4
I have found in a particular configuration of feminist cultural studies a methodological approach that appears to satisfy all of these prerequisites . While I may exploit multiple feminist theories in each chapter, the discussion in its entirety is characterized by certain positional continuities. First, I do not confine my investigative schematic to only one epistemological formation, nor do I feel that it should be neatly subsumed by only one notional category (for instance, postmodern feminism or socialist feminism). I have therefore gone to great pains to extract the richest and most pertinent insights from a range of feminist theories and approaches. To do so, I have applied some of the more contemporary postmodernist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic feminist theories to my interrogations of these musicians. I have also sought to integrate the recent indispensable insights of queer, black, and postcolonial feminisms into my analyses. Finally, I have revisited a good deal of movement (or second-wave) feminist scholarship on questions related to women and their situation in popular culture. This last body of work has gone out of “scholarly style” for many perfectly legitimate reasons: it tended to essentialize sex/gender categories, it sometimes left the question of subjective agency unproblematized, it often presumed a universal (and universalizing) conception of the female subject, it frequently neglected axes of difference other than those of sex/gender, and it occasionally positioned women as incurable victims of patriarchal conditions (see Brooks 1997, Butler 1990, de Lauretis 1988). Doubtless, these problems represented significant theoretical shortcomings that quite reasonably limited the application of movement scholarship. I want to argue, however, that in either wholly abandoning or effacing many of the cogent and well-founded insights produced within the time and space of second-wave feminism—as a good deal of contemporary feminist theorizing has—certain feminist theorists may have done themselves and the late-twentieth-century feminist movement a disservice. I in no way mean to suggest that all feminist theorizing should have direct, accessible, and/or practical applications to the feminist movement. Nor do I intend to posit that all feminist theorizing should either exploit or celebrate the insights of movement scholarship. I do feel, however, that fewer and fewer feminist treatises speak to the radical potential of feminist consciousness channeled through popular aesthetic forms. It is this fiery radicalism that I hope to communicate through the use of certain movement feminist texts.
Recalling the incisive radicalism of movement feminism in our investigative enterprises is important if only to gauge the highly problematic prevailing representations of sex, gender, and feminism currently haunting the popular landscape. As some feminist scholars have already noted (Cole and Hribar 1995, Lafrance 1998), the popular imaginary is increasingly characterized by “postfeminist” positions, articulations, and representations. As Cole and Hribar posit,
While movement feminism generated spaces and identities that interrogated distributional and relational inequalities, meanings, differences, and identities, the post feminist moment includes spaces that work to homogenize, generate conformity, and mark Others, while discouraging questioning. ... Those spaces are established in the realm of the popular and include, for example, the news, films (from Fatal Attraction to Thelma and Louise to Disclosure), television programs... advertisements... and celebrities such as Madonna, Jane Fonda, and Camille Paglia. ... Regardless of the limitations of the political spaces available in the post feminist imaginary, in the post feminist moment, the politics associated with movement feminism seem troubled, less compelling and outdated. (356)
The postfeminist moment, then, appears to be characterized by a shift away from movement feminism’s anger at social relations and formations of inequality. Consequently, the postfeminist moment is characterized by an embrace, on the part of both women and men, of an allegedly new egalitarian order (Cole and Hribar 1995, Lafrance 1998). And, it is worth noting, feminist scholarship is not immune from like-natured postfeminist impulses. Indeed, much of the scholarly criticism leveled at postfeminist academe appears to be related to specific yet highly influential forms of postmodern theorizing and their effect on academic formulations of oppositional struggle. Here I will take a moment to delineate those elements of postmodern theorizing that have been perceived by some as particularly problematic for the elaboration of feminist strategies.
