Issue 38 2003

Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother"

ByKATHLEEN ROWE KARLYN

"Popular culture is the politics of the 21stCentury"
Gale Weathers,Scream 3

[1] The 1990s might well be remembered as the decade of Girl Culture and Girl Power. New phrases began sounding in the air and new images surfacing in our media, changing the face of popular culture in a decidedly more youthful and feminine direction. In 1994, Mary Pipher'sReviving Opheliahelped put the issue of teen girls on the national cultural agenda. Indicting our "media-saturated culture" for "poisoning" our girls, the book sold 1.6 million copies. In cinema, teen girl audiences emerged as one of the most powerful demographic factors of the late 1990s, creating surprise hits out of movies ranging from the low-budget romantic comedyClueless(1995) to the slasher parodyScream(1996). In 1997, teen girls saved the romantic epicTitanicfrom financial disaster when groups of them flocked to theaters for repeat viewings of it.Clueless'ssuccess was followed by a TV spin-off and a wave of teenflick romances, and the cult aroundScreamled to two sequels. On television, more programming than ever began featuring teen girl protagonists in situations ranging from the everyday (FelicityandDawson's Creek) to the fantastic (the highly ratedBuffy the Vampire Slayer, based on a 1992 movie of the same name). In music, phrases such as "Girl Power," first articulated by the underground "riot grrls," moved into the mainstream with the international if short-lived phenomenon of the Spice Girls, adored by very young girls (if reviled by almost everyone else). "By sheer bulk," according to one studio executive, "young girls are driving cultural tastes now. They're amazing consumers" (Weinraub).

[2] Girls now control enough money to attract attention as a demographic group. This may or may not represent an advance in terms of girls' actual social power, but it does indicate that girls are being listened to by cultural producers who are taking them and their tastes very seriously. That hasn't necessarily been the case, however, for people with far more compelling personal and political stakes in understanding young women and what drives them: that is, their mothers, their teachers, and feminist thinkers in general. And while more academic feminists are beginning to follow British scholar Angela McRobbie's lead in examining the relation between feminism and youth cultures, these investigations (in special issues ofHypatiaandSigns) have more often focused on alternative, independent and subcultural venues, such as riot grrls, rather than mainstream popular culture. Like Mary Pipher, educated and liberal-minded adults from widely differing backgrounds have more often felt a deep unease about the connections between girls and popular culture, especially youth-oriented genre films and TV.

[3] Let me cite a few examples. As a teacher and researcher of film studies and television and the mother of three daughters in early adulthood, I've been following the emergence of girl culture since the mid-nineties. Recently I spoke to a large group of academics and other professionals who work with girls about the ways such media icons as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess and the Spice Girls challenge familiar representations of femininity by affirming female friendship, agency and physical power. While my audience was entertained by my examples, many could not see past the violence, overt sexuality and commercialism in the clips I showed and in fact were troubled by my argument. At the same time, I've taught educated and involved mothers in my classes who have battled with their daughters over their tastes in popular culture. The filmScreamhas been a particular flashpoint. Despite its influence among teen girls, these women have discouraged or even forbidden their daughters from watching it, and they have certainly avoided watching it with them.

[4] These responses speak to real fears about the damaging effects of popular culture on young people, and to real desires to protect girls from those effects--fears which increased dramatically after the wave of school shootings in the 1990s, with worries about violence focused on boys and about sex on girls. More important, however, the responses toScreamstand as poignant examples of missed opportunities for women of my generation—the "mothers" of contemporary feminism, or feminists of the Second Wave—to learn about where our daughters are today and to mend or at least better understand some of the rifts and fissures that divide us. For despite the preferences of many educated adults for more refined examples of culture, for Jane Austen'sEmmaover Amy Heckerling'sClueless, for Mary Shelley'sFrankensteinover Wes Craven'sScreamtrilogy, popular culture infuses the world in which today's young women live, and the face of feminism today, for better or worse, is being written across media culture. A startling image on the cover of a 1998 issue ofTimemagazine depicted succeeding generations of US feminism with the faces of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem in black and white, followed by Calista Flockhart's in "living color." (Flockhart is the actress who plays Ally McBeal, the most popular female character on TV that year.) The headline on the cover, "Is Feminism Dead?" suggests that if feminism lives, it does so in the fictionalized characters of popular culture.

[5] The tension I've observed between mothers and daughters on the issue of popular culture resonates elsewhere in the US feminist movement today. Carol Gilligan describes a "relational crisis" (25) about how to foster authentic connections across real differences of experience, values and identity, while Carol Siegel notes how ideological and generational differences have eroded feminism's "shared sense of purpose" (3). The challenge of making feminism represent more than a class of privileged white women is not new, of course, and inspired productive internal conflict within feminism's Second Wave. What appears new, however, is the generational dimension to this tension. On the one hand, "Girl Power" and "Girls Kick Butt" are familiar phrases on magazine covers, bumper stickers and T-shirts, one sign of the ways the Second Wave has changed the world young women are growing up in. On the other hand, feminism itself seems most evident as a "structuring absence" for middle class young women attempting to define their identity. "I'm not a feminist, but. . . ." has become the most ubiquitous reference to feminism today, heard in university classrooms, the popular press and a wave of recent books on contemporary feminism. Brought up during a period of social conservatism, young women today are reluctant to identify themselves with any social movement and instead more likely to place their faith in free-market individualism. This resistance to thinking collectively, however, has serious political consequences at a time when collective action remains necessary not only to advance feminist goals in an age of globalization but to protect its still-vulnerable achievements in the areas of abortion rights, affirmative action, education and healthcare. For example, feminists have failed to protect the social safety net for poor women and the families of illegal immigrants.

[6] Thinking collectively requires both real and imaginative models of productive relationship, which have been hard to come by for girls and women in high art as well as popular culture. While representations of sisterhood or female friendship have begun to appear with more frequency in popular culture, especially with the new presence of female sport teams after Title IX, the mother/daughter bond, a key model of female connection remains, as Adrienne Rich has argued, invisible, unexplored or taboo. With a few important exceptions (theAlien films, especiallyAliens[1986] andAlien Resurrection[1997]; andSpecies II[1998]), movies tend to dispatch mothers with a vengeance, relegating them to sentimentality (Stepmom[1998]), hysteria (American Beauty[1999]), monstrosity (Titanic[1997]), or mere invisibility (Rushmore[1998]). Similarly, as Lucy Fischer has argued inCinematernity, film criticism itself is characterized by a kind of "amnesia" about the maternal. As a result, girls have been hard pressed to imagine what female collectivity might look like, among women of their own generation or across time. Sentimentalizing sisterhood as an ideal of false solidarity among women is not the answer, especially when that ideal obscures real differences among women and the power differentials that accompany those differences. However, without models of common goals and action, the liberal ideology of free-market individual power can and does thrive.

[7] My purpose here is not to mount an unconditional defense of popular culture, but to argue that women who care about the next generation of girls need to learn more about the popular texts they're drawn to, whetherAlly McBealorBuffy,Y/Mmagazine or MTV. If a productive conversation is going to happen among women of all ages about the future of the feminist movement, it will have to take place on the terrain of popular culture where young women today are refashioning feminism toward their own ends. As Australian feminist Catherine Lumby argues, "If feminism is to remain engaged with and relevant to the everyday lives of women, then feminists desperately need the tools to understand everyday culture. We need to engage with the debates in popular culture rather than taking an elitist and dismissive attitude toward the prime medium of communication today" (174). Catherine M. Orr similarly warns that academic feminists may find themselves "positioned uncomfortably" against the populism implicit in the Third Wave (41).

[8] This paper takes a step in that direction first by mapping out the connections between Third Wave feminism and popular culture, then by illustrating those connections with a reading of theScreamtrilogy. As I will show, these films provide a rich opportunity to study the contradictions and possibilities of feminism in a postmodern age.Scream(1996) stands as a key text in identifying girls as a powerful audience, and as Jonathan Hook and Steven Jay Schneider have argued, it had a major impact on the Hollywood film industry. The cult following that developed around the film led to two sequels (Scream 2[1997] andScream 3[2000]) as well as the parodyScary Movie[2000] andScary Movie 2 [2001]) and contributed to the wave of movies and TV shows targeted to teen girls in the late 90s. Built around themes of female empowerment and narratively driven by the ambivalent but powerful connection between mother and daughter, the trilogy raises the issue of bonds among women across time, gesturing toward a way out of current feminism's "relational crisis." Unabashedly postmodern in its celebration of B-movies, it provides keen insights into the tastes, desires and issues that move young women today, as well as the cultural landscape from which Third Wave feminism, or the feminism of our daughters, is emerging.

The GAP(S)

[9] One of the most puzzling elements in recent public discussions about feminism is the degree to which young women have disavowed a social movement intended to benefit them. Before proceeding further, I would like to define a few terms of my argument as well as its methodological limits. As Amanda D. Lotz and others have argued, contemporary feminism has preferred the concept of "wave" (first attributed to Rebecca Walker in 1992) rather than "generation" to discuss its history, in order to avoid the overdetermination of "generations" and the ambivalences evoked by the mother/daughter relation, as well as to suggest the cumulative impact of these phases. Generation, however, remains a useful concept, especially when viewed not as a biological term but as an indicator of political values held in common. I do not wish to draw strict parameters around the terms "girl" or "young women," although market researchers have created increasingly refined distinctions among groups of females (such as 8-12, 13-18, 18-25 or 18-34) in order to determine their viewing habits, spending and politics; and important institutional and ethnographic research needs to be done on these groups, as well as on the overall impact of the kind of market fragmentation Joseph Turow analyzes inBreaking Up America. However, the questions that interest me here I invite a qualitative methodology based on cultural history and critical readings of media texts.

[10] It is even more difficult to pin down the meanings of such widely contested terms as "Girl Power," Girl Culture" and above all "feminism." What is—or was—feminism? Who has the authority to define it? What was the Second Wave, and how historically accurate are current understandings of it? What is the Third Wave? The generalizations that follow are not intended as definitive answers to these questions but as tools cautiously employed to explore a thesis about the current state of what is broadly understood as feminism.

[11] Finally, while I refer anecdotally to actual mothers and daughters, I use these terms metaphorically. I also use them with political intention. First, the mother/daugher relation ties a nexus of cultural representations that "erase" mothers into a broader political order that erases history or historical consciousness. Second, given our culture's tradition of mother-blaming as well as its expectations that older women "disappear," feminist scholars should not shrink from this metaphor, despite its inadequacies, as a means of conceptualizing women's relations across time. Not all of us are mothers, but we all have mothers. And we all have a stake in the future of girls and young women, whether we see them as our daughters or not.

[12]One of the most puzzling elements in recent public discussions about feminism is the degree to which young women have disavowed a social movement intended to benefit them. Feminism has become an easy target for women who do not feel that they have benefited from the highly-touted booming economy of the late 1990s, and who in fact are working harder than ever to get by, with less time to enjoy the rewards of family life and domesticity. At the same time, while young women of all races and social classes appear to be uncomfortable with the term "feminism," most agree with many of the principles associated with it, such as equal pay for equal work. Most young women also have little knowledge of the history of the woman's movement, or of the restrictions on women's lives that existed a mere generation ago.

[13] Explanations abound for this apparent turn against feminism, from the notion of backlash identified by Susan Faludi in 1991 to probing critiques of the Second Wave from within. InBacklash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi argues that feminism became the target of a massive effort during the socially conservative 80s and 90s to reverse the gains achieved by the women's movement since the mid-60s. From her perspective, if today's young women believe in their unlimited freedom and opportunity as individuals, reject structural analyses of social power, and avoid questioning the unequal effects of the period's economic boom, that is because of they came of age in a conservative political environment. This environment also accounts for the wave of highly publicized books by women such as Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, and Rene Denfield who identify themselves as feminists but according to a new set of definitions built on an array of rhetorically savvy terms and misleading oppositions: "victim feminism" vs. "power feminism," "gender" or "difference" feminism vs. "equity" feminism. Young, white, educated at elite institutions, these women conform toTimemagazine's choice of Ally McBeal, a narcissistic, Ivy League-educated lawyer, as the "face" of popularized feminism. Other conservative voices with more established academic credentials have joined the chorus, including Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Camille Paglia, and Christina Hoff-Sommers. While Debra Baker Beck, Alyson Cole and others have refuted their ideas in more scholarly venues, the mainstream press has embraced these authors as the new voices of the women's movement, using their work as the basis for sensationalized discussions of the state of feminism today. While claiming to refashion a "new" feminism, however, these women have not learned the lessons about racial and class privilege so hard won by the old. (See Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, and Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry, with women of color, such as bell hooks, Angela Davis and Rebecca Walker, particularly pointed in their critiques.)

[14] If Faludi has looked outward to the social formation explain the current challenges to feminism, others, such as psychologist Carol Gilligan, have turned inward to the psyche. Gilligan argues that girls' socialization, especially during adolescence, causes them to develop a "different voice" or sense of identity, ethics and values from boys. Her work, which influenced Mary Pipher's bestsellerReviving Ophelia, has been widely criticized for its essentialism, especially early in her career, but scholars such as Cressida J. Heyes are now calling for a reevaluation of its contributions to feminist scholarship. In "Getting Civilized," Gilligan extends her previous work on the impact of relationship in women's lives to broader debates about feminism today. She suggests that the problems besetting current feminism arise from our culture's pervasive ethos of alienation and separation and its effect on women and girls, who learn as they mature that success in our culture requires them to "dissociate" or disconnect from their authentic perceptions and desires. The issue, she argues, becomes how to maintain our connections with the power structures of the social world while remaining connected with each other and ourselves. The solution, for feminism and for the culture at large, is a model of "relational psychology" that would privilege relationship or connection with ourselves, each other and the world itself.