‘Cher’, entre o mito da celebridade e o empoderamento das minorias. Transmutações da “mulher desviante”

8QLYHUVLGDGHGR0LQKR ,QVWLWXWRGH/HWUDVH&LrQFLDV+XPDQDV 2UTXtGHDGD&RQFHLomR/)06DQWRV&DGLOKH ¶&KHU·EHWZHHQWKHP\WKRIFHOHEULW\DQGWKH HPSRZHUPHQWRIPLQRULWLHV7UDQVPXWDWLRQV RIWKH¶XQUXO\ZRPDQ· -XQKRGH 8PLQKR_ 2UTXtGHD6DQWRV&DGLOKH ¶&KHU·EHWZHHQWKHP\WKRIFHOHEULW\DQGWKHHPSRZHUPHQW RIPLQRULWLHV7UDVQPXWDWLRQVRIWKH¶XQUXO\ZRPDQ· ii DIREITOS DE AUTOR E CONDIÇÕES DE UTILIZAÇÃO DO TRABALHO POR TERCEIROS Este é um trabalho académico que pode ser utilizado por terceiros desde que respeitadas as regras e boas práticas internacionalmente aceites, no que concerne aos direitos de autor e direitos conexos. Assim, o presente trabalho pode ser utilizado nos termos previstos na licença abaixo indicada. Caso o utilizador necessite de permissão para poder fazer um uso do trabalho em condições não previstas no licenciamento indicado, deverá contactar o autor, através do RepositóriUM da Universidade do Minho. Licença concedida aos utilizadores deste trabalho Atribuição CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ iii Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Ana Gabriela Macedo, who once listened to a very incipient research proposal and believed enough in what she heard to accept the case study. Professor Macedo has guided and encouraged me to carry on, often with long doses of patience, through the subtleties of scientific writing. I am also very thankful to the teaching and research staff at the Centre for Humanistic Studies at the University of Minho (CEHUM), which have taken time to discuss and enrich my work and provide me with a very stimulating environment. Particularly valuable were the research seminars that I have attended and participated in throughout these years, as well as a wide range of opportunities to present my then, work in progress. My gratitude to the professors of the Doctoral Program in Comparative Modernities, who have always encouraged my work, namely professor Orlando Grossegesse (then CEHUM director), to professor Laura Triviño Cabrera, and professor Rogério Miguel Puga, who have created the financial conditions that allowed me to participate in conferences at the University of Malaga, Spain, and at NOVA University in Lisbon, respectively. These experiences will leave marks beyond this thesis. I would like to thank all my PhD colleagues, with whom I have shared moments of both anxiety and excitement. Some special words of gratitude go to my friends who were a major source of support when things would get a bit discouraging: Laura, Carol, Sam, Fabi, Ella, Adriana, and Mansour, as well as my dear friends Fátima, Nani, and António who were always ‘at hand’ whenever I needed them. I want to express deep gratitude to my dear friend Sarah Tesdale who, from across the Atlantic, has always gone off her way to make me feel strong enough whenever times, for a variety of reasons, were somewhat though. Thank you guys for always being there for me. To my mom, who would be very proud of me, only if she could be at least ‘mentally’ present. To my daughter Mafalda. To Cher who, without being aware, has provided me with so much inspiration, resilience, and empowerment. iv STATEMENT OF INTEGRITY I hereby declare having conducted this academic work with integrity. I confirm that I have not used plagiarism or any form of undue use of information or falsification of results along the process leading to its elaboration. I further declare that I have fully acknowledged the Code of Ethical Conduct of the University of Minho. v ‘Cher’, entre o mito da celebridade e o empoderamento das minorias. Transmutações da “mulher desviante” Resumo Esta tese propõe o estudo do conceito de “mito da celebridade”, enquanto fenómeno cultural, em diálogo com os estudos performativos e os estudos de género. O objetivo foi investigar o impacto de ícones da cultura popular na sociedade contemporânea, questionar até que ponto estes contribuem para ruturas e mudanças sociais e, por último, demonstrar o potencial destas figuras para desconstruírem representações dominantes e terem, portanto, um papel político-social. Em particular, investiguei como a artista Cher tem vindo a dar um contributo crucial a esta dinâmica uma vez que persistentemente representa o mito da “mulher desviante”, a qual adota um infinito número de atitudes transgressoras e ameaça normas especificas da ideologia dominante. Analisei igualmente as relações intersemióticas entre tais representações alternativas como reescritas empoderadoras de representações dominantes, nomeadamente representações que abordam questões étnicas, papéis de género e de cidadania. Analisei ainda como Cher insiste em se colocar em espaços liminares, ajudando a promover a interseção entre margem e centro e a eliminar as linhas de divisão entre grupos sociais. Palavras-chave: Cher, cultura da celebridade, fandom, performance, reescrita vi ‘Cher’, between the myth of celebrity and the empowerment of minorities. Transmutations of the ‘unruly woman’ Abstract This dissertation discusses the concept of the ‘celebrity myth’ in the context of cultural studies in dialogue with performative studies as well as gender studies. It aims to research the impact of popular culture icons in contemporary society and question up to what extent they are catalysts of social ruptures and changes, ultimately demonstrating the potential for such figures to deconstruct dominant representations and thus perform a socio-political role. In particular, I have studied how the performer Cher has been playing a crucial role in these dynamics since she persistently embodies the myth of the ‘unruly woman’ who adopts an infinite number of transgressive attitudes and threatens distinctive roles of the dominant ideology. I have worked on the intersemiotic relations between such alternative representations as empowering rewritings of dominant ones, namely in performances that deal with ethnic, feminine, and feminist issues. I have also analyzed how Cher constantly places herself at liminal spaces and helps promote the intersection of margin and center as well as eliminate the lines of division between social groups both through her performances and her activism. Keywords: Cher, celebrity culture, fandom, performance, rewriting vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements p. iii Resumo p. v Abstract p. vi Table of Contents p. vii List of figures p. ix List of appendices p. xi Introduction p. 13 Chapter 1: Myth 1.1. Myth, an Intertextual Story p. 16 1.2. The Myth of Prometheus p. 20 1.3. The Myth of the ‘Unruly Woman’ p. 22 1.4. Celebrities and Myth p. 25 1.5. Conclusion p. 36 Chapter 2: Ethnicity and ‘Unruliness’ in Cherilyn Sarkisian’s (Cher’s) Performance 2.1. Cher’s Roots and Socio-cultural Background p. 37 2.2. American Identity and the ‘New’ Immigrants of Early Twentieth Century U.S.A. p. 39 2.3. Ethnic Cultural Performances p. 42 2.3.1. ‘Off-White’ White Trash p. 55 2.4. Conclusion p. 63 Chapter 3: Femininity and Feminism. The role of religion 3.1. Framed Women. Damsels in Distress p. 64 3.2. Unframing the Damsels p. 68 3.2.1. The ‘Damsel’ and King Kong According to Cher p. 70 3.2.2. The ‘Damsel’ and the Wolf According to Cher p. 71 3.3. Deconstructing the Witch p. 79 3.4. Cher on Wheels. Hitting the Road and Deconstructing “The Angel in the House” p. 90 3.5. When the Public and the Publicly Personal Collide. Directing and acting in If these Walls Could Talk p. 95 Chapter 4: ‘Gender Trouble’ and ‘Monstrosity’ 4.1. Socio-cultural Background. The Repercussions of Post-World War II in the U.S.A. p. 101 14 the stage to the main body of the thesis, more specifically to its division in three chapters since it debates the types of representations that such performers tend to engage in, as well as the aesthetics, style, and politics that side them. Chapter Two, ‘Ethnicity and ‘Unruliness’ in Cherilyn Sarkisian’s (Cher’s) Performance’, starts by offering a short biography of the performer chosen to be the central case study, followed by an overview of the impact of the arrival of ‘new’ immigrants in the beginning of the twentieth first century in the U.S.A., more specifically their relevance for the establishment of what would be known as the ‘American identity’, taken into account that her body of work has significantly been influenced by such background in combination with her own roots and upbringing. As a result, the chapter proceeds with the analysis of subversive ethnical performances of the artist that empathize with the marginal and help build a collective experience that culminates in an impressive number of followers and, therefore, with meaningful cultural and political implications. Chapter Three, ‘Femininity and Feminism in Cher’s Performance. The role of religion’, in turn, looks at the way representations of women have always been conditioned by the prevailing mentality of a particular time in history. I apply the notion of frame to representations of gender in popular culture and examine the way women have been resisting and reworking them. I start by studying the archetype of the ‘damsel in distress’ and a variety of portrayals of this ‘framed woman’, reporting as far back as to the Greek mythology to further analyze the processes adopted by feminist artists to ‘unframe’ such ‘damsels’, in particular Cher. I analyze her reworkings of the ‘damsel in distress’ in portrayals of characters on television shows, video clips, and films, as well as in public interventions for specific causes and show how counter-stereotypical images may be a highly effective way of fighting gender bias. The aim of Chapter Four, ‘‘Gender Trouble’ and Monstrosity’, is to present results of the impact of certain popular icons within the LGBTQIA in standing for the sexual rights of minorities, For the purpose, it was imperative to start the chapter by providing the reader with the repressive socio-cultural background of the post-World War II U.S.A., since it sets up the stage to the understanding of the significance of the figure of the rebel star for the gay community up to the present day. In particular, the case of James Dean is analyzed through the lenses of director Robert Altman and the film Come Back to the Five & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean , as well as Cher’s major contribution for the cause in this particular film and in other performances throughout her career path both as an artist, with strong postfeminist, unruly performances and in her personal life. I will also focus on the negative role of religion in undermining such human rights and how she frequently defies religious standards of morality and analyze how, through the use of laughter and powerful carnivalistic transgressions, she is able to deconstruct what Mikahil 15 Bakhtin (1984) called the “classic body” and prove that femininity is a “masquerade” (Mary Russo, 1995) and that gender is socially constructed, as Judith Butler has brought to the fore in her groundbreaking work, Gender Trouble (1999), and before that in Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’ (1993). Chapter Five, ‘Why does it matter to Talk about Popular Icons?’ discusses the cultural relevance of popular icons and how their significance is associated to the fandom phenomenon, which, in turn, leads to ‘poaching’ (appropriation and remixing of positive role models, as defined by Henry Jenkins), participatory culture, and political intervention. As a final remark, we emphasize the fact that the domain of representation in popular culture is particularly important for historians to, as much as possible, try to accurately depict past events. The Conclusion elaborates on the reasons which led us to determine that Cher is a pivotal case study worth reflecting upon, namely the fact that she has been a postmodernist and a postfeminist since her early years, and, therefore, much ahead of her time. She has undoubtedly proven to be an ‘unfinalized’ popular icon, with a huge media representation and consequent social impact as a controversial ‘celebrity’ that has never stopped being a ‘rebel with a wide variety of causes’, and has, therefore, remained a phenomenon of irreverence within popular culture, defying the myth of the celebrity’s passivity over decades. 16 Chapter 1: ‘Myth’ 1.1. Myth, an Intertextual Story The present chapter aims to give a general overview of the conceptualization and history of the concept of myth and the establishing of a mythography, within a variety of contexts, while taking into account the role played by performance in the context of cultural studies. The relevance of the concept of intertextuality and its articulation with myth theories will also be discussed here. Definitions of the word ‘myth’ generally refer to gods and tales of human origins as the focus of belief. Such tales are, according to the American literary critic Meyer Howard Abrams (1999), stories in a mythology, that is, in “(…) a system of hereditary stories of ancient origin which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain (…) why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, and to establish the sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their lives” (p. 170). On the gods and heroes in such stories, authors Peter Childs and Roger Fowler (2006) add that such characters, “may have instituted a change 1 in the workings of the universe or in the conditions of social life” (p. 146), while, in regards to why myths are invented, David Leeming (2005) explains, “(…) it has always been that adults have told stories to children to describe our journey, and leaders have told their people stories for the same reason”, that is, because “We are always aware of the journey aspect of our existence” (p. vii). In this respect, myths can be seen as both dreams and metaphors. Just as the paintings in the Paleolithic caves are expressions of humanity’s willingness to “leave a story” and an attempt to find an identity, so is myth. Leeming (2005) adds one must think of myths as both “cultural and universal human dreams” (p. vii). When comparing myths, it is inevitable to come across intricate and meaningful webs of intertextuality. In 1957, while studying the social condition, Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies (1991) 2 , “A myth ripens as it spreads” (p. 151). He was speaking about the way myth is, as Julie Sanders (2007) explains, “(…) persistently relocated in a new social and cultural geography at each occasion of adaptation and appropriation” (p. 63). Myths do not only spread; they are constantly being rewritten. Barthes (1991) goes on to say that, “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication (…)” (p. 108). He was influenced by the work of the anthropologist 1 Italics mine. 2 First published as Mythologies (1957). 17 Claude Lévi Strauss 3 , namely by his chapter “The Structural Study of Myth” from the book Structural Anthropology (1963), where he discusses what he considers an apparent paradox in myths: on the one hand they seem arbitrary (since they do not abide any logic and anything can happen in a myth), on the other hand, many cultures present similar myths. While context varies, both across cultures and across times, the structure of myths remains the same. He asserts that myth functions like language in the manner Ferdinand de Saussure described in “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” (1959) when he differentiates between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ and concludes the linguistic sign is arbitrary (its meaning derives from its function within a linguistic system and, therefore, at a certain moment in time). After Saussure, the linguistic sign is considered unstable. Similarly, a myth has its ‘langue’, the synchronous structure that enables the specific ‘parole’ of a certain myth. Levi Strauss holds that a myth is not static and the different times see different versions of the same myth. There is, according to him, no ‘correct’ or ‘original’ version. All are valid for study because they are a product of contradicting values, which exist in every culture. The myth works to symbolically resolve cultural contradictions. He notes binary oppositions and the attempt at balancing them as common to myths and folk tales and concludes that they lay bare a human desire to reconcile conflicting aspects of life. Barthes understood that myths are political tools that tell cultural stories; that they belong to politics, economics, and ideology. Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (1979) proposes that the function of myth is to help human beings cope with the inexorability of reality and considers the forms and variations of myths that survive are those that prove able to cope effectively with the changing social environment. Still, according to Blumenberg, myth is best conceived as an ongoing process, not as a fixed, final story. Barthes made use of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality when, eleven years after writing Mythologies , he moved away from structuralism and influenced the development of post-structuralism by questioning the role of the author in the production of the meaning of a text in “Death of the Author”. He states that, “(…) a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes, 1977, p. 143). According to him, the intertextual nature of any literary work always guides the reader towards new textual connections, which does not allow for the literary meaning to be established in its totality. The writer is considered the orchestrator of the ‘already-written’ and not its creator. The term ‘intertextuality’ itself emerged in the mid-sixties and has roots in theories such as that of the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (originally published in 1929). Bakhtin (1999) challenges the canonical historicist critique, which sees the novel as a homogeneous representation of reality that expresses the direct worldview of an author. In opposition, he develops the 3 First published as “ La Structure des Mythes” in Anthropologie Structurale (1958). 18 concept of the polyphonic novel, which does not directly comply with the ideology of the author, but rather expresses the different ‘voices’ often contradictory, that permeate the text. The polyphonic novel is also characterized by a carnivalistic standing that questions the power of the dominant ideologies and institutions and thus the reality of any system 4 . The Bakhtinian concept of the carnivalization of literature is, in itself, already a theory of intertextuality. In The Dialogic Imagination (1982), written in the 1930s, Bakhtin defends that any language is intrinsically dialogic, that is, anything that is said is in answer to something that has been said before as well as it anticipates whatever will be said about it. As a result, language is dynamic, relational, and constantly ‘redescribes’ the world. The dialogic work informs and is continually informed by the latter. Such a dialogue allows for the earlier work to be changed by the newer and vice-versa without losing its identity. In 1966, under the influence of Saussure and Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva writes Séméiotikè – Recherches pour une Sémanalyse where she introduces the concept of intertextuality. In the chapter “Le Mot, le Dialogue et le Roman” she asserts the literary text is a work of assimilation and transformation because it is never just the product of memory: it rewrites its memory. Therefore, the intertextual perspective is always critical and ‘text’ means now ‘a system of signs’. Kristeva (1980) writes, “(…) any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (p. 66). Intertextuality is, as Manfred Pfister, Douwe Fokkema, and Susan Suleiman among others advocate, one of the most significant characteristics of postmodernism. For Fokkema (1984), “Postmodernism is convinced that the social context consists of words, and that each text is written over an older one” (p. 46). In turn, Suleiman (1991) states, “The appropriation, misappropriation, montage, collage, hybridization, and general mixing up of visual and verbal texts and discourses, from all periods of the past as well as from the multiple social and linguistic fields of the present, is probably the most characteristic feature of what can be called the “postmodern style” (p. 118). On her turn, Linda Hutcheon (1988) argues that the contradictory double code that is characteristic of postmodernism questions the available modes of representation while simultaneously recognizes that it must use such codes (p. 49). When postmodernism uses past forms, it establishes an ironic distance and, therefore, its use is linked to the concept of parody, which, in turn is intimately linked to that of intertextuality. Hutcheon considers that postmodern literature may involve a radical questioning of the forms of representation and, therefore, of the kind of knowledge available in a certain culture. As a postmodern literary genre, historiographic metafiction plays here an important role. Hutcheon (1987) coined the term and it is used for works of 4 ‘Carnivalesque’ refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. 19 fiction that combine the literary devices of metafiction 5 with historical fiction 6 . Such works are also distinguished by frequent allusions to other artistic, historical and literary texts in order to show the extent to which works of both literature and historiography are dependent on the history of discourse. Hutcheon argues that some postmodern novels remind us that there is no historical narrative that transparently reports or represents the events: every historical narrative depends on the available narrative modes: the comic, the tragic, the romantic or the satirical, depending on the author’s convictions. The historical facts reach the historian through what Gerard Genette calls ‘paratexts’: the historical documents he has to rely on and that are impregnated with traces of previous authors, with her/his own ideologies, assumptions, and discriminations. History consists, thus, of a wide web texts and the new narrative is the product of the struggle of the author to negotiate the path through a net of previous representations and forms. As a result of the concept of intertextuality, as Ana Gabriela Macedo (2008) argues, the strategy of rewriting is pivotal, which, in turn, is closely related to the “death of the author”. According to Macedo, intertextuality values the writer as a reader of cultural texts who rewrites them because of the undetermined textual construction of history and society and points to Barthes’ statement, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author” (p. 148). Matei Calinescu, in his influential essay “Rewriting” (1997) considers it consists of a group of ancient techniques of literary composition that includes imitation, parody, burlesque, transposition, pastiche, adaptation, and translation and that it is a core stone of postmodernity. Rewriting sets a new structure and a new perception into an older text. According to Hutcheon, elements of the Greek parody 7 were adopted during the 20th century by the artists who aimed at narrating the past while registering the differences brought about by modernity. Still, according to Hutcheon, postmodern parody does not despise the context of the past representations it cites but it makes use of irony to show one is inevitably alienated from such a past. In terms of historiografic metafiction, postmodern parody is, for Hutcheon, a way of rereading the past, which confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history. “Postmodern parody is both deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation – in any medium” (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 98). Moreover, as Graham Allen 5 Metafiction is a literary device used self-consciously and systematically to draw attention to a work's status as an artifact. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. 6 Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past. 7 In the Greek parody full elements of a work are withdrawn from their context and reused but not necessarily to be ridiculed. 20 (2000) asserts, intertextuality reminds us that every text is potentially plural, open to the readers’ presuppositions, with no definite boundaries. Intertextuality reports to the impossibility of singularity, unity, and, therefore, unquestionable authority. Rejecting the notion of an original, in a postmodern fashion, Marina Warner (1994), a storyteller and social anthropologist deeply interested in myths and myth-making, considers there is a secret cunning in myths in the sense that they pretend 8 to present matter as it is and must always be (p. 419), which does not mean that they are immutable. In her opinion, myths can work as lenses onto human culture in their historical and social context and their stories can lead to others. These new stories, Warner adds, are as authentic as those of antiquity, which, in turn, derive from a long tradition of borrowing and mending, an activity of tailoring we should all engage in 9 . On myth, comments Hans Blumenberg (1990), “(…) one should think not only of attitudes of reverence and seeking favor but also of those of provocation, of forcing commitment, and even of malicious cunning, like that of Prometheus (…) To make the gods endure curses, mockery, and blasphemous ceremonies is to feel out and possibly to displace the limits on which one can rely” (p. 17). As we will show, the myth of Prometheus is highly relevant to our research and must, therefore, be kept in mind throughout this thesis. 1.2. The Myth of Prometheus There are different versions of the myth of Prometheus but one of the best known is Hesiod’s. It tells how Prometheus toiled diligently over the creation of the first man from a lump of clay and how, when he realized his brother Epimetheus had bestowed all the qualities from the gods upon the other animals and had left none for humans, he devised the plan to steal fire from the gods and give it to them. Such actions 8 Italics mine. 9 Myths are not immutable and neither is the work of art. The questioning of copy and original recalls Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1939), where he discusses how the reproduction of a work of art can shape our view or ‘reality’. In traditional societies, art was linked to a ritual or a religious experience and it could not be massively reproduced, therefore, it was only within reach of the upper classes. You were supposed to experience the ‘aura’ of the object, meaning the distance and reverence that only its uniqueness could offer. With the arrival of new art forms such as photography, differentiating between a copy and its original no longer makes sense and, thereby, the “aura” of the piece of art looses its meaning. The replica, a reproduction of an original piece of art, can never possess what he calls the aura but it is of major significance since when the aura is lost, singular authority is also lost and an aesthetic interpretation of the reproducible image is allowed. The same applies to the myths that are rewritten. 