Hi All-
Our readings for Wednesday as you to consider textual performances of gender online and ways collection reveals gender - in this case in regards to record collections.
For this post, please pay particular attention to the record collection reading and watch the Indigo Girls' song Driver Education (also the studio version). In preparation for our artifact analysis paper due Thursday, post a short analysis of this song (as a comment to this post). You might want to consider specifically what sort of girlhood does it
promote/sell? How does it position non-normative/queered girlhood?
Reference at least one of our readings in this analysis.
I chose this song because I think it picks up on some of the commodities of childhood/adolescence that we read about for today (Pixie Sticks, Reese's Cups, etc) in representing girlhood. This is also a current song - think 2011 - but looking back at past girlhood/teenhood. I also wanted us to consider a narrative of girlhood that may counter heteronormative girlhood we have been studying. I'm always struck by non-normative things like mentions of suicide, drug use and "tatooed girls with pasts they can't remember." It makes me think of a quote a friend sent me recently: “heavily tattooed women can be said to control and subvert the
ever-present 'male gaze' by forcing men (and women) to look at their
bodies in a manner that exerts control.” ― Margo Demello
Can't wait to hear what you guys have to say about it.
The computer ate my first response. This response won't be as thorough or coherent. Weep-weep. It's getting late. Sorry!
ReplyDeleteMusic through technological advances as the radio, CDs, and mp3 players has lost some of it primordial appeal. The bodily experience is diminished with the loss of sight, smell, and touch. Communication has also lost some of its face-to-face or body-to-body presence through IRC on the computer.
In a study by van Doorn, Wyatt, and van Zoonen titled "A Body of Text" internet users attempt to ground themselves in their experience by exchanging a/s/l qualities (427). These details enhance the sensory experience for participants.
Similarly, Indigo Girls' song "Driver Education" conjures images of the body through sensual details as well as a/s/l categories. For example, age is implied as the growing up years; the sex is female although the gender is lesbian, and the location is suburbia in the 70's. This information creates a persona. Further sensual details of sight, taste, smell, and sound are experienced through visual images like "soft rock hair;" auditory reflections with the sound of water at the lake and swimming pool; kisses taste like cigarettes or spring. These descriptions transport the listener to a concrete time and place. With richer details then the IRC, a deeper narrative is created. Additionally, the descriptive clues place the listener in an alternative type of girlhood from the heteronormative. What the alternative type of girlhood is can be defined by what it isn't. What it isn't is male-dominated.
Diane Railton in "The Gendered Carnival of Pop" defines traditional rock as being influenced by the "inherent masculinity of the bourgeois public sphere" (580). Amy Ray and Emily Saliers erode the masculine normative centered music culture by describing what it is like to be a homosexual girl growing up. The images of water such as the line "We come into this life waterlogged and tender" (20) represent a birth counter to the popular culture which doesn't have all the answers with its "Films and drills and safety illustrations/The crushed cars of driver education" (5-6).
Saliers and Ray further disregard the postfeminist media culture by refusing to sexualize themselves in their visual performance. Their identity is not "defined as bodily property" (Gill 137). These are real looking women; they are not hyper-monitoring themselves to meet external expectations (141).
The narrative quality of this song appeals to me. So much of the music I hear now has this strange time-inertia, placing people and events in static realms that ignores history. I think Collen brings up a great point about Saliers and Ray. Their identity is not "bodily property" and perhaps that allows them a greater freedom in writing their music. Their not bound in the mainstream push to be beautiful, forever, popular, and relevant to the "now" culture. I agree that the song engages in a culture that tries to have the all the answers.
ReplyDeleteI agree, and I think that the song itself has more layers that are worthy of contemplation.
DeleteI thought the Indigo Girls’ song was a good example of how women can be singularly situated through their relationships with men. The references at the beginning of the song to guys and pop-culture products (Marlboro, Reese’s, Pepsi) seems to make the claim that heterosexual relationships are the accepted norm, and even more American, if you will. Additionally, these references seem to add credence to the “’masculinist politics’ that surround so much popular music” (Straw, 633). As the song goes on it seems to show a very displaced picture of the homosexual girl, someone who is more abstract and less defined than the males.
