Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood

A. Winch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230348752
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312747
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.

1

The Girlfriend Gaze

Being mean is such a rush. It is like that feeling you get when someone loses weight and then they brag about it and then they gain it all back.

(Ellie, Cougar Town)

Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.

(Cady, Mean Girls)

The film Mean Girls (2004) is a teen comedy representing girls’ high school cliques. The heroine, Cady (Lindsay Lohan), has been home-schooled by her zoologist parents and at the beginning of the film she moves back to the US after living on the African continent for 12 years. At school, the innocent Cady is confronted with a variety of in-groups, including The Plastics: so-called because of their Barbie doll aesthetic. The Plastics are ruled by the Queen Bee, Regina (Rachel McAdams), who is blonde, wears pink and is the most powerful girl in the school. She controls her girlfriends – and the other students – through regulating body image and style; no one can be as perfect as her. Her attitude towards other girls is revealed when one of The Plastics, Gretchen, asserts that ‘seven out of ten girls have a negative body image’. Regina replies, ‘Who cares? Six of those girls are right.’ She abuses the students by denigrating their weight, and she also participates in slut-shaming by calling the other girls sluts and whores. These forms of regulation intersect with misogyny. As one of the teachers, Ms Norbury (played by Tina Fey, who is also the writer and therefore a privileged mouthpiece for certain ideas) warns: ‘you all have to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.’ The Plastics are intrigued by Cady and they befriend her. However, after Cady falls for Regina’s boyfriend, she enacts revenge on Regina by cutting off her ‘resources’, including the way that she looks. Cady fools Regina into eating high-calorie weight gain bars. As a result, the Queen Bee receives her just deserts as getting fat teaches her about humility. Nevertheless, through the film’s narrative, Cady must also learn her own lessons about what it means to be a good friend.

Mean Girls represents the pleasures and terrors of high school friendship groups. Partially based on Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughters Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence (2002), the film reveals the bitchiness prevalent among female cliques. It portrays how the lure of belonging, and therefore being normal, can also mean subjecting oneself to cruelty by friends. Cady confesses, ‘The weird thing about hanging out with Regina was that I could hate her, and at the same time, I still wanted her to like me.’ Cady notes how Gretchen also submits to punishment in her quest for hypervisibility:

the meaner Regina was to her, the more Gretchen tried to win Regina back. She knew it was better to be in The Plastics, hating life, than to not be in at all. Because being with The Plastics was like being famous … People looked at you all the time and everybody just knew stuff about you.

I have used Mean Girls here to illustrate the complex emotions and systems of control that permeate female sociality in a postfeminist context. The schoolgirls’ bitchiness and their desire for visibility are brought to excess and satirized. The bullying is, to some extent, exaggerated. However, the affect of friendship that the film depicts and evokes is pertinent to the media I am examining in this book. Girlfriend media both reproduce these social pleasures of belonging to an intimate group, while also holding up the female body for analysis and scrutiny. They are sites that induce pleasure and belonging, while also enacting surveillance and cruelty. Moreover, girlfriend media offer the possibility of achieving hypervisibility through participating in these friendship networks. Indeed, part of the desire to partake in this intimate female sphere is the recognition and distinctiveness that it might bring. In this chapter, I look at the UK’s Heat magazine and its representation of the reality TV celebrity Josie Gibson, as well as (to a lesser extent) the representations of friendship in the US television sitcom Cougar Town (ABC 2009–) and the film Sex and the City 1 (2008). I identify the ambivalence located in their evocations of female sociality. In other words, these media texts both promote the intimacy of female networks and the pleasures of belonging to a ‘we’. Simultaneously, however, they regulate their consumers around body image by inducing feelings of shame and humiliation. I also introduce the idea of the ‘girlfriend gaze’. Developing Foucault’s configuration of the panopticon I argue that women are regulating each other’s bodies through affective networks of control which constitute a gynaeopticon where the many girlfriends survey the many girlfriends.