21 share the principles subjacent to Prometheus’ behavior: on the one hand, he is a thief and a transgressor, and, on the other hand, he is a savior. The literary theorist Ihab Hassan (1977) says, “Prometheus is himself the figure of a flawed consciousness struggling to transcend […] divisions” (p. 207). Prometheus crosses borders between the human and the divine and allows mankind to overcome its limits through art and technology. His story symbolizes the defiance of tyranny and authority. Comparisons have been drawn between Prometheus’ defiance of Zeus and the French revolution as well as between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (his attempt to reanimate life in the lifeless) and also the French revolution. In Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus , Mary Shelley used the myth as a symbol of optimism: Frankenstein wishes to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (Bennett, 1990, p. 40). According to Shelley, Prometheus “used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which they are virtuous through wisdom” (Lederer, 2002, p. 65). In the end of the novel, when Victor Frankenstein is dying, he tells his friend Walton: Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of your distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed (Shelley, 1992, p. 210). In the beginning of the novel the monster is a curious, rational, and intelligent being with feelings. Abandoned by his creator he undergoes a process of self-education and search for human companionship. He struggles with matters of identity and personal history and tries to find a place in society but suffers from loneliness and is sad that he cannot find an equal. He becomes an assassin because he rebels against his creator and the treatment he gets from humans. The challenge Frankenstein embraced does not seem to be what Shelley wants to condemn. She criticizes the fact that he rejects the creature he created. Another myth one can simply not ignore is that of the ‘unruly woman’. 22 1.3. The Myth of the ‘Unruly Woman’ The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) Who surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a (…) divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her ((…) to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she is trouble. - Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1976) The feminist critic Mary Daly (1984), drawing on the scholarship of a number of leading mythographers, writes that mythologies around the world originated in the worship of the mother goddess as the source and destination of all life, that is, she was considered to be the origin of the universe and all creation was perceived as being of her substance (p.47). However, according to Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor (1987), the advancement of food-management techniques and the decrease in the need for hunting during the Neolithic period altered men’s role in society. The latter speculates that the new task of guarding food supplies from thieves, in parallel with substantial developments in the use of metals during the Bronze Age, generated an interest in warfare. Women, who had had a primarily role in society, became, along with children, animals, land, and resources, prizes in a new regime of raid and conquest and male gods started to make sense. The link between the body of the god and creation could no longer be established since the male body can neither produce offsprings nor feed them. As a result, the notion of an original oneness became dualized and the universe, including god, was dislocated from the self and objectified. Sjöö and Mor relate this change to the emergence of the rigid class system of royal masters and slave laborers that coalesced around the new patriarchal elite. A pattern of structures of binary opposition have organized our thinking and decreed that woman shall operate as the negative of man. They started appearing in myths and legends as only passive victims or as sirens. Associations of the feminine with transgression and monstrosity in Western culture can be traced as far back as to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Eve’s characterization symbolizes the essence of women as a group, that is, one of inept, immoral, and corrupt human beings. The number of classical representations of ‘daughters of Eve’ is countless, manifesting patriarchal concerns with the role of 23 women in society, namely the threat they represent to men’s status quo as well as trying to assure traditional roles will remain as such. On the subject, comments Virginia Allen (1983), “(…) the original source of the femme fatale (…) is the dark half of the dualistic concept of the Eternal Feminine - the Mary/Eve dichotomy” (p. ii). The polar oppositions of soul and body, spirit and flesh were established in the scriptures and the feminine maternal woman is not supposed to be erotic or else she will not attain virtue. In her influential book The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir (1949) refers, “All Christian literature endeavors to exacerbate man’s disgust for woman” (p. 221). She further asserts that Christian ideology played a major role in women’s oppression. Looking at John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost , one finds a classical example of such representations. At a point Adam asks why God created women and the rhetoric is blatantly misogynistic: (…) Oh! why did God, Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n With Spirits Masculine, create at last This novelty on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With Men, as Angels, without Feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind? This mischief had not then befall’n, And more that shall befall, innumerable Disturbances on Earth through Female snares, And strait conjunction with this Sex (…) (Milton, 1968, X. 888-98) Virginia Woolf (1989) in A Room of One’s Own stresses Milton’s patriarchal view when she advises the reader to “look past Milton’s bogey” (p. 117). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2000) 10 in their 10 First published in 1979. 30 the prime roles are given. Hyper femininity and drag can both be read as camp performances linked to the concept of replica and the instability of the subject. Patriarchal representations are committed to repetition and try to establish and control the ‘Other’. For that not to happen, says British performance artist Catherine Elwes (1985), women performers should “never stay the same long enough to be named, fetishized” (p. 173). Addressing the same issue, Judith Butler (1999) considers gender is a category constructed in ‘performance’, encrypted and forced upon by society. However, she argues that roles pre-established by society can be reversed if the cultural means are used to support another cause. Authors such as Bakhtin, Derrida, de Certeau, and Adorno value performance as a way of resisting dominant cultural models of behavior and suggest the concept of ‘deviance’ in repetition as responsible for the occurrence of cultural changes. In this context, Derrida introduces the notion of ‘iterability’, that is, a repetition with “a deferred, delayed, deviant, deferring force or violence that causes a difference” (apud Doria Leibetseder, Queer Tracks: Subversive strategies in Rock and Pop Music , 2016, p. 15). In this, Derrida sees a possibility for deconstruction of previous representations, bringing difference to the surface. Earlier on, in Rabelais and his World (1984) Bakhtin proposes that all words coexist in three dimensions, emphasizing the polyphonic nature of the ‘word’ itself as an ideological “arena” 16 : (…) as a neutral word of a language, belonging to nobody; as an other’s word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other’s utterance; and finally, as my word, for, since I am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my expression (pp. 88-89). Henceforth, Bakhtin sees all speech as involving citation of a previous speech, stressing though that no citation is ever entirely faithful since the context always varies. He argues that people continually “assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate” words from others, although they carry something of “their own expression, their own evaluative tone” (Ibid.). According to Marvin Carlson (2004) speech always involves reproduction and flux, a creative tension between repetition and innovation, which, as he states, “deeply involved in modern views of 16 Expression used by Bakhtin in: M. Bakhtin (Volosinov, V.N.), (1929;1973), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , Seminar Press, 1973. 31 performance” (p. 59). De Certeau further debates ‘the practice of everyday life’, in which the role of the spectator expands into that of participant. As Joseph Roach (1995) explains, “De Certeau’s ‘practice’ has itself enlarged into an open-ended category marked ‘performative’” (p. 46). Such spectator, when he/she becomes participant, is most certainly using repetition to deconstruct normative representations, of, for instance, gender, ethnicity, or class. Adorno (2008), in turn, suggests that human activity: (…) is characterized above all by the fact that the qualitatively new appears in it, that it is a movement that does not proceed in pure identity, in the pure reproduction of what has already existed; it is movement in which there is novelty and which acquires its true character through that novelty (…) (p. 251) . In the context of performance, this means that fans do not simply always replicate their idols: frequently, they add personal interpretations when they ‘incarnate’ them and/or follow their paths in some way. Such a perspective goes hand in hand with the concepts of replica and instability of the subject and, therefore, with the phenomena of drag and camp. Drag queens easily corroborate this premise since they replicate and ‘cite’ the divas they revere and represent an unstable subject whose gender is performative but inevitably, they also add a personal touch to their performances since the latter are the result of a previous evaluation of their object of adoration. The reason drag queens do so is because such divas do, themselves, use excess femininity often as a way of reproducing and simultaneously deconstructing gender and cultural stereotypes. By imitating them, they are also achieving the same effect. We will have the opportunity to study such cases throughout this dissertation. In a review of Roland Barthes’ new edition of Mythologies , Marco Roth wrote in The New Yorker of April 18, 2012 how in “Myth Today” Barthes “(…) explains how the coverage of royal weddings, sensational crimes, (…) advertisement for cleaning products and food constituted a language with rules as codified as those of the classical French theatre he’d studied” (p. 19). He further argues that Barthes’ essay and on professional wrestling had a direct influence on Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”, as well as pretty much every subsequent, serious exaltation of low or popular arts and culture, since it, “(…) makes us see the spectacle and its actors (…) - through style – and reminds us that the word ‘theory’ really just means a way of seeing things” (p. 19). In his essay, Barthes (1991) considers that professional wrestling is a staged spectacle acting out society’s basic concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, of “suffering, defeat and justice” (p. 19). The characters portray grossly exaggerated stereotypes of human weakness and the audience expects to watch them suffer and be punished for their own transgressions of wrestling’s rules in a 32 theatrical version of society’s ideology of justice. In a similar vein, Susan Sontag, in her essay “Notes on Camp”, defines ‘camp’ as a sensibility that expresses itself not in content but in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration. Some postmodernist critics, feminists, and queer theorists have explored the ways that camp, namely the drag show can trouble the belief that gender is ‘natural’. Camp style, by focusing on the outward appearance of roles implies that they are superficial, a matter of style and that manners are social codes. Cross-dressing, in particular, heightens the fact that sex roles are only roles, not innate or instinctual personal features. Other representations used by postmodern performers with the same purpose are those labeled by Creed as ‘the monstrous feminine’: that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject, monstrous. Such representations bring about the encounter between the symbolic order and what threatens its stability. They include the abovementioned figures of the female vampire and the witch, as well as that of the cyborg. Representative work such as that of Donna Haraway on the figure of the cyborg sheds light on the effects of technology on gender and identity and more specifically on the relationship between the cyborg and feminism. Haraway (1991) states there is “nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female (…)” (p.14), pointing to its constructiveness. For Haraway (1991), cyborg writing is about “the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other (…). Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (p.33), she claims. Haraway is criticizing Enlightenment ideas when she ponders how women have historically been set aside from the technological world. Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon (2009), talking about the postfeminist cyborg of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, consider that “(...) cyberspace becomes a location where the distinction between the subject and the object, the self and the other, dissolves” (p.147) and where the Cartesian dualism of the subject is therefore transcended. The politics of the cyborg claim there is no such thing as “one code that translates all meaning perfectly” (p. 148). Furthermore, they consider that by blending sexuality with assertiveness as well as hyperfeminine characteristics with 'tough-girl' strength, the female cyborg is able to “transcend the patriarchal limits of 'female identity/femininity” (p. 150). The paradoxical and sometimes conflicting ideas of the cyborg are very similar to the characteristics of the postfeminist woman since she seems to conform to patriarchy but is in fact reworking it behind a mask of excess femininity, which is frequently attained by cosmetic surgery. The transformational shifts that performers embody tend to personify transformations that are ideologically crucial. The degree of alteration in a star’s persona is subject to the longevity of the star’s 33 career, therefore, the longer her career is the more socially influential is the legacy of that person’s work and she is more likely to ascend to the status of ‘myth’. According to Marvin Carlson (2004), looking at the performance that was taking place in Los Angeles, a 1990 report pointed to the fact that most of the identity performance was being produced by “(…) a coalition of women, gay men, African-American, Hispanic and young Asian-American artists whose aesthetics and politics challenge both the art world’s and the media’s version of our socio-cultural reality” (p. 177). By then, a feminist performance was particularly interested in questioning, exposing, and dismantling the cultural and social pillars governing the traditional roles assigned to men and women, the way the body was displayed on stage, as well as the performance of gender: the emphasis is now on the “(…) social construction of the body, the body as a carrier of signs, and with it the social construction of the subject in performance” (Valie Export, 1992, p. 33). In the 1980s and early 1990s the woman artist becomes a subject with a voice as opposed to the traditional role of the woman as the ‘Other’, the object of the male gaze. The emphasis on the instability of repetition is an important characteristic of the modern political performance of resistance, especially that of women and ethnic artists. Instead of avoiding representations with strong ethnic nuances, these artists have systematically tried to use such material and subject it to ironic connotations. When playing such roles, the artists reveal a subversive and parodic self-consciousness typical of the contemporary engaged performance. Elis Diamond (1989) suggested the term ‘mimicry’ to talk about such performance, meaning a mimic distortion of the conventional doctrine of ‘mimesis’. The French theorist Luce Irigaray considered that when Plato condemned mimesis, he was trying to control the proliferation of alternatives to a stable, patriarchal, monolithic truth. As an alternative to mimesis Irigaray (1985) chooses the term ‘mimicry’ that nullifies the vindication of a patriarchal truth and suggests women should “play with mimesis” and “assume the feminine role deliberately, which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it” (p. 76). Other theorists consider that what is behind the disturbing power of the ‘mimicry’ is the excess and exaggeration, the path taken by masquerade. Mary Ann Doane (1991) argues that masquerade “makes visible” the artifice of femininity, that is, what is supposed to remain concealed, the gap between an impossible role, ‘femininity’ as such, and the women playing it. She defines it as “to designate a mode of being for the other (…) the sheer objectification of reification of representation” (p. 33). Ultimately, she suggests that a woman playing a character in film can subvert ‘real’ traditional roles and “flaunt her femininity, produce herself as an excess of femininity – foreground the masquerade” (p. 81). In turn, Mary Russo (1995), influenced by Bakhtin, postulates a carnivalesque body acting, 34 conscientiously “making a spectacle of itself” (p. 85) to call the attention to performance as a process and a construction. In his 1965 book America Learns to Play - a History of Popular Recreation 1607-1940 , culture historian Foster Rhea Dulles explores how the 19th century USA, with a predominantly white, protestant, AngloSaxon population with a puritan background, started facing the arrival of a new wave of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who ended up threatening to eliminate the distance between the white and the black. These new immigrants, whom, says historian Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998), earned probationary white privileges, are considered to have contributed to the concept of leisure to a culture that was obsessed with work by developing “leisure activities” (such as films and vaudeville) 17 . Mark Winokur (1986) considers that the culture historians who came after Dulles and up to the 1980s view the Anglo-puritan culture as the founding half of a binary system: in the other half lays all the other cultural influences. He asserts Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, among others, studied the disparity between history and its representation (or lack of it) by hegemonic groups interested in keeping an ‘official’ history. George Lipsitz (1998) states, “Wild West shows, minstrel shows, Hollywood films, and commercial advertising have not merely reflected the racism that exists in social relations but have helped produce a unified white racial identity through the shared experience of spectatorship” (p. 99). Caught in such a context is the ethnic woman who is even more marginalized since she fits neither into the category of white nor male. Having ‘played’ intensely with a new image of women during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, by the beginning of the twentieth century artists had created the stereotype of the “femme fatale”. V. Allen (1983) concludes that all descriptions of these women lead to a definition. She is always “(…) a woman who lures men into danger, destruction, even death by means of her overwhelmingly seductive charms” (p. vii). By the time Barthes published “Myth Today”, France had recently been engaged in a long war and a territorial occupation and was trying to recapture the prestige it had before the Second World War and hold on to its colonies in the North Africa and Southeast Asia. The French empire was still keeping nationalism at high levels while embracing consumerism and the use of mass media. Barthes, an admirer of Bertold Brecht, was following in the footsteps of Brecht’s friend Walter Benjamin, who examined the ideology of the ‘culture industry’ and revealed how the interest of the dominant classes were furthered through Hollywood films. Such a trend dominated the classic Hollywood period (1917-1960). Fortunately, 17 Even so, such media do not directly reflect the experience of these ethnic groups: hiding ethnicity is the natural way to success in the American culture. 35 from then onwards, as Diane Negra (2001) reminds us, “(…) ethnicity is a discourse spoken with increasing sophistication in the interests of cultivating ethnic nostalgia or as a means of evading more contentious social differences at a time when we openly identify our society as a ‘multiculture’” (p. 17). She goes on to say, “By fictionally enlarging the parameters of ethnic difference, contemporary films establish a safe plane on which to enact crises of difference far less volatile than crises of race or class, in the end working to conceal them” (p. 17). There are performers who, rather than attempt to leave their ethnicity behind, they choose to amplify their ethnic identities. Negra (2001) considers that the ‘ethnic female star personae’ is able to ‘work to alleviate tensions between the myth of American culture as allincorporating and the reality of a fragmented, divided society’ (p. 9). In many of the narrative forms in which she appears, the figure of the ethnic woman is located outside of dominant American cultural values. She is associated with disruption, unruliness, excess and also innovation, having the ability to work to familiarize and reduce the threatening ethnic ‘Other’ and catalyze spectatorial fantasies of resistance and agency. Female filmgoers may engage and identify with a figure privileged to defy the order of a white and patriarchal society. Thus, representations of ethnic femininity promote the evasion from cultural strictures that disempowered women. On ethnicity comments Ella Shohat, (1991) “The very word ethnic, then reflects a peripheralizing strategy premised on an implicit contrast of norm and other (…)” (p. 215). The ‘probationary white’, as Jacobson (1998) puts it, is usually devalued as ethnic in American culture and, therefore, seldom put under scrutiny. In the existing literature on ethnic performers it has generally been explored the most devalued ethnicities, assuming that the others were on more stable and privileged ground, which is not necessarily the case since they are located at a delicate liminal space. That being said, they are also strong tools of empowerment. On his turn, the anthropologist Victor Turner (1991) defines liminal individuals or entities as being “(…) neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (p. 95). According to him, the liminal stage embodies optimism, a ‘storehouse of possibilities’, and a gestation period that precedes new life. The entertainer (who stands at a liminal space) is particularly fit to represent liminality and thus be politically significant. While reaching out to fellow oppressed, she manages to somehow remain attractive to her oppressor. Since the political power of an entertainer is masked, she is less easily resisted and becomes highly effective, which makes the entertainer a subject very interesting to be looked at. 36 Acknowledging plurality, the postmodern performer plays with allusion, reference, tribute, mise en abym 18 , pastiche, and intertextuality. In a metafictional manner, the artist may self-consciously and systematically draw attention to her status as an artifact in order to question what reality is. Considering that everything has been said before, she proclaims the devaluation of the Benjaminian ‘aura’ of the object. Her discourse echoes other discourses but ultimately rewrites them because the star persona fluctuates, evolves, and adapts in relation to social history and by doing so is a source of empowerment. She transcends patriarchal limits of identity recoding images behind a mask and subverting command and control. Apart from the body of work of an artist; fan magazine stories, publicity photos, poster art, interviews, and reviews are also very consequential modes of discourse with substantial historiographical usefulness. Despite their low cultural status, such textual material can be both complex and richly illuminating. These materials are significant because they are able to mediate the space between performances and the public and are thus crucial in the building up of celebrity myths. They will, therefore, be subject of attention through this thesis. 1.5. Conclusion As a conclusion, to this already long introductory chapter on the meaning and construction of the celebrity myth, one could say that the myth of ‘celebrity’ (the product of fandom or, in other words, the product of assimilation) signals the possibility of change in a social system that essentially desires conformity. Such a possibility answers the question why certain stars linger significantly in the popular imagination long after the height of their success, even long after their deaths and turned into myths. All these reflections will be substantively put to use and will help contextualize and critically consider the case studies we want to focus in this dissertation in a variety of angles and through different angles of analysis. 18 Mise en abyme occurs within a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole. It is a play of signifiers within a text, of sub-texts mirroring each other. This mirroring can get to the point where meaning may be rendered unstable and, in this respect, may be seen as part of the process of deconstruction. The film-within-a-film is an example of mise en abyme. 37 Chapter 2: ‘Ethnicity and ‘Unruliness’ in Cherilyn Sarkisian’s (Cher’s) Performance’ I will now concentrate on the central case-study of my dissertation and start by having a close look at Cher’s socio-cultural background as well as at the role the newly arrived immigrants of early twentieth century U.S.A. played in the new forms of entertainment, such as vaudeville, extravaganza, and burlesque, and their impact in the culture of the United States. Such aspects are crucial to understand how Cher came to be an icon of unruliness. 2.1. Cher’s Roots and Socio-cultural Background Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20 1946 in El Centro, California, U.S.A. to an Armenian - American truck driver addicted to gambling and drugs (eventually convicted) and an American mother with, English, Irish, German, and Cherokee Indian ancestry. Three months into her wedding, her mother was pregnant and considering abortion 19 (she had found out about her husband’s addictions and was living in poverty). She eventually divorced him when Cher was ten months old but would remarry twice. She pursued a career in modeling and acting under the name of Georgia Holt while working as a waitress and raised Cher and her half-sister Georganne, for most of the time, on her own, often moving from place to place with little money. Cher frequently recalls her humble, unsettling origins during interviews, namely the fact that she used to go to school wearing rubber bands around her shoes to keep the soles from falling off, which Cher’s biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli associated to her “deep feelings of inadequacy” (Taraborrelli, 1986, p. viii). Cher’s memories of the times her mother was married to her father are not the happiest: there was a time he pawned her mother’s jewelry and once he almost set their house on fire because he was intoxicated. 