I finally had some time to think about Kate Durbin's provocative (sexy & thought-provoking!) piece at Delirious Hem, "A Teenage Girl Speaks as a Melodramatic, Hysterical Demon," and here are my thoughts:
First, I'm really struck by the idea that your piece seems to suggest (in a bunch of different ways) that girls are the purgers (of vomit, gold coins, etc.) because the culture feeds them THE MOST SHIT. I think that is right on. It would be cool if we could convince bulimics to puke all over magazine stands, to connect the effect back to its source. That one is public and one is private makes it difficult to link them back up.
And then, of course, the other difficulty is that girls can wield the content of those publications (for magazines, insert all media outlets) in a way that you seem to have done and still do, Kate. The "arty girl" way, la via de Lady Gaga, Taking Fashion Back, highlighting the artifice of selfhood, putting the fashion back into self-fashioning. (This is when the purge goes public again??)
The other idea here that really interests me, and is something I've tried and failed to write about in a way that really captures it, is that TEENAGE GIRLS CAN ACTUALLY DO MAGIC. I mean, I'm sure some people are reading your Ouija and levitation details as the cutesy images of sleepovers, but I'm reading them like so: "Hmm, yeah, I remember when my friends and I had these powers, and then we grew up and traded them in for Lady Skillz." And of course this sounds crazy to you, reader, but that is the whole point. Nonrational powers that get buried, shoved down, when girls grow up, because they are not valued by the larger culture. They are scoffed at; you are a Crazy Lady if you still believe in or practice them. You are a nut if you teach a class on The Goddess, etc. I feel this every time someone tries to police my speech -- every time I turn back into a superstitious, crass, full-o-wonder teenage girl and dare to say something out loud in that voice, I turn around and someone's shushing me. We can't say that shit in this big bad world ruled by Logic, Reason, Progress: in most public places, there is someone there to stop us.
Becca,
ReplyDeleteThe entire time I was reading your comments I was nodding emphatically. I love what you say about the purge going public--that seems so essential. Wielding the vomit with intention, so it doesn't become just self-abuse (though of course, I've always seen suicide as a big fuck you world, so all self-abuse is an attempt by the abused to abuse the abuser at some level, and it does succeed at that).
But yeah, that idea of channeling the vomit in our work now, seems really interesting/crucial. And the real belief in magic, not just an intellectual belief.
The teenage girl's body is magic, a fetish object--because she is not child or adult. It's also a weapon. And hormones are her voodoo powder.
I'm wondering about collectivity too--because, like you said, it was always at the slumber parties that the girls harnessed the most power. What could a girl gang do, with channeled power (okay, now I am thinking of that awful movie the Craft--do you remember it?) But maybe the gurlesque could be seen as a movement like this, to some degree...
Yeah, drawing a continuum from vomit to suicide is really important, because of course some types of self-abuse are more dangerous than others.... when does self-destruction hit self-immolation?
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of collectivity is crucial, too. In my own life, what I always think of when I think about groups of teenage girls and their powers is my JV high school girls' volleyball team. It was the last time I was ever on an organized sports team :), and we had this really tight-knit group. Our coach -- a goofy, kind math teacher, a man -- had us over to his house for dinner, and then afterward taught us how to lift a girl up with just a couple fingers. It involved us putting our hands together first and concentrating, like sports teams do. But then we took that energy someplace way beyond volleyball. It worked so well that every day before practice we'd have someone lie down in the locker room and we'd hold a different kind of "practice," until we were lifting each other with a couple fingers and barely any effort. It wasn't exactly levitation, but it wasn't gravity either, if you know what I mean!
I won Most Team Spirit. Get it? Haha but it's true.
I don't know how this translates into poetry, besides an AWP slumber party, but I want to concentrate on that and see what happens.
And yeah, hilariously enough, The Craft is the only pop culture reference I can think of when I talk about this stuff, too. It came out when I was in high school, so maybe it helped us feel like we were normal as we burned underbrush and chanted "So mote it be" down by the lake?!
And on the flip side, as Virginia Woolf and plenty of others remind us, how many of those women who did magic in the past -- those "witches" -- were really artists? "The Witch's House" was a teenage attraction down by Lake Michigan where I grew up -- but the witch herself was actually a visual artist, Mary Nohl, who just happened to be awesome enough to put her own sculptures in her yard.
http://www3.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=11655
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary-Nohl-House-May09.jpg