ReplyDeleteRoxy,
DeleteI agree with your comments about the pop-culture products connected to males mentioned in the song. The song also has some female-specific references, such as the sweet sixteens. Although the voice does appear to be less defined that male or female genders, she connects more with the male discourse.
Nora
I took the Indigo Girls' song "Driver Education" as a ode to collectioning. "From one perespective, records are mererely the physical residues of processes of commodity turnover...ad as such, are part of the ongoing, unofficial relocation of objects from the public, commercial realm into the omestic environment," (Straw, 633). If we replace the word "records" with "men" then that would tie perfectly into the Indigo Girls' song.
ReplyDelete"I fell for guys who tried to commit suicide/with soft rock hair, blood shot eyes," this lyric seems to me that the person that this song is about likes to find guys to nurture, to bring them past the brink of wanting to commit suicide and back to safety. It seems that the girl gets off a bit on being a savior to guys.
"Now it's tattooed girls with a past that they can't remember/Who pledged allegiance to a life of bending the curriculm," This next verse seems to be a the effect of taking in and pursuing relationships with troubled guys, but instead of collecting the experiences of the guys, she now collects tattoos.
"We should not forget that many women privately amass personal possessions far in excess of any practical need, without any thought of public exhibition rather than adornment," (Baekeland, Straw 633). It seems that this girl is displaying her first collection of troublesome romantic experiences as a new collection.
The combination of tattoo imagery within the song and the chorus of "films and drills and safety illustraions/the crushed cars of driver education," seem to resonate a point of a sort of "adhere to this fairy tale message" point that girls shouldn't be trying to nuture bad boys, for they will "crash" as well.
A song I think that nicely parallels this one, is Something Corporate's "I Woke Up In A Car" in that the person leaves home after his seemingly troubled girlfriend goes off to presumably college (that assumption comes from other songs on the album) and he decides to live in this "Into the Wild" kind of mentality.
The song has this beautiful lyrics, "I met a girl who kept tattoos of homes that she had loved/If I were her I'd paint my body/Until all the skin was gone," which seems to parallel nicely with the collectiveness we see in the Indigo Girls' song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCGJoEFxdY
Christine,
DeleteI agree with you about this song including a theme of collections. You make a good point that the speaker is 'displaying her first collection of...romantic experiences.' This song seems to be cataloguing past experiences and important influences and how they have affected the future.
Life as a collection of people, objects, objectified people. . .
ReplyDeleteI thought melancholy was really present in "Driver Education." Am I misreading it, and it is only nostalgia?
Colleen,
DeleteI think you are right, it is nostalgia for her coming of age as a non-conventional female. The voice seems to say that while most of us where following the drills and the safety rules of the "natural" femininity, she was doing quite the opposite:
"When you were sweet sixteen, I was already mean and
Feeling bad for giving it up to the man just to make the scene.
Where were you, back when I had something to prove,
With the switchblade set and the church kids learning my moves?"
Nora
Colleeen,
DeleteThe song is very melancholy. We know the speaker had regrets and felt that a change in her life could have made things better. She regrets her heterosexual sexual encounter. She laments that the person she is attracted to now was not around before. There is a sense that the speaker has grown as a person. I think she realizes things have happened but she does not necessarily look back on them fondly. She sees them more as lessons that had to be learned. The whole “deep water”imagery and the danger within also speaks to this.
Thomas
What stood out for me about the song was the title, “Driver Education.” It appears to have a double meaning, in my opinion. On the one hand “Films and drills and safety illustrations/The crushed cars of driver education” seems to say that the safety images of the natural gender and all those drills about being girly didn’t work, and that all these “education” ended up in a disaster...lesbianism. The voice feels out of place; an accidental gender. On the other hand, the voice seems to say that she didn’t get the female education that society expected as a copilot of men, but she got the male education of the driver. She constructed her own gender, she bent the rules, and –instead of collecting records like some young males do, according to Straw— she collected tattoos (an embodied symbolism of masculinity).