Normative cruelties: Mean Girls

Female friendships are complex and formative in the production of feminine identities. As the psychosociological ethnographic research of a number of theorists demonstrates, meanness pervades many girls’ intimacies. Terri Apter and Ruthellen Josselson examine the psychological impact of friendship in the lives and identity formations of girls in both the UK and the US. Rather than focusing on the role of the mother or the family in shaping feminine norms, they argue that codes of acceptable femininity ‘are established anew in each generation’ and consequently ‘the power of friends to shape values is enormous’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 211). This suggests that, although familial relations are primary, friends and their gaze disseminate and negotiate much of the normative (and subversive) discourses that constitute a feminine skills set. Women and girls look to their peers to secure appropriate behaviour and looks. Apter and Josselson theorize a ‘female gaze’ which is formed in childhood but then internalized. They argue that women and girls search for what is feminine ‘in the mirror of her girlfriend’s gaze’. This can be confirming and comforting, but if ‘she sees criticism or rejection, she can be struck with panic’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 4). In addition, Apter and Josselson suggest that female friendship can be ‘a school of correction’ where the rules about what is and is not acceptable are meted out (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 66). Friends are punished and rewarded according to the rules of the clique.

As illustrated in Mean Girls, school friends can regulate each other through controlling body image. Apter and Josselson note how the rules of belonging are intertwined with food and the body: ‘Try to persuade a teenage girl to resist the social obsession with how she looks or how much she weighs, and one will run headlong into the brick wall of the norms of her friendship circle’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 66). Conforming to the standards of the group is essential to guard against ostracism. Furthermore, belonging can be achieved by mocking and humiliating others; cruelty can be a means to develop bonds among girls. What is of particular interest here is that girls’ hunting packs often locate the changing body of adolescence as a site of abuse. The anxiety that attends puberty can be projected on to a girl who is less popular and whose physical changes are more noticeable. These experiences of bullying are part of the complex rules of friendship ‘which may go unnoticed because they are sometimes implicit and subtle, but are nonetheless controlling’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 63).

Educational sociologists Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold investigate school friendships in the UK. They argue that although girls describe their ideal friends as nice, they often perceive real girls to be mean, two-faced and unable to keep secrets. Moreover, their interviewees reveal how they are ‘systematically betrayed and talked about by one another. Meanness is therefore part of the normative cruelties of “doing” girl’ (Ringrose and Renold, 2010, 585). Ringrose’s data illustrate how the ideal girlfriend is not only expected to be ‘supportive’ and ‘there for you’, but also non-competitive and ‘friends with everybody’ (Ringrose and Renold, 2010, 584). Nevertheless, the reality is often more complex than this and Ringrose and Renold propose a nuanced understanding of what bullying constitutes. Rather than perceiving schoolgirl relationships through the binary logic of bully and victim, they explore how ‘a range of “normative cruelties” inhere in the social and cultural processes of becoming a recognizable gendered subject’ (Ringrose and Renold, 2010, 575).

‘Normative cruelties’ is a powerful phrase that neatly encapsulates the affective power dynamics of friendship groups, as well as the girlfriend media that I am looking at. Ringrose and Renold demonstrate how girls employ cruelty in order to discipline feminine identities. Significantly, they identify how these forms of control are linked to regulating sexuality:

A primary way girls are socially sanctioned to express meanness is through subtle and direct regulation of other girls’ sexuality [ … ] it is normative for girls to position themselves and others in sexual hierarchies, invoking regulative discourses around sexuality, appearance and behaviour in the private spaces of their friendship groups as a mode of constructing idealised femininity.

(Ringrose and Renold, 2010, 585–586)

What is pertinent here is that the school where they were conducting the research did not perceive this as bullying. Indeed, Ringrose and Renold note that the figure of the bully is often pathologized as transgressing normative gendered behaviours, rather than imposing them. Consequently, we can read girls’ mutual controlling through shame and humiliation around the body and sexuality as institutionally acceptable; the friends both channel normative feminine discourses and police them. As Ringrose notes in Postfeminist Education?:

I want to emphasize that sexual regulation of other girls provides the primary means through which girls are socially sanctioned to express their assertiveness, aggression and rage (against other girls), usually against a particular member of their affective networks (friendships) at school. When jealousy and competition emerge they are legitimately allowed to discipline other girls’ sexual subjectivity, a dynamic that works to bring some of the friendship group closer together while other girls are projected onto as objects of hatred, shame and/or disgust.

