Grrls

My last blog entry was almost completely beside the point, and I apologize to anyone who was led even further down the garden path by it. Instead of doing some homework, I assumed that Halley somehow originated the term “girlism,” and if Joel hadn’t mentioned the word grrl, I would never have realized that Halley’s use of the term “girlism” represents a hijacking of what a decade ago was a complex punk-feminist strategy. I was on the right track with Cyndi Lauper, but my despising of the queen of sell-out, Madonna, blinded me to the early connections between Lauper, Madonna, Courtney Love, and others. I’ve said sarcastic stuff about Madonna in past blog entries, and it’s time I explained why. When Madonna first came on the scene in the early 80s she was cool. She used sex as a performance to punch holes in the status quo. This was at a time when MTV was just starting out and many of us were seeing our first music videos on local late-night cable channels, not via the soon-to-become giant retailer. The success of MTV changed all that. By the 90s she was utterly co-opted, and “Madonna-sex” was used as a marketing tool. I’ll admit that this disappointed me very much, and although Madonna doesn’t control the media economy, I expected more of her than simple acquiescence. When she pulled her original version of the video Life in America at the start of the second Iraq war, she just kind of dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. As for wannabes like Britney Spears: she never even started with what Madonna had: Britney’s a sale flyer for K-Mart. It’s like the difference between de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in the late 18th century and its 20th century dialectical incarnation, as shown by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film in which de Sade’s treatise becomes a catalogue of fascist-totalitarian tortures. If a thing has potentially subversive powers in one epoch, it doesn’t necessarily carry them over into others, especially if it can be used to fuel an economic or political rationale. And that’s what happened to girlism, which gained such force by the early 90s that it was theorized by pre-eminent postmodern feminists like Judith Butler. (In a typo-slip, the author of this article refers to her as Judith Butter: Tango, anyone? Yes, it’s always back to sex.) Butler rejects gender as a fixed category and instead prefers “those historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts.” Gender isn’t fixed; gender identity can shift and change according to context and circumstance. Our actual bodies are at issue, as are their representations: if your gender identity is fixed upon a set of categories — “girl,” “woman,” “man” — you, as an individual, are left with no room to maneuvre, to resist, to change. Hence, gender identity has to be fluid and changeable if it is to have any liberatory or explosive force. The connection between punk feminism, “girlism,” and punk girl bands — with names like Hole (Courtney Love), Cunts with Attitude, The Slits, Dickless — came about because these performers enacted a transgressive feminity — “look, no dick!, slit instead!, fuck you anyway!” — which used the symbols of femininity and pre-sexualized girlhood (hence the “girlism”) as an in-your-face slap to status quo notions of “womanhood.” While a juggernaut of theory was built up around this punk music praxis almost immediately, it was also nearly immediately co-opted into marketing and branding, especially via MTV. There is no way you can turn subversion into an ism (which is why feminism isn’t subversive per se: it is constructive, with all the attendant problems that entails). Grrls and girlist practice was originally a subversive performance that had nothing whatsoever to do with the slick, hole-less and artificially dick-ified Angels of Chuck. It had nothing to do with the glossy, mass-marketed “beauty” of the entertainment and advertising industries, beauty ideals that are destructive and limiting for the (individually beautiful) individual, but which hound that individual at every turn. It deliberately used “ugliness” and crudity, and in its nastier moments figuratively shat on the perfect model abstraction of the Beauty Queen. Butler’s theory that gender can be manipulated by the individual with some kind of freedom remains wishful thinking, however. From the link above: “Butler says: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’ (Gender Trouble, p. 25). In other words, gender is a performance; it’s what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.” This is true as far as I can see, but as a blueprint for action, it is also immediately constrained by the realities of co-optation. For example, if the grrls use girlish signifiers to masquerade a femininity that confounds patriarchy, their theorists should be reminded that it’s legal in Canada to have sex with real, actual 14-year old girls. And if marketing makes it ever more desirable to sell sexualized “play-with-the-markers-of-femininity-but-dress-like-a-slut” clothing to 6-year-olds, we’ll just see more sexualized children, not more playful adults free of gender-constraints.