Bitch The Politics of Angry Women Kylie Murphy Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in Communication Studies This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University 2002. DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. Kylie Murphy ii ABSTRACT ‘Bitch: the Politics of Angry Women’ investigates the scholarly challenges and strengths in retheorising popular culture and feminism. It traces the connections and schisms between academic feminism and the feminism that punctuates popular culture. By tracing a series of specific bitch trajectories, this thesis accesses an archaeology of women’s battle to gain power. Feminism is a large and brawling paradigm that struggles to incorporate a diversity of feminist voices. This thesis joins the fight. It argues that feminism is partly constituted through popular cultural representations. The separation between the academy and popular culture is damaging theoretically and politically. Academic feminism needs to work with the popular, as opposed to undermining or dismissing its relevancy. Cultural studies provides the tools necessary to interpret popular modes of feminism. It allows a consideration of the discourses of race, gender, age and class that plait their way through any construction of feminism. I do not present an easy identity politics. These bitches refuse simple narratives. The chapters clash and interrogate one another, allowing difference its own space. I mine a series of sites for feminist meanings and potential, ranging across television, popular music, governmental politics, feminist books and journals, magazines and the popular press. The original contribution to knowledge that this thesis proffers is the refusal to demarcate between popular feminism and academic feminism. A new space is established in which to dialogue between the two. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mostly I would like to thank Dr. Tara Brabazon for being an exemplary supervisor: offering equal measures of supportive and critical feedback. Special thanks to Gavin for supplying emotional and logistical sustenance. To my family for their loving support. Lastly, I would like to thank those people who have read drafts of chapters and whose comments have helped me to refine my argument. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Copyright License i Declaration ii Abstract iii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v Introduction 1 Part 1: Bitch Feminism Tell me why? 25 Chapter 1: I’d Rather be a Bitch than a Bad Girl Any Day 28 Part 2: Pop Culture Bitches Choosing Cordelia 61 Chapter 2: Re-Vamp-ing Feminism:The Third Wave on the Small Screen 63 The Affect of Popular Music 102 Chapter 3: “I’m Sorry – I’m not Really Sorry”: Authenticity and Feminism 104 Seeking Rap(port) 140 Chapter 4: Missy Elliott’s Feminist Movements 142 Part 3: The Conservative Bitch Including the Original Celebrity Feminist 169 Chapter 5: Germaine Greer: a Feminist Provocateur 171 Lighting the Red Head Match 205 Chapter 6: Pauline Hanson: Bitch Nationalism 208 Ending Conclusion 243 Bibliography 258 Vision and Sound 293 v INTRODUCTION Australians go for the underdog and now she’s [Cheryl Kernot] the underbitch, isn’t she? John Laws1 The current political climate in Australia is frightening. For the international audience, this is revealed most obviously by the so called ‘refugee crises,’ which has continued to fire a climate of hatred stoked by Hansonism. Or perhaps it is the recent United Nations report on the plight of Indigenous Australians that has tainted the view of Australia as a benevolent Western democracy. As this thesis is an examination of bitch celebrities, angry women existing in the contemporary public sphere, to commence with tandem images of refugees and Australia’s Indigenous citizens may seem jarringly discordant. These two instances highlight abrasions between domestic politics and international condemnation. They also prioritise race over gender. Unequivocally, these groups are disadvantaged and marginalised unlike the affluent celebrities around which this thesis is focused. I contest such simple binarised understandings. Distinctions between hard-edged politics and soft identity formations are too easily made. Obviously, the suffering of indigenous and refugee groups is not equatable with the disadvantage suffered by a middle class woman living in a Western democracy. That is the point. Race, gender, age and colonisation are neither easy to theorise nor contextualise. New Times need new politics.2 1 Cited in, J Szego, 2002. 'Oakes the Villain, Says Public Opinion,' The Age. (5 July) [online]. <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/04/1025667035212.html> Accessed: 5 July 2002: fulltext. 2 S Hall and M Jacques, eds. 1989. New Times. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1 While women have had the vote in Australia since 1902, their concerns and issues are still inadequately represented. The political process continues to discriminate against women. Across the Tasman in New Zealand, the head of the parliament and the judiciary, as well as the Queen’s representative, are all women; Helen Clarke is Prime Minister, Dame Silvia Cartwright is Governor-General, and the Right Honourable Dame Sian Elias is the Chief Justice. During the election of 1998, both the opposition and incumbent party were led by women. Notably, it is the second time the roles of Prime Minister and Governor-General have been performed by women. Australian women have not achieved any of these positions. Women in positions of leadership, be it in parliament, the court, education or business, are far from normative. It would seem that a female boss is still highly irregular. Tony Abbott, is a senior member of the Liberal Party and the current Work Relations Minister. As I write this Introduction, he has just apologised for the following statement made during a speech at an industrial relations conference: If we’re honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband … Notwithstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he’s employing someone.3 The governmental head of Australian workplace policy is normalising leadership as a masculine privilege, regardless of ineptitude. The subsequent outrage focused on Abbott’s lack of concern about the safety of the workplace. Even his critics had assumed that all bosses were men, and that a nuclear family was preferable to other social alternatives. Masculinity has access to various models of management or leadership. Femininity is still not granted the same privileges. 3 S Douez and K Taylor, 2002. 'Anger Over Abbott's Latest Jobs Crack,' The Age. (2 July) [online]. <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/01/1023864709126.html> Accessed: 2 July 2002: fulltext. 2 For an apparently egalitarian society, women in Australia have a tenuous grasp on power. The current government has reinforced this tendency. The number of Liberal women who are Members of Parliament decreased at the last election. Australia has had a total of seven female cabinet ministers throughout its history. Mary Gaudron, our only female High Court judge, resigned in June. It is yet to be seen if the current Government will replace her with another woman. Their lack of commitment to feminist politics makes such a decision doubtful. The insistence that this job should be granted solely on merit ignores that the appointment of supreme court judges is a highly political enterprise. Merit is a ideological category and not a natural expression of an innate quality. Culturally, women in Australia are judged as lacking in the attributes required to lead. David Marshall argues that, “Masculinity continues to connote power, control, and mastery. Political leaders must demonstrate these qualities of masculinity to establish their legitimacy.”4 Feminist-inspired progress means that women do have greater access to institutional power and influence. Metaphorically this progress should not be imagined as strides forward but rather as a kind of tottering inching. The most basic aims of feminism have not been met: women’s wages are still not equal to men’s, influential and high status jobs are not distributed evenly, and the courts still display bias. Women who do exert a modicum of cultural influence are still too easily vilified. The media flashpoints that participate in powerful women’s fall from grace are a discursive mechanism that supposedly confirms women’s unfitness for power. This insight has international currency, but is given a particular poignancy in Australia at the moment, as Cheryl Kernot is once again denounced by the media. 4 PD Marshall, 1997. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 217. 3 Cheryl Kernot is famous for resigning as leader of the Australian Democrats to challenge a marginal House of Representative seat as a member of the Labor party. At the same time as the media’s dissection of Abbott’s comments, the publicity machine promoting Kernot’s political memoir, Speaking for Myself Again was assuring her of contemporaneous coverage.5 The book provides an inventory of how Labor mistreated, under utilised and failed to counter the press’s constant scrutiny of her. Within two days of the book’s release, one of the most senior political journalists in the country, Laurie Oakes, broke the news of a secret five year affair between Cheryl Kernot and Gareth Evans, a then member of Labor’s inner circle. On Wednesday, 3 July, in his Bulletin column, Oakes alluded to ‘the big secret’ Kernot had omitted from her book.6 Later that evening on Channel Nine, he stated that he had evidence of a five year affair between Kernot and Evans starting prior to her defection to the Labor party and ending in October 1999.