I posted this video the other day when I had too much going on to really explain the thoughts going through my head. It was a synthesis of my teenage dream-come-true interview with Neil Gaiman (yes, Neil fucking Gaiman, buy the next issue of Comic Foundry to read all about it) and talk about Iggy Pop, and my beloved Pop Feminist’s question Can Women Be Part of Counterculture? and Octo’s post on Feministe about “Sparkle.”
And so before I went out I posted Siouxsie. With her short-cropped hair and Egyptian-queen makeup, her shorts and vest and skinny boyish body are genderfuck supreme here, especially singing an Iggy Pop song where she takes on the male power-role—she isn’t the passenger, someone else is. She’s going to take him for a ride.
She’s got both masculine and feminine aspects here, of course. She’s glittery and glam and made-up but in skinny boyclothes, taking on the male role. When she dances, she does high kicks with the boys from her band, she covers Budgie’s eyes, and mostly you have to stare her in the face—each time she moves, she keeps her eyes on you.
Siouxsie was punk rock and goth and glam all at once, and a huge influence on my style at one point. She went from juvenile rebellion (swastika armbands and the Lord’s Prayer) to actually surviving the implosion of the Sex Pistols scene to learning to control her voice and still putting out good music 20-odd years later. Robert Smith gets all the cred from the indie rock kids, but Siouxsie was way cooler in my book.
Pop Feminist asked if women could be part of the counterculture, and I’ve written plenty about how goth and subcultures influenced my feminism. Being a goth girl in New Orleans was like being part of some glamorous demimonde, and even though I outgrew the spiderwebs and vinyl boots (kept the corsets, but mostly for nostalgia) I tripped blithely through punk rock and glam rock and psychobilly and settled into the girl I am now, who alternates between lazy (shorts and tank top today, prepping for hours in airports and planes) and glammed up with red lips and four-inch heels and not quite as much black eye makeup as I used to wear.
(Because who doesn’t remember when Molly Ringwald wiped off “that black stuff” from Ally Sheedy, who protested “I like the black stuff”? but it made the jock boy kiss her, right?)
Back to Pop Feminist, anyway (I’m a bit all over the place with this, bear with me, I approve of nonlinear thinking). She said:
What the hell do women have to do with the abject political ideology of 1970s punk? Youth rebellion is not the domain of young women whose sexual viability bequeaths them with more power than they are ever taught to hope for and therefore have little reason to be angry at “the establishment”. For those women who see through the bullshit (feminists, woot!), I’m extremely skeptical that their rebellion would look anything like punk or other male-dominated subcultures. They are present, to be sure, but maintain a secondary status. Someone’s got to provide the “sex” in a “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” lifestyle after all…
And she’s right on one count–Siouxsie had little to do with Johnny Rotten’s spitting, snarling anger. Her political poses were paper-thin and counted less than the performances she gave with her tits out. She quickly moved past the boys’ ripped clothing and snarls and the need for them to stick up for her to Stanton Grundy, and she both drew on her gender with wide eyeliner strokes and hid it behind them, as the boys of the 80s started to steal her style and behind her the glam gods of the 70s had appropriated makeup and glitter and platform shoes to play with their own sensuality.
Octo examined sparkle and noted that
That doesn’t make it feminist. If it doesn’t move forward women’s position vis a vis men — and even ironic twists on expected behavior don’t do this — it’s not an actively feminist statement.
I would agree with her that one’s taste in clothing is not in itself a feminist statement, and I also agree with her here:
you know, filing all female pleasure in body or exhibition or adornment under “for male approval” is pretty antifeminist in itself, in placing oneself in a supreme position of being the judge and jury for women’s motives, isn’t it?
However, since I tend to come down on the Judith Butler side of the fence with regards to gender performance, but tend to also see that performance as both more pleasurable (someday I’ll post my Gilda essay, I swear…) and more potentially subversive, I do think that there is potential for sparkle to be a feminist act. Not really the sparkle I engage in these days–it’s pretty socially-acceptable, heels and dresses and makeup.
But let’s consider Siouxsie again. Her makeup is beyond acceptable–anyone outside of a goth club would look ridiculous in that eyeliner, right? She’s cropped her hair into a boy-cut (and when my own hair was that short I felt the need constantly for more makeup lest I look too much like a boy, despite my own body’s distinct refusal to play any sort of androgynous role) and the only bit of her body she reveals in her skintight leotards is her back, lithe and sexless. But the makeup–oh, the iconic Siouxsie makeup–and her glitter jewelry is the very epitome of sparkle. Yet in the scene she came from, men were toying with those gender signifiers themselves.
