Semio-Sex: New Wave Rock and the Feminine

A 5 E MI 0 -SEX NEW WAVE ROCK AND THE FEMININE DAN GRAHAM In the late '60s women played the role of victim-in long skirt, sitting on a kitchen stool, crying into a strictly non-electric guitar. . . . Punk rock in 1976 was thefirst rock and roll phase ever not to insist that women should be picturesque topics and topics of songs. Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons in The Boy Look At Johnny. For two decades rock was a ritual affirmation of adolescent male sexual identity. As opposed to the heroic male rock star, the somewhat rarer female performer would present herself as a spectacle for passive male contemplation. Women's satisfaction was assumed to be that of being looked at by men: Men's "desire for the ... [woman] to be a . .. spectacle." (Stephen Heath, Screen) Lacan also refers to "the satisfaction of a woman who knows she is being looked at." Laura Mulvey's article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," (Screen) speaks about the respective roles of male and female performers in the classical Hollywood film and suggests that the male star is more readily identified with by the spectator since he is the one who is in control of events and thus provides a "satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male star's glamorous characteristics are . . . those of a more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego." Contrastingly, "the meaning of women [to the spectator] is [that of] sexual difference" which presents a threat to the man's sense of ego wholeness. Due to her body's absence of a penis, the woman symbolizes, for the man, the threat of castration. Her potentially threatening look-her potentially castrating look-can only be sublimated in a performance by her fetishization: by her presenting herself as an iconic mask, or by her playing out the role of a satisfying and reassuring image for the male spectator to comfortably rest his eyes upon. "The castration that is posed . . . in the shifts of the eye/look of the man/the image of the woman . . . is ... the symbolic . . . [representation] of sexual difference." (Heath) The male gaze desires to have the woman (which is to be in the position from which the woman's desire emanates). Luce Irigaray has noted that the masculine 12 privilege given to the eye over the other senses downgrades "smell, taste, touch, hearing . . . [and] bodily relations. . . . It has contributed to disembodying sexuality. The moment the look dominates, the body loses in materiality." Whereas, for the woman, she says, "the emphasis is on the voice as against the look." (f/rn) With the advent of the '70s a newly liberated female with sexual and aggressive drives equal to the male was represented in the "macha" pose of performers such as Suzi Quatro and Patti Smith. "Macha" seemed a simple inversion of the male "macho" principle, basing itself upon male identification. "Macha" performers assert that they have the penis, or that they are the penis. The Runaways, four sexytough teenage girls outfitted in leather and packaged like Charlie's Angels and performing not uninteresting songs written by the leader, Joan Jett, took the image to a reductioad absurdium. As a simple inversion, it lacked irony and was essentially exploitative which explains why later New Wave female performers scorned the role. The irony resulting from an "unreal" selfparodying , early '60s sexually feminine pose is adopted by the lead singer of Blondie , Debbie Harry. The comic-strip character she plays is used by the group as a hook upon which to hang the group's early '60s rock imagery (which, like The Ramones, is actually a comment on the late '70s). Although in "real-life" Harry may be much like "Blondie" (or may not be), it is apparent that she is playing the character at a distance. Like the concept behind the early '60s all-girl group, The Shangri-Las, Blondie is a fabricated stereotype. But a difference is that whereas The Shangri-Laswere created by Shadow Morton who wrote their songs and staged their act, "Blondie"Debbie Harry-writes much of her material , and her persona may serve as a vehicle to express her real emotional identity (a reverse irony given the...