19 In her U.S. TV documentary Dear Mom, Love Cher Cher comments, "I heard the abortion story when I was a teenager. The orphanage story has been a touchy one for my mum her whole life, and she didn't want to talk about it. I said, 'Mum, why didn't you just march in and take me?' "She said, 'I didn't have the power. I didn't have any money or a job, and the church was so strong. I'd go see you every day and you'd be crying. You don't know what it was like.' It was harder for women then." Cher insists, though, she is not ashamed to speak about her troubled upbringing, "So I come from a poor white trash background. It doesn't make any difference”, she says. 38 There were times, though, when she lived comfortably, namely when Georgia was married to Gilbert LaPiere, a wealthy bank manager and she attended elite schools and lived in Beverly Hills. One of such schools was Mother Cabrini’s High School in the San Francisco Valley, a Catholic school she has no good memories of because she could not understand the discipline imposed by the nuns. Her mother’s friends included people from the gay community and she interacted with gay men from an early age. Finding herself at a liminal space, she claims, “I used to tell my mother she was going straight to hell when she died because she didn’t do any of the things we were supposed to do.” (Taraborrelli, 1986, p. 27). Another school she attended was a private prep school in Van Nuys, California, where the teachers used to complain about Cher’s long hair (she would refuse to cut it) and disciplined her for coaxing her classmates to go to school barefoot. The school dean eventually suspended Cher for wearing clothes that she considered inappropriate school attire such as slacks, t-shirts, and boots. Since very young Cher expressed fascination for film stars but she would not find many Hollywood actresses she could emulate. She comments that, as a child, her origins made her feel unattractive and untalented. Darker than her mother and half-sister, she seems to have felt social discomfort related to her ethnic origins: most of the Hollywood actresses were, by then, the blonde type and she did not fit in. Cheryl Napsha and Connie Berman (2001) cite Cher, “All I saw was Doris Day and Sandra Dee (…) In the Walt Disney cartoons, all the witches and evil queens were really dark. There was nobody I could look at and think, 'That's who I'm like'” (p.22). Once Cher, her mother, and sister went to Mexico and officials at the border did not want to allow Cher back into the country because they thought she was Mexican and was being sneaked over the border. The complexity of Cher’s ethnic and economic background placed her, from a very early age, at a liminal space within society. During her adolescence, she realized her looks were usually associated with irreverence and started emulating the Hollywood exceptions (such as Tina Turner) she began identifying herself with. By the age of 16 she was “rebellious, smart-mouthed (…) She was also a shy, awkward child with deep feelings of inadequacy stemming from a childhood dotted with periods of poverty and an unsettled home life”, describes Taraborrelli (1986: viii). She was, as Taraborrelli (1986) puts it, “(…) a girl from the wrong side of the tracks (…)” (p. xiii). By then, she had moved to Los Angeles where she took acting classes and worked to support herself. That same year, she met Sonny Bono who was working for record producer Phil Spector. It was the year of 1962 and the start of Cher’s career as a backup singer on many recordings, including The Ronettes’ Be My Baby and The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ . Fifty-five years ago Cher belonged to a ‘no man's land’ and as such, she was the type of girl who was easily unsettling to the national imaginary, even among the ‘melting pot’ of the United States and 39 basically, from the start of her career, her persona began to thematize what Negra (2001) calls ‘ethnic chameleonism’ by “referencing assimilation imperatives that have historically impacted both ethnic immigrants and persons of color” (p. 166). 2.2. American Identity and the ‘New’ Immigrants of Early Twentieth Century U.S.A. In the first two decades of the 20th century, at times of apparent prosperity but, nevertheless, of a certain fear about the efficacy of American economic politics and the ability to maintain cultural independence, many actresses, originally from Southern and Eastern European countries, arrived at the Hollywood scene. Others would be given fictional biographies to suggest that they had roots in such locations. These actresses would come to personify a category of new immigrants who were coming mainly from these regions. They were mostly Poles, Italians, and Jews and were visibly different from the precedent white population and constituted a threat to American cultural consensus. Actresses such as Pola Negri, Theda Bara, Lya de Putti or Nita Naldi came to play the role of the vamp and reflected the cultural need to regulate woman’s sexuality in an attempt at ideological management. As Negra (2001) states, “(…) the vamp is a particularly potent marker of the transition from women’s sexuality as in need of regulation for its own sake to a deep cultural investment in that process of control and regulation to bolster patriarchal norms” (p. 61). As in the beginning of the 20th century female labor outside the home grew, so did the vamp’s problematization of women’s work, expressing concerns regarding their access to work and its rewards. The American morality was being threatened and the vamp had to be discredited in order for ‘the good girl’ to be valued. In particular, the vampire myth represents vampires as liminal figures since they are in between an old and a new world but possess a destructive power that is linked to their strong connections with their homeland and origins (after all vampires sleep in coffins filled with their native soil, which implies they can never totally adjust to a new culture) and the fact that they are constantly trying to convert others. These were the qualities some Americans feared new immigrants to possess, therefore, having the potential to contaminate the American population. The image of the female vampire functions not only as a sexual and ethnic contaminant but also as an economic one. It is linked to working women because the vampire is represented as a self-absorbed individual connected to city life and, therefore, its image does not fit the paradigm of the close family unit. Nevertheless, immigrant ethnic women would end up playing an important role in the mythology of American identity and in the promise of a multicultural U.S.A. due to their discursive power. Negra 46 When Cher asks for more light, she is shifting the focus from her to the audience and simultaneously identifying herself with her fans: they are all in some way marginal figures. Still during the same segment Cher mentions that she has many natural hair colors (wigs) and that she does not understand how she has a 35-year-old repertoire when she is not 35 years old yet (by the time she was 53). When she alludes to the number of natural hair colors that she has, she is addressing her ethnicity and hybridity and advocating that identities are constructed. As Loran Marsan (2010) points out, Cher is embracing what seems to be opposites (youth/old age; natural/artificial) and by doing so defying rules and showing labels shall not be used since opposites can go together (p. 54) 25 . During the Dressed to Kill Tour (2014), while performing the song I Hope You Find It , Cher wore a wig that was blonde at the front and black at the back, a Mother Mary like headpiece, and a goddess gown. During the performance she is on a platform above the audience and amid sparkling lights that resemble a starry sky. She seems to be symbolically displaying herself as a hybrid ‘divine entity’ moving among her fans empowering them with a message and giving them strength to find whatever they are looking for in life. At the end of the performance, her hands assume a praying position in recognition of their devotion. As we have previously mentioned in this chapter, in the beginning of the twentieth century, ethnically marked actresses played the role of the vamp to serve patriarchal objectives, namely, to control women’s sexuality at an age when female labor outside the home was growing and, consequently, women’s financial independence was perceived as a threat to the establishment and had to be tamed. After World War II the role of women at the work place could never be reversed in totality, despite the 25 http://vcg.emitto.net/5vol/Marsan.pdf. Figure 3: Cher during the Dressed to Kill Tour Performing I Hope You Find It 47 attempts made during the late forties and fifties. As a consequence, the image of the workingwoman would have to be desensualized and associated with orderliness and restrain. In the late nineteen seventies interventionist artists such as Cher, would still feel the need to address such issues and expose the conditions of women at work. On April 3 1978, Cher... Special , a one-off television special, was broadcast on ABC. As the show begins, there is a spotlight on the floor and the voice of Cher's mother is heard calling her young daughter: “Cher? Cher? Cher, is that you? I thought I asked you not to mess up my record albums”. Cher steps into the spotlight, made up to look like a younger version of herself. The young Cher tells her mother that she is upset because she is not blonde and says that all the pretty girls have blonde hair and blue eyes, alluding to her ethnic background. Later, a segment of the show consists of Cher working by day in a boring secretarial job and dancing by night at the discos. At the office, five secretaries are sat at their desks. They are all dressed alike, with formal, plain clothes that look like uniforms. They are typewriting and answering phone calls in synchrony. On the background you can listen to the noise of the typewriters and the phones ringing and Cher’s voice, “In response to yours of the third, I regret that we are unable to comply with your request.” She then answers the phone and says, “Mr. Fisher’s office (…) No, I’m sorry, he is not at his desk at the moment”, and hangs up. She goes on to say, “He is out on Broadway eating live chickens”. While going over a Rolodex, she reads several names starting by the letter “b” and ends with “Boredom” (capital “b”, as she claims). She then opens a paper bag, lists the food inside, “carrot sticks, celery stocks, low-fat yogurt, non-fat milk” and comments, “Boring, Boring, Boring, capital “b””. She then stands up and says: Somewhere between tedium and terror, A little to the east of fear and A little to the west of apathy, There is a space called me, And all the 9 to 5s, The Mondays to Fridays, The filling and the unfulfilling Feeling of time smothers to me Smothers it in a blanket of blah, beige blah. 48 And somewhere between a yawn and a scream, A little to the North of anxiety and a little to the South of resignation, Is a space called ‘free’, And in that space on Saturday night, When the phone stops and the typewriters shut down and the Rolodex stops rolling, The “me” and the “free” get together. 26 At this point, Cher exits the office and as she is walking down the road, the camera focuses on her legs and feet and her clothes change: she is now wearing a beaded evening dressed and high heels. In the next scene she is dancing to the sound of disco music with people from different ethnicities ( Disco Inferno , Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood , and My Boogie Shoes ). Between songs you can hear “She is not at her desk at the moment” and, at the end, once again, “In response to yours of the third, I regret that we are unable to comply with your request”. Cher becomes a vamp when she exits the office and engages in nightlife. Considering vamps, Camille Paglia (1994) writes that both vamps and tramps evoke: (...) the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism. Vamps are queens of the night, the primeval realm excluded and repressed by today’s sedate middle-class professionals in their orderly, blazing bright offices (…) I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp (p. 11). Cher, with this performance from 1978 was precisely making such a point. Paglia goes on to point out how, white middle-class style: (…) despite the Sixties rebellion, still tyrannizes us, because corporate business, with the streamline efficiency of the profit-based work ethic, was born in Protestant Northern Europe, before 26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGewz9DCeEU. 49 and after the Industrial Revolution. It has been puritanical and desensualized from the start (…) office manners grind down and homogenize all ethnic and racial differences. The world is going WASP” (p. 14). Once again, it seems that Cher wanted to call the attention to this particular issue when she chose to have a black woman among the secretaries and have them all perform in synchrony. Between 1971 and 1974, Sonny and Cher recorded The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour , a variety show that ran on CBS and was a Top 20 hit in the ratings for its entire run 27 . On the variety show of the 1970s, Diane Negra (2001) remarks how well suited they were to “ (…) reflect and respond to social identities in flux and to stage social contestation in such a way as to re-orient difference as diversity” (p. 168), namely due to their fragmented style and emphasis on masquerade. In The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour , Sonny and Cher would constantly address questions of the status and social role of the outsider. By, as Negra (2001) points out, “(…) filtering their alterity through mainstreaming its hippie hosts”, they attempted to “(…) discursively knit back together an increasingly polarized American culture (…)” (p. 169). As Negra (2001) claims, thanks to “the fluidity of roles in the variety show format, ‘hippiness’ could be seen as transient, un-serious and put on” (p. 169). On every episode of the show, Sonny would exchange banter with Cher and she would put him down in a comic manner. Comedy skits would follow, mixed with musical numbers. Among these were The Vamp Sketches , a sequence featuring at least three mini-skits with Cher playing notorious women in history or fiction (e.g.: Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Marlene Dietrich, a Transylvanian vampire), indirectly making reference to popular memories of the vamp as a caricature of predatory ethnic femininity. Each one of them was preceded by Cher in a parlor lying atop an old-style upright piano with Sonny pretending to play it. She would sing one verse of a song between each mini-skit (the lyrics usually set up the next mini-skit), followed by the chorus, "She was a scamp, a camp and a bit of tramp, she was a V-A-M-P, vamp". At the end of the sketch she would sing, “Through wind and rain or sleet or hail, it takes a scheming demon woman to deliver her … male!”. In one of the sketches Cher is Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary). Born in 1852, Calamity Jane was an American frontierswoman and professional scout known for her habit of wearing man's attire. She fought against the Native Americans and was an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok. In the sketch, though, Wild Bill Hickok (Burton Reynolds) challenges Calamity Jane at a 27 The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was weekly watched by over 30 million viewers during its three-year run. 50 saloon because he heard that she had been claiming to be his equal. “I am gonna show her there ain’t no woman that take hold no man”, says Hickok. When she arrives, he asks her if she thinks she is his equal, to which she replies, “Equal? Bill Hickok? You’re a mangy, lowdown skunk while I am a warm, wonderful frontier lady with a terrific charisma and a fantastic set of 45s”. She calls him spaghetti arms (because of his cowboy coat with fringes on the sleeves) and when he claims, “there is no woman that’s equal to no man” she shows him Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and tells him to read it because it is all in there, about the equality of the sexes. He argues, he can’t read or talk but that, on the other hand, he is physically superior and defies her to do arm wrestling with him. She agrees: “Indian wrestling it will be”, and with a whistle calls her Native American friends who defeat him in a matter of seconds. Hickok, still on the floor, feels sorry for his luck, “The first time I get to play a white guy in a Western, the Indians beat the daylight out of me”. Calamity Jane defies him, “You’ve got until sundown to get to my place, Mr. Hickok, cuz I’m just gonna find out how come they call you “Wild Bill”. And shaking her pistols, she proffers, “See that gun action?”. In the end, Hickok turns to the bartender (Sonny) and asks him what kind of Western that is. “The only kind you’ll ever see on this show buddy, an Italian one 28 ”, he replies. “In that case, I’ll have a chianti and a pizza to go”, orders Hickok. As mentioned, during the 1960s and 1970s, the history of the Native Americans was reread and rethought. These two decades also saw the birth and development of the second-wave feminism, a reaction against the renewed domesticity of women after World War II. Concomitantly, it is only natural that in the sketch, contrary to the historical facts, Calamity Jane becomes a friend of the Native Americans and Hickok’s enemy. She has read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (Calamity Jane is said to have been illiterate), and Hickok is the one who can’t read. 28 In the vamp skits, Cher also played Cleopatra and in the introductory song to this skit she points out how “Antony and Cesar fell into her [Cleopatra’s] grasp”. Mark Antony calls her “Egyptian ruler” and she calls him “old Italian meatball”. In the end, she rewrites the story with a small touch of historiografic metafiction and a taste for the tramp of the group: between Mark Antony, Cesar and a lowly extra impersonator of Cesar she chooses the latter because “this is a variety show, isn’t it?”. 51 Second-wave feminism, though, developed an anti-media attitude. They made a point of being conceived themselves as ‘outside’ the dominant consumerist culture and as offering an alternative to stereotypical images perpetuated by the media. Says Genz and Brabon (2009), “(…) popular culture was criticized for its cultural representation and reproduction of gendered inequalities” (p. 20). As such, it was rejected, as argues John Storey (1997), as “a sort of ideological machine which more or less effortlessly reproduces the dominant ideology” (p. 12) and also because it was credited with the invention and circulation of what would become the icon of the movement, the ‘bra-burner’ figure that cemented into the public’s mind the perception of feminism as anti-feminine, as an enemy of glamorous women. By rewriting history, the sketch aims at emphasizing the plight of two minorities, the Native Americans and women. In fact, the parodic rewriting brings to television the changes the feminist movement and Native Americans were fighting for and, taking one step ahead, Cher is, using the media, alluding to the fact that you do not have to adopt the prototype of the ‘bra-burner’, on the contrary, you can choose to look feminine and simultaneously demand the right to be treated with respect and on equal terms by men. While Calamity Jane was known for dressing man’s clothes, Cher, as Calamity Jane, wears feminine sexy clothes (high heels and a blouse showing her bellybutton) and does catwalk, which does not prevent her from being a fierce woman. As I will be able to discuss further on, Cher was one of the most “aggressive” pioneers in using parody in the media to present women as both feminine and empowered, a disrupting antinomy. The show can also be considered historiografic metafiction ahead of its time since the term was only coined by Hutcheon in the late 1980s and is mostly associated with works of postmodern art. Past and present are intertwined when Calamity Jane (1852 – 1903) holds a copy of The Female Eunuch , Figure 4: Calamity Jane Figure 5: Cher as Calamity Jane 52 when Hickok directly reminds the viewer he is playing a white guy in a western and, indirectly, watching a show, and finally, when he asks the bartender what kind of show that is. When the latter claims it is an Italian western, he is claiming the show is set up from the perspective of a minority group that knows repression. On The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour minority groups are empowered. The fact that Burt Reynolds (as Hickok) claims he usually plays the role of an Indian in westerns emphasizes the fact that identities are fluid and condemns stereotypes (he can easily ‘shift’ from one identity to another) and by playing the role of a cowboy who dies in the hands of the Native Americans, it means that the show reverses the faith of two groups and empowers the second. Cher lends the same message in the abovementioned Cher … Special . After she comments how ugly she feels, her mother tells her that she is beautiful and someday she will realize just how special she really is. Cher explains that she got into her mother’s record albums so that she could learn the songs from the film West Side Story for school. When the mother asks her which part she is going to play, she replies, “all of them”. She looks at the camera and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, for tonight’s entertainment, I am proud to present West Side Story . I will be playing all the parts. Thank you”. Cher starts the program by singing and dancing to a medley of songs from the musical, playing both male and female, white and Latino characters. West Side Story is a stage musical inspired by William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet . The story is set in the Upper West Side of New York City in the mid-1950s in an ethnic, blue-collar neighborhood and explores the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds, respectively a white and a Puerto Rican one, and the ‘impossible’ love story between Tony (the ex-leader of the Jets) and Maria (sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks). The original play, a 1957 Broadway production, was adapted into a musical romantic drama film by directors Figure 6: : Cher as Anita; Cher as Maria; Cher as Bernardo; Cher as Tony from West Side Story 53 Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins in 1961. The story condemns racial intolerance while utilizing popular racial and gender stereotypes and depicts lack of adult authority, suggesting that ultimately, it remains up to the young people to overcome prejudice in order to create a peaceful, tolerant society 29 . After three members of the group have died, the others realize the rivalry is pointless and feel ashamed of their attitudes. The story reflects upon the difference between the American dream and its reality. By playing the different characters, Cher’s star persona proves to be flexible in such a way that different identities can be called upon and simultaneously brings strength to minority groups. As Negra (2001) puts it, “Cher’s star body in particular challenges conventions of whiteness in its high degree of self-awareness” (p. 164). The concept of ethnicity becomes more linked to the notion of what Negra (2001) labels as ‘flexible consent’ other than ‘rigid descent’ (p. 166). Choice prevails over destiny. Cher ... Special concludes with her saying: Momma, I'm still here. I've got the same hair, the same bumpy nose and vampire teeth. But you were right, I feel better about myself now (…) my children Chastity and Elijah both have blonde hair. I guess they don't have the advantages of having black hair, but nobody told them it was going to be easy. Then she sings When You Wish Upon a Star . By then, she was already adopting a posture that resonates with one many are only recently learning to adopt. In 2000, Marilyn Halter (2000) would point out “more and more instances of what can be called ‘blended ethnicity,’ the amalgamation of two or more ethnic backgrounds, are showing up in the marketplace” (p. 186). The awareness of such a reality has been growing thanks to performances and stances such as Cher’s. What is particularly interesting about Cher is that she “moves in cycles to undo moments of assimilation and integration, positioning her ambiguously and continuously as neither fully inside nor outside prevailing categories of identity” (Negra, 2001, p. 164). In 1986 the academy did not nominate Cher for her very acclaimed role in the film Mask . When presenting the Oscar for best supporting actor that year, she ‘answered’ the academy by wearing a very outrageous Mohawk outfit, contact lenses that made the pupil of her left eye brown and the pupil of her 29 By the 1950’s, Mexican men were often depicted as either lazy workers or bandits while Mexican women were portrayed as sexy sirens who attempted to seduce white men. In the film, lieutenant Schrank sides with the white gang and reinforces racism, forcing the Sharks to leave public areas. In turn, officers Krupke and Doc (a drugstore owner and Tony’s boss) are presented as helpless individuals. 54 right one green, and smiling, she announced, “As you can see, I did receive my academy booklet on “How to Dress Like a Serious Actress!” 30 . Some considered the remark a kind of ‘middle finger’ to the Academy. She displayed herself as a sort of a Native American ‘aberration’ in the eyes of the Hollywood ‘gods’. Cher systematically assumes a political postmodern identity rooted in difference, in ‘otherness’ and is constantly standing at a liminal space, at a threshold: while reaching out to minority groups she manages to, up to a certain extent, remain attractive to the normative society, which is politically paradoxical. In fact, Cher’s whiteness seems to be securely linked to ‘white trash’, as Negra (2001) explains when she writes, “(…) Nor does her well-publicized wealth necessarily interrupt the narrative of her white trash identity” (p. 180). She is attached to unrestrained consumption, is the owner of an excessive and selfproduced body, and her performance is most of the time highly camp, all elements that are typically linked to ‘white trash culture’. In fact, white trash icons also seem to frequently have an affiliation with Native Americans. Gael Sweeney notes in Matt Wray and Annalce Newitz (1997), “It is fascinating that many of the icons of White Trash, from Elvis to Bill Clinton to Loretta Lynn, have acknowledged an Indian heritage, linking themselves at least in spirit to these marginal mixed-race groups” (p. 253). And so does Cher. 30 https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/10641/when-bob-mackie-dressed-cher-as-a-showgirl-for-the-1986-oscars. Figure 7: Cher at the 1986 Academy Awards 55 2.3.1. ‘Off-White’ White Trash Negra (2001) considers that “In keeping with the tendencies of ‘white trash’, and as part of a twentiethcentury trend in which ‘divadom’, as Susan J. Leonard and Rebecca A. Pope (1996) state, “escaped its elite precincts and ‘descended’ to the realm of pop music and culture” (p. 22), Cher’s persona has the ability to unsettle a series of apparently fixed cultural boundaries. On May 22 1986 she was an invited guest on David Letterman . Their conversation began: Letterman: “You smell terrific, you really smell great. Do you mind if I ask you (…) I mean, I knew you would smell nice (…) can you mention the scent or would you rather not? Cher: Well, it’s two together. One’s really cheap, called Ritz (it’s like Taboo , good girls don’t wear it) and the other is really expensive, called Vanilla . Letterman: And you just mix them up? Cher: Yeah. Letterman: The end result is quite effective. 