(Ringrose, 2013, 95)

Consequently, conflicts based on gendered and sexualized regulation demand the recouping of the traditional feminine qualities of being nice and good in order to maintain female friendship (Ringrose and Renold, 2010, 587). This is pertinent as conflict in girlfriend culture, especially the girlfriend flick, is resolved through this childhood fantasy of ‘just being friends’. Consequently, sexual power relations and hierarchies are subsumed under a sentimental understanding of girlhood and idealized feminine relationships – and sexual regulation by girlfriends is glossed as friendship.

Slut-shaming is a concept recently theorized to account for how girls discipline each other’s sexual conduct. Indeed, Ringrose and Renold identify that the most pressing and affectively charged conflicts between girls at school relate to sexualized status, identity and competition (Ringrose, 2013, 87). Friends, therefore, not only police each other’s normative feminine conduct around sexuality, but this mutual governance originates from feelings of envy and competition. Ringrose suggests that ‘slut-shaming appears to express a dynamic where jealousy gets sublimated into a socially acceptable form of social critique of girls’ sexual expression’ (Ringrose, 2013, 93). Ostensibly, girlfriend media eschew an overt condemnation of female sexuality. Indeed, the normatively cultivated feminine body is admired for its erotic capital; girlfriends who have harnessed their sexuality for empowerment within a normative paradigm are celebrated. However, a girlfriend must know how to correctly regulate her libido in a postfeminist market, and this regulation is partly enacted through monitoring the consumption of food. Women’s eating habits and body image are obsessively scrutinized, analysed and judged, and those who ‘let go’ are critiqued. These affective forms of control are constituted out of a complex web of envy, competition and friendliness. In other words, the mutual disciplining of body size is apparently supportive in an individualized postfeminist culture which privileges normativity. On the other hand, these forms of control can also be cruel as they channel the ugly feelings also experienced between women. As Ellie from Cougar Town states, ‘Being mean is such a rush. It is like that feeling you get when someone loses weight and then they brag about it and then they gain it all back.’

Experiences in childhood and adolescence – ‘the threshing floor of friendship’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 7) – also affect the performance of identity in adulthood. This has a number of implications for the girlfriend media that I am looking at. It means that feminine identities, shaped in the playgrounds and private spaces of adolescence, are still susceptible to, and shaped by, girlfriends in older life. It also means that these formative relationships can evoke powerful feelings in adulthood; the wounds inflicted by girls are still vulnerable to further exploitation, and this includes the shame of unbelonging. Significantly, Apter and Josselson argue that childhood traumas around friendship are re-lived through adult relations with other women: ‘behind the most confident and powerful woman is a girl who wants a friend, and a girl who has learned to be terrified of a friend’s abandonment and betrayal’ (Apter and Josselson, 1999, 5). This search for confirmation and comfort does not dissipate with age; it is part of the need for, and popularity of, women cultures, intimate publics and girlfriend media. These sites of popular culture exploit and build on the joys and scars of adolescent friendships. The pain and anguish of being excluded, of being not quite right, are played and replayed.

Valerie Walkerdine (2011) examines the affect of shame through the framework of class and gender in the context of reality television. She maintains that provoking shame functions effectively on reality television because it is already embodied by the female viewer. In particular, Walkerdine perceives shame as variously experienced, depending on class. For example, middle class women wield it as a means to subjugate and distance themselves from working class women. Indeed, fat is conventionally linked to working class or ‘chav’ culture throughout popular culture and in the press. Consequently, just as policing eating habits is a means to control sluttishness, so it is also a way in which symbolic violence is legitimately enacted. In other words, the working class body is configured as pathological through its association with excessive sexuality, which itself is marked on the body through fat; exploiting the fear of fat is a strategy of class exploitation in an aspirational popular culture.