ReplyDeleteNora
I just am not sure that I can do justice to this. My first thoughts of this song were of the angst of youth and the pain that comes with not understanding one’s own strength in life. A life where there is no path to a normalized future because normal is not what they are seeking or even understand. It is a dead end with the same ole thing every day, day in and day out, just as “we watched the same films and the same drills” such as the horrors of pictures during driver education. The boys dated were the same type that fed into misogyny, patriarchal macho men as symbolized by the Marlboro cigarettes.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is hope with the non- normative world of ‘bending the curriculum.’ This ability or agency is the ticket for freedom from possibly the heteronormative dominant ideology. Watching someone else find alternatives to what the singers profess as ‘feeling bad for giving it up to the man…where were you, back when I had something to prove,”…I could have used your strength. ‘Waterlogged and tender,’ we are driven to conform. Drills and safety illustrations keep us in line. “Running for miles through the suburbs of the seventies” in order to find who I am. Butler might say ‘running to be.’ It was at that time, the 70s, when non-normative began to appeal to those who had been silent and invisible for so long. As Gil states, the body is in constant need of “monitoring and surveillance, discipline and remodeling in order to conform” (137). The crushed cars of driver education to me represent the alternative meaning of crushing out conformity. They were crushed, damaged and were no longer reparable-the abject.
Goffman’s presentation of self and how we want to be perceived is how we manage our self for others, as van Doorn, Wyatt, and van Zoonen mention (424). This songs represents that dissolution of that presentation of self as conformed by culture.
Ads I was reading your analysis, I thought that there were many similarities to my analysis. I pictured at woman in her late 30's maybe singing this song to the memory of her younger self?
DeleteThank you for your interpretation of the 'crushed cars' image. I didn't really know what to do with it and I think your analysis really works.
DeleteI was a fan of the Indigo Girls in the 90's. So this song actually seems like a statement of a time reserved for finding oneself. I also see it as a song of preference, going against the grain, and trying to realize your desire. It may be a stretch or a bit literal, but the lyrics:
ReplyDelete"I fell for guys who tried to commit suicide,
With soft rock hair and blood shot eyes.
He tastes like Marlboro cigarettes, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups,
A Pepsi in his hand, getting off the school bus."
infers an attraction to the "bad boy" or even the forbidden. It also seems an attempt to break away from what society sees as acceptable. Although it is hard to just join a certain group or adopt the group characteristics or hipness. But, falling for one of those "bad boys" is a sure and quick way to feel a sense of belonging to the elusive group. Straw explains that "Hipness maintains boundaries to entry by requiring that the possession of knowledge be made to seem less significant than the tactical sense of how and when it is made public" (635). So the one looking for love and or acceptance is assimilated into this microsm of aloofness and nonconformity:
"When you were sweet sixteen, I was already mean and
Feeling bad for giving it up to the man just to make the scene.
Where were you, back when I had something to prove,
With the switchblade set and the church kids learning my moves?"
As the lyrics end, there is a sense of questioning choices that were made. I think that everyone does that, whether it is regret or hindsight,
"I ran for miles through the suburbs of the seventies,
Pollen dust and Pixie sticks, kissing in the deep end
Of swimming pools before I knew what's in there.
We come into this life waterlogged and tender. "
and if I only knew then all that I know now.
I've loved them forever too, Yolonda. I like the focus on choices. I think that's a huge motif for the duo in many of their songs!
DeleteYolanda,
ReplyDeletePretty cool post. That is what I thought as well but I didn't know how to label them - the bad boys. Isn't that the stereotype that once existed? That women fall for the 'bad boys.' A sort of sadomasochistic that 'naturally' exists in women?
The only label that comes to mind is "bad boys." Yes, I totally agree it is an old stereotype. Maybe it is the natural tendency for women to seek out someone not acceptable that they can change or save?
Deleteoh, and I think Staw defines them as Brutes.
DeleteHa ha Yes! women are 'naturally' savers and changers!
Deletecalming the beast within aka beauty and the beast!
In “A Body of Text: Revisiting Textual Performances of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet,” Doorn, Wyatt, and van Zoonen posit the strong relationship between gender, sexuality, and physical bodies as it relates to internet chat rooms. They quote Jodi O’Brien, who states: “The ‘alternative’ experiences that are enacted in “alternative” or queer spaces are based on realities of the flesh: real, embodied experiences and / or fantasies cultivated through exposure to multisensory stimuli” (425). The Indigo Girls’ song “Driver Education” is infused with references to sensory input and it’s importance to defining the queer experience.