31 Since very early in her career, Cher’s ‘trademark’ has always been nonconformity to what is viewed as socially appropriate and acceptable and, therefore, she has been mixing and mingling ever since. She does not consider herself a “good girl”, otherwise she would not wear “Ritz”, and neither is she a “bad girl”, or she would not wear “Vanilla”. Later Cher admits to Letterman that the reason why she had refused his previous invitations to come on the show (a total of four) was because she thought he was an “asshole”. She subverts what is subversive through deconstruction. Twenty-nine years later, on May 6 2015 Cher is once again on David Letterman : He is about to retire and she asks him if he recalls the first time she was on the show and the name she called him. As Stephen Jay Gould (1985) mentioned, “Anyone who does not grasp the close juxtaposition of the vulgar and the scholarly has either too refined or too compartmentalized a view of life. Abstract and the visceral fascination are equally valid and not so far apart” (p. 65-66). 31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcblpszrwAk. 62 While Cher was giving her acceptance speech at the 2001 Artist’s Achievement Award ceremony, she commented: I have also had critics for the last forty years saying that I was on my way out every year, right, so fuck them (…) I still have a job and they don’t (…) I was watching Martin Lawrence the other day and he said something about life and he said, “You got to ride it until the wheels fall off” and I think that’s about the most important thing I have heard lately (…) 41 . The ceremony was broadcast on the Fox network and Cher’s expletive labelled a “broadcast indecency” but eventually characterized as “fleeting” (not calculated or planned) and lawyers for the Fox network argued that it would be impossible to prevent celebrities from swearing during live broadcasts. We consider that it is hard to believe that the acceptance speech was not planned, in particular, the use of the expletive; Cher was simply intelligent in the way she simultaneously was able to send the message she wanted to both her fans and her, so to speak, “enemies” (namely the conservative party and her supporters who systematically try to demean her). Fox network was in trouble with the law, yet no repercussions were inflicted on her. Furthermore, to defend itself, the network had to indirectly defend Cher and claim her reaction was spontaneous and her language fleeting. Corroborating such a conclusion is the fact that Justice Scalia, who wrote the 2009 opinion for the US Supreme Court, concluded that “(…) even unpremeditated ‘fleeting indecency’ occurs according to subcultural rhetorical conventions (those of a cultural elite) and does not differ in a substantial way from un-fleeting indecencies” (Hunt, 2012, p. 4). As Hunt refers, Tony McEnergy 42 mentions how the cycle of concern about swearing fits very nicely with sociologist Stanley Cohen’s theory of ‘moral panic’. A moral panic involves certain characters, including a scapegoat and what Hunt calls ‘the moral entrepreneur’ (in this case the Bush Administration’s FCC). Hunt concludes that rhetorical analysis “(…) tends to be light on evidence about the most important aspect of rhetoric: its actual impact on audiences” (p.11). He considers that the moralism that says that foul language shows lack of judgment must be discarded so that new fields of study can be discovered, “(…) ‘outlaw’ rhetorics that can’t be evaluated with the yardstick of our own sense of decorum” (p. 12-13). Implicitly, he is saying that rhetoric must ‘give a fuck’ to foul language. I 41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLyHvHhc-Ac. 42 A linguist and author of Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity, and Power from 1586 to Present. 63 would like to add one should ‘give a fuck to Cher’ since when she is put aside it is simply because she does not match preconceived conventions. The screenwriter Chris Carter also linked Cher’s image to that of white trash in the episode of the The X-Files 43 The Postmodern Prometheus 44 placing Cher as a “(…) presiding deity over a working-class, white trash community” (Negra, 2001, p. 179). Throughout the episode elements of popular culture abound: one of the characters in the story is writing a comic book, his mother likes watching The Jerry Springer Show , and circus tents are thrown on top of houses when the main character of the episode invades such dwellings to the sound of Cher’s music. 2.4. Conclusion Cultural discomfort, as well as fascination with identity ambiguity, remains part of the public imaginary and Cher’s artistic career has been giving a significant contribution to the topic in mainstream culture since her work has been helping multiracial identification become more accepting. From a position which combines ethnicity, gender, class, (dis)ability, and age, Cher insists on the particularity of minorities’ experiences and aspirations. As Grenz and Brabon (2009) argue, “(…) queer analyses puts forward the idea of multiple oppressed subjectivities rather than privileging any one site of oppression (…) the feminism of the 1970s is problematized (…)” (p. 28). The combination of radical opposites is inherent to the rhetoric of show biz and the representation of the vamp in the context of a postmodern point of view. In such paradigms, one can find women who are both feminine and subversive and one can find the ‘half-breed’, who is usually despised by black and white people alike. Cher’s body of work is a particularly interesting case study, since by the 1970s she was, ahead of her time, already engaging in a postfeminist, postmodern stance. 43 Chris Carter’s The X-Files was nominated for 7 awards at the Emmys of 1998 and due to its popularity, it became a major aspect of popular culture having attained a certain degree of historical importance. Several props from the series and other items are now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. 44 It aired on the television network Fox on November 30 1997. 64 Chapter 3: ‘Femininity and Feminism in Cher’s Performance. The role of religion’ 3.1. Framed Women. Damsels in Distress When looking at representations of women, one is faced with the way such representations were conditioned by the prevailing mentality of a particular age, that is to say, how they were ‘framed’ by it. In this chapter we will apply the notion of frame to representations of gender in popular culture and study how, in spite of having had frames imposed on them in a constraining way, women have successfully resisted and reworked them, shockingly displacing traditional iconography to a new sphere, namely popular icons and their fans. A ‘damsel in distress’ is, definitely, a framed woman. She has been, throughout history, a common archetype in myth. Always helpless, she is in need of being rescued by a male figure; an idea that must have done wonders to the egos of male writers and readers alike. One of the earliest portrayals of a damsel in distress is presented in the Greek myth of Andromeda. Princess Andromeda’s mother claimed that she was more beautiful than all the water nymphs in the sea. Angered, the nymphs sent a giant sea serpent to terrorize the coast of the queen’s country. When the king and queen asked the gods for advice on how to appease the nymphs, the gods said that they had to sacrifice their daughter. Rembrandt’s Andromeda Chained to the Rocks depicts a nude Andromeda waiting for the sea serpent to eat her. Perseus (a human man, whom the gods had given wings) offers to save her as long as she marries him. Figure 10: Rembrandt’s Andromeda Chained to the Rocks (c. 1630) Oil on panel, 34 x 25, Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands 65 Thousands of years later, the film King Kong (1933) told, yet again, the story of a beautiful woman and a scary monster, the beauty and the beast. Even though the two stories were written centuries apart, after comparing Rembrandt’s Andromeda and the scene from King Kong where Ann Darrow is also tied and terrified as King Kong approaches her, one cannot but notice the similarities. Both women are representations of beauty in their time and are in a state of extreme danger because they were offered in sacrifice to monsters. In the case of Darrow, she has just arrived at Skull Island to shoot a film and is taken hostage by the natives who prepare her as a sacrifice to the ape Kong, the ruler of their jungle. She is, eventually, rescued by Jack Driscoll, the explorer that Carl Denham (the filmmaker) had taken with the crew to help them get to know the island. In classical fairytales, prince charming is a character that comes to the rescue of a damsel-indistress, usually a beautiful and innocent young woman who is facing a dangerous situation and is, therefore, in need of a male hero to engage in a quest to free her from either a villain, a monster, or an alien. Once the rescue is successful, the hero often obtains her hand in marriage. She is to be found in classic fairy tales such as Snow White , Sleeping Beauty , Cinderella , and Little Red Riding Hood , stories in which the heroine is not in a position to do anything when her rescuer arrives other than stay in a comatose state. Postmodern and second wave feminist writers view the classic tales as editor Jack Zipes (1993) states, as “a male creation and projection” (Zipes, 1993, p. 80) that “reflects men's fear of women's sexuality – and of their own as well” (Ibid, p. 81). In fairytales, one of the figures that can put a damsel in distress is that of the wolf. In literature and culture, it traditionally represents danger and destruction and is, thus, associated with the devil 45 . In many cultures, the identification of the warrior with the wolf led to the notion of ‘lycanthropy’, the mythic 45 Yet, they are predators, and, therefore, have also become the symbol of warriors. Figure 11: Ann Darrow in King Kong (1933) 66 identification of man and wolf. The Bible contains thirteen references to wolves and presents them as metaphors of ambition and destruction that personify Satan. The Malleus Maleficarum (2007) states that, according to the Book of Leviticus 46 (p. 26) and the Book of Deuteronomy 47 (p.32), the wolves are either agents of God sent to punish the sinners or agents of the Devil sent with the blessings of God to harass the believers and test their faith. In the Christian Western literature, the wolf represents the ‘Devil’ or the ‘Demon’ that runs after the ‘sheep’, that is, the believer. In Milton’s Lycidas (1983), for instance, the metaphor is obvious, “The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed / But swol’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw / Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw / Daily devours apace” (p. 11). In canto I of Dante’s Inferno (2009), the pilgrim finds a she-wolf blocking the path that leads to a hill full of light (p.2). This female wolf represents the sin of concupiscence and incontinence and is prophesized by the shadow of Vigil to eventually be sent to Hell. In European tales of witch hunts from the beginning of the Early Modern Period, the witches are compared to wolves since, such as the latter, they wander in the woods. In present day folklore, as well as in popular literature and culture, the image of the wolf is significantly influenced by the stereotype of the “bad wolf” with origins in Aesop’s, Perrault’s and Grimm’s fables. Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is frequently labeled the founder of the modern fairytale since he was the first to have them published in book. Nevertheless, his work was influenced by previous fairytales, namely those of Marie-Catherine Le Jurnel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy. In 1690 she was already writing tales and was the first to call them ‘fairytales’. As Marina Warner (1995) put it, Perrault has, in fact, adapted a folk tale in which a young lady finds a wolf on her way to her grandmother’s house. The wolf tries to convince her to eat a piece of the grandmother and drink her blood; yet, she manages to escape when she claims she has to go out to urinate. He ties her to a rope and lets her out of the cabin. She manages to set herself loose and escapes. Perrault’s version, in turn, ends with the grandmother and the granddaughter eaten by the wolf. The happy end of the original story is subverted because this girl is not smart enough. Perrault has explained the moral of the story as follows: Children, especially attractive, well-bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say ‘wolf’, but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, 46 The third book of Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. 47 The fifth book of Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. 67 who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all (Warner, 1995, p. 181). More than a century later, the brothers Grimm write two versions of The Little Red Riding Hood . The first is a version of Perrault’s where the erotic details are omitted and the end is less dramatic since a hunter saves the young girl and her grandmother. In the second one, a sequel, the girl follows the path to the grandmother’s house, the grandmother locks the door so that the wolf cannot enter and when he attempts to do so by going down the chimney, he falls into a pot of boiling water that the young girl uses as a trap. In the 1970s, research done in Germany by critics and experts in the Grimm’s collection started exposing the misogynist ideology behind the symbolism of the tales and denouncing how they helped spread repressive values advocated by the 19th century bourgeoisie. The redeeming endings matched the mentality of the Enlightenment, which was detached from the religious way of thinking and advocated that one can learn from experience. In their book Framing Women : Changing Frames of Representation from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism , editors Sandra Carrol, Birgit Pretzsch, and Peter Wagner (2004) draw attention to the confining roles used to frame women in contemporary Western society and contrast two periods, the Enlightenment and Postmodernism. The first places a coherent frame of meaning on issues, while the latter accepts and embraces contradictory frames and, therefore, a multitude of truths. By doing so, Postmodernism points to the fact that Enlightenment assumptions about women are still present in contemporary society. Ana Gabriela Macedo (2017) considers that the concept of ‘frame’ is key to the understanding and discussion of identity politics and of ‘re-presentation’, which, according to the latter, were always intrinsic to the critical debate of Feminism. Macedo argues that the strategies of postmodern denaturalization linked to the politicization of desire that Feminism claims as its own is a critical and ideologically assumed revisitation of memory that significantly contributed to a parodic subversion from the center, as pointed out by Linda Hutcheon (1989). Especially since the 1980s, a theoretical body of work was developed, which contributed to ‘save’ the memory in the feminine, that is, to present history through the eyes of women. Such resulted in a more equitable mapping of the art, as well as in the inscription of difference and the feminine heteroglossia, in the canons of art. As Macedo (2017) states, contemporary feminist art can be understood as an aesthetics of critical appropriation and one that questions the tradition that 68 exhibits the dialogical tension between “registering”, “reframing”, and “resisting”. As Macedo (2015) argues, “(…) the dialogue between framing and unframing (…) rejects standardization and critiques the cultural representation of women” (p. 83), the critic underlines the fact that both literary and visual narratives “(…) can provide a similar challenge to fixed codes of representation while transgressively ‘unframing’ women and thus ‘reframing’ the silences of history” (Ibid.). 3.2. Unframing the Damsels As Kate Bernheimer (2009), in her preface to Fairy Tales Reimagined – Essays on New Retellings argues, “Scholars (…) provide transfixing narratives about the Marxist, postmodern, psychological, feminist, and aesthetic magnets in fairy tales, which rivet audiences worldwide in music, film television, literature, and fine art versions and inspire new versions to be produced at an immeasurable rate” (Bernheimer, 2009, p. 2). According to Donald Haase (2004), Zipes’ anthology The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood encourages and clarifies comparisons between versions and the historical analysis of the development of tales. Haase considers that Zipes’ conclusions, as well as the organization and methodology of his work (which reveal the vital importance of comparing oral and literary versions in socio-historical contexts to understand the relationship between the tale and gender and socialization), significantly contributed to feminist studies of the fairy tale. The introductory study of the history of the tale confirmed that it reflects the civilizational process of western societies and that it had a main role in such process by reinforcing the ideology of the middle class. More specifically, Zipes showed that many adaptations are linked with cultural stances pertaining to the roles of males and females in society. He further refers how Perrault and the Grimm Brothers have produced versions of the Little Red Riding Hood that drastically changed the oral tale and erased the positive references to sexuality and feminine power. Such rereadings gave rise to rewritings of the tale. As Christa Mastrangelo Joyce puts it: Contemporary women poets (…) explore and recreate the fairy tales. These poets entered a literary genre long dominated by men and claimed it as their own (…) They have stretched the original boundaries of the tales (…) reversing or highlighting many of the perverse misogynistic views with which the source texts were imbued (Joyce, 2009, p. 31). 69 Angela Carter’s tale “The Company of Wolves”, published in the collection of short fiction The Bloody Chamber (1979), is an example of such rewritings, as we will be able to further explore in 3.2.2. of this chapter. Carter deviates from the moralistic warnings of the Grimm Brother’s and Perrault’s tales and portrays a feminist protagonist who is no ‘damsel in distress’ about to become an easy prey. Instead, she is an independent subject, in control of her sexuality and in charge of her fate. The canonical values are, therefore, subverted and the young woman is no longer ‘framed’ but empowered. Within the context of performance, one can say that, up to a certain extent, the fandom phenomenon is the product of interpreting certain performances as deconstructive of ‘framed’ representations. Examples of such performances can certainly be found in Cher’s TV variety shows of the 1970s and one can speculate up to what extent they were triggered by what was going on in her personal life or if, in fact, the opposite happened, that is to say, her self-confidence was boosted by the roles she played. In 1974 Sonny filed for a separation from Cher citing “irreconcilable differences” (Napsha and Berman, 2001, p. 35) and Cher countered with a divorce suit and charged him with “involuntary servitude” (Napsha and Berman, 2001, p. 35) claiming that he had withheld money from her and deprived her of her rightful share of their earnings. They battled in court over finances and the custody of their child (which was granted to Cher) and the divorce was finalized in 1975 but problems had started as early as 1972, one year after The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour had begun. Cher had been feeling “she abdicated to Sonny any involvement in her career (…) he was also controlling her personal life (…) she had obeyed him for years, she had never once defied him” (Taraborrelli, 1986, p.148). According to Negra (2001) Cher's body was, by the time, presented in the show as an idealized, governed body in agreement with the interests of a white patriarchy. Nevertheless, she considers that “Despite these kinds of maneuvers, Cher's career in the 1970s is often best remembered today for the sharp and unruly public put downs she regularly delivered to her husband” (p. 169). I would argue that in spite of talking much less than Sonny throughout the shows, Cher's words were sufficient to ridicule her husband and for her to come out as the smart woman ‘on top’. I consider the show to play with the carnivalistic inversion of roles (the husband presented as the fool and the wife as sharp and witty) and, therefore, resisting and rewriting the traditional role of women in the household. Upon Sonny Bono’s death, Ginia Bellafante (1998) wrote about the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in an article for the Time magazine entitled Appreciation: The Sonny Side of Life. She refers to it as “ (…) the CBS variety show that brought a jokey, mass-market, safe feminism to TV as Sonny played emasculated buffoon to Cher's smart aleck”. In her personal life Cher was struggling with a controlling husband and during the television shows she was, 70 subtly, empowering herself, as well as other women and minorities in general. When talking about ‘safe feminism’, Bellafante is referring to the masked power of the entertainer. In 1975 Cher had her own TV series entitled Cher , in which she kept deconstructing ‘framed’ representations, and between 1976 and 1977, during a troubled marriage with Gregg Allman, she professionally reunited with her ex-husband in The Sonny and Cher Show , yet again embracing an array of empowering performances. 3.2.1. The ‘Damsel’ and King Kong According to Cher The October 31st 1976 The Sonny and Cher Show includes a sketch called Beauty and the Beast , which features Cher as King Kong’s sweetheart. The first image is that of a poster from the 1933 film King Kong, in which King is grabbing a defenseless Darrow but, in contrast, Cher soon appears comfortably lying on top of King’s body. She is making a phone call and doing her nails. She is calling the doctor because King has got chills, a cough, it hurts when he swallows, and he has been complaining about dizziness. She is asked to check his pulse, which is a bit rapid, as well as his testicles (one is for sure clammy) and, therefore, he is supposed to take 200 aspirins and call the doctor in the morning. When he sneezes, she gets worried and blames it on the fact that he is not wearing the slippers she has bought him. She offers him a nice cup of tea, fresh fruit juice or bananas but he refuses; instead he wants chicken soup, which she does not know how to make and will, therefore, have to buy. Figure 12: Cher & King Kong (The Sonny and Cher Show – 1977) 71 He gets upset because his Jewish mother had advised him not to get mixed up with a shisha. 48 The sketch alludes to the fact that religion links the woman who is a non-believer to one who is also a ‘poor’ housewife. Domesticity and religion go hand in hand and those who do embrace them are censored. She rebels against his attitude, but, nevertheless, offers to buy him the soup as well as a thermometer since the doctor also said he should have his temperature checked. King gets very worried fearing to have the thermometer put on his testicles and Darrow is the one who calms him down and tells him not to be silly because they only do that when you are a child. In Cher’s sketch King Kong is a ‘man in distress’ because he has a cold. His woman lies on his body, relaxed, in control, ‘on top’. She has to take care of him. King is not only harmless but a baby in the shape of a monster, yet she loves him. On the other hand, in the film, Darrow does not fall in love with the beast in spite of him being protective of her and doing her no harm. She has to be rescued and has to fall in love with a white male. In the end, Darrow is both a ‘damsel in distress’ and a ‘femme fatale’: Carl Denham’s last words in response to the police lieutenant’s “Well, Denham, the airplanes got him” were “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast”. The woman of the 1933 film is a siren, who, with her beauty, is able to destroy a very strong ‘monster’ that is, in fact, harmless. Cher’s character, in turn, understands his nature and the fact that he needs to be taken care of. In this rewriting of the traditional fairytale, Beauty saves the Beast. 3.2.2. The ‘Damsel’ and the Wolf According to Cher To be moonstruck is to acknowledge the wolf within, to give its place; to grant that howling at the moon is the foundation of social institutions. – Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995) The damsel-in-distress, as an example of differential treatment of genders in literature, works of art, and film, which perpetrates regressive and patronizing myths about women, has particularly become a stock figure of melodrama. In 1987, Norman Jewison directed the post classical romantic comedy Moonstruck based on the screenplay by John Patrick Shanley, an intersemiotic and intertextual product with traces of both Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood as well as of Puccini’s opera La Bohème . 48 According to the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, “shiksa” is an often-disparaging term for a non-Jewish woman or girl and, among Orthodox Jews, the term is used to describe one who fails to follow Orthodox religious precepts. The etymology of the word is partly derived from the Hebrew term “sheqes”, meaning ‘abomination’, ‘blemish’. 78 and that Loretta, presented as the unruly woman, is suspending ‘normal’ rules of society (not in terms of social strata as in the case of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival but in terms of gender). Gender inversion is observed when Johnny and Loretta listen to Perry, a middle-aged professor, being humiliated by one of his female students who is having dinner with him at an Italian restaurant. Johnny laughs at the situation and tells Loretta that a man who does not control his woman is funny. In turn, Loretta ridicules his remark when she replies that their argument has to do with their age difference. In the same scene Loretta chooses what Johnny is going to eat because he wants to make a poor decision and eat something that is going to make him feel sick during the flight he is about to catch. Before leaving, Johnny proposes but without having a ring to offer Loretta and she asks him to give her his pinky ring, which makes him feel sad. On the way to the airport she, once again, reinforces her dominance over him when she makes him agree on scheduling the wedding date, despite his insecurity and against his will. Johnny expresses his willingness to get married after his mother passes away, which seems to imply that he is thinking about getting married to have a wife play the role of his mother. Later, on the phone from Palermo, he comments his mother is dying but Loretta does not believe him because, as she tells her mother, “She’s dying. But I could still hear her big mouth”. She feels the need to talk to him as if she were talking to a child; therefore, she reminds him, “And don’t stand directly under the sun. You’ve got your hat, use your hat”. When Ronny is eating the stake she cooked, she asks him, “You got any whiskey? How ‘bout giving me a glass of whiskey?” The description reads, “Loretta picks up her glass and swallows a healthy dose” (p. 40). Later on, “Loretta pours herself another shot” (p. 40) and finally, “(she pours them both another drink)” (p. 40). Loretta’s family is Italian-American; from an ethnic group in the margins of the American society, she is used to drinking generous quantities of alcohol, which is typical of an ‘unruly’ woman. Her unruliness is also expressed in scenes such as the one in which she slaps Ronny in the face and says, “Snap out of it!” when she is trying to make him forget her. Yet, as Janhavi Mittal (2013) argues, “The label of monstrosity is contingent on an implicit recognition of monstrosity by its corresponding society” (p. 105) and what might be perceived as monstrous by the American society might not be equally perceived by the Italian culture. Finally, as Kathleen Rowe (1995) rightly claims, Cher’s character is “a paradigmatic woman on top, enhanced by the strong unruly off-screen presence Cher brings to the part” (p. 204). 