LEARNING FROM TINKER BELL, GIDGET, AND HOLLY GOLIGHTLY: We're devoting the next two classes to Susan Douglas's Where the Girls Are (1994), a history of baby-boomer culture and its portrayal of girls and women. A boomer herself, Douglas infuses her study with both self-deprecating humor and self-righteous indignation, but she's also an academic expert in communications history, anchoring her pop-culture analyses in their broader social and political context. As I said in my first post, it's a love-it-or-hate-it book, and therefore great to teach.
Douglas's central argument revolves around the ways in which post-WWII popular culture promoted both rebellion against and conformity to traditional gender roles: "the news media, TV shows, magazines, and films of the past four decades may have turned feminism into a dirty word, but they also made feminism inevitable." Douglas traces this ambiguity and contradiction through a wide range of pop-culture productions. Her earliest chapters examine the conflicting ideals of narcissism and masochism, presented in popular culture as essential elements of female identity. In Disney's Peter Pan (1953), Tinker Bell is a "scheming, overly possessive, vain ... no-good little bitch," while Wendy is "a kind-hearted, servile ... wimp who only wants to wait on boys." From melodramas like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), boomer girls learned that selfish young women who rejected parental authority would reap only misery and unhappiness, while self-sacrificing mothers who slaved for these ungrateful wretches would die saintly deaths (though at least Mahalia Jackson would sing at your funeral).
Yet by the early 1960s, pop-culture heroines were moving out of these traditional roles, becoming more assertive, and acknowledging the broader social changes going on around them, particularly the sexual revolution. In "pregnancy melodramas" like A Summer Place (1959) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), girls who got "knocked up" weren't automatically condemned as whores, and even wound up snagging Troy Donahue or Steve McQueen. The Shirelles' #1 hit "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (1960) wondered whether a boyfriend would stay faithful after "the first time," implicitly condemning the sexual double standard that encouraged male wild-oat-sowing but demanded female chastity. In Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), the character of Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) took this sexual liberation to a startling extreme, displaying a glamorous nonconformity and a brilliance for reinventing herself. Other 1960s heroines -- Sally Field's Gidget, Patty Duke's identical cousins -- lived far more conventional lives, but Douglas claims that they still captured the era's gender contradictions through the complicated quality of "perkiness," or assertiveness disguised as cuteness. Even the Beatles, Douglas argues, can be interpreted through the lens of gender ambiguity, because they "so perfectly fused the 'masculine' and 'feminine' strains of rock 'n' roll in their music, their appearance, and their style of performing."
While we'll follow Douglas's narrative into the late 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties next week, let's use today's discussion to talk about our own pop-culture educations in gender roles. When you were growing up, what did popular culture teach you about being a girl (or a boy)? In what ways was your gender identity shaped by the mass media?
Also next week: the counterculture, the counter-revolution, and the Hollywood revival of the '70s.
Douglas's central argument revolves around the ways in which post-WWII popular culture promoted both rebellion against and conformity to traditional gender roles: "the news media, TV shows, magazines, and films of the past four decades may have turned feminism into a dirty word, but they also made feminism inevitable." Douglas traces this ambiguity and contradiction through a wide range of pop-culture productions. Her earliest chapters examine the conflicting ideals of narcissism and masochism, presented in popular culture as essential elements of female identity. In Disney's Peter Pan (1953), Tinker Bell is a "scheming, overly possessive, vain ... no-good little bitch," while Wendy is "a kind-hearted, servile ... wimp who only wants to wait on boys." From melodramas like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), boomer girls learned that selfish young women who rejected parental authority would reap only misery and unhappiness, while self-sacrificing mothers who slaved for these ungrateful wretches would die saintly deaths (though at least Mahalia Jackson would sing at your funeral).
Yet by the early 1960s, pop-culture heroines were moving out of these traditional roles, becoming more assertive, and acknowledging the broader social changes going on around them, particularly the sexual revolution. In "pregnancy melodramas" like A Summer Place (1959) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), girls who got "knocked up" weren't automatically condemned as whores, and even wound up snagging Troy Donahue or Steve McQueen. The Shirelles' #1 hit "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (1960) wondered whether a boyfriend would stay faithful after "the first time," implicitly condemning the sexual double standard that encouraged male wild-oat-sowing but demanded female chastity. In Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), the character of Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) took this sexual liberation to a startling extreme, displaying a glamorous nonconformity and a brilliance for reinventing herself. Other 1960s heroines -- Sally Field's Gidget, Patty Duke's identical cousins -- lived far more conventional lives, but Douglas claims that they still captured the era's gender contradictions through the complicated quality of "perkiness," or assertiveness disguised as cuteness. Even the Beatles, Douglas argues, can be interpreted through the lens of gender ambiguity, because they "so perfectly fused the 'masculine' and 'feminine' strains of rock 'n' roll in their music, their appearance, and their style of performing."
While we'll follow Douglas's narrative into the late 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties next week, let's use today's discussion to talk about our own pop-culture educations in gender roles. When you were growing up, what did popular culture teach you about being a girl (or a boy)? In what ways was your gender identity shaped by the mass media?
Also next week: the counterculture, the counter-revolution, and the Hollywood revival of the '70s.
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