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2013 | Buch

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Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood

verfasst von: Alison Winch

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

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'.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Introduction: Girlfriend Culture

Abstract

The Thinspiration blog showcases photographs of ‘real girls, models, and celebrities’ and has 8659 members (http://thinspiration-pictures.blogspot.co.uk). The blogger is a young Australian called Erin whose aim is to motivate women to lose weight by posting photographs of ‘super skinny girls in fashionable clothes’. She made the site ‘for girls who were like me that needed something to motivate them’. Erin explains that previously, ‘I thought I was curvy and looked like any other “healthy girl”’, but the images of these women inspired her to become thinner. The women in the photographs are the size that we normally expect from models and celebrities. However, because celebrity is marketed as democratic, all women can aspire to be like them. Thinspiration is a friendly, feminine, and intimate blog where the ideal body is trafficked among a homosocial group of women. The images are employed to incite comparison, competition, envy, identification and aspiration.

Alison Winch

1. The Girlfriend Gaze

Abstract

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.

Alison Winch

2. BFF Co-Brands

Abstract

How can a girlfriend negotiate the apparent abundance of choice? How is she to choose the right food, the right diet, the right clothes, the right haircut? Which vitamins should she take? When is it OK to eat chocolate? And what type of chocolate? Sales of self-help books are evidence that women are willing to spend more than ever on postfeminist expertise. One niche in the self-help market is books written by girlfriends; authors who market themselves as BBFs and who speak to their female audience within this sphere of belonging. These texts, which include Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female (2009) by Tania Kindersley and Sarah Vine, who define themselves as ‘[p]roud feminists’ (Kindersley and Vine, 2009, 53) and the New York Times bestseller I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives (2001) by Ellen Goodman and Patricia O’Brien, celebrate and sanction female friendship. This chapter looks at two British conduct books written by ‘best friends’: Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine’s What Not to Wear spin-off books and Fearne Cotton and Holly Willoughby’s Best Friends’ Guide to Life (2010). It also focuses on the American Skinny Bitch brand that is written and promoted by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin.

Alison Winch

3. Strategic Sisterhoods

Abstract

In a 2009 Guardian feature showcasing ten ‘Icons of the Decade’, Naomi Wolf celebrates Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, asking whether she ‘did as much to shift the culture around certain women’s issues as real-life feminist groundbreakers?’

I stepped into a restaurant in New York — and in brushed a woman in big sunglasses and crazy boots, who warmly greeted the staff in a manner so familiar to me I smiled instinctively. I thought it must be a friend of mine. Well, I wasn’t completely wrong. Actually, it was Sarah Jessica Parker, a stranger. Yet every woman in the room reacted with a similar happy, gut familiarity.

Why? Not because of the actor — because of the character. Because we had all heard Carrie’s stories from our own girlfriends, and recognised in her something of our best selves. Hey girlfriend! (Wolf, 2009)

Alison Winch

4. Womance

Abstract

The wedding aisle is a sign of completion in the romantic comedy. It is where the lovers achieve their resolution. This chapter explores how female sociality in girlfriend media is played out against the backdrop of a straight, white wedding. Whereas the romcom typically portrays boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, movies configured through ‘a womance’ relate the ups and downs of girlfriendship. Rather than being desirable ends in themselves, the emotional signifiers of a heterosexual marriage or motherhood are employed to heighten the affect of womancing girlfriends. Increasingly, the traditional feminine fantasy of the perfect man providing financial security and a happy ever after ending is no longer wanted or tenable in a precarious economic climate where women hold more power in the workplace. Instead, the focus is on the loyalty of girlfriends. The male love interest is marginalized or rendered benign, and it is women’s ability to shine for and with their girlfriends that drives the narrative. In the womance, the aisle is a highly sentimentalized locus of friendship and reconciliation between women: the two white-gowned sisters in In Her Shoes (2005) express their sibling love in the aisle while the grooms stand by. Similarly, in Bridesmaids (2011), it is the relationship between the girlfriends that delivers the climax of the film.

Alison Winch

5. Making White Lives Better?

Abstract

From the white nostalgia of Mad Men (AMC 2007–) to the new Oscar-winning The Help, there has been a resurgence in media representations of black women cast as maids and servants. The assumption of a post-racial society has opened up a site for old stereotypes. This racism is implicitly justified because these portrayals are claiming to be authentic representations of the past.¹ In The Help the stereotype of the Mammy — the archetype of the black female servant — is resurrected in the name of authenticity. The plot centres on Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), a college graduate who accepts a job at the local paper in her hometown of Jacksonville as the house-cleaning agony aunt. As part of her research she interviews her friend’s ‘Help’, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis). Through these interviews, Skeeter realizes that she can further her career by writing a book from the perspective of the Helps. This is a subversive project in 1960s Mississippi, and Skeeter is cast as the girl-heroine who innocently sees through the retro racism of her peers. Although she should represent the generation of second-wave feminists, she is troped through the signifiers of postfeminism: she is girly, happy, thin and relentlessly entrepreneurial. The two main Helps, Aibileen and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), have prominent speaking parts which are eloquent and, within the context of the film, have depth.