79 3.3. Deconstructing the Witch A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. - Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978) The carnival, not as a license to be free, but rather now as a free license to become. - Ted Hiebert, Becoming Carnival: Performing a Postmodern Identity (2014) Cher gave yet another contribution to the deconstruction of hegemonic femininities (and masculinities) in the film The Witches of Eastwick (1987) namely to the deconstruction of the stereotype of the ‘macho man’ and of the witch of the fairy tales. The film is an adaptation of John Updike’s novel by the same name (1985) by Michael Cristofer (who wrote the script) and John Miller (who directed it). One can argue that Updike’s novel is representative of a particular powerful regime of truth that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the Enlightenment: the glorification of science with its domination of the rational (male) mind over (usually female) matter, a way of thinking that encapsulates much of what is understood as ‘modernism’ and is also fundamental to ‘humanism’. In turn, the film adopts a postmodernist point of view. Postmodern and poststructuralist discourses show the discursively constructed nature of much that was taken in these discourses to be the fundamental unquestionable base on which argument could be built and ‘truth’ established. By deconstructing those binaries, the human body becomes capable of manifesting itself in various ways. We will be looking at the way the film rewrites the novel by rewriting the myth of the ‘unruly’ witch. In an interview, Updike has described his novel as an attempt to “make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors” (Rothstein, 1988, p. C21), meaning it was meant to be a reply to those who would argue that his women characters were systematically spouses, housewives, and sexual objects. He further explained that his objective was to link the liberated woman to the symbol of the witch, yet, on the reasons why he had chosen such a topic, he claimed, “I would not have begun this novel if I had not known, in my life, witchy women, and in my experience felt something of the sinister old myths to resonate with the modern female experiences of liberation and raised consciousness” (Updike, 2012b, p. 855). Ultimately, using the symbolism of the witch, he represented women both as wicked and as the ‘second sex’. On the back cover of the first Ballantine Books edition of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1985a) one can read: 80 Alexandra, Sukie, and Jane, who consider themselves a coven, meet each Thursday for food, drink, gossip and magic. At the opening meeting of the novel, the witches gossip about the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne. Soon this man becomes central to the witches’ lives, and the coven meetings are transformed into tennis and hot tub baths at Darryl’s house. The relationship between Darryl and the witches quickly becomes sexual, and the Thursday afternoon meetings become orgies. Later, Jenny, a much younger woman, joins the group, and Darryl marries her. The three witches, jealous of Darryl’s affection, cast a spell on Jenny and, eventually, she dies. At this point, the coven disintegrates, and each witch remarries and loses her powers. This plot summary reveals the end of the story and how Updike chose to emphasize the wickedness and weakness of the witches by having them commit murder and lose their powers. Many reviews were not in favor of Updike’s portrayal of the witches. Critic Peter S. Prescott (1984) found them, “unsympathetic (…) empty, vulgar, uninteresting, forlorn, and nasty” (p. 92). Margaret Atwood (1984) commented, “Updike provides no blamless way of being female” (p. 1) and, in turn, Katha Pollitt (1984) calls the book, “patronizing”, “mean-spirited”, “sexist” (p. 773). Finally, Paul Gray (1984) considers it to be Updike’s answer to the women’s movement since he seems to think that women who renounce domesticity will turn to evil and, after all, “What every liberated woman wants most of all is another husband” (p.113). Updike reflects what David Glover and Cora Kaplan (1992) labeled “sixties-within-the-eighties” (p. 222). They refer how the eighties in the United States underwent a national conservativism and right-wing backlash against what was, by then, perceived as an excessive liberalism. They write: Today the fate of the sixties-within-the-eighties is a notoriously important issue in the struggle for cultural and political meaning, an instance of the way the conflicting forces in every conjuncture attempt to write uncontestable histories for themselves. The hegemony of the New Right has involved a sustained critical attempt to monopolize the complex terrain of the popular, and in particular to drastically overhaul the social significance of the sixties. (p. 222). 81 While Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) examined and debunked the myth of feminine evil, Updike remythologized it in The Witches of Eastwick . Updike chooses to set the plot in Rhode Island of the sixties when, “Female yearning was in all the papers and magazines (…) the sexual equation had become reversed as girls of good family flung themselves toward brutish rock stars (…) dark suns turning these children of sheltered upbringing into suicidal orgiasts” (Updike, 1984b, p.11). Where once a puritan family blossomed, the Lenox’s, “By the time of Alexandra’s arrival in Eastwick there was not a Lenox left in South County save one old widow, Abigail, in the stagnant quaint village of Old Wick (…)” (Updike, 1984b, p. 9). By calling this last descendent of the Lenox family ‘Abigail’ and having her inhabit Old Wick, he is definitely alluding to the historical figure of Abigail Williams, who was one of the initial accusers in the Salem Witch trials. Having the Puritan family associated with witchcraft is ironic and depreciating for Alexandra, Sukie, and Jane. Updike depicts the atmosphere of the 1960s as pathetic and dangerous and compares it to the negative repercussions of the ‘witchy woman’. The Puritan inheritance slides into further despair with the arrival of Darryl van Horn who buys the abandoned Lenox mansion. He alludes to songs as “Satisfaction” and “I Got You Babe” 52 as being from an “era of many proclaimed rights, and blatant public music (…) [when] the spirit of Woodstock was proclaimed” (Updike, 1984b, p. 21). The witches are presented as pathetic second wave feminists who avoid a feminine look to feel empowered, although they despise their appearance. About Alexandra, he writes, “One of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had ceased constantly weighing herself” (Updike, 1984b, p. 17). Alexandra is fat and her hair is a “muddy pallor now further dirtied by gray” (Updike, 1984b, p. 12). In the beginning of the novel, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie are divorcees who have relationships with married men, and the reader learns that they had previously been unfaithful to their husbands, namely, by engaging in affairs with each other’s husbands. They are unscrupulous to the point of betraying their own friends. When explaining the betrayals, Updike puts the blame on the women in every situation. They are allegedly unfaithful to provide comfort to men who are in relationships with controlling women but, in the process, they are destructive because they make their husbands lose power as they attain some independence, “The gift of sculpture had descended with her other powers, in the period when Ozzie turned into colored dust” (p. 19): 52 In fact, the song was Sonny and Cher’s first big hit, and, therefore, he is indirectly criticizing the singer who will later play in the film adaptation the role of the character he created (Alexandra). 82 As Alexandra accepted first one and then several lovers, her cuckolded husband shrank to the dimensions and dryness of a doll, lying beside her in her great wide receptive bed at night like a painted log picked up at a roadside stand, or a stuffed baby alligator (…) By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become mere dirt-matter in the wrong place, as her mother bad briskly defined it long ago—some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir (pp. 5-6). The fears about women that psychoanalysis suggests men suffer, such as that of castration, surface in witchcraft mythology where their sexuality represents death for the men who are seduced by them 53 . On the subject, Silvia Bovenschen (1978) comments: (…) the word ‘witch’ experienced the same transformation as the word ‘queer’ or ‘proletarian’: it was adopted by the person affected and used against the enemy who had introduced it (…) to the extent that women have appropriated the frightening apparition and collectively taken over the myth, the individual is freed from it (p. 86). 54 53 As a vamp in The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour , Cher played Eve in the Garden of Eden, while Sonny was Adam. The song that introduces the sketch says, “Adam had a witch named Eve, Eden’s first daughter of sin. Beneath her lovely golden tresses, she really had a set of skin. She took a little nipple of the famous fruit and probably got evicted in a birthday suit” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4I-0U2I0qg). Cher does not present Eve as being an innocent woman who was tricked by the snake. She is labeled “witch” and she and the snake seem to be buddies (he says he is her neighbor) and he suggests that she tempts Adam, which she does. Adam, in turn, is presented as a joke because he is a man who does not even no what having sex means (he has to ask her and she clarifies). One of the first ways that sexual humor entered into 1970s television was through the variety shows, namely through The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour . 54 Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement depict the witch in La jeune nee (1975) and Cixous unruly laughing Medusa is also a witch. About her, Rowe (1995) wrote, “A more courageous meeting of her gaze would allow Perseus to apprehend not petrifying monstrosity but beauty (…) As long as men avert their eyes from her, fearing the sight of her and her gaze, “woman” can be only a phantasm of castration for them, deadly and grotesque” (p. 10) and compares her to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grinning pregnant hags (…) with roots in the narrative forms of comedy and the social practices of carnival” (p. 10). The female gaze became associated with witchlike female monstrosity and female power starting in the 1970s when feminists took Medusa and madwomen in general as heroines whose gazes and non-linear language transgress the symbolic order. The witch has 83 Only during the second wave of Feminism did the witch become a central empowering figure, namely among the female gothic tradition. Beginning in 1968 with the WITCH 55 movement feminists have claimed solidarity and identity with the persecuted witches of the modern period, expressing interest in the Goddess and questioning the possible existence of a pre-Christian matriarchal witch, who would have been a priestess in that pre-Christian culture 56 . Cynthia Eller (1993) claims: The most significant aspect of WITCH was its choice of central symbol: the witch. By choosing this symbol, feminists were identifying themselves with everything women were taught not to be: ugly, aggressive, independent, and malicious. Feminists took this symbol and molded it - not into the fairy tale "good witch," but into a symbol of female power, knowledge, independence, and martyrdom (p. 55). Contrary to the novel, the plot of the film is set in the 1980s and can be divided in three main parts. First, the three witches are depicted as postmodern ‘damsels in distress’ in search of an equally postmodern ‘prince charming’, a ‘Mr. Right’. In a second part, they are involved with the, so to speak, ‘prince charming’ and enjoying the relationship. Finally, in the third part they find out about Darryl’s ‘dark side’ and decide to eradicate him from their lives. The film depicts the cynicism of men who proclaim Puritan principles and convictions but do not put them into practice and women who encounter men who introduced themselves as feminists just to earn their favors. These witches are able to stick together and not allow jealousy to ruin their friendship. They are still good, carrying mothers incapable of purposefully committing atrocities and harm others. Furthermore, they are feminine and behave as third wave feminists; they are ahead of their time. become the outspoken pro-woman, ‘the bitch’. Says editor of Ms. Magazine Marcia Gillespie in the editor’s page of the 1999 issue, “I want to affirm the witch in me”. 55 Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. 56 Linda Badley (2003) claims how the power of the witch is “inherited matrilineally and the craft is handed down from mother to daughter or aunt to niece” (p. 5) and how the “bastion of misogyny” (p. 7) is religion. It is of interest how domesticity (recipes, cooking, gardening, and sewing) and things a patriarchal society labels as “frivolous” (clothes, beauty, and makeup) are presented as powerful by witches. 84 The first scenes of the film show a Puritan, patriotic, New England town where married, religious men are unfaithful to their wives, a behavior the witches condemn. At the elementary school where Jane is a teacher, the principal suggests he will increase her salary in return for sexual favors and pats her on the behind in front of the students. The children are learning under a traditional, boring educational system, where, at the opening ceremony of the new school year America, the Beautiful is sung and the principal’s speech exalts the “good old days” and the Lenox family that founded the town and subdued the Indians. He laments the present disintegration of values and “lost mores” and thanks Jane for her contributions, commenting, “I can see we all have our work cut out for us” (as he blinks at her). Jane seems bored, exhausted, annoyed and later Sukie comments that he had made a pass at her a week before with the wife “ten feet away”. The viewer learns that her husband has left her because they had “too many” children, that Jane’s has left her because she could not bear any, and that Alexandra is a widow. When, in one of their gatherings, they express their wish to find a smart man they could talk with, “somebody you could be yourself with”, they envision him as “Foreign. A tall dark European, (…) a foreign prince riding a great black horse”. This would be the perfect postmodern (and mockvictorian) ‘Prince Charming’ to these ‘Damsels in Distress’. Darryl arrives in town as a result of their wishes. They had the power to bring him into their lives only to learn the lesson of how cautions they needed to be. Nevertheless, they were oblivious of such potential since women are usually not unaware of how powerful they are. Updike, in turn, characterizes these witches as less smart and with fewer powers than Darryl. Towards the beginning of the novel, they try to recall his name but are unable to do so, “The three witches fell silent, realizing that, tongue-tied, they were themselves under a spell, of a greater” (Updike 1984b, p. 37). Darryl is an inventor, working on the interface between solar and electrical energy, which they do not know anything about, and Alexandra does not even assume her lack of knowledge on the subject. He talks about the concept of “Big Interface” and Sukie was not ashamed to ask about it but Alexandra “(…) would just have nodded as if she knew; she had a lot still to learn about overcoming acculturated female recessiveness” (p. 50). When discussing a painting, Sukie calls it “electrifying” (p. 51) and Van Horn calls the comment a “flirtatious featherheaded thing” (p. 51) and regrets having wasted his time talking about it to her. They are also prejudiced against other races. Alexandra, “(…) had brought with her from the West a regrettable trace of the regional prejudice against Indians and Chicanos, and to her eyes Darryl Van Horn didn't look washed. You could almost see little specks of black in his skin, as if he were a halftone reproduction” (Updike, 1984b, p. 39). They are also prejudiced against homosexuals: when they hear the news that Darryl has arrived, they proceed to comment, “’No wife and family, evidently’ (…) ‘Oh, 85 one of those’. Hearing Jane’s northern voice bring her this rumor of a homosexual come up from Manhattan to invade them, Alexandra (…)” (Updike, 1984b, p. 1). Yet, they are sexually attracted to each other. Lesbian sexuality is, though, “forbidden” and they “weep” at “(…) the curse of heterosexuality that held them apart (…)” (Updike, 1984b, p. 185). Updike found depictions of homosexuality not to his taste, which transpires in most of his work. Towards the end of the novel, he proceeds to describe Jane’s “new” husband by writing, “He had heavy-lidded protruding eyes the pale questioning blue of a Siamese cat's; he did not drop by so briefly as to fail to notice - he who had never married and who had been written off by those he might have courted as hopelessly prissy, too sexless even to be called gay” (Updike, 1984b, p. 340). Gay writers, among them Tony Kushner, frequently expressed their annoyance with his remarks. Updike’s women even reach the point of committing atrocities such as causing a woman to fall and break a leg (in the film the responsible for such an act is Darryl) and a puppy to die simply because it is barking. Children are also a burden to them. “God, don’t children get in the way? I keep having the most terrible fights with mine. They say I'm never home and I try to explain to the little shits that I'm earning a living” (Updike, 1984b, p. 71) says Sukie to Alexandra. According to Updike women can either be good wives and mothers or think about themselves and their happiness, but not both. In the film, Jane, Alexandra, and Sukie are carrying, tender mothers in spite of not being housewives. In fact, Jane even expresses her discomfort with the traditional educational system and eventually decides to subvert the norms and adopt an unconventional approach to teaching. Cristofer seems to have chosen to transfer his reading of Updike’s view of women to the character of Darryl. When he first approaches Alexandra, he pretends to be a feminist to win her heart: DARYL (…) Women are the source, the only power. Nature. Birth. Re-birth. Cliche, cliche. Sure. But true. ALEX Why are you telling me all this? 86 DARYL Because you're an honest woman. And I'm being honest with you. I like women. I respect them. If you want me to talk to you like you're a dumb twit, I will. But what's the point? You have brains, Alex. More than brains. You have power. And you don't even know it, do you? Well, most women don't. ALEX Were you ever married? DARYL Good question. You see? Brains. The answer is no. Don't believe in it. Good for the man. Lousy for the woman. She suffocates. She dies. I've seen it. And then the husband runs around complaining that he's fucking a dead person. And he's the one that killed her. Where's your husband? ALEX 87 Dead. DARYL Well, sorry, but you're one of the lucky ones. When a woman unloads a husband -- or when a husband unloads a woman -- however it happens -- death, desertion, divorce -- the three 'd's' -- when it happens, a woman blossoms. (…) That's the woman for me. (Cristofer, 1986, p. 31) Later he uses the same technique with Jane and Sukie. They all end up having sex with him and subsequently undergo a radical change in their appearance. This corresponds to the second part of the film, when the three women are under Darryl’s spell. From then on, they all have amazing pre-Raphaelite curls and become aggressively feminine, as a parody of stereotyped femininity, and, at the same time, masquerading as the ‘postmodern diva’. While doing this, they defy the concept of immutable identities while adopting the carnivalesque body as a masquerade and by using excessive femininity they are appropriating instruments culture offers Figure 14: Jane, Sukie, and Alexandra saying goodbye to Daryl as he leaves to buy ice cream. 94 (2001) writes, “all the trees and flowers were polypi, half animals and half plants; they looked like serpents with a hundred heads (...). The branches were long slimy arms, with fingers like flexible worms” (p. 21). But, unlike the sea witch who lets the snakes “crawl all over her bosom” (p. 21), the little mermaid is terrified of these phallic symbols. Andersen instills terror of sexuality in his little mermaid while the evil sea witch is seen as accepting of her sexual desires. She represses her budding sexuality in order to attain the feminine ideal: she must lose her tongue (voice) in exchange for a potion that will give her legs, creating a stereotype that subordinates women since they are supposed to be mere objects for the pleasure of men but are not allowed to speak their minds. Regina Bendix (1993) writes about Andersen’s tale, “Nowhere else in classic children’s literature is there so terrified a vision of sex, as seen through the eyes of innocence” (p. 282). In turn, Robert W. Meyers (2001) describes Ariel’s losses as “the relinquishment of her right to be heard, the loss of her creativity and the wound of castration” (p. 153) and Hélène Cixous’ following words in The Laugh of the Medusa could very well be applied to the little mermaid: Who surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was to believe that a welladjusted normal woman has a (…) divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her ((…) to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she is trouble (Cixous, 1976, p. 876). The Disney version (1989) reflects tensions between not touching fixed definitions of masculine and feminine gender identity and considering the refiguring of gender that will “read” women as speaking subjects. The film Mermaids definitely rewrites, through parody, the myth of the mermaid as a dangerous creature, presenting her as a beautiful, harmless, fascinating, empowered, and empowering being. 95 While relaxing in the bathtub, Rachel reads Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious, a story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice that was avidly consumed when first published and simultaneously condemned by critics and the clergy. Its characters, incidents, and settings were based on real-life places and events and is, nowadays, still a code for a community harboring a sordid secret. As Ardis Cameron (2015) describes, it became a cultural phenomenon. She argues that, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class, ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, the novel is part of a postwar struggle over belonging and recognition and pushes to the surface the rebellion of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America. The female central characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings, anticipating second-wave feminism. In 1963, Rachel is reading Metalious , possibly because she knew she was living in a society that still shared many, if not all, characteristics of Peyton Place, and she was representative of a minority in the communities she lived in, thus her frequent moves. By setting the plot of Mermaids in the sixties, the film shows the importance women such as Rachel had in their time, as well as when the film was produced (early nineties). And one wonders, aren’t they still relevant today? 3.5. When the Public and the Publicly Personal Collide: directing and acting in If These Walls Could Talk In the 1996 made for television film If These Walls Could Talk Cher gave her contribution to its third segment both as an actress and as a director. Figure 18: Mrs. Flax reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious 96 The film is divided in three segments, each of them telling the story of a woman who has to cope with an unplanned pregnancy. All the stories take place in the same house twenty years apart (1952, 1974, and 1996 respectively), and expose the mainstream views of society on the issue in each of the given decades. The 1952 story deals with a widowed nurse who becomes pregnant by her brother-in-law and decides to undergo abortion to avoid hurting her late husband’s family. At the time, abortion was illegal. She does not have the money to pay for a safe procedure and dies shortly after resorting to a man who is simply interested in earning money. The story emphasizes how the problem of having a child places the burden on the woman: she is the one who feels the discomfort of having to deal with the situation, not the father of the child, since shame is a woman’s issue. The cult of domesticity and true womanhood of the 1950s portrayed women as pure, holy, and spiritual. Men were supposed to dwell in the world of work, while women work at home. In fact, many of the qualities of a perfect woman under the cult of domesticity and true womanhood are reflected in the archetype of a damsel in distress. They are both supposed to be pure, righteous, innocent, and delicate. In the Bible, there are references to Jesus being the savior of young and helpless women, for instance, when Jesus saves Mary Magdalene from being stoned by the townspeople. Although Jesus is not portrayed as Prince Charming, he is portrayed as a savior, and his character in the Biblical story can only be labeled as a hero. In 1974, Barbara Barrows is a middle-aged married woman with four children who has recently gone back to college. She becomes pregnant and considers abortion but, ultimately, chooses to keep the child. She has to decide whether to raise one more child or have a career since the husband does not come forward with the decision of being the one to compromise. The third story, which Cher directed, is about a college student who gets pregnant by a married professor. She chooses abortion when he breaks up with her and offers her money to have an abortion. The procedure takes place during a violent protest outside the clinic. At some point, an anti-abortion protester walks in on the operation room and shoots the gynecologist. The story of this last segment opens with the house where the women of the three stories live and “1996” on screen. Action starts after a fade out to a black screen: the first scene emerges out of the shape of a cross on this black background. The mood is subtly set to issues pertaining to religion: A ‘mailwoman’ is delivering mail (a message). The messiah is now a woman, not a man. The camera moves from that house to that of the neighbor’s, where there is a panel with a religious image hanging from a 97 balcony. A male voice asks someone to turn down the music by the artist formerly known as Prince. We March is playing: Uno para todos y todos para uno. If we want a change, then come on get in line Next time we march. If this is the same sister that you cannot stop calling a bitch It will be the same one that will leave your broke ass in a ditch If you can't find a better reason to call this woman otherwise Then don't cry, you made the bed in which you lie. The lyrics appeals to solidarity among different ethnic groups: women, the Hispanic, and the African American communities, and Prince is telling minorities to get involved in social and political activities in the struggle for change. The song also addresses those men who do not treat women with respect and warns them they will pay the price since women have the power to seek justice. By using Prince’s song, Cher seems to be referring to the Million Man March (1995) which had taken place one year prior to the release of the film. Feminists had issues with the lack of female participation in the march, which was labeled an ‘all male’ event. One of the organizers, Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan, told women to stay home with their families and considered he was celebrating the return of, “ (…) the Black male as the head of the household, positive role model and builder of our community” (Ronald H. Bayor, 2004, p. 934). bell hooks has pointed out that a march for blacks that deliberately excludes women is not really a march for black people, but rather a march for something like rejuvenated black patriarchy (Reid-Pharr, 1996, pp. 38-39). After the death of Prince, Farrakhan claimed Prince sent We March to the organizers of the event for the song to be used during the gathering and that at some point he donated $50,000 to the cause. It seems he has used Prince’s image to attract followers since the song does not seem to have been played and the singer has never spoken about such matters. In If These Walls Could Talk Cher chose to expose the frequent anti-abortion protests that were occurring outside abortion clinics in the USA. Unfortunately, two decades later they still do, both in the U.S.A. and in many other countries. 