Girls, Girlhood, and Popular Music: Visibility, Fandom, and Feminist Critique

Girls, girlhood, and popular music

In the summer of 2013, an article about One Direction in GQ Magazine set off a firestorm. One feminist critic remarked that it read “like a sexist bingo card,” describing the band's audience as “rabid, knicker-wetting banshee[s]” who would “tear off [their] own ears in hysterical fervour.” This characterization was hardly new. The condescending dismissal of girl audiences — and often of girl artists too — has long been a fixture of music criticism. What stood out this time was the swift, furious, and very public backlash from girls themselves and from adult feminist supporters.

Within hours, the British and American editions of GQ (the U.S. version bore no responsibility for the piece) became targets of an avalanche of angry tweets. The ferocity and supposed unladylike language of those posts generated additional stories in the press. Predictably, some outlets used the tweet-storm to reinforce stereotypes. GQ itself shared a selection of fan tweets with a snarky warning about “serious abuses of Caps Lock.” The Daily Beast dismissed the outrage outright, asking, “[R]eally, how could you not laugh at a situation like this?” Entertainment site NewNowNext mocked the notion that girls could wield power, offering the sarcastic line “be afraid magazine editors, be very, very afraid.” Yet the speed and scope of web coverage also gave girls and their allies a platform to bypass the very critical and business institutions that have always relied on them even as they demeaned them.

Sites like Jezebel, Daily Dot, and PopDust ran pieces challenging the blatant sexism and ageism on display — not only in the GQ piece but in wider coverage of teen idols, boy bands, and their female fans. Reader comments revealed how deeply the misogyny stung. One person posting as LePrint Anna wrote, “Thank you for this article… No one else picked up on the misogyny, no one else wrote about the real reason why the fans are pissed off.” Another commenter, Kat Dells, pushed back on standard assumptions about fan identity and motivation: “I am a lesbian and a huge One Direction fan. I feel in love with 5 goofballs. I do not want to jump into their pants anytime soon, and that’s not just because I am a lesbian.”

The confrontation between One Direction fans and GQ reveals the persistent patterns of how girls appear and disappear in popular music discourse. As performers or fans, girls have always been hypervisible. They appear as screaming idol worshippers, as vulnerable and sexualized hip-hop consumers, and as the youthful personas inhabited by adult artists. Yet, as Norma Coates argued in 2003 in the first serious treatment of girlhood for JPMS, rock’s intellectual culture in the 1960s built its own legitimacy by labeling girls “teenyboppers” — grotesque others whose tastes were portrayed as immature, unreflective, and bodily driven. All the while, those same girls — through active fandom, solo dance expressions, and girl-group performances — helped form the youth music culture that rock claimed as its own. (Ironically, the rock press that cemented this derisive image arrived on the journalism scene a bit late next to teen magazines such as Tiger Beat.)

Ruth Nicole Brown observed that Black girls in hip-hop are both everywhere and nowhere: their images are pervasive target of critique, but their own insights into music that “give[s] meaning to [their] girlhood” are seldom recognized. She writes that mainstream hip-hop culture knows Black girls “too well but are not credited or counted as active participants,” leaving them “noticeably and pathetically absent from discussions.”

Girlishness itself has been a fundamental performance trope for female artists across genres and generations. By the 1990s, as Gayle Wald notes, the enactment of girlhood had become a “cultural dominant within the musical practice of women in rock.” It remains so today in the eras of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande, now layered with different meanings as actual girls claim that persona. Think of Britney Spears’ schoolgirl look, Hannah Montana’s girl-power energy, or the kawaii cuteness of young J-pop stars.

Still, the battle between 1D fans and GQ illustrates something new. The internet, social media, and YouTube have created novel forms of visibility for girls. They have public outlets to defend their taste, challenge reductive media depictions, and broadcast their critical opinions. Kat Dells’ public presence as a lesbian Directioner highlights what Barbara Brickman calls the “apparitional queers” of teenybopper culture, unsettling the heterosexual framing that popular music has long taken for granted. Social media helps girls with means and interest to develop critical voices and connect with one another as girls. Queer fans of One Direction have organized online and in-person communities, such as Rainbow Direction, which stage meet-ups at concerts and run a Tumblr where queer fans and allies can share space.