I discuss this further in chapters 6 and 7, but here I want to suggest that shame is employed as a governing weapon, that it can be experienced as trauma by women across class lines, and that these emotions are learnt and absorbed in childhood. Indeed, like Susie Orbach in Bodies, Walkerdine discusses how women’s experiences of their bodies (as culturally regulated and disciplined) are passed among women. In particular, she argues that shame is intergenerational and passed down from mothers to daughters. If we extend this transmission to friendship groups, we can understand friends as sharing, controlling and disciplining each other through embodying and inflicting shame; friends are like sisters perpetuating the rules of maternalism and patriarchy. In turn, girlfriend media exploit, court and activate these formative affective social relations.

Friendship has a complex and subjective affect depending on one’s experiences and history of female relating. The work of Ringrose, Renold, Apter and Josselson usefully reveals how friendship networks imprint traumatic experiences of shame and exclusion on the body, while simultaneously codifying these phenomena as expressions of friendliness and sisterhood. Girlfriend culture cultivates this dual affect. In her work on makeover television, Brenda R. Weber conceptualizes the term ‘affective domination’ to capture the ways that ‘experts point out flaws in a combined gesture of humiliation and care’ (Weber, 2009, 30). Drawing on Richard Brodhead’s works on childrearing, Weber identifies ‘a disciplinary regime structured through intimacy’. Authority here dons a human face – the makeover experts – and sentimentalizes the disciplinary relation between the participant and the expert. Consequently, the participant appears to be bathed, not in rules, but in the power of love. It is this love-power that has the authority to control behaviour (Weber, 2009, 97). This is pertinent to girlfriend culture which also produces affective domination but through the representation and signifiers of friendship. Girlfriend culture generates an affective girlfriendliness, a loving meanness.

Who cares about letting go? Heat magazine

In June 2012, the front cover of Heat zoomed in on the apparently round bellies of five female celebrities. They included the 2010 winner of UK Big Brother, Josie Gibson, as well as the wife of footballer Wayne Rooney, Colleen. The strapline reads ‘In Love & Ditching the Diet: Who cares about letting go? They’re loved up!’ Colleen is ‘eating more & Wayne likes her bigger’ while Josie ‘[l]oves her curries with boyfriend Luke’. Among the omnipresent glossy and airbrushed flat stomachs, these curves are an anomaly. But Heat understands what has happened:

We’ve all been there. You get a new boyfriend, and suddenly the gym doesn’t seem as inviting as the sofa [ … ] suddenly you’ve gained half a stone.

The ‘we’ speaks to a (mainly) female group who are aware of body image and the rigours involved in attempting to maintain an ideal look. The readers are on the same plane as the loved-up women, who are ‘just as guilty of scoffing junk with their new men as we are’. The democratization of celebrity, as evidenced in the figures of Josie and Colleen, means that all women now have the potential to be hypervisible (Tyler and Bennett, 2010). Consequently, Heat includes its readers in its sphere of body analysis. And it also includes its readers in its apparent celebration of that unaspirational and class-coded vice – the eating of junk food.

The photographs of Josie were taken while she was on holiday in Ibiza and were subsequently posted across the internet and throughout the press. Josie is working class and apparently spent her childhood in traveller communities. When she won the UK Big Brother in 2010 she received 77.5 per cent of the votes. The publicity work that she has done since winning has focused on her ‘ordinariness’, including the irreverent down to earth performance of her farting, laughing and eating in public. However, her class and her body are highly problematic markers in girlfriend culture. Heat ostensibly celebrates Josie’s (and the other celebrities’) ‘happier’ bodies – ‘Ladies, we salute you’ – and insists there is no need to apologize for them. In doing so it pokes fun at the mechanics of celebrity culture, as well as the contemporary obsession with body image. However, the magazine wants to hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Girlfriend Culture
• 1. The Girlfriend Gaze
• 2. BFF Co-Brands
• 3. Strategic Sisterhoods
• 4. Womance
• 5. Making White Lives Better?
• 6. Catfight
• 7. Class and British Reality Television
• 8. The Friendship Market
• Conclusion: Feminism, Friendship and Conflict
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index