98 Large swaths of American society embrace conservative ideals and claim that they are following the Bible. Therefore, still in present day United States of America abortion clinics need to have employees at the door to escort the patients inside since the latter frequently have to face groups of religious organizations who try to persuade them to give up abortion by making them feel they are about to commit a sinful act. Jesus is often pictured by such groups as a hero who can rescue damsels in distress. An example of such behavior can be found on the website of Sisters of Life (2020), a group of Catholic religious Sisters. They claim: Abortion can leave many women and men suffering from deep guilt, shame, pain, anxiety, depression, fear, and feelings of isolation from God and others, sometimes for many years (…) We offer a safe, confidential, and non-judgmental environment that can allow you to enter into Jesus’ healing embrace. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is beyond the love and mercy of Jesus Christ. No sin is too big for Him, no darkness too great 63 (n/p). The film also suggests the intolerance of Christian groups towards other believes: a protester shouts to a Jewish employee of the clinic, “Have you ever asked if this is a Christian way to make a living?” and a scene inside the clinic emphasis it is harder for a black woman to decide to give a child for adoption since it is much more difficult for a black child to be adopted. In 2000, the creators and cast of If These Walls Could Talk won the Lucy Award for Innovation in Television, which recognizes work that has enhanced the perception of women through the medium of 63 https://sistersoflife.org/who-we-are/who-we-are/. Figure 20: Present day photo of a clinic escort outside an abortion clinic in the U.S.A. Figure 19: Present day photo of an anti-abortion protest outside an abortion clinic in the U.S.A. 99 television 64 . It is significant the fact that the film was made for television since, as David Crary (1996, September 18) put it, it tackled “(…) a topic no Hollywood studio is even ready to touch (…)” (p. 26B). HBO vice-president said; “I don’t believe there’s a studio in the world that would finance this picture” (Crary, 1996, September 18, p. 26B). He praised Demi Moore (who was executive producer) and Cher for having the courage to use their celebrity to address the issue of abortion. Moore spent seven years trying to get the film made. Having the project accepted by a television network, these women managed to have their message passed along to the large-scale audience of HBO. In 2014, to celebrate International Women’s day, the Cork Women’s Right to Choose and the Crawford Film Society teamed up and screened If These Walls Could Talk in the Crawford College of Art and Design in Dublin. Of anti-abortion activists who want to impose a ban Moore said, “(…) that’s what they’re asking us to go back to (…) the shame and degradation these women faced – that’s really what is criminal” 65 (n/p). Cher considers “It has to be the individual’s choice. How could you possibly legislate it?” 66 (n/p). Still today, the film arises heated debates on the topic. 64 It was nominated for a total of 18 awards (including three Golden Globes), having won three of them. Cher herself was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, for the OFTA Television Award for Best Director of a Motion Picture or Miniseries, and for the Golden Satellite Award for the Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. If These Walls Could Talk also became the highest-rated movie in HBO history. 65 https://apnews.com/805beb391893d7ecc759d20812629d8c. 66 Ibid. Figure 21: Advertisement of an international Women’s Day film event in Dublin in 2014 100 During the 2012 Presidential Election, Cher made a political advertisement in which she urged voters not to allow Presidential nominee Mitt Romney to turn back time on Women’s Rights and on January 21 2017 many were the female icons that protested at the Women’s March on Washington , reacting to the election of Donald Trump for president. Cher and Madonna were among them. “Stand and be counted or sit and be nothing”, said Cher, addressing the audience while being interviewed for CNN. Women’s rights, and the topic of abortion is just an example of many of Cher’s representations. The film If These Walls Could Talk , advocates the viewpoint expressed by activist Patricia Valoy in one of her campaigns aiming to promote the success of people of color in the U.S.A. and dismantle oppressive regimes worldwide. She claimed, “We all firmly believe that our bodies are primarily ours and we should be able to do with them as we desire” (Valoy, 2015, “How Do We Promote the Success,” para. 4). Decades earlier, more specifically in 1978, Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman was already thinking the same way when she legally changed her name to Cher, going without her father’s, her stepfather’s, and her first and her second’s husband last names from then on. Figure 22: Cher at the Women’s March on Washington: “If you don’t have a vote you don’t have a voice” 101 Chapter 4: ‘‘Monstrosity’ and ‘Gender Trouble’’ After all, a mutt is stronger and healthier than a pure breed. - Orquídea Cadilhe (2020) After having looked at the way certain performances have been providing audiences with alternative representations of ethnic minorities as well as rewriting classical portrayals of ‘damsels in distress’, namely those of the iconic Cher, the core of chapter four lies in the analysis of the work of popular icons that consubstantiate the premise that there are no pure, unique, stable identities in what concerns the representation of gender. Besides, it presents a discussion of Cher’s impact as a performer within the LGBTQIA community. We will start by looking at the socio-cultural background of the U.S.A. after the end of WWII, which provides the reader with insights about what triggered drastic changes in the mentality of women and the younger generation in this respect. 4.1. Socio-cultural Background. Repercussions of Post-World War II in the U.S.A. During the Second World War, what were considered to be the prerequisites to social stability by the patriarchal society of the U.S.A. were at stake. The father was away overseas and the mother had to work in factories and offices and was learning how to make ends meet without a man by her side. When the war ended, it was decided that things should return to their ‘proper places’, the father as the breadwinner and the mother as the family caregiver, yet, not without reminders: if the man worked too hard, the son would have little chance to observe the father and he would not be a role model. In turn, if the mother overindulged the son, he would become effeminate, weak, and consequently a ‘pervert’ (DeAngelis, 2001, p. 27-28). Deviation from narrowly defined roles was, thus, scrutinized and there was a backlash against working women. Some legislators argued that unmarried women were abnormal and not fit to become schoolteachers, “(…) for they would pollute the minds of the nation’s children” (Springer, 2007, p. 21). Others would hold that married women should be barred from teaching jobs solely on the grounds that they belonged at home. The medical profession, as Springer (2007) further adds, “(…) routinely sedated women with tranquilizers (…) and told them that they were mentally ill if they were not satisfied as wives and mothers” (p. 21). It had long been a practice of more conservative politicians to refer to progressive reforms, such as women’s suffrage, as ‘communist’ acts. Under such a repressive social climate of the postwar society of the 1950s U.S.A. characterized, as Claudia Springer (2007) mentions by “homophobia, racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism” (p. 20), 102 young people started to reject their parents’ authority and values in large numbers and their attitudes and behavior gave rise to a cultural crisis, provoking stern government and media attention. As Springer (2007) points out, in 1947, the United States Congress was already launching the anti-Communist witchhunts, which continued during the 1950s when the Senate started its own hearings, leaving people imprisoned, made unemployed and blacklisted. During the McCarthy era, labor union activists, professors, teachers, actors, folksingers, and any who advocated progressive social changes were particularly vulnerable. As a byproduct of such a political and cultural climate, gay men had very few opportunities to speak about their desires in written discourses and their investment in rebel star figures and practices of identification with such figures grew exponentially. A relative recent invention, the rebel icon, had strong roots in making of the image of James Dean, who, for that matter, deserves close attention. Figure 23: Advertisement from the mid-1950s describing the dangers of supporting members of the communist party who work in the entertainment industry. 103 4.1.1. James Dean as Gay Icon The stars are a reflection in which the public studies and adjusts its own image of itself (…) The social history of a nation can be written in terms of its film stars. - Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (1967) Having had a brief career (it started in 1950 and ended in 1955 with his death), the few characters Dean portrayed on screen were strong individuals who, nevertheless, were able to openly showcase their emotions. Because of such powerful performances, he was capable of redefining masculinity and give it a new meaning, which was in synchrony with what the ‘outcasts’ of the post war era were yearning for. He became the personification of the ‘rebel with a cause’. American teenagers of the mid-1950s started identifying with James Dean and the characters he played, namely with the fact that the latter experienced a sense of alienation and lack of understanding by everyone around him. Dean also exhibited a moody personality, which was read by a large segment of the American population as a symbol of their dissatisfaction with the status quo . The years that followed World War II, marked by the disintegration of traditional assumptions about identity, turned out to be in perfect synchrony with the splintered persona Dean exhibited: he was both tough and sensitive, projecting an aura of androgyny that both men and women found sexy and endearing. Anna J. Varadi (2014), referring to Clark Gable and James Dean, comments how “the gender of the gaze of these stars deviates from what Laura Mulvey (1975) describes as normative” (p. 1). In the case of Gable, a female gaze is allowed to penetrate the normative alignment, turning a male into a ‘sex object’. On his turn, Dean was able to “accommodate (…) gay, straight, male, and female subjects[s]” (DeAngelis, 2001, p. 16), diverting his persona from the active/passive heterosexual division between spectator and figure on screen, which helped him gain universal appeal amongst the 1950s’ nonconformist youth culture. His vulnerability in Rebel Without a Cause , as Varadi evokes Mulvey’s “passive/female” object of the gaze (Mulvey, 1975, p. 11). Varadi uses Mulvey’s association of Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ 67 with processes of identification to discuss the relationship of movie spectators to James Dean. Dean appears like the infant in the Mirror Stage, as Lacan puts it, “trapped in his (…) nursling dependence” (Lacan, 1966, p. 1164) when he lies 67 ‘Mirror Stage’ is, according to Lacan, the moment when an infant recognizes herself in a mirror. Since the infant is always divided from the mirror-image by the physical presence of the mirror, a division between the self (the infant) and an Ideal-I (mirror-image which the self tries to become) can never totally vanish. 110 period of time” (Graczyk, 1982, p. 41) when he was nearby during the recording of Giant. Stella, another member of the club, asserts, “I’ve seen dead dogs layin’ out ‘long the side of the road with more life than this town’s got” (Graczyk, 1982, p. 45). Two events, in particular, enraged Sydney and made him fire Joe: the fact that he dressed in drag to sing Sincerely 70 (along with Mona and Sissy, pretending they were the McGuire Sisters) and to play a trick on Lester T. Callahan (Sissy’s future husband), who actually believed that he was a woman. Mona, though, comments with Sissy that Joe “(…) really does make a very pretty girl (…)”, to which she replies, “Lester T. sure thought so, didn’t he? (…) thought he was the cutest thing he’d ever seen” (Graczyk, 1982, p. 25). The scene confirms what Judith Butler would later call gender performativity when she argues gender is nothing but “(…) a stylized reiteration of conventions that eventually become naturalized and consolidated” (Butler, 1999, p. 125), and consequently, “(…) all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation” (Butler, 1993a, p. 313). Butler aims at disrupting the acts of citation that the performativity of gender consists of and considers drag acts as a subversive practice that challenges gender identity since “(…) in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself” (Butler, 1999, p. 175). Drag proves repeating is possible and, therefore, that performativity can simultaneously be theorized in terms of subversion that empowers the subject. In this line of thought, femininity is, as Butler puts it, “(…) the forcible citation of a norm” (Butler, 1993, p. 232). Such as Joe, the women in the club face problems of identity and they take a step backwards under the shame of exposing their ‘miserable’ conditions. Mona, for instance, had a son with Joe, yet she denies the fact and claims he is James Dean’s son. She considers Jimmy Dean (her son) to be mentally retarded (he is the son of an outcast), placing her, at this time of the story, in the position of a Victor Frankenstein, who feels he has created a monster in the eyes of society. Her friend Sissy does not agree and explains, “The only thing wrong with his mind is that he couldn’t make it up soon enough to get the hell outta here (…)”. Sissy is described as having “gigantic breasts (…) large to the point of being abnormal (…) awesome” (Graczyk, 1982, p. 21). Interestingly enough, abnormality is associated with awesomeness. Sissy disrupts normality in different ways: her discourse is that of an ‘unruly’ woman, she wears extravagant clothes and jewelry, she drinks alcohol, and is daring enough to try to become a member of the “Ice Capades”, a skating team, when she is already in her late thirties. When she expresses her willingness to do so, Juanita comments, “You’d just be makin’ a fool of yourself, an’you know it”, to which Sissy replies, “Well, it’s my life to fool aroun’ with, ain’t it?”, expressing indifference 70 The choice of a song with such a title alludes to the fact that in those moments Joe felt comfortable expressing his sexuality, which he was compelled to hide from the Texan society. 111 towards the comments others may eventually make 71 . “Ice Capades” is a suggestive name taking into account the heat wave Texas is experiencing at the time and the need people feel to escape the ‘suffocating’ atmosphere. The ‘world’ of Texas is dominated by a patriarchal, oppressive society; it is ‘hell’ for them. 72 Sissy also tries to hide a painful truth, namely the fact that her husband never really loved her and left her after she underwent a mastectomy. Juanita, in turn, cannot face the fact that her supposedly religious husband was an alcoholic. She denies it and criticizes Sissy for drinking beer (because there is no water). During Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean , Altman plays with mirrors to connect between the present and the past. Reflections in mirrors are part of many of the film’s compositions. They become a window into 1955, enabling the characters to gaze into the past and helping them to eventually identify themselves in the reflection, which is the message Michel Foucault (1986), wants to convey when he discusses the role of the mirror: I believe that between utopias and (…) heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space (…) But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward 71 Cher is known to express the same views in her publicly personal life: a famous sentence of hers being, “If I want to put my tits on my back, that’s nobody’s business but my own”, which makes her image on and off screen coincide. 72 In 1979, Cher released an album called Prisoner , which includes the song called Hell on Wheels (mentioned in chapter 3). ‘Hell’ can be appropriated in different ways and be given either a pejorative connotation or one of positive irreverence. Various religions regard it as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering where wicked people are punished after death but the term can be used to fight secular oppression. Subjects who are considered ‘evil’ may, in turn, use the term to rewrite their stories and empower themselves. In her song, Cher is precisely doing that: she is “hell on wheels” but she is also a guiding star, having the role of a secular icon such as James Dean. The audience of the film knows Cher in her multiple facets but she displays a continuity that transcends any individual role and makes different images of herself collide, in what Dyer calls one of the main characteristics of any icon. 112 myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am (p. 4). The character of Joanna (transgender Joe) is representative of the truth since she has already undergone this experience of looking herself in the mirror and being able to ‘come out of the closet’. When she enters the store, the mirror of deception and repression slowly starts melting away and the other characters also begin to reconstitute themselves. She claims, “(…) unlike all of you (…) I’ve undergone a change (…) I don’t have to pretend any more”. Standing for James Dean, she arrives in a sports car, making a noise that makes Juanita think she heard thunder. The stormy weather in the 50s, when Dean was alive, contrasts with the draught that has been haunting the area since then. She tells a story to Sissy that makes her face reality and accept herself. She narrates the occasion when she met Sissy’s husband and he tried to have an affair with her, not realizing she was a transgender. During the encounter, Joanna started laughing because, while laying down looking at the ceiling, its cracks seemed to her the road map she had travelled (the inner trip she had undertaken). Ironically, Lester T. had left Sissy because she had lost her breasts to cancer but then he is misled by a transgender. Feeling empowered, Joanna and Sissy laugh at the situation. Then Joanna tells Sissy the story Lester T. told her, of the wife he left behind because she had lost her breasts. Right after, the latter opens the door of the store and screams to the outside that her boobs are not real since from that moment on, she no longer accepts delusion. Joanna is also the way to freedom for Mona’s son, who ‘runs away’ in her sports car, in the manner his father and Dean did 20 years earlier. Eventually, every character reaches a space of ‘otherness’, a heterotopia, an empowered stage. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is, in part, an attempt to explore the way women are forced to suppress their emotions and personalities in order to be accepted by the male society around them and explores a connection between the oppression of women and patriarchy’s dread of sexual deviation and gender ambiguity to the fullest. Altman depicts the misogynist and prejudiced society of rural Texas by presenting the terrifying dystopias that these minorities encountered in every corner by means of a group of James Dean’s fans and the adversities they were subject to by the locals of McCarty, Texas. Dean was the figure that united them and made them build a utopic world represented by the fan club, a world where they could be sincere, symbolized by the song with the same name that they used to sing. 113 Another song they sing is The Eyes of James Dean are Upon Us, instead of singing The Eyes of Texas are Upon Us (one of the soundtracks of Giant ). They need to be intervenient to honor the myth that helped them free themselves. Religious and secular iconography clash in the film but the latter ultimately wins over. The disciples of James Dean symbolize all of those who look at a Hollywood myth in the refusal to exist in a world that is swollen with banality and misogyny because to establish one’s place in the world, it becomes necessary to recognize oneself in others as well. The process of identification with others is what ultimately allows the individual to constitute herself as a coherent being. For that purpose, the celebrity myth has plenty to tell. It is the product of assimilation and signals the possibility of change in a social system that essentially desires conformity. Such a possibility answers the question why certain stars (such as James Dean, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, or Cher) linger significantly in the popular imagination long after the height of their success, even long after their deaths. Cher, who was nominated for best supporting actress in a motion picture for her role in the film, plays a particularly strong character. At this time of her career she was starting to build a legacy of work that systematically aims at standing by the side of the outcast. Unlike James Dean, who died young and because of that his image is open for appropriation, Cher is idolized because of her seemingly capacity to resist the test of time thanks to her never-ending ‘reinventions’. For example, when she plays a character that undergoes a mastectomy and has the breasts replaced by prostheses, she is starting to trace the path of a career of, as Garber (1992) puts it, “relentless self-construction” (p. 117) and to create a secular icon. Figure 28: Mona, Sissy, and Joe singing Sincerely ( Come Back to the Five & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean ) 114 4.2. Playing with Make Believe Got to go back & polish my Cher impersonation. - Cher What is it about gay men and divas? The first are particularly mystified by the latter, while divas seem to build strong, long-lasting friendships with members of the gay community. While growing up, they have somehow undergone similar experiences. Both gay men and divas share stories of oppression and insecurity, which brings them close. The fact that the latter are ultimately associated with success stories makes every gay man aspire at being able to do the same. For instance, every time Cher ‘officially’ attains recognition, such as by winning the Oscar for best actress in the film Moonstruck , she overcomes stigmatized origins and her diva worship is reinforced. In 1997 she was a guest at The RuPaul Show 73 . While interviewing her, RuPaul proffered he loves the fact that Cher did the The Sonny and Cher Sho w (with ex-husband Sonny Bono) while she was pregnant with (then husband) Gregory Allman’s child, and about to divorce him, plus the fact that she never used to wear dresses as a teenager (she put one on when she went to see the pope). He said, “From that day on I was like, she rocks, she is cool, I am with her forever and that’s how it’s been. I am Cher. No, she is Cher but I live for Cher. It’s the truth” 74 . Cher laughs. He asks her how the world would be like if it were a woman’s world (because of her album It’s a Man’s World ) and she basically claims that there would be more love. They talk about how she has been doing well in this ‘man’s world’ and she adds, 73 RuPaul is an American actor, drag queen, model, author, and recording artist. 74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EJTF0phPKQ. Figure 29: Cher on The RuPaul Show (1997) 115 I am really glad I am a woman because I can wear pants and a dress, so can you. It’s not my way to be a bitch but oh, can I, when I want, you know, when I have too, it’s all there, I can really be tough. I have to be pushed to be tough. I can be both things and that’s why I think it’s nice to be a woman. You have this side that is fully developed and then you have to develop the other side. 75 RuPaul replies, “I think that’s why a lot of your fans, especially gay fans really signature with you. Because of the duality. You are as soft as a petal on a flower but at the same time you kick ass”. Cher’s huge gay fan base understands better than anyone else the fact that she is an advocate of the intertextual body that rewrites itself and that she defends construction in performance. With her heavily beaded gowns and overly glittering eye shadow she is almost as hyperfeminine as a drag queen. Both in her performance of the song Perfection filmed during her two Heart of Stone Tour specials at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas in 1990 and in the video of the song Walking in Memphis , she embraces the concept of ‘replica’ as Walter Benjamin put it in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, meaning the reproduction of an original piece of art, as opposed to the original work. The first can never possess what he calls the ‘aura’ but it is of major significance since when the aura is lost singular authority is also lost and an aesthetic interpretation of the reproducible image is allowed. Cher is comfortable with ‘replicas’ of herself since she knows that her inner self, her aura, is not what she reveals. Therefore, these replicas are depicting the images of the Cher she plays but, politically, they are highly relevant since they precisely point to the fact that we are always performing a certain identity. The former starts with a female impersonator on stage, making the viewers believe for a while that they are in her presence. Then, the two perform together 76 . 75 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EJTF0phPKQ. 