Alison Winch

6. Catfight

Abstract

The Hills (MTV, 2006–2010) is a hybrid reality series (Hearn 2010) that traces the social lives of a group of affluent Californian young women. It follows the friendship between Heidi Montag and Lauren Conrad as they move in together in the first episode, through to the pain endured as they subsequently grow further apart. The womance between Heidi and Lauren is the emotional and narrative focus of the first and second seasons and is dragged out as a subplot until Lauren eventually leaves. Heidi laments to her ex-BFF Lauren: ‘I never thought in my wildest dreams that this would be how things ended up [ … ] the only thing really missing in my life is you’ (‘I Heidi Take Thee Spencer’ 4:20). Although these two girlfriends broke up in season 1, the show milks the affect of their broken womance until Lauren finally leaves in season 5, but not before she confesses to Heidi, ‘I still love you’, and Heidi replies ‘my favourite stories are my stories with you, my favourite memories are my memories with you’ (‘Don’t Cry on Your Birthday’ 5:1). Heidi and Lauren’s girlfriend break-up veers from sentimentality to crisis. Moreover, the suffering induced by their conflict is heightened because it is created by an unreliable and untrustworthy male — Spencer. Because of him, the segregated spaces of entitled girlfriend love are gate-crashed by one of girlfriend culture’s omega men.

Alison Winch

7. Class and British Reality Television

Abstract

In the spoof documentary Trinny and Susannah: What They Did Next (2004), Susannah claims, ‘This is a relationship that’s been going longer than 14 years.’ ‘It’s lasted longer than my marriage’, chimes in Trinny and the camera lingers on their sullen faces. In this ‘mock-umentary’ Trinny and Susannah camp up their class, celebrity and friendship through portraying themselves in country houses, riding horses, being massaged and reaping the benefits of an upper middle class lifestyle. They simultaneously laugh at themselves through their self-representation in career meltdown and friendship bust-up. Coined ‘the princesses of makeover’, they perform themselves as alcoholic, hysterical and heading for failure. Here, Trinny and Susannah take the class signifiers that were so evident in their UK television show (BBC, 2001–2007) and bring them to excess. This chapter examines how this excessive manipulation of classed subjectivities is employed as a means to generate conflict between women. I explore the affect of friend-ship and female sociality in the UK ‘social work’ television programmes (Skeggs and Wood, 2011, 42), What Not to Wear, Cook Yourself Thin (Channel 4, 2010–2012) and Wife Swap (Channel 4, 2003–2009). Not all these programmes are overt examples of girlfriend culture as they do not all represent friends. However, they do enact and enable the girlfriend gaze through their policing networks.

Alison Winch

8. The Friendship Market

Abstract

In The Program: Fifteen Steps to Finding a Husband After Thirty Rachel Greenwald appropriates techniques from the Harvard business model to advise women on how to transform themselves into successful brands.¹ Making oneself into a brand, she enthuses, will ensure the ensnaring of a husband — even after 30. Greenwald advises that the potential bride brand will be more authentically herself and, simultaneously, meticulously crafted and cultivated through marketing strategies. These strategies combine branding techniques that have been honed at Harvard along with the purloining of traditional attributes and performances of femininity. According to Greenwald, most men prefer feminine women; this means that they ‘prefer longer hair [ … ] that is soft to touch’ (Greenwald, 2004, 45–46). She tells her readers:

Part of evaluating your look and how you are perceived by men requires a frank assessment of whether or not you look and act feminine [ … ] I have seen time and again that men are usually more attracted to women in skirts than in trousers [ … ] most men seek women who exude feminine qualities. (Greenwald, 2004, 52)

Alison Winch

Conclusion: Feminism, Friendship and Conflict

Abstract

Women friends constitute my most precious relationships as well as the most complex. Eichenbaum and Orbach identify the exquisite intimacy of female friendships while also noting how they have the potential to generate powerful negative feelings: ‘Behind the curtain of sisterhood lies a myriad of emotional tangles that can wreak havoc in women’s relationships with each other’ (Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1988, 10–11). Indeed, my most cherished friendships are precisely those knotty ones in which we have found ourselves exposed, vulnerable, hurt, but also loving; where we have created an alchemy of relating unique to us and which has illuminated much about ourselves and each other. These ‘emotional tangles’, however, have also caused the dissipation of some friendships and their loss continues to be a source of grief. Eichenbaum and Orbach identify how feelings like anger and betrayal are not easily expressed and, as a consequence, collaborations, networks and intimacies can be destroyed. If conflicts between women do not have a collective space to be unpacked then solidarities can implode, leading to the dissolution of projects and manifestos.

Alison Winch

Backmatter

Titel: Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood
verfasst von: Alison Winch
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-31274-7
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60203-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312747