ReplyDeleteIn the first verse, the singer recounts the type of boy for whom she typically fell: a bad boy, who “tried to commit suicide” and “tasted of Marlboro cigarettes and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.” The kind of boy who tries to commit suicide can have multiple interpretations, but describing his taste -- cigarettes and candy -- paints a vivid mental image of a adolescent poised between childhood and adulthood, unable or unwilling to choose between them. She adds that he has a “Pepsi in his hand” getting off the school bus, another allusion to both taste and youth.
By the second verse, the singer has shifted her focus to a more alternative experience -- girls. Again, she initially describes these girls with an elusive descriptor: [A] past they can’t remember,” but goes on to say “She tastes like spring.” Here, she juxtaposes the tangible with the intangible -- taste and spring -- indicating that her connections to women have a more metaphysical basis than those with men. The image of spring signifies rebirth and rejuvenation -- perhaps for the singer, discovering queer love, and perhaps for the object of her affection, who, forgetting her former life, intends to build a new one. However, this encounter is fleeting: by the end of this verse, the tattooed girl has returned to revelries with the boys by the lakeside.
In the third verse, she addresses her transient lover directly with a series of questions. This is the only verse that doesn’t contain overt sensory references, and allows the singer to express her frustrations: had this tattooed girl entered her life sooner, perhaps the Marlboro boys could have been avoided, and the search for queer identity less tumultuous or painful.
The song concludes with a recollection of the singer’s childhood: the ebullience of running “for miles through the suburbs of the seventies” and “pollen dust and Pixie sticks.” The self-criticism that subtly pervades the other verses of the song has vanished. She recounts “kissing in the deep end of swimming pools / before I knew what’s in there.” Interpreted figuratively, she alludes to her sexual liaisons with boys, which she entered only half-aware; not until her encounters with women did she gain full consciousness. The last line of this verse is especially poignant, both sensually and thematically: “We come into this life waterlogged and tender.”
Through her vivid descriptions, the singer allows the listener to become intimate with the trajectory of her sexual life, confirming O’Brien’s assertion about sexuality, gender, and physical bodies.
Hayley
I like your focus on choice too. Great read of the body coming into sexual awareness - making choices about that and many things. I also really like the way you are doing a sort of literature analysis of the song. Great!
DeleteI just realized this goes here, sorry:
ReplyDeleteAfter contemplating the readings and considering the lyrics of Driver Education by the Indigo Girls I would like to share the following thoughts. In the article, “A Body of Text.” The authors bring up the notion that, “people rely on others to have knowledge about the gender script to which they are performing their identity, since this is the only way in which their interactions can be meaningful. This is known as interactional knowledge. (van Zoonen p424)” Driver Education plays on these gender scripts heavily. In fact, it counts on you knowing the scripts by heart so you can fully realize the change present in the main character of the song. The well-placed references (school bus, pledging allegiance, driver's ed) clue us into the fact that these are high school aged teens.
The song promotes a girlhood full of experimentation. First this girl “falls” for boys who smell like cigarettes and drink Pepsi. We understand this is no longer the case when we hear, “Now its tattooed girls with a past they can't remember.” “Bending the curriculum.” is a not-so-veiled reference to the “non-normative” lifestyle addressed within the song. She regrets sex with these boys as it did not lead to the “scene” she thought it would. She laments to this other girl, “Where were you when I had something to prove?” As if her first sexual experience should have been with the current girl. You get a sense the narrator has learned life's hard lessons. “Kissing in the deep end of swimming pools before I knew what's in there.We come into this life waterlogged and tender.” clearly the narrator avoids “deep water.” meaning she tries to avoid being in over her head now in her life. The reference to being born has to do with how she is now which is the opposite of a newborn. She is much older and aware of who she is and what life hands out at times.
I would say this band doesn't need an extensive record collection. They have bypassed all “nerd” collectors. Opting instead to make their own musical artifacts. The song positions queer culture in a place of acceptance which is where it should be. Finding true love as opposed to just sex is an undercurrent present in the song as well. It feels that is being "sold" here.
Excellent reading, Thomas (and no worries about where the post ends up - blogs are crazy). I chose this song mainly for the ways I see products and the gender scripts you describe intersecting. I wonder if we can position the song itself as a product, a girlhood product? In this way it seems to be both commenting on commodification of the adolescent experience and also