76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GoT_4V2ACg. 116 The lyrics of the song claim the importance of love over the fight for perfection and speak about the burden society places on the individual, demanding that she be perfect, especially on those that are à priori labeled as “imperfect”: you are supposed to “(…) be the best, prove them wrong (…)”. The subject realizes perfection is worthless if one is incapable of loving and be loved. The song definitely talks about the life of famous people and Cher seems to be specifically talking about herself. She presents herself as someone who is idolized, as a semi-god, yet she understands that is not all. Unlike Mary Shelley’s symbol of the Enlightenment (Frankenstein) who ends up lonely because he was unable to love imperfection, Cher embraces these replicas of herself. Cher is telling the large community of her fans that perfection is worth nothing if you disregard the importance of love. As Diane Negra (2001) claims, “(…) Cher herself calls upon the images of the multiple Cher, the constructed Cher (…). In authorizing her own quotation, Cher acknowledges herself as fictionalized production, and proffers to her audience a pleasurable plurality” (p. 175). In an interview on the Early Show (2003) Cher says she was born to play herself. They talk about her role in the film Stuck on You (a cameo) and she explains she does not identify herself with the character and would never expose her inner self. When the interviewer tells her how great she is, she thanks and says it took her only four hours (to achieve that look) 77 . Another of her performances that consubstantiates such a stance is that of her cameo in the 7th episode of the 3rd season of the television series Will and Grace , which originally aired on NBC in the U.S.A. on November 16, 2000. One of the aspects of the episode, entitled Gypsies, Tramps, and Weed 78 , focuses on the character of Jack carrying a Cher doll, as a result of his adoration for the artist. One day, 77 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npTys0H2IfA. 78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1g8cy3rbQ&list=RD4PVXYZQTcuE&index=3. Figure 30: Cher performing Perfection (1992) 117 Cher meets him, yet, he does not recognize her; he thinks he is in front of a drag queen even when Cher sings the famous verse of the song with the same name, “If I could turn back time”. As a consequence, she slaps him the way her character does to the character of Nicolas Cage in the film Moonstruck . At this point, he realizes he is talking to Cher, which implies that she is aware that her fictional characters identify her better than her ‘true’ persona and, simultaneously, that identities are performative constructions. Two years later, Cher is again on the show, this time on episode 25 of the 4th season (May 16, 2002): A.I.: Artificial Insemination . This time Jack meets Cher in a dream. He is in heaven and Cher appears as God surrounded by ‘dancing fairies’ 79 and sings This is a Different Kind of Love Song 80 . She persuades him to stay in the show business in spite of the fact that he has been rejected several times by telling her own story: she had “gone in flames” countless times before winning the Oscar for Moonstruck . She tells him “follow your bliss”, and he grabs one of the fairies as the others exit. 81 The sitcom has been credited with improving public opinion of the LGBT community, with former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden commenting that the show “(…) probably did more to educate the American public (on LGBT issues) than almost anything anybody has ever done so far” (David Eldridge, 2012). In Cher’s Do you Believe? (1999) tour, when introducing the song Walking in Memphis 82 , she talks about its video, which is displaying on the giant screen and says, “I made this really cool video where I got to play Elvis, I actually didn’t play Elvis; I was Elvis (…) I want to warn you gay guys, don’t fall in love with me because I am a really cute guy”. Just as the drag queen RuPaul ‘considers himself to be Cher’, she also has no problem in ‘considering herself to be Elvis’, or impersonating him to the full. The video starts with Cher (dressed as Elvis) arriving by bus in Memphis. A black and white setting takes the viewer to what seems to be Tennessee in the 1950s: a flashback, since right after that one sees Cher singing on the steps of a bus in modern day clothes. 79 Gay men in slips and with wings on their back. 80 A Different Kind of Love Song was released in 2001 as part of the album Living Proof . The lyrics can easily be interpreted as an allusion to same-sex love and thus incite the possibility of gender rebellion. 81 https://vimeo.com/8434630. 82 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnkLHTgAQKg. 118 She checks in at Pink Hotel and displays a poster of Elvis on the bedroom wall. She eventually goes on to sing at a local bar and the video ends with her leaving Memphis by bus. Knopper (2011) mentions how Marc Cohn, the writer of the lyrics and the first to record the song, considers it to be about a kind of spiritual awakening, about a trip where you are different when you leave. He also thinks that it shows his acceptance of everybody in terms of what they believe as well as it defines his conflicting feelings about religion. Cher’s version of the lyrics replaces lines such as “but I’m as blue as a boy 83 can be” with “but I’m as blue as a girl 84 can be”, reversing the acting subject in regard to gender. Interestingly, the song talks about the arrival of a white woman/man in “the land of the Delta Blues” asking W.C. Handy not to “look down over” her/him because she/he is a wealthy person (“got a first class ticket”) but, nevertheless, “as blue as a girl/boy can be”. Cohn built a bridge between different races and social strata and Cher added the gender issue when she chose to simultaneously make this change and appear dressed up as Elvis, making the song extremely appealing to her gay fan community. The woman in Cher’s version (or present-day wealthy Cher) is empathizing with the poor black community of Memphis as well as with the gay/transvestite one. And when you are able to ‘travel’ in this manner, just like Elvis and Cher did/does, you raise hope in those that feel the need to cross boundaries and they turn into believers: “When you haven’t got a prayer/But girl/boy you’ve got a prayer in Memphis (…) Tell me are you a Christian child?/And I said/Man I am tonight!!” 85 . 83 Italics mine. 84 Ibid. 85 See appendix for full lyrics. Figure 31: Cher dressed as Elvis in the video clip of Walking in Memphis Figure 32: Cher as herself in the video clip of Walking in Memphis 119 Marjorie Garber in her seminal study Vested Interests. Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992) claims how Elvis’s performances used to cause a double scandal: his music was considered too black and his image was effeminate. Wearing eye shadow, he used to mimic Little Richard, impersonating who was, in turn, a female impersonator. His move was read as a cross move in gender terms. Cher, playing Elvis, is playing a man (Elvis) who cross-dressed as a woman because he played a man (Little Richard) who played a woman (because, as above mentioned, he was a female impersonator). Elvis’s performance ended up disrupting race and gender and so does Cher’s. When she is singing, “I saw the ghost of Elvis”, the video displays the face of a black young man, not Elvis’s. Garber, talking about the politics of transvestism asserts that clothes not only construct but also deconstruct gender and gender differences and claims, in a cross-reference to Susan Gubar, that for her “the ‘third-sex’ turns out to be largely a way of securing power for modernist women” (Garber, 1992, p. 10). The lyrics mention the ghost of Elvis roaming Graceland, which alludes to his immortality. Cher is herself associated to this image due to the longevity of her career: she has been called the ‘Eternal Phoenix’ due to her capability of reinventing herself and ‘writing’ on her body during the last five decades and, therefore, being the perfect example of the subject permanently ‘under construction’. In a sketch from The Sonny and Cher Show (1977), the Mannequin Scene, Cher and Farrah Fawcett are two mannequins whose bodies are positioned and adjusted by chauvinistic male workers who treat women as objects 86 . The lines of the male characters are presented as ridiculous throughout the dialogues, while those of these mannequins are coherent and rational and depict a narrative of their own. The scene, by deliberately using ‘excess femininity’, or ‘femininity as masquerade’, a concept used by Mary Ann Doane (1991) 87 , ridicules the ‘use’ of women as objects of the ‘male gaze’ 88 . By recognizing themselves as such, the women in the sketch end up using, in disruptive and challenging ways, the 86 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Hgw12VS3k. 87 Mary Ann Doane considers femininity as masquerade is generally employed “to designate a mode of being for the other [...] the sheer objectification or reification of representation” which is, according to her, what happens in the case of Joan Riviere's patient (1929), since, when she masquerades, she “renounces her status as the subject of speech [...] and becomes the very image of femininity in order to compensate for her 'lapse' into subjectivity (i.e. masculinity in Riviere's analysis) and to track the male gaze” (p. 33). Nevertheless, says Rowe (1995), “she hesitates to evoke laughter, seeing it structured, like spectatorship, at women's expense”(p. 6). 88 Barbie dolls may as well be interpreted in the same way. That is the case when Jack venerates a Cher Barbie in the previously mentioned series Will and Grace . 126 ‘performed’ by another ‘subject’. And this subject is an unruly, ‘gender troubled’ one. She is claiming the power of a divine entity can be found in the hybrid campy cyborg. That is how she empowers the ‘marginal’ (herself as well as her followers). Carlsson (1999), commenting on the video, views Cher “(…) as an electronic shaman (…) a modern sorceress using the electronic magic of visual special effects” (n/p.) 96 Cher’s visual representation is reinforced by the audio processor auto-tune, which alters her vocals and was used in this song as a deliberate special effect for the first time. From then on, the effect became known as the ‘Cher Effect’. Referring to the technique, Kay Dickinson (2001) calls it ‘vocoder’ 97 , and considers “this sucking of the human voice backwards into the less nuanced scale types of the computer’s tone bank gives it a certain cyborg feel” and wonders, “(…) what happens, then, when these two concepts (human and android) overrun each other?” (p. 334-335). Cher, with a campy performance, is engaging in gender parody and raising questions of authenticity. Dickinson (2001) considers the body to be “a fluctuating cultural factor” (p. 336) that is woven from and attracts certain politics that are inevitably present in popular music and its discourse. Performing with these technologies, Dickinson reflects, empowers the performer, as I have mentioned, and also those consuming them (the latter being presented by the strength the girl acquires to move on with her life). What you can look for in religion, it 96 http://filmsound.org/ what_is_music_video. 97 Not vocoder but auto-tune was used in Believe . While vocoder is an analysis and synthesis system used to reproduce human speech, auto-tune is an audio processor, which uses a proprietary device to measure and alter pitch in music recording performances. The latter was originally intended to disguise or correct off-key inaccuracies. Figure 36: Stills from de end of the video clip of Believe 127 seems, you can look for in a diva (to give you the strength to overcome adversity). Says Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair (2014) , whose main character is obsessed with Cher: I think the idea of the Goddesses never really goes away, whether its Cher or some writer I love (…) I think she is a goddess actually. It’s important to worship; when you worship God or a good life-giving presence, energy comes back to you, so that feels really good. But if you worship a crappy idol (…) I feel that draws energy off you (n/p) 98 . In this case, Cher’s natural voice is impaired by the autotune effect, which takes her further away from traditional associations of women with ‘naturalness’ as opposed to that of men with science. The whole association makes Cher an agent who questions these assumptions 99 . Cher seems to be able to combine sensibility with rationality. Performances such as these benefit a feminist politics of representation. In 2000, Madonna obtained similar results recording the song Music . In the video of the song Strong Enough 100 Cher is equally presented as a cyborg when she comes alive on the monitor of a man as he starts building a screensaver to the sound of thunder. Outside, a building is struck by lightning and Cher’s face appears on it. Inside, she also appears on the young man’s monitor and it seems as if she has simultaneously enlightened and ‘saved’ him when she ‘becomes’ his screensaver. The campy images of the people transfixed by her appearance on the screen report to Cher’s capabilities to empower minorities in general. 98 https://www.bustle.com/articles/47517-darcey-steinke-talks-sister-golden-hair-cher-and-the-70s. 99 Yet, she is interestingly not the scientific subject of the Enlightenment depicted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus . Instead, she is, as Chris Carter put it in the episode of The X-Files he dedicated to Cher – The Postmodern Prometheus –, precisely that, a Postmodern Prometheus. She is a ‘guilt-free’ Prometheus because when she creates ‘monsters’ she does not discard them as imperfections; she loves them unconditionally, which places her on the side of the half-breed. 100 See appendix for full lyrics. 128 Light is constantly mentioned in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1992), namely in Victor Frankenstein’s epiphanies. When he discovers the secret to creating life, he describes his feelings as if “a sudden light broke in upon me” (p. 51) and he envisions pouring a “torrent of light into our dark world” (p. 52) through the creation of a new species. Yet, he reaches the conclusion that he should not have persued such a goal, that he was unsuccessful in his enterprise, that he has created a ‘monster’ in his quest for enlightenment. Consequently, he rejects and abandons his creation. Cher is also associated to light but in a positive way. She is a ‘cyborg monster’ that fascinates millions of ‘monster’ fans. Such is the message the director of The X-Files Chris Carter wanted to convey in the episode entitled The Postmodern Prometheus (1997). 4.5. Cher or The Postmodern Prometheus Oh, brave monster! Lead the way. - Shakespeare, The Tempest In The Postmodern Prometheus , the series creator rewrites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus and, by establishing a parallel between Cher’s public image and the myth of Prometheus, shows how her subversive performance empathizes with the marginal and helps build a collective experience that culminates in an impressive number of followers. Many dramatizations of Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus took place before The Postmodern Prometheus aired on television network Fox on November 30, 1997 but, interestingly, by Figure 37: Stills from the video clip of Strong Enough 129 then scientists at the National Institute of Health were raising questions and concerns similar to those raised by Shelley’s contemporaries: Dolly the sheep had been cloned the year before and newspaper and magazine articles talked about the dangers of transplanting animal organs, of ‘playing god’ as Prometheus did. The episode of The X-Files The Postmodern Prometheus begins when a comic book, The Great Mutato , is opened. Eighteen-year-old Izzy, Shaineh Berkowitz’s son, goes on a trip and she stays at home alone. While she is watching The Jerry Springer Show (a mother with a very hairy baby is being interviewed) a circus tent covers her house. She starts listening to The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore 101 (Cher’s cover of The Walker Brother’s version) as the room is filled with smoke. Then she sees a disfigured form approaching and becomes unconscious. FBI special agent Fox Mulder receives a letter from Shaineh, who has heard about him from The Jerry Springer Show . She describes the event to him and claims she is now pregnant as a result of the attack. The same had happened when she got pregnant 18 years ago. Mulder and his partner, Dana Scully, travel to rural Albion, Indiana. After talking to Shaineh and Izzy they learn that the creature that attacked her looks like one of the characters from Izzy’s comic book, The Great Mutato , who, in turn, is inspired by a mysterious creature who has been seen by the locals. Izzy takes Mulder and Scully to a wooded area where they see The Great Mutato 102 from a distance and talk to an old man who tells them there are no monsters there and advices them to see his son (Dr. Pollidori, a genetic scientist) if they are looking for a monster. Pollidori shows them his experiments and Mulder starts suspecting Pollidori created The Great Mutato. In the meantime, Elizabeth, Dr. Pollidori’s wife, is attacked in her house in the same manner as Shaineh had been. As Mulder and Scully are passing by the house, they see it covered by a circus tent and hear Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves , another song by Cher. Inside, they find Elizabeth unconscious and soon after they also fall unconscious. Dr. Pollidori’s father steps from the smoke with a gas mask covering his face. When Mulder and Scully regain consciousness they find a chemical residue from an agricultural agent used to anesthetize animals and they grow suspicious of Dr. Pollidori’s father, a farmer. At the old man’s house, while The Great Mutato is watching the film, Mask, the old man affectionately calls him son and advises him not to stay up until late. In the scene from Mask Cher’s character is also displaying her affection for her deformed son. Dr. Pollidori comes to his father’s house and kills him. The Great Mutato finds the body and buries it in a 101 Its lyrics speaks about the loneliness one feels when one lacks love, which is what this ‘monster’ experiences, and probably, up to a certain extent, this single mother, who likes to watch The Jerry Springer Show. 102 The Great Mutato is a big Cher fan who has established a parallel between his life and that of Rocky, the character from the 1985 film Mask (based on the life of Roy L. “Rocky” Dennis, a boy who suffered from craniofacial dysplasia). 130 barn alongside pictures of him with the old man. Mulder and Scully come to the house and find the grave. They decide to protect The Great Mutato from an angry mob of townspeople who Dr. Pollidori has, in the meantime, lead. He explains to all he was created 25 years before, the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong by Dr. Pollidori, and that Pollidori Sr. rescued and raised him. To provide a friend and mate for him, he tried to create hybrids from his farm animals. The townspeople realize The Great Mutato is not a monster and Dr. Pollidori is arrested for the murder of his father. Mulder demands to see the writer of the story because he thinks Dr. Frankenstein (Dr. Pollidori) should pay for his evil ambitions and The Great Mutato should escape and search for his bride. Mulder and Scully take The Great Mutato, along with the townspeople, to a Cher’s concert. Shaineh and Elizabeth go to The Jerry Springer Show with their newborn babies (The Great Mutato lookalikes) and are asked if it is hard to love those babies: Shaineh replies, “What’s not to love?” The story ends with Cher 103 calling The Great Mutato on stage and Mulder and Scully dancing to the song Walking in Memphis 104 . It is the end of The Postmodern Prometheus as well as the end of the comic book. It is understood the story of the episode is the story of the comic book. A metafictional story self-consciously alludes to the artificiality and/or literariness of a work 105 by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques and, by doing so, it poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. By having a rewriting of Shelley’s novel start with the front cover of a comic book ( The Great Mutato ), Chris Carter deliberately calls the attention of the public to the fact that they are in the presence of fiction since the spectator is immediately face with the fact that the story is not a real life even. Simultaneously, he also ‘ignores’ the classical barrier between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. 106 He offers the viewer a metafictional piece in which the writer of this comic book, Izzy, (also a character in his own story) is writing it as the story unfolds. Being so, as the viewers are watching the episode, the end is still open and Mulder can influence the writer to choose an end different from the expected one (a type of replica of Shelley’s novel). Mulder also reminds the viewers they are watching fiction since the story he is ‘living’ is Izzy’s story. At the end of the Postmodern Prometheus , Mulder wonders if he should arrest The Great Mutato, “This is all wrong, Scully. This is not 103 An impersonator played the character of Cher. 104 See appendix for full lyrics. 105 In this case we are clearly presented with a rewriting of Shelley’s Frankenstein. 106 Fiction and reality are once again intertwined when the story lays claim to an historical personage (Cher) and The Great Mutato does not differentiate her from the character she plays in the film Mask . He says, “Cher loved that boy”, referring to how her character, Florence (Rusty) Dennis, loved her son Rocky. 131 how the story’s supposed to end. (…) Dr. Frankenstein pays for his evil ambitions, yes, but the monster’s supposed to escape to go search for his bride.” Scully replies, “There’s not gonna be any bride, Mulder. Not in this story.” But Mulder insists, “Well, where’s the writer. I want to talk to the writer.” The Great Mutato does ‘escape’: he is not arrested and is even given the opportunity to attend a Cher’s concert, implicitly finding his bride in the person of Cher. 107 Form fits content. Carter intentionally rewrote and subverted the end of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus to give the marginal a voice, presenting Cher as a source of empowerment. In the beginning of the story, the popular memory of the ‘Other’ is presented in its original form when the circus tents are used to cover Shaineh’s and Elizabeth’s houses to the sound of Cher’s songs. In the first case, the song The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore is used. Once again, as the viewer listens to this song, we are in the presence of a lonely, marginalized woman, since her husband totally disregards her emotional needs. In the scene where Elizabeth’s house is invaded, the song Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves is also symbolic because the title mentions three categories of marginals. It is during these ‘invasions’ that The Great Mutato tries to conceive beings close to him in appearance and, therefore, those are glorious moments for him. In spite of having impregnated the women without their consent, the action does not seem to involve violence because these women are lonely, somewhat marginal beings. What seems to have happened is not a case of rape but artificial insemination with animal DNA, which helps them defy marriage as a social institution and claim they do not need to live according to conventions to conceive and be happy. When Elizabeth hears Mulder say she may have been impregnated she looks up in delight. Later Scully tells Mulder: Psychologists often speak of the denial of an unthinkable evil or a misplacement of shared fears. Anxieties taking the form of a hideous monster for whom the most horrific human attributes can be ascribed. What we can’t possibly imagine ourselves capable of we can blame on the ogre, on the hunchback, on the lowly half-breed. When Pollidori murders his father, the community easily believes The Great Mutato was the murderer and gathers efforts to kill him. When he is able to tell his story, the community realizes he is not a monster. 107 The Great Mutato, as was the case with teenager Cher, feels he does not conform to the parameters labeled as normal by society and wishes to find someone who looks like him. 132 At this point the camera keeps moving from focusing on animals in the barn to townspeople, alluding to resemblances between them, a parallel similar to that made by Cher when the lights shift from the stage to the public during her Do you Believe? tour. When Jerry Springer asks Shaineh and Elizabeth “Is it hard to love these babies?” and Shaineh replies, “What’s it not to love?” Carter is making an intertextual reference to the film Mask in which Cher’s character says to Rocky, “What is not to love baby?” after he has mentioned he met a girl who loves him. Since her role in Mask , Cher became interested in helping the families of children with Rocky’s disease and is presently the national spokesperson for the Children’s Craniofacial Association in the United States. She has also been supporting her transgender child Chaz Bono, who struggles with matters of identity. Shaineh, Elizabeth, Cher’s character in Mask , as well as Cher herself are advocating Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg presented in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto , originally published in 1985, since they accept a world in which “people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory stand points” (Haraway, 1991, p. 8), a ‘manifesto’ which allows and even encourages self-transformation. Haraway calls for a reconstruction of identity: individuals can construct a “post-modernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity” (Haraway, 1991, p. 9) and ‘rebel’ against Western traditions of wholeness. In turn, Homi Bhabha speaks about the way “subjects are formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘part’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2). The Postmodern Prometheus is, therefore, a metafictional work that both says there is no such thing as an original story, a ‘true’ story, as there is no such thing as ‘the’ perfect being. Such is precisely the message Cher persistently conveys with her work. By the end of the episode, The Great Mutato and ‘Cher’ dance at her concert – two marginal figures ‘on top’. Diane Negra interprets the appropriation of Cher’s image by Carter as a metaphor for “the possibility of self-transformation” (Negra, 2001, p. 177) because she considers that Cher’s body represents an invented constructed body, such as The Great Mutato’s. Cher is particularly known for her long career of ups and downs and for overcoming criticism and rejection but, as the Promethean liver, she persists in rebuilding herself. She is known for being a mother of reinvention: with the use of extravagant costumes and wigs, and her history of tattoos and plastic surgery, she defies the aging process and looks younger than she is. She has been attracting an impressive number of fans from the gay community and is considered a gay icon. The reverence The Great Mutato pays to Cher symbolizes the way her fan base behaves in relation to her, proving she is capable of working as an agent that empowers minorities. 