Drawing on Geraldine Finn’s Why Are There No Great Women Postmodernists? I argue that one’s engagement with the so-called crisis of modern Western epistemological authority depends a great deal upon one’s position within the time and space over which it has ruled. Those heavily invested in and rewarded by its authority, such as the “great” postmodernists (most of whom are moneyed, white males), may well be profoundly disturbed by the collapse of modern Western grand narratives. Modernist myths of Reality, History, Freedom, Reason, and Man, however problematic, not only benefited moneyed, white male scholars, but also attributed preeminence and value to their experiences. Of course, in so doing, these myths also “disappeared” marginalized and disenfranchised members of alleged “minority” groups. It is small wonder, then, that the great postmodernists have framed the disintegration of such myths in apocalyptic terms. The apocalyptic terms in which these theorists have formulated contemporary moments are made manifest through the many conceptual casualties storied by “official” postmodernism, such as “the end of the known and signifying universe... the end of History as such... the death of the Subject (as if there were only ever One), the loss of the Social, the disappearance of the Real, the absence of the Signified, the end of all Politics” (Finn 1993, 127). Within the confines of postmodernism, the disintegration of modernist certainties is translated into, as Finn puts it, the disintegration of “all certainties and all possibilities of certainty and thence of all judgment... into a position... which (I want to argue) abdicates ethics and politics and intellectual responsibility in the name of their contemporary impossibility” (127). Cultural studies scholar Dick Hebdige has also criticized the postmodernist “line that we are at the end of everything” (cited in Nehring 1997, 11). Indeed, he asserts that white male postmodernists have responded to the increasing presence of disenfranchised groups in academia by resolving to “take it all—judgment, history, politics, aesthetics, value—out the window with them” (11).
Wendy Brown (1987), Jane Flax (1987), Nancy Harstock (1987 and 1990), and Neil Nehring (1997) concur with Finn (1993) and Hebdige (1987) in positing that certain influential strands of white male postmodernism (for instance, those of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard) tend to both paralyze oppositional politics and reverse much of the recognition hard won by women, queers, and racial and ethnic minorities. In a now well-quoted assertion, Harstock demands, “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?” (1990, 163). More specifically, Nehring has indicted postmodernist and poststructuralist theorizing related to the study of women and popular music, asserting that “[under] the rule of postmodern theory, even feminist literary scholars who deign to examine mass and popular culture typically turn to Madonna—not out-and-out angry but ambiguous (supposedly) and thus a more suitable subject than [angry feminist musicians such as] the Riot Grrrls for postmodern treatises on the instability and fragmentation of all communication” (1997, 120).5
Though I am not necessarily in agreement with all of the views expressed in the previous paragraph, there can be no doubt that these theorists challenge some of the assumptions of postmodernist scholarship in meaningful ways. Yet, I am not convinced that these challenges truly enable the feminist scholar to improve and/or refine her conceptual tools. In my view, they tend to leave the theorist with two choices, neither of which is particularly desirable: on the one hand, the feminist scholar can refuse postmodernism’s sensibilities and return to a past/passed analytic style; on the other hand, she can exploit the resources of postmodernism, but only at the expense of resistance struggle. In this book, I attempt to avoid this impasse as I endeavor to engage a constellation of approaches, productively examining what can be worked with and worked over, and discarding that which might be seen as deleterious to a progressive and inclusive feminist theoretical strategy.
My transdisciplinary approach to feminist theorizing is evidenced throughout the book. For instance, to make sense of Tori Amos’s song “Crucify”—a work pertaining to the concrete and metaphorical crucifixion of women in Western Judeo-Christian culture—I discuss its internal structure of meaning and trace its representations of gendered agency, resistance, rage, and violence. To do so, I draw upon theoretical trajectories as diverse as Foucauldian feminist theory (for instance, Balsamo 1996, Bartky 1993, Bordo 1993 and 1995, Cole and Hribar 1995, Fisher and Davis 1993), radical feminist theory (for instance, Daly 1968, 1973, and 1978, Reuther 1974), sexual difference feminist theory (for instance, Butler 1989, 1990, 1993a, and 1993b), and postmodernist feminist theory (for instance, Flax 1990, Fraser and Nicholson 1990). Again, while these theories may at first glance appear somewhat irreconcilable, when taken together they produce a rich and involved interpretive sc...

Table of contents