The Mediated Youth Reader

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mazzarella, Sharon R., editor.
Title: The mediated youth reader / edited by Sharon R. Mazzarella.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2016. | Series: Mediated youth,
ISSN 1555-1814 (print), ISSN 2378-2935 (online); Vol. 27 |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015040773 | ISBN 9781433132896 (hardcover: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781433132889 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781453917800 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and youth. | Mass media—Social aspects. |
Mass media and globalization.
Classification: LCC HQ799.2.M35 M378 2016 | DDC 302.23—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040773

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover design by Clear Point Designs

© 2016 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

SHARON R. MAZZARELLA (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Professor of Communication Studies at James Madison University. She is editor of five anthologies, and her research has been published in a range of journals. Her current research examines the moral panic behind journalistic constructions of girls and girlhoods.

About the book

Since the first book was signed almost ten years ago, the Mediated Youth series has published nearly two dozen volumes, with more in process or production. This milestone provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on how the series has evolved, how it has contributed to the field, and in which direction(s) it is moving.

The chapters reprinted in this volume have been selected to showcase the variety and diversity of topics published in the series. Grounded in cultural studies, they approach mediated youth through the lenses of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, and technology. As a whole, they paint a multi-faceted, complex, and nuanced picture of the relationship between youth and media today, and demonstrate that there is no one, singular “youth.” They remind us of the rich diversity of life experiences and media involvements of youth from a range of backgrounds, cultures, and countries.

These chapters serve not only as a retrospective collection of scholarship published in Peter Lang’s Mediated Youth book series, but also as a roadmap to the diversity of scholarship characterizing the field of youth media studies during these years.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

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CHAPTER 3

The “Dollification” of Riot Grrrls

Self-Fashioning Alternative Identities

Meghan Chandler and Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

In their 1990 music video for “He’s My Thing,” American Riot Grrrl pioneers, Babes in Toyland, present a nightmarish world paved with rubble and populated by dolls. Rejecting the typical pacifiers and rattles, these dolls prefer matches and machetes. The lead doll, who bears an uncanny resemblance to lead singer Kat Bjelland, with her messy blond curls, navigates the post-apocalyptic landscape to find a porcelain doll playing with a ballerina figurine. As stand-ins for conventional femininity, this old-fashioned doll and her ballerina plaything embody what girls and dolls should be: dainty, demure, and contained. In stark opposition stands the blade-wielding, Bjelland look-alike doll, who proceeds to amputate the limbs of her porcelain counterpart and set fire to everything around her. By similarly maiming old notions of girlhood, other Riot Grrrls also broke down existent patriarchal notions of what girls should be by carving out an empowered, alternative identity. Through their subversive reworking of doll figures, they challenged the longstanding cultural belief that doll-play cultivated “good” girls.

In A Study on Dolls, a pioneering text in the field of childhood psychology published in 1897, G. Stanley Hall and A. Caswell Ellis argued that dolls fostered girls’ feminine identity. After polling over 640 boys and girls attending American and British schools, the two American psychologists concluded that playing with dolls shaped children’s understanding of society (p. 22). By making sense of the outside world through small-scale doll-universes, children supposedly formed life-long notions of “goodness” and “badness,” which informed their self-perception as well-adjusted individuals. The psychologists claimed that “by trying to teach her doll” manners, morals, and hygiene, a girl tried “to set a good example” that often translated into optimized self-care. In fact, several parents included in the study reported that “car[ing] for [a] doll’s body help[ed infants] to know and care for their own” (p. 45). Parents also observed that doll-play stimulated their children’s ability to “cultivate taste in dress,” ultimately making them “more stylish, more refined [… and with a] love of beauty.” Thus, according to Hall and Ellis, the doll functioned as a mirror through which the child learnt formative lessons on beautification, fashion, and self-maintenance. Biased gender-coding, however, undergirded these foundational teachings. Such achievements in fashion, taste, and self-grooming positioned doll-play as a mock-practice for assuming ← 49 | 50 → traditional feminine roles, shaping the child’s “fit[ness] for domestic life,” “the care of children,” and “womanliness,” while preparing them for heterosexual coupledom (pp. 44–45). In sum, A Study on Dolls proposed that, while both genders engaged in childish doll-play, only female subjectivity became radically molded by its formative lessons on ladylike propriety, beauty, and domesticity.

