Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture (review)

Last autumn, an alarmist newspaper article circulated widely, appearing in slightly different print and online iterations. The piece served notice that women (already besieged by numerous cosmetic imperatives) were now at risk for 'computer face', an ailment consisting of wrinkles and sagging jowls brought on by too much time spent in front of computer screens: it counselled the use of Botox and the placement of a mirror beside the screen so users could be more self-conscious of their own facial expression. In reading Geek Chic, the collection of essays by the prolific editor Sherrie A. Inness, this piece came back into my mind as an example of the ways in which popular culture discursively polices women's work, often through threats (both direct and oblique) that intelligent and diligent application is somehow a risk factor for the loss of femininity.

Geek Chic is concerned with the culturally constructed tensions between intelligence and female identities. Inness observes that 'American society has a deeply-rooted fear of brilliant women' (2) and the book's essays are set up to explore media representations where intelligent girls or women are centralised. Thus, there are essays on the depiction of female professors, female scientists, female lawyers, girls who wear glasses, 'super slacker girls', the female ensemble members of television drama The West Wing and Hillary Clinton and the jokes made about her. A consistent observation across many of the essays is that when smart women are sanctioned for popular cultural representation they are rarely freed from (raced and classed) appearance norms. Indeed, compliance with the physical codes of normative femininity is in many instances a precondition for a woman to be valued for her intelligence.

It can be challenging to do justice to a broad topic in the relatively constrained space of an anthology article and most of the contributors to Geek Chic manage to be concise without sacrificing rigour and depth. (There are one or two exceptions in this regard - for instance, Rebecca Hains provides a careful elucidation of the ambiguous ideological status of 'girl power' texts but then dispenses with that ambiguity in an effort to tease out what is 'good' in girl power.) The strongest essays in the collection are able to come to grips with the ambivalent positioning of female intelligence in popular culture forms. Beth Berila's discussion of female roles in The West Wing, for instance, aptly notes that the series problematises 'sexism while containing smart women in positions that reinforce the stereotypes' (156).

The contributors to Inness's book are sometimes not as attentive to the historical positioning of their case studies as one would wish. Michele Paule's insightful essay pinpoints a very interesting representational cluster of 'super slacker girls', whom she identifies as 'smart young women in television dramas who reject academic success and traditional career trajectories. Instead their lives are shaped and given meaning by some form of supernatural prompting toward philanthropic acts' (85). For Paule, the supernatural elements of these series become 'the voice of cultural anxiety, the speaking of the need to control and contain the powers of gifted young women' (100). Yet, because she never tells us exactly when the series Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Joan of Arcadia were broadcast (all had short but arguably distinctive runs between 2003 and 2005), she misses the opportunity to historicise their placement both in terms of the evolution of broadcast genres and in wider cultural contexts. And this points to a larger problem in the book as a whole, which tends not to provide much of a sense of historicisation (such historicisation would not necessarily need to be linear but it should be clear and intellectually defended).

Lacking such a framework, readers of the book are likely to be somewhat uncertain about its organisational logic. The rationale for sequential placement of the essays is not apparent and sometimes case-study selection criteria are a little fuzzy (while the vast majority of essays deal with popular forms of the...