Beyond queer visibility, contemporary connections often foreground performance of girl identity. As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, those performances can span from Biebers (lesbians who both love and want to resemble Justin Bieber) to the work of little girls singing Jenni Rivera songs on YouTube to teenage girl rappers who demand that society acknowledge their sexual desires.

Yet visibility does not equal meaningful agency or true inclusion. Consider J-pop: the performance of girlhood has become a dominant trope in the sense Gayle Wald meant, but, as Sarah Keith and Diane Hughes demonstrate, it remains a commodified product — “a set of repeatable and performable behaviors” that stay under the control of male producers and audiences. The girl performer’s own agency is minimized and managed to produce a marketable star. Her perceived pliability, even her inexperience as an artist, becomes part of the draw. In other cases, a girl performer becomes visible not as herself, not even as a recognizable blend of femininity and youth, but as a symbol of wider cultural anxieties. Alexandra Apolloni shows that Millie Small’s popular appeal was tightly bound to respectability politics governing her girlhood, race, and national identity. That performance of respectability was intended not for girls but for adult consumers searching for a cute, uncontroversial West Indian immigrant — an image that meshed with the political tensions of a Britain dealing with race and immigration from former colonies.

Even when girls openly confront expectations of normative girlhood, as the emcees of P.T.A.F. (discussed by Carney, Hernandez, and Wallace) did, they face being reframed as both harmed and harmful in hip-hop’s ongoing sexual debates rather than recognized as people articulating their own desire.

These highly visible but managed forms of girlhood in pop music tend to obscure the far more complex relationships real girls build with music on their own terms. How can we make space for fans like Kat Dells, for Millie Small, or for the young emcees of post-Fight the fl!t collective to become visible on their own terms, whether in public or only in their daily surroundings? One recurring call voiced in this issue — echoing the cross-generational defense of girl Directioners and Rainbow Direction’s support networks — is to embrace what Hernandez and Wallace term an “erotics of feminist solidarity.” This kind of alliance foregrounds intergenerational connections and asks that we put them at the service of girls’ self-expression, especially by recognizing the “affective and corporeal dimensions” already present in radical cultural and sexual politics. Naming this solidarity brings into view the often-invisible feminist pedagogies that thrive within popular music culture. Following on insights from hip-hop studies and, less fully, from the girls rock movement, these essays demonstrate that girls’ engagement with popular music extends far beyond the privatization of youthful “bedroom culture.” The practices uncovered here underscore the unexpected and under- documented reality of intergenerational solidarity.

For example, Hernandez-Garcia shows how the “sonic pedagogies” within Jenni Rivera’s music work as practical, musical guides to navigating hardships of class, relationships, and sexuality for fans both young and older. Crucially, as listener La Yaquesita notes, singing that music alongside a friend’s mother became a way to show mutual recognition and appreciation: “I wanted to express to her that I saw her hard work and was thankful for her being the great mother she was to my friend and to me.”

In her passionate rebuttal of the forced politeness imposed on 1D fans lashing out at sexism, Daily Dot’s Aja Romano reminds us to question any assumption that “communities of worship aren’t learning to think critically, to find their own voices, and become strong …. anyone who think Directioners aren’t learning these things hasn’t been paying attention.”

New technologies and institutional structures are making girls and their music cultures more visible than ever. It is essential now that we do pay attention — and that we allow girls to choose the lenses through which we view them. That means shedding the stereotype of the hysterical devotee and seeing teenybopper culture in all of its complex diversity including queer and intergenerational dimensions. It means examining the specific cultural and historical meanings embedded in the figures of girlhood so common in performance. And it means looking past our own preconceived notions about girlhood in order to see clearly how girls’ investments in popular music reflect, shape, and give meaning to their experiences, identities, and knowledge.

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The most terrifying responses to our One Direction covers. (2013, July 30). GQ. Retrieved from http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2013-07/30/one-direction-gq-covers-most-terrifying-responses

The six most sexist moments of GQ’s One Direction cover story. (2013, August 2). PopDust. Retrieved from http://www.popdust.com/the-six-most-sexist-moments-of-gqs-one-direction-cover-story-1889726345.html

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