133 Back in November 1987 Cher had also expressed her empathy with the outcast in two television commercials that launched her first perfume called Uninhibited. In them she mentions her inhibitions, “Beauty didn’t encompass me when I was growing up. There was no place for me to fit in at all and so, instead of having to fit in, I had to expand. (…) So, what I did was to make it work for me, instead of walking away from it. I just turned it around” 108 . (…) you can do whatever is that you want to do, that’s the only thing that is important. There is just lots of people inside me” 109 . In the following year, when talking about its name in an interview, she explains, “I have many inhibitions and I think that’s why it is a good name because all women can use it and then be who they are”. One can infer from these comments that she is reclaiming her hybrid persona as a multitude of identities. In the film Stuck on You (2003) Cher, yet again, is linked to the outcast. The plot is about two conjoined twins who venture to go to Hollywood and eventually meet Cher (she plays a cameo). Since she is recording a film and the contract she has signed says she has the right to choose her own co-star, when she finds out the film is not what she expected it to be, yet she cannot simply quite, she chooses, the ‘creepy’, the ‘monstrous ones’ to be her, as she utters, “leading man, men”, hoping the director would make her redundant. That does not happen because she is ‘Cher’, she is, as her cameo claims, “(…) a fucking Oscar winner”. The film is a success and she is ‘responsible’ for catapulting the two young misfit actors, who happen to be her fans, to fame. During The Believe Tour (1999) Cher performed her song The Power 110 while one of her dancers was dressed as a troll in stilts. Once again, she aligned herself with the outcast. 108 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGHiAutm_80. 109 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eziZ4z7sV5A. 110 The song talks about a king and a queen and how he is sad for having lost her. The supposedly “mighty strong” is missing the “mighty weak” and, therefore, the power, that everybody seeks, is questioned and presented as a sword with a double blade. The song ends with the verses, “I believe and you believe/And we believe that everybody's gonna be alright/Alright in just my mind”, implying that actually no one is ever totally all right and nothing is ever totally fair. 134 Trolls, a class of beings in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, can do things humans do and are said to dwell in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves and the Nordic folkloristic beliefs say that some trolls are human-like yet different, therefore, attributing a human/non-human dichotomy to the troll, which is also supposed to have black hair and brown skin. By 1976, the cover of the June issue of Ms. Magazine was representative of the impact Cher already had in popular culture when she is chosen to illustrate the main article: “Brace yourself for your genetic future (…) cloning: the new virgin birth?”. In fact, it displays ‘three Chers’, an adult, a teenager, and a baby one. The adult Cher seems to be the mother of the other two. The teenager seems to be venerating the adult Cher, since she is looking at the latter with her hands in a praying position and staring at her with a smile on her face. Interestingly, the ‘young Chers’ have disproportionate arms, legs, and hands and one can only think of ‘mother Cher’ as an entity that ‘gives birth’ to a powerful combination of strong, yet beautifully feminine ‘offsprings’. Throughout her career, Cher has given birth to many ‘monster fans’. Figure 38: Cher performing The Power during The Believe Tour (1999) 135 Figure 39: The cover of the June 1976 issue of Ms. Magazine Talking about Frankenstein, Mulder says: When Victor Frankenstein asks himself ‘Whence did the principle of life proceed?’ then as a gratifying summit to his toils creates a hideous phantasm of a man he prefigures the Postmodern Prometheus. The genetic engineer whose power to reanimate matter – genes into life – us – is only as limited as his imagination is. Here Mulder labels the genetic engineer the Postmodern Prometheus but Cher’s extravagant body, associated with non-conformism to rules, as Negra says, reinforces the power of the will to transcend disempowerment and works, therefore, in a promethean way. In a postmodern approach, one can argue that The X-Files episode The Postmodern Prometheus empowers the marginal voice of ‘the creature’ by establishing a parallel with the artist Cher. The myth of Frankenstein has been used for over a century to represent in various media ‘the monster’ in the moral sense of the word. This story passes on the message that there is not such a thing as the perfect body; that every body is subject to construction and therefore one cannot talk about identity based on a pre-established corporeality. This is, in our view, the leitmotif of Cher’s transgressiveness and empowering career. 142 As King claims, "Most of the stuff I've done that is deemed political is actually about the failure of a certain kind of political ideology (…) It's about the failure of the left, mainly. So things like Cher Guevara (…) are really about the commodification of once meaningful imagery and gestures" (apud Justin Quirk, 2008, n/p 112 ). In turn, the text that the art gallery offered on King’s artwork, which is entitled Pink Cher , reads, “King’s Cher stands in for counter-culture hero Che Guevera, a rebel-icon and its lost meaning, long dissipated by mass reproduction. Emblazoned in acid-house pink, left-wing radicalism becomes fused with celebrity obsession, a contemporary by-product of cultural dysmorphia” 113 . Have not feminists (women and men) been adopting the color pink to protest within a male dominated space, thus subverting the traditional associations of pink with passive femininity? Such has been the case at the Women’s March in Washington (2017-2020). Pink is a bold, eye-catching color and the more it becomes visible the better, parodically representing women’s voice and resistance to ‘commodification’. 112 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/mar/31/art. 113 As it reads on the website of the Saatchi Gallery (retrieved on https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/scott_king.htm). Figure 40 : Pink Cher at the exhibition entitled Marxist Disco (cancelled) at the Saatchi Gallery in London (2008) 143 In a similar context, we argue that Che Guevara’s symbolic meaning was not lost due to its massive reproduction in posters, t-shirts, caps, and alike. In fact, its widespread representation has been associated with values of political and social resistance. We believe that, by associating the myth of Che Guevara with Cher’s iconicity, King is extending the power of a celebrity to the realm of politics. It has been twelve years since that exhibition took place and Cher remains significantly present in today’s popular culture. 5.3. Fandom and Participatory Culture Fans sometimes seek to influence the text they inspired themselves in and claim the right to retell stories. It can be said that fans transform the experience of watching a performance into participatory culture since they appropriate popular texts and reread them in a way that serves their needs. Their response involves, on the one hand adoration for and on the other hand frustration with certain principles and they “(…) become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (Jenkins, 2013, p. 24). The struggle for popular access to the means of cultural production and circulation built the path to participatory culture. And, as we will now discuss, fandom is a very specific kind of participatory culture, one “(…) which facilitates the social negotiation of the meaning and value of popular texts, enables grassroots creative responses, and provides a context for debates about issues of representation, diversity, and inclusion” (Jenkins, 2018, p.11). It is meaningful to talk about audiences Figure 41: A man wearing pink at the Women's March on Washington Figure 42: Signs being held at the Women’s March on Washington 144 and their activities, namely because of the fact that fans can belong to very different social groups (even scholars themselves acknowledge that they are fans of something of someone) validates the impact and social meaning of the contemporary fandom phenomenon. Such individuals, called ‘aca-fans’ 114 , are labeled by Jenkins as hybrid identities, for whom identifying themselves as both fans and academics is not problematic. They are better prepared to write in an open way about their experience of fandom without feeling they need to be defensive for fear of not being taken seriously and, as Jenkins puts it, “what cannot easily be dismissed as ignorance must be read as aesthetic perversion” (Jenkins, 2013, p. 19), meaning that when certain people consider the work of an artist who belongs to the world of popular culture worth studying, they are categorizing that same work an extravagant, yet undeniably, valuable piece of art. Jenkins’s interpretation is linked to Bourdieu’s epigraph at the onset of this chapter. No one owns the right to revendicate the so called ‘legitimate culture’ since cultural meanings are constantly being reorganized and renegotiated and the establishment of both ‘legitimate culture’ and ‘sacrilegious tastes’ are not necessarily exclusive. In his essay The Aristocracy of Culture (1984), Bordieux discusses the way tastes operate for all classes and how they serve to produce divisions across the entire social field. For him, consumer preferences, are, as Douglas E. Allen and Paul F. Anderson (1994) put it, “socially conditioned and (…) the objects of consumer choice reflect a symbolic hierarchy that is determined from other classes of society” (n/p) 115 . Therefore, taste becomes a weapon used by society to differentiate from the most mundane items of consumption to objects that have a recognizable aesthetic component. In this frame of mind, one can infer that pop icons can be labelled ‘visual theoreticians’, meaning that they express their ideologies not simply in words but also, and significantly, by the way they present themselves in the public eye (for instance, by the way they dress and by their mannerisms) and their cultural significance derives from the discourses from which they emerge. As Jeff Ferrell (1995) claims, in a postmodern view, “(…) form is content, style is substance, meaning, thus, resides in presentation and re-presentation” (p. 397). The interaction of people with certain representations has meaningful consequences since cultural history may be in the making. Their exposure to certain popular icons influences and may change the way they perceive the world around them and, consequently, the way they will act upon it. Therefore, as previously pointed out, after interacting with the work of their idols, the fans might appropriate and adapt their texts and thus participate in the production of culture. While history only talks about the ‘official’, in cultural history you find the ‘unofficial’. Similarly, as Geoffrey Eley (1995) 114 The term was popularized by Matt Hills in Fan Cultures (2002). 115 https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/7565/volumes/v21/NA. 145 points out, during the first phase of the Women’s Liberation Movement there was a strong hostility to popular culture since “(…) the power of conventional sex-gender signs in everything from makeup to romantic fiction was taken as evidence of backwardness, oppression and male exploitation (…)” (p. 26). Yet, during the third wave of feminism, this situation, in terms of social awareness and ‘political correctness’, changed and evolved: “(…) we have seen growing efforts to explore how cultural production works on needs in appealing and contradictory ways (…) In this sense, ‘culture’ is defining a ground of politics beyond the space conventionally recognized by most political traditions as the appropriate context for policy-making in education and the arts” (Eley, 1995, p. 26). It must, therefore, be concluded that historians should look more into the domain of representation in popular culture since it disseminates meaning and prompts strategies of resistance to the homological social order. When celebrities are not punished for their defiance of norms and manage to get away with positively being the ‘Other’, they remain powerful. When they are able to challenge authority and, in some cases, even rewrite themselves as that authority, they attain the status of social icons and their cultural narratives, thus empowered, become vehicles for the dissemination of alternative political ideas with wide impact. Eventually, new kinds of communities, with a different way of looking at their surroundings, are, as described in some of the examples we have previously analyzed, shaped around their artistic participation, which can ultimately deconstruct the myth of the rotten apple. The well known phrase “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch” alludes to the spread of mold or decay from one infected apple to the rest. A person can be called a ‘rotten apple’ for being considered a ‘bad’ individual among a ‘good’ group. The term has been used by religious groups such as the United Church of God which advocates in its website Beyond Today that “(…) corrupting ideas spread their poisonous effects” (Seiglie, 2013, n/p). They mention how between 1962 and 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court made decisions to ban prayer and Bible reading from American public schools and cite Randall Price, an archaeologist and religious writer, “(…) these anti-values are marketed wholesale through the entertainment industry (movies, TV, and video games) that saturates our culture (…)” (Ibid). We would, instead, say that popular cultural helps deconstruct the above-mentioned myth. The website also refers that before the birth control pill was available, most women would avoid sex before marriage because of the risk of unwanted pregnancy but now they perceive it as “(…) a method 146 of avoiding consequences as license to commit sexual immorality (…)” (Ibid). That being said, these religious groups label the women who use contraceptives as ‘rotten apples’. Yet again, as we have seen with the particular case of the film If These Walls Could Talk , popular culture is able to depict women according to a totally different perspective. On new depictions of women, as Kimberly Ann Wells pointed out 116 , “(…) as more than “either/ors” [they] show options that previously did not exist for women, and in so doing, challenge our expectations of what being a woman means. (p. 31). In fact, and as Wells defends, new myths take away false binaries such as those of virgin versus mother, wife versus whore, or angel versus temptress, thus eliminating our perception of what makes sense and widening the powers with which women have been associated. Such examples can be found in the way Cher herself has, throughout the decades, shaped her career. One such case can be found in the way the lyrics of the song Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) were rewritten, reverting the role that the woman plays in the story. This song, originally written by her then husband Sonny Bono, was a hit single for Cher in 1966. It tells the story of a relationship between the female protagonist and a boy who was a childhood friend and later her partner and how he made her suffer throughout the years. In 1987, she recorded another version for her 1987 Platinum-certified album Cher and performed it in concerts such as her Heart of Stone Tour and on Living Proof: The Farewell Tour . In 2014, it was instrumentally played on the Dressed to Kill Tour . While in the first version she is telling the story about the two of them, in the second one she is addressing him. Another difference is that in the lyrics of the first version, the female character wears white and the male wears black but in the second version the color of their clothes is reversed. Apart from these changes, this latest version added the following verses (italics): You shot me right between the eyes You meant to paralyze Bang, bang, bang, Oh, baby I am laying on the ground But I am never going down , Bang, bang, Oh, baby come on back to me, You’ll see how sweet is gonna be 116 See Kimberly Ann Wells’s PhD dissertation Screaming, Flying, and Laughing: Magical Feminism’s Witches in Contemporary Film, Television, and Novels (2007). 147 Bang, bang This female subject is presented as much stronger and more empowered than the first one since, despite “laying on the ground”, she is never “going down”, hoping that one day her partner will come back because she seeks revenge “You’ll see how sweet is gonna be”. The song was part of the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) which tells the story of a woman who seeks revenge after her former boss kills her fiancée and leaves her in a comma on their wedding day because she had decided to leave her gang after getting pregnant. Just like the woman in the song, she was shot down but not defeated. Recently, the CR Fashion Book #16 (2020), a biannual publication from Carine Roitfeld celebrating fashion and creativity chose Cher, Kim Kardashian, and Naomi Campbell to be bikers in the new short film called Bang, intertextually linking the later and the above-mentioned song. The setting is downtown Los Angeles and the film is in black and white. The story is narrated by a man who says he goes specifically to that part of town in order to see the female biker gang, the Angels of Santee Street 117 . He is narrating a dream he had the previous night during which he kept getting lost on those streets and finding these women in every corner. Instead of riding bikes they were now riding horses and showing up at every corner, making him fear for his life 118 . One can speculate if the short film took inspiration not only from the Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) , the second version, but also from the song Just Like Jesse James . Jesse James 119 (1847-1882) was the leader of the JamesYounger Gang, which used to rob banks and trains. During the Civil War, together with his brother, he joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as ‘Bushwhackers’. The song refers to a vain man who thinks too much of himself and takes pride in making women fall in love with him only to leave them afterwards. The narrator warns him that this time he is going to meet his “match”, and, therefore, he is going to fall in the trap he usually sets for his ‘victims’. The narrator of the short film Bang comments that Cher is said to have, once, robbed a bank and he fears these women may shoot him down at any moment. The American actress and activist Geena Davis, known for having received numerous accolades for her portrayals of strong female characters, namely that of Thelma in Thelma and Louise , launched in 2004 the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which focuses on working with the entertainment industry to dramatically increase the presence of female characters in media and reduce stereotyping of 117 The name given to the group of bikers seems to be inspired in the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, whose members are known to ride Harley Davidson motorcycles. Cher herself is known to ride a Harley Davidson. 118 See appendix II for the narrative and screenshots of the short film. 119 See appendix I for the lyrics. 148 females by the male-dominated industry. For her work, she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bates College in 2009. Women who defy patriarchy and the roles they are given are in favor not only of equal footing but also of gender blurring. They are, in fact, trying to go back to a time before the split, when there was no division between men and women, that is, before Adam and Eve. They are feminists appropriating the concept of androgyny. 149 Conclusion Inevitably, today’s stories are but prologues or sequels to other stories, true and less true stories, stories that are themselves intermissions, stories without end. - Todd Gitlin, The anti-political populism of Cultural Studies (1997) [T]he post-modernist temper demands that what was previously played out in fantasy and imagination must be acted out in life as well. Anything permitted in art is permitted in life. - Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism (1972) There are lots of things I'd like to be and nice just doesn't seem good enough. - Cher (1991) Why Cher? Why is she, up to the present day, an interesting icon worth reflecting upon? Cher has been ahead of her time ever since she started her career, building the path for postmodernism and postfeminism. Angela McRobbie (2005), talks about a new set of interests in cultural studies and in sociology that emerged in the mid-1980s when postmodernism first came forth. She mentions “(…) a concern with surface, with meaning being paraded as an intentionally superficial phenomenon (…) stripped of its old hidden elitist difficulty (…) already familiar (…) a cover version of an original which never was (…) full of jokes (…)” (p. 2-3). Yet, Cher has been applying (as we have seen throughout this thesis) such principles to her performance since her early days in the music industry. Nevertheless, Cher, and female pioneers in general, are, as Joe Lynch (2017) puts it, “(…) typically under-celebrated when it comes to critical retelling of popular music’s history” (p. n/p) 120 , which is one of the reasons the study of their body of work is highly pertinent. Postmodernism, described by McRobbie (2005) as “(…) a multiplicity of fragmented, and frequently interrupted ‘looks’” (p. 12), perceives nothing as being original and, since everything is a representation, the past becomes much more appealing in the hope of giving it a meaning that can be simultaneously old and new. Cher calls herself neither a singer nor an actress but, instead, an entertainer, which seems to allow us to label her, if we choose to do so, a paradigm of postmodern trends. 120 https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7800161/cher-music-radical-icon. 150 As the research presented throughout chapters 2, 3, and 4, acknowledges, Cher’s performance fits into the concept of cultural performance and evidences many of the characteristics of the ethnic and feminist cultural performance almost right from its onset. Throughout the years, she has persistently been rewriting the role of the ‘infamous’ woman in cultural history having these premises as the pillars of her career: an image that is also associated to her persona. In his biography of Cher, J. Randy Taraborrelli (1986) refers to the criticism she was subject to at a preview of the film Silkwood 121 in 1983. The audience applauded when they saw Meryl Streep and Ken Russell on the screen but when they heard “(…) and costarring, Cher!” someone commented, “Oh sure! Cher! She’ll be just great with Meryl Streep” and the entire theatre burst into laughter (p. viii). One of the reasons for Cher to be such a relevant case study is precisely the fact that she never conformed to the rules within the world of entertainment, namely those of Hollywood, and is, therefore, among its exceptions, as an exotic and ‘ex-centric’ 122 (Ana Gabriela Machedo, 1998) character, even though working within the mainstream entertainment culture. Cher's persona does not fit into the category of a fixed self but rather into that of a fluid one and, as a result, right from its early years, Cher's career has been a product of the impact of the immigration that started in the nineteenth century in the culture of the United States. As a minority herself, her performance has been, more specifically, the result of an insurgence against discriminatory acts towards minorities and in her work race, class, and gender issues seem to interlock in the struggle for energies in a fight for the rights of minorities. Throughout her career, she has used ‘appropriation’, an act which implies borrowing and recycling composited elements in the creation of a new piece of art as a strategy to deconstruct normative representations of class, gender and ethnicity. Marvin Carlson (2004) considers that ‘appropriation’ is typical of the politics of postmodern performance as a mode of resistance to the ‘status quo’ (p. 276). Cher’s career embodies the debates that postmodernism, and more particularly postfeminism, is known to bring about. As Rosi Braidotti (1992) puts it, the postmodern subject is one in process (p. 183). In Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), she describes how ‘nomadic subjects’ “(…) are capable of freeing the activity of thinking from the hold of phallocentric dogmatism, returning thought to its freedom, its liveliness, its beauty!” (p. 8). She asserts, citing Donna Haraway (1992) in ‘Ecce Homo, ain’t (ar’n’t) I a woman, and inappropriate/d others: The human in a post-humanist landscape’ that we need feminist figures of 121 In Silkwood , she portrays the character of a working-class lesbian. 122 See Ana Gabriela Macedo’s use of this concept in her article “Angela Carter's disquieting poetics: an ec-centricity excentrically assumed”, Daughters of Restlessness: Women's Literature at the End of the Millennium , eds. Sabine CoelschFoisner, Gerhild Reisner and Hanna Wallinger, Universitatsverlag, C. Winter Verlag, Heidelberg, 1998 (pp. 81-90). 151 humanity who “(..) resist literal figuration and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new terms of historical possibility” (p. 86). Cannot one say that Cher is a postmodern, postfeminist, ‘in process’, indeed much ahead of her time? Cher’s career started during the second-wave feminism and her performance has allowed her to remain active up until the present day, providing us with a vast body of work that is paradoxically limited (since one is talking about a single case study), and contextualized and was, therefore, a viable and natural option. Cher’s success, unlike other artists, is not limited to one field of entertainment, which is ‘intersemiotically’ appealing: she has been honored with numerous worldwide awards and accolades for her success in music, television, fashion and film, which makes her a rather unique case in the entertainment industry. Just to give a few examples, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Icon Award at the Billboard Music Awards, making her one of few artists to have received those many top honors. Cher is also the only artist to date to have achieved a number-one single on a Billboard chart in each of the past six decades. In 2001, when she was awarded the Artist’s Achievement Award, Steven Tyler introduced her by saying: Tonight’s artist’s Achievement Award honoree has (…) turned on audiences for four decades so far and is one of the rare artists who has (…) number one singles, a Golden Globe, a Grammy, and (…) an Oscar. Mastering nearly every musical style (…) she is the definition of longevity but what it takes a multi-faceted artist is all about that voice (…). When Believe went to number one in 1999, Cher earned yet another amazing achievement: she became the most mature female artist ever to hit the top spot (…). I am honored to present the Artist’s Achievement Award to Cher (aerobettyfr, 2007, n/p) 123 . Adding to such accomplishment, she also works as a producer and has been honored for her activism on behalf of various social and civic causes. For instance, on April 11, 2015, the fifth annual inspiration Gala São Paulo in Brazil, honored Cher with the amfAR (American Foundation of AIDS Research) Award of Inspiration. Speaking of her willingness and ability to use her fame for the greater good, the amfAR 123 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLyHvHhc-Ac.