Girl Groups on Girl Groups; or, Why Girl Singers (Still) Matter

Abstract

Girl Groups on Girl Groups; or, Why Girl Singers (Still) Matter Sheila Whiteley (bio) She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music. Edited by Laurie Stras. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 266 pp. It’s always exciting to be invited to review a book on popular music and femininity, not least when you look at the contributors and recognize so many leading academics in the field. Martha Mockus is undoubtedly one of the earth-moving researchers of queer musicology, and I was privileged to meet her in 2003 when she was part of a keynote panel titled “Queering Popular Music” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) International Conference in Montreal, Canada. The panel also included Jennifer Rycenga, who subsequently coedited Queering the Popular Pitch with me and, like Martha Mockus, contributed to Philip Brett’s seminal text, Queering the Pitch.1 I am also familiar with Annie J. Randall’s work, having recently reviewed her book Dusty! Queen of the Postmods for the Royal Musical Association.2 Full of insights and a delight to read, it was my favorite book of the year. Patricia Juliana Smith was a great influence on my own writing on the queer sixties, and Jacqueline Warwick and I met several years ago in Jyväskylä, Finland, at the Beatles conference and subsequently in Turku, where she was on my keynote panel on sexualities and gender. Norma Coates and I go back even further, as she contributed a wonderful chapter to Sexing the Groove when books on popular music and gender were a rarity. I am also a fan of Susan Fast (not least her work on Led Zeppelin, a favorite [End Page 86] band) and Sarah Hill (whom I know from IASPM). Although I am familiar with Robynn Stilwell’s writing on cinema and screen, I was intrigued to find a shared interest in Brenda Lee, and I’m anticipating some thought-provoking ideas. Laurie Stras, of course, is at the University of Southampton, and I hope we meet up sometime when I’m at Southampton Solent University. Curiously, She’s So Fine was on my wish list when I last received the Ashgate update on recently published works, so when Eileen Hayes suggested I review it for Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture I was, needless to say, delighted. Without more ado, then, what does the girl group have to say about whiteness, femininity, adolescence, and class in 1960s music? As Laurie Stras writes in her introduction, “Gender, race, adolescence and class are four distinct yet interconnected axes of identity that themselves are and have been fundamental to the identity of British and American teenage girls.” She continues: Each category relies upon the others for its production: the perception of femininity is inflected by youth, race and manners; race can be implied by conventions of femininity and “breeding,” as well as certain adolescent behaviours; class may be articulated through performances of femininity, ethnicity, and maturity; the experience of adolescence, social and biologically, is largely determined by gender, class, and race. The interconnectedness and interdependence of these constructs typically cause them to become conflated, or to obscure each other—only meticulous and patient enquiry can tease out the strands of identity that they produce. (10–11) The communication and e-mail discussions between the contributors was an effective means of interacting and sharing thoughts and ideas on these key issues, so individual chapters are not simply the thoughts of the writer but also benefited from discussions with fellow “prof-ettes” (as Stras calls her fellow authors).3 The shared conviction that “girl singers matter” (2) and the lucid discussions that follow provide the reader with a compelling insight into those “teenage girl singers who sang like, about, and for teenagers” (9) and, in doing so, open up the question of whether 1960s British and American girl pop was just as much a site of tension between conformity and resistance as a barometer of social change, as the Spice Girls were in the 1990s. As Stras convincingly argues, the lenticular logic and manipulation of doxa of girl pop and girl...