One hundred years after Hall and Ellis, a cadre of teenage girls on both sides of the Atlantic reworked conventional ideas about feminized doll-play. In a variety of ways, these rebellious, riotous girls gleefully embraced the process of “dollification,” a term Hall and Ellis (1897) described as “the childish instinct to find or make a doll out of everything—even themselves” (pp. 11, 46). Donning hand-ripped attire and banging on hard-strummed guitars, American and British Riot Grrrls rehearsed a much darker, sexualized play with dolls at the dawn of the 1990s. In an attempt to subvert corseting views on female beauty and girlish passivity surrounding the figure of the doll, these girls—some of them underground singers and working-class performers, many others middle-class high-school students—caked their faces with smeared make-up; gashed their mouths with runny, red lipstick; shaved or teased their “birdnest” hair (http://katiejanegarside.com/press.html, n.d.); and costumed themselves in soiled, flimsy baby-doll dresses that exposed their bruised and tattooed young bodies.

Banded together, these girls birthed an idea-swapping “network and a space for experimentation,” which two Portland teenagers first dubbed the “Riot Grrrl” movement. Tellingly, the term originated within their private correspondence, propelled by the 15-year-olds’ shared desire to witness young females revolt against America’s male-dominated popular culture. In a self-fashioned journey through the proverbial looking-glass, they metamorphosed into outspoken, crude versions of Hall’s “elegant French dolls.” While in 1897, Hall and Ellis claimed that, “if dolls lose their heads, eyes, or get otherwise deformed, little children are afraid of them,” by 1989, those “rude and maimed dolls” no longer scared girls (pp. 11, 42). Rather, Riot Grrrls celebrated such grotesquely reconstructed doll figures by mimicking their scabs, scratches, and sutures. As a result of this perceptual twist, girls ceased to long for dolls that mirrored a beautified notion of self. Instead, dolls became the externalized reflection of girls’ hidden fears, personal obsessions, and coming-of-age nightmares. Riot Grrrl artists further played upon these darker aspects by crafting a powerful menagerie of violated prom queens, maimed super models, and strung-out cheerleaders. While their creative reinterpretations dismantled previous models of girlhood, Riot Grrrls nonetheless reused some of the left-over pieces to fashion new feminist images. Sometimes Riot Grrrls posed with dolls for promotional photos, cover-art, and in music videos; sometimes they re-appropriated mass culture depictions of commercial dolls (such as the infamous Barbie) in their confessional writings and self-reflexive art practice. Other times, the performers themselves embodied the wound-up automaton, spasmodically trashing across the stage while fans waited for their batteries to run out. In the end, Riot Grrrls found a voice in the otherwise historically silent figure of the doll, and became “dollified” spokespersons for new feminist ideals.

This chapter aims to extend the parameters of existent histories on Riot Grrrls by investigating the doll imagery appropriated and produced by three ringleaders of dollification: Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland; Courtney Love from Hole; and KatieJane Garside from Daisy Chainsaw. While cultural theorists such as Ross Haenfler (2010) and feminist scholars such as Anne Higonnet¹ (1998) and April R. Mandrona (2012) have identified doll images and doll-making within the “do-it-yourself ” ethos of the Riot Grrrl movement, we push this perspective further. We ask: in what ways did Riot Grrrls use the doll as a central figure and repeating motif in their artistic works or performances? How did such reappropriation intersect with or diverge from previous meanings ascribed to dolls and their intended cultural work? By exploring these questions, our chapter demonstrates that, in the hands of Riot Grrrls, the doll served as a significant political figure who subverted patriarchal views about young femininity. We utilize material culture, as well as the textual and visual analyses of these three artists’ stage personae, their album artwork, music videos, and lyrics to interrogate how and why the doll figured so centrally in Riot Grrrl musical culture. ← 50 | 51 →

More than an aesthetic object choice, Riot Grrrls used dolls to become what sociologist Dick Hebdige (1979) dubbed, “subcultural bricoleur[s].”2 Riot Grrrls gave new meanings to dolls by transforming and re-contextualizing them. They creatively filtered dominant meanings of dolls through their subcultural agenda, consequently re-appropriating them as tokens of feminist resistance. Broken and bruised, lewd and loud, Riot Grrrls rewrote the doll’s iconography and cultural meaning of prim beauty, frigid innocence, and passive composure. Their “dollified,” animated bodies thus became a vehicle through which Riot Grrrls staged their intervention as subcultural bricoleurs and empowered agents, hell bent on subverting mainstream ideas on proper feminine identity.