I came to sparkle through goth as well–I went from being a tomboy nerd who rode horses through a grunge phase into wearing things my mother deemed “too sexy” but I just wanted to look like Death and Delirium. Pleasing the boys at my high school? Ha! The “black stuff” was a deliberate fuck you to the jock boys, not a come-on. The fishnets I donned in the school bathroom in the mornings since my mother wouldn’t let me wear them, they were my rebellion both against my parents and against the pretty Southern girls and their flip-flops, and the boys who dared look at my legs.
Yet I felt beautiful.
As Siouxsie is beautiful.
As Bowie was beautiful (still is, but not in quite such a genderfucked way).
And Neil? Well, we talked about Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, but I see in Siouxsie’s performance of the song so many more snapshots of the Endless–has anyone ever looked more like Gaiman’s Desire than she does in this video? In other places, she’s Dream and Death and even Despair and Delirium…her aesthetic is much more Sandman than ever Iggy Pop’s hypermasculine yet fluid sexuality was. And Iggy leads us to Bowie, the original Lucifer. If the Sandman is goth, it’s also glam, and it appealed to women as no comic had done before precisely because of both its sensuality–even its male characters were so–and its lack of that hypermasculine dream. In Gaiman’s world, Destruction has left the building, left the galaxy, really, and he alone of all the Endless doesn’t fit that aesthetic…
Rebellion, for me, was comics and black eyeliner, fishnets and music that no one liked but me, and books books books, and writing. My refusal to be part of the games planted the seeds for my feminism, and Siouxsie was its icon, regardless of her personal views. It was a distinctly feminine solitary rebellion, and when I moved to New Orleans and found scores of people who dressed the same way, liked the same things, well, that probably contributed as much as anything. Just as with online feminism, goth and punk scenes police their own, and kick you out if you’re not a properly conforming nonconformist, and I just want to burn the whole fucking thing down.
So I take bits and pieces of things from all countercultures and the dominant culture and I create myself a persona, a body, a mind, and loves. I take the words of men, like Siouxsie did, and make them my own, putting them on my body or twisting them into my own shapes. Put pictures on my skin, tone my arms, wear clothes that play up or play down curves, draw new features onto my face or leave it blank, and sculpt a world that requires only my own approval. Is that subversive enough for you?
And so, Siouxsie, again for you.
I love Siouxsie so much. I was a goth girl. Used to spend ages drawing spider webs on my eyelids with liquid liner, and crimping my hair. I bloody loved it. The look I used to aim for was mixture of Siouxsie and Kate Bush circa 1979 - and I have to say I succeeded a lot of the time! And thanks also for the introduction to Pop Feminist - I hadn’t heard of that site before, and isn’t it great?! (as is this site, of course).
Oh, and yes, Neil Gaiman = living legend in my eyes. And quite gorgeous too. xx
GREAT post. This is so smart and strong. you have it exactly. I would love to talk to you more about goth subculture. You’ll definitely have some great insight. To my mind, it’s one of the few totally pro-woman subcultures of them all, though I don’t know quite why I have this sense…
Well, whatevs. I’m going to link this in my next links post.
I told Janice you kids were too young to know anything about Siousxie and the Banshees, and that I watched that video on 120 Minutes in high school. Then she told me you were 29, but still, I don’t think it’s enough.
Then she sent me the link to IBTP, now it’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m having flashbacks to Planet Smith and my decade in Northampton.
I too love siouxsie, and emulated her look for a while as well, and I do think she was, in many ways, very much in control of what she was doing…and her getting naked, in the day, was more for shock value than sex value I think…but she still got naked (which hey, I have NO problem with), and looked “sexy” when doing it…
But you know, really, who the FUCK cares? Do Siouxsie’s tits negate anything and everything did (and still does) as one of the first, and biggest, women in the punk/goth scene? Without the Siouxies, Joan Jetts, and Kate Bushes of the world, there would be NO Switchblade Symphony’s or Sinaed O’Conners or L7’s….
And I DO think women can carve out their own spaces in subcultures, but it ain’t always easy…
hummm….
feels a post on being the 36 year old cybergoth brewing….