What Happened to Girl Power? Girls and Nostalgia
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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 What Happened To Girl Power? Girls and Nostalgia JULIA DANE, University of East London ABSTRACT This paper will draw on qualitative data collected through interviewing girls talking about music video, to interrogate how girls understand and negotiate contemporary discourses of femininity, which are produced as potentially offering new spaces of negotiation for girls (McRobbie, 1997), and in particular the concept of girl power. The data was collected across a series of focus groups conducted with girls aged thirteen and fourteen. In some ways the advent of girl power marked a division in feminist generations. Although the implication of a divide between generations of feminism is conceptually useful in framing the idea of new and old femininities, there are of course no clear cut divisions. Through analysis of the girls’ talk, this paper will highlight how the girls define girl power through a discussion of what is not girl power, and express nostalgia for the loss of the girl power they identify as represented by the Spice Girls. KEYWORDS girl power, focus groups, conversation analysis, girls’ friendships, nostalgia Introduction Popular female artists today perform a femininity which is ‘feminine and feminist at the same time, merging notions of personal agency with the visual display of sexuality’ (Genz, 2010: 106). Sexuality has become linked to empowerment producing a pluralistic, paradoxical postfeminist position’ (Ibid.). Beyoncé’s ‘Run The World (Girls)’ (Knowles, 2011) offers a useful example, having been described by Jocelyn Vena of MTV News as a ‘female empowerment/girl power type of song’ (Vena, 21st April, 2011). The lyrics of ‘Who run the world, Girls!, who run this motha, Girls!’ are accompanied by the now ubiquitous hypersexualised performance from Beyoncé and her backing dancers. Associating this type of music and performance with girl power can be linked to the Spice Girls’ and the 1990s wave of feminism. This paper draws on qualitative data collected through focus groups with girls talking about female performance and girl power, to explore how girls understand and negotiate discourses of femininity in terms of girl power and musical performance. Furthermore, I aim to demonstrate how these discourses 181 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 have relevance in the girls’ own experiences of growing-up-girl and how nostalgia for a loss of girl power is expressed in their talk. This research began in 2004, with the aim to investigate girls’ understanding and negotiations of post-feminist femininity. There have been identified shifts in discourses of femininity across the last thirty years, with the term ‘new femininities’ coined to encapsulate perceived changes (McRobbie, 1997). This term suggests a shift from patriarchal femininities founded in traditional moralities, to new discourses of femininity in terms of freedom and choice. For the purposes of this project, music video was identified as a means to map out changing representations of femininity. At the time the research was conducted, female artists such as Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé Knowles epitomised the successful, independent and sexy post-feminist woman. Beyoncé currently maintains this position as highlighted above. Method To explore girls’ engagements with discourses of new femininities, a series of focus groups were conducted with girls aged thirteen and fourteen. Music videos, as a visual representation of the research question, were shown to prompt group discussion. This was an explorative project with the aim to investigate the themes that emerged in the girls’ talk. Nine focus groups were conducted with a total of fifty four Year Nine girls interviewed. Five sessions were conducted at a coeducational school and four in an all girls’ school. The second series took place some months after the first, allowing the sessions to be adapted to incorporate issues raised in previous groups. Focus groups can help to address power dynamics and encourage the participants to talk to each other as well as the interviewer. Meanings are brought to the discussion by the participants, who are encouraged to elaborate, thus allowing conversations to develop between participants which are useful in analysis. The aim of the focus group is to create an environment which allows ‘participants to generate their own questions, frames and concepts, pursue their own priorities on their own terms, in their own vocabulary’ (Barbour and Kitzenger, 1999: 5). Using music videos to prompt and facilitate discussion meant that although the girls did answer my questions, they also directed the discussion in their own terms. By conducting focus groups then the girls were able to talk in their own vernacular about the issues I wished to explore. By doing so my research questions were reframed in unexpected ways. Each of the focus groups produced transcripts which include the voices of between five and seven girls, with seven of the nine groups containing six participants. Once the transcripts were complete, it was apparent that the method had not produced traditional forms of narrative such as found in one-on-one interviews. What emerged was more in keeping with a conversation. Myers and McNaughten (1998: 174) argue that complex talk is produced in focus groups and that they should be analysed as such. While there are interventions from the researcher/moderator which 182 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 direct talk and produce particular opinions, the discussions are like everyday conversation (Ibid). I believe that the most productive method for analysis of focus group transcripts is considered to be conversation analysis. Conversation analysis is a systematic and rigorous method which studies order and orderliness in social talk (Psathsas, 1995). Traditional conversation analysis looks at linguistic devices such as turn-taking or extended sequences to analyse not just the content of speech but how it functions, and how the participants make sense of the interactions. Although my transcripts incorporate these strategies, and do represent a certain kind of order, they do not strictly follow the organisational structures discussed by conversation analysts such as Psathsas. When the girls talked they often shifted the conversation, or produced group rather than individual narratives. Extended sequences rarely occurred and when they did it was important to consider the context in which they emerge and their relation to the group dynamic. Turn-taking is rarely ordered as the girls interrupt and end each other’s sentences. Therefore, while interpretation draws on conversational analysis techniques, what was needed was a form of analysis which relates to the type of transcript produced. Jennifer Coates has produced work on the gendered nature of conversation, describing herself as a feminist linguistic ethnographer (Coates, 1996). She suggests that traditional methods of conversation analysis are based on male talk. Coates notes that female conversation is produced in flows, often jumping from one topic to another and is based on building on shared interests which draw predominantly on personal experience (1994, 1996). This suggests that male conversation tends to follow the rules of turn- taking around exchanges of information, female talk functions in a different way. Talking Girls Coates’ study of conversation among female friends produced transcripts which closely resemble those obtained here (1996). Coates recorded and transcribed female friends in conversation across a period of five years. Her transcripts showed how female friends converse and build narratives through linguistic parallels, that is how they mirror each other and collaborate in conversation. Where in conversation analysis the linguistic devices of turn-taking and story telling are considered, Coates draws on the work of Carole Edelsky to argue that female talk is produced in terms of a collaborative floor (1993: 189). Within the collaborative floor, through interruption and overlapping talk, discussions progress in a particular way to produce a group voice. I believe this method of analysis appeared to be naturally more applicable to the data collected for this project. It is worth noting at this point that for Coates, the production of a collaborative floor is a linguistic device which constitutes and maintains female friendship. Coates discusses the linguistic devices which produce the collaborative floor. For example, in traditional conversation analysis, interruption would be defined as a break in the structure of ordered turn-taking which disrupts the conversation. However, when the girls interviewed for 183 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 this project talk, the interruptions are accepted and form the conversation (Coates 1996: 133). The collaborative floor is a means to produce a group voice which positions no one as expert, but allows mutual development of a topic. Another linguistic device which serves this is hedging, that is posing statements cautiously through the use of terms such as ‘kind of’ or ‘I mean’. Statements are supported by minimal responses or repetitions which encourage the development of a topic. Girl Power The question ‘what happened to girl power’ emerged as a useful question to ask during the early focus groups conducted at the first School. My initial research question was framed through a discourse of new femininities in terms of expressions of independence and desire (McRobbie, 1997). As Barbour and Kitzenger point out, focus groups allow the development