While most Riot Grrrl histories tend to focus exclusively on American individuals, our work expands these borders to consider Riot Grrrls and their doll-play on an intercontinental scale.³ Analyzing Hole and Babes in Toyland in tandem with British band Daisy Chainsaw, our chapter examines the transatlantic as well as transhistorical continuities of doll imagery. In addition to broadening our scope beyond the traditional American-centric perspective, we also move beyond the era typically associated with the heyday of the Riot Grrrl movement. As such, we consider how pro-feminist doll-play continues in the form of contemporary Riot Grrrl acts such as Doll Fight!, a three-woman Riot Grrrl band from Vermont, and the art practice of KatieJane Garside, the iconic lead singer of Daisy Chainsaw. In fact, Riot Grrrls’ reappropriation of dolls remains alive in girls’ cultural productions, performances, and imaginations.

“Revolution doll style now:”⁴ American Riot Grrrls

The Riot Grrrl movement first emerged in the early 1990s as an underground feminist punk movement; it continued throughout the 1990s, spreading from its original epicenter in the Pacific Northwest across the United States and the world. Several outspoken, politically oriented feminist artists—including Kathleen Hanna and her Bikini Kill band, Bratmobile, Heaven to Betsy, 7 Year Bitch—led the movement through music as well as other visual art practices, including self-published “zines” and “do-it-yourself ” art production. Riot Grrrls attempted to reclaim and self-fashion a counter-hegemonic version of female empowerment through these projects, and utilized hyper-sexualized images of girlhood as a privileged motif.

Even though Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland held complex and at times oppositional positions toward the Riot Grrrls,⁵ their early endeavors (musical and otherwise) established the foundational tenets and ethos of the movement. In particular, images of dolls served as a staple in the musical and artistic output of Kat Bjelland’s band, Babes in Toyland, as well as Courtney Love’s band, Hole.⁶ Sugar Babydoll, the musical and artistic collective founded in 1981 by Love and her Portland-based friends, Ursula Wehr and Robin Barbur, is evidence of Love’s early exploration of dolls as culturally meaningful artifacts. The collective later relocated to San Francisco during 1982–84, with singer Kat Bjelland and bassist Jennifer Finch replacing Wehr and Barbur. In an interview with VH1, Bjelland admitted that Sugar Babydoll was always “more about taking pictures” than producing real music (Gottlieb, 2010, 1:27:05). Yet these early collaborations introduced two major themes—girlhood imagery and the doll figure—that Love, Bjelland, and other Riot Grrrl artists would explore in their songs, videos, and performances.

Following Sugar Babydoll’s lead, Riot Grrrls played upon and toyed with idealized notions of dolls, girlhood, and the “Romantic child.” Since the eighteenth century, Romantic girls sporting frilly dresses, coiffed hair, and demurely dimpled smiles served as long-standing emblems of pure, innocent girlhood and idealized femininity (see Higonnet, 1998). Riot Grrrl bands reworked fetishized exemplars of naïveté and innocence—from Victorian fashion dolls to the sickeningly sweet line of Strawberry Shortcake dolls of the 1980s—by ripping their own frilly dresses, disheveling their hair, and turning their smiles into sardonic sneers. Exploding romanticized images of female childhood from the inside out, ← 51 | 52 → Riot Grrrls acted as self-aware agents who subversively refashioned themselves into parodied pastiches of childish yet sexual vamps. Their reformulations of girlhood and its associated objects, ranging from baby-doll dresses to actual baby dolls, revealed how girlhood and its iconic images could be used as a powerful cultural critique as well as to empower alter-egos.

Riot Grrrls, however, were not the first to play with dolls or forge public personas that sexualized girlish cuteness. According to Kim Marie Vaz (2013), author of The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition, in 1912 African American women from the New Orleans red light district banded together to form the Million Dollar Baby Dolls. The group masqueraded in baby doll costumes and assumed doll personas in order to carve out new identities in the predominately white male carnival traditions of Mardi Gras. As forerunners to Riot Grrrl Kinderwhore, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls costumed themselves in an ironic mix of short satin dresses, sexy garters, and demure bonnets. Their costuming turned the innocuous cuteness of passive baby dolls into a sexually empowered, alternative pastiche. Paving the way for later Riot Grrrls, these marginalized New Orleans women exploited stereotypes and used images of dolls to make themselves publicly visible.

Similarly, in the hands of Riot Grrrls, the doll ceased to be an embodiment of childish cuteness and passive purity. While Lori Merish (1996) theorized that cuteness de-sexualizes the child’s body and facilitates the disavowal or sublimation of eroticism, Love and other Riot Grrrls dollified themselves into living parodies of sexual, girly playthings. Rather than playing the good girl, rebellious Riot Grrrls played with alternative presentations of what girls could be. In doing so, they transformed dollish innocence into a performance of empowered female sexuality. According to feminist scholar Karina Eileraas (1997), the Riot Grrrls’ surreal juxtapositions of conventional prettiness with violent, violated images “create[d] a visual economy that emphasize[d] the violence to and alienation from the body that obedient performances of ‘pretty’ femininity entail” (p. 124). Shattering the glossy veneer of girly prettiness and doll-like cuteness, Riot Grrrls pieced together a tattered quilt of knowing sexuality. Echoing this, Courtney Love even described how she consciously veered away from stereotypical notions of upper-middle-class femininity and prom queens in favor of embodying “subculture, [and becoming] a teenage bag lady” (O’Brien, 2002, p. 171). Thus, by playing with sexualized images of dolls and re-presenting themselves as “child-women, [or] fucked-up Lolitas,” as Eileraas described them (p. 128), Riot Grrrls perverted cute images of girls. Their self-conscious refiguration of the dress and aesthetics of girlhood defined Riot Grrrl style and delineated their politics of oppositional identity-making.

“Crazy old doll in a crazy old dress:”7 Courtney Love, Kat Bjelland, and Kinderwhore

Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland defined Riot Grrrl style through their Kinderwhore fashion. Their ripped baby-doll dresses, torn stockings, messy doll-like curls, and smudged makeup became the fashion staples of this trademark look. Babes in Toyland’s 1990 song, “Lashes,” effectively spelled out the crazed, destructive ethos at the core of Kinderwhore. As Bjelland’s lyrics proclaim,

Garbed in tattered nighties and messed-up make-up, Riot Grrrls crafted a twisted style that tore at the decorous dress signifying proper and poised femininity; instead, they replaced these candy-coated stereotypes with “sweets laced with razor blades” (Women on the Verge, 2011).

While some credit Bjelland with pioneering the Kinderwhore trend, Love undoubtedly popularized it amongst Riot Grrrl fans. Love “seemed iconic compared to other female musicians on the scene,” ← 52 | 53 → wrote one Atlanta teen, “all those bands had girls trying to be like the boys or girls too soft and sweet, but Court and Kat [Bjelland] were just right, a marriage between feminine and fierce” (kidsoncrux, 2012). Simultaneously appropriating the styling of naïve schoolgirls as well as tawdry women, Riot Grrrls problematized the fetishistic fantasies constructed around imagined ideals of innocence and passivity in doll objects—the central metonym for girlhood itself. Courtney Love especially turned the innocent cuteness of doll-like girls into an embodied “glistening sex doll” performance by combining ripped baby-doll dresses with smudged makeup and barrette-studded, mussed hair (Attwood, 2007, p. 241).

Love constructed a subversive image of girlhood with her Kinderwhore fashions, then beat and battered her dollified image in Hole’s songs and music videos. For example, songs such as “Babydoll” graphically explored adult sexuality: “Drill it in my good hole so that I can see / Here she comes Her pants undone / Oh my babydoll what a whore you are” (Love, Erlandson, Emery, & Rue, 1991a). Love also used Kinderwhore costuming to produce intentionally twisted visuals and question normative understandings of acceptable feminine behavior.8 Through her performance of self-abuse and sexual stylization, Love struck back at the very patriarchal constructs that defined idealized femininity as socially and sexually passive. In music videos for “Violet” (Seligar & Woodward, 1994) and “Miss World” (Muller, 1994), Love’s Kinderwhore costuming served to further challenge stereotypical notions of how “good girls” should conduct themselves. In particular, “Violet” addressed sexual exploitation and self-exploration by juxtaposing children dressed as ballerinas with women “dressed” as strippers and burlesque dancers. Wearing a gauzy tutu alongside prepubescent ballerinas, Love baited listeners to “Go on, take everything” while she proceeded to stage-dive into a salaciously groping male crowd. Appearing as both the vulnerable child and a sexually active woman, Love effectively blurred the boundaries between these diametrically opposed positions. Hole’s “Miss World” video also mixed childish appearances with a more mature type of physical expression, characterized by Love’s reckless trashing and aggressive screaming, which flew in the face of prim, good-girl behavior. During the video’s chorus, for instance, Love angrily screams and bangs her guitar in front of a twinkling backdrop spelling out the phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” This adage echoes back to cultural demands upon little girls: namely, that they remain pure and grow into decorous women. Love resists this proscription, however, and instead presents a raucous, unruly version of herself. Donning dirty off-white knee-highs, scuffed Mary Jane shoes, and a mussed Peter Pan collar dress, Love defied dominant expectations and investments in hygiene, self-containment, and beautification—the same virtues that, as Hall and Ellis theorized, dolls should instill into little girls.