‘A Shock to the System’: Feminist Interventions in Youth Subculture—The Adventures of Shocking Pink

Abstract

For feminists of the second wave, feminism was understood to be a social movement ‘outside’ of, and usually in opposition to, mainstream popular culture. The idea that girls and young women were socialized into identifying with ‘false images’ of femininity through popular culture was a widely adopted view within feminism of this period. Magazines for girls and young women inevitably became a concern both for feminists working in academic disciplines and to those more widely within feminism. From this perspective, magazines demanded a feminist intervention that would show ‘real’ images of girls and young women. This article explores one such intervention—Shocking Pink, a magazine that appeared between 1981 and 1982, and then resurfaced between 1987 and 1992. Perceived as a challenge to commercial magazines for young women (e.g. Jackie and My Guy), Shocking Pink included articles on politics, sexuality and ‘race’, along with radical re-appropriations of mainstream teen magazine staples such as photostrip love stories. This article traces the history of Shocking Pink and argues that although being a feminist magazine, Shocking Pink engaged with and took advantage of a wider range of changes in young women's experiences, identities and expressions during the 1980s. In addition, it was also a contradictory text for many established forms of feminism of the period. Whilst it explored the ways in which gender inequalities are produced and reproduced through mainstream magazines, it also examined the ways in which feminism had reproduced other sorts of power relations. Shocking Pink was a magazine produced by a collective of young women, for young women, and, as such, it also offered a challenge to older (largely white, middle-class) feminist critics of popular culture, problematizing their distinctions between ‘real’, or ‘good’ young feminist identities, and ‘bad’.