Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages/Midwest I: Women in Rock

Session A
Session Organizer: Marla Jaksch
Pennsylvania State University
mlj132@psu.edu

“Children to be grandmother for”: Laura Nyro’s Daughters and Granddaughters  

Biologically Laura Nyro had no daughters, but culturally, she had several while she was alive, and her granddaughters keep coming along. This paper considers Nyro’s career as it served to change the climate for women singer-songwriters, making possible the careers of two other female singer-songwriters, Rickie Lee Jones and Vanessa Carlton. Looking at the debut albums of these two artists, Jones in 1978 and Carlton in 2002, I will show clear acknowledgment of Nyro’s influence and how these artists typify the changes Nyro brought about for a certain kind of woman performer. Despite Jones' protests on "Sunday Morning" on March 21, 2004 that she was no one's follower, her debut album shows she was Nyro's. As for Carlton, for her generation of artists Nyro was a distant echo, and yet it was an echo to which Vanessa was attuned, both in some of her musical choices and in aspects of her image. Would these women become singer-songwriters if Laura Nyro had not come before them? Possibly, but there would have had to be someone blazing the path through the business as it was before they came along, creating the role of a certain kind of female singer-songwriter, the inspired young woman at her keyboard.

Patricia S. Rudden
New York City College of Technology
prudden@citytech.cuny.edu  

It’s Just Not Phair!: Chameleon-Like Performances by Liz Phair

After Liz Phair’s debut album Exile in Guyville topped critics’ polls, she told Opinion that “[t]he only thing that [critics] care about is what it’s like to be an upper-middle-class cute girl with smart parents singing dirty words.” Presciently, Phair seemed to anticipate what would happen when critics no longer cared about four letter words. On Nick Hennies’ “Band-A-Minute” list that’s been circulating the Internet since 1999, the one line description of Phair’s career runs: “Fuck fuck fuck. (Has baby.) Darn darn darn.” What’s implicit in this description is the notion that Phair took on two different performing roles at two different times in her career: the unfuckwithable young woman on Exile in Guyville which became the mature artiste on her 1998 album whitechocolatespaceegg. With the overtly personal criticism hounding her self-titled 2003 release, it seems most mainstream journalists could not fathom that Phair had become an unfuckwithable mature artiste. It’s our contention that, from the beginning of her career as a musician, Phair has always been a chameleon-like performer.

Reading against the mainstream critical grain, we use fan responses, personal observations of her live performances, and internet/zine reviews to ultimately show that her chameleon-like persona underscores her status as of the most challenging female musicians in rock.

Anthony Bleach and John Lennon
Lehigh University
acb8@lehigh.edu and jfl2@lehigh.edu

“All is Full of Desire”: Pushing Body Boundaries and Satiating Subjects in Björk’s Music Videos

Since the advent of MTV in 1981, the music video has become as integral to the success of musicians as the songs they write and perform. One uniquely individual musician, particularly successful in melding the visual image with musical sounds in technologically innovative and artistic ways, is Icelandic-born artist, Björk.

Björk’s power not only lies within her artistic talents. It is her ability to use the mass viewed video form to parody and play with gender performance that separates her from her contemporaries. Both within the video-texts, and the songs that they accompany, she refuses to allow spectators to satiate their desires by pushing representations of the female body to the limit and playing with notions of binaries and boundaries in relation to gender and sexuality.

In this paper I use Janet Staiger’s work on spectatorship, alongside the French Feminists’ notions of fluidity and abjection, to examine the ways in which Björk’s video texts alienate the viewer by deferring desire. In addition, through an analysis of main-stream audience responses to Björk’s texts, I attempt to define why Björk’s work is both popular with mainstream audiences and influential to many female artists.

H. Louise Davis
Michigan State University
Helouise_davis@yahoo.com

Session B
Session Coodinator: Janet LaBrie
University of Wisconsin-Waukesha
jlabrie@uwc.edu

Dreaming of Home: Poetry, Politics, and the Dixie Chicks

While the Dixie Chicks are perhaps most (in)famous for their statements made against the United States’ War on Iraq, they have been a political feminist force in popular music since their first entrance onto the country music stage. Initially their songs rejected stereotypical notions of feminine subjectivity within country music, replacing victims who had been “done wrong” with joyous rebellious women embracing “wrongs” of their own. After establishing country music popularity, the Chicks began expanding their audience, appealing to rock fans as well. To this larger crowd, they started challenging notions of female sexuality, refusing to be read as sexual objects while insisting on their rights to sexual freedom and expression. They also began dealing with overtly political feminist subject matters such as domestic abuse, suggesting ways in which their fans could focus on rebuilding and re-imaging their lives free from violence and filled with love. While the Chicks’ focus on love seemed directed toward the self, their latest CD and concert tour politicized love, emphasizing the importance of envisioning freedom for all human beings, especially when rights to freedom and love seem to be in danger of slipping away. This paper traces this feminist development of the Chicks’ work, analyzing their contributions to popular culture.

Kim Bowers
University of Texas at Arlington
kpb2360@uta.edu

Venus Xtravaganza: The Bearer or Maker of Meaning?

This presentation will focus on the theme of “performance” as presented in Jennie Livingston’s documentary film “ Paris is Burning.” In my analysis of Livingston’s main protagonist Venus Xtravaganza, I will show how the heterosexual hegemony abjects the bodies marked by the “deathly” ritual of gender, race and class.

I begin by focusing on the example of Venus who, as the transgender Latino, participates in the drag balls which work as the parody of the hegemonic culture. At the same time, Venus tries to “perform” and pass within the heterosexual culture itself. And she pays the highest price for having been interpellated as”the marked body.” Next, I draw on Butler’s Bodies That Matter, putting forward the question of liberation from the domineering regulatory power. In my analysis of Venus’ story, I look for answers to the questions: Can the marked body survive in the racist, homophobic society? Can abjects show any instance of agency or possibilities of resisting “gender interpellations?” Finally, I interpret Venus’s case as the exemple of agency and possibility of subverting the dominant norms. I explain how Venus’ agency allows her to change her position from the bearer to the maker of meaning.

Katarzyna Rozanska
University of Northern Iowa
krozanska@yahoo.com

The Masquerade is the Only Mask We’ve Got

This is a journey from Stella Dallas to Polly Jean Harvey, assessing how appropriate feminist film theories have been in unpacking the image of female rock and R’n’B musicians, investigating en-route, melodrama, excess and Othering. It is also a journey into sound that aims to move beyond a theory of the image towards that of circulating synaesthetic images whose meanings accumulate through metatextual discourses, to an embodied, synaesthetic spectator and beyond the distinction of sound and vision (Goodwin 1992).

It maps a split between the ideal feminine articulated within the apparatus film theories of the 1970s (Mulvey, 1975; Metz 1974, Dyer, 1979,86) or what Ang (96:37) terms, the "critical" approach and the real feminine of the Cultural Studies turn (Radway 1984, Hobson 1982, Ang 1985). This split runs through feminist film studies, Cultural Studies and meanders on through academic input on women and music. In order to map performative femininities (Butler 1990, 1993) within a field that has been unsatisfactorily polarised between the ‘given’, ‘ideal’ feminine of the text against the essentialised and unproblematized feminine of the audience documenting this chasm between text and audience in relation to key debates and arguments on performing the feminine across a range of media is essential in order to be able to proceed with theorising the circulating image.

Abigail Gardner
University of Gloucestershire
agardner@glos.ac.uk

Achieving Independence: Woman and the New Soul Movement

This paper looks at the growing number of artists who are bypassing the majors and releasing music through websites and independent distributors. A disproportionate amount of these are black women, usually working within a “neo-Soul” aesthetic framework. I want to celebrate these artists and suggest that there are certain unifying features (relating to ideology, musical style and image) that point to a collective rejection of aspects of mainstream pop and R&B culture.

I will look at performers such as Delilah Harris, N’Dambi, Ledisi, Angela Johnson, Amel Larrieux, Antoinique, Debra Killings, and Tiffany Laing – all of whom are generating a great deal of interest worldwide while remaining relatively unknown in the U.S. Some have an explicit political or social agenda; all perform in a style that challenges certain dominant values. Their rise can be traced back to the mid-nineties, but their proliferation is a feature of the new millennium.

While my main purpose is simply to raise the profile of these acts, I hope to ask a few questions about the limitations and narrowness of roles open to African-American women performers in contemporary culture and to comment on the relationship between tradition and innovation within the “neo-Soul” aesthetic which seems to me its most interesting feature.

Maurice Bottomley
Manchester Metropolitan University
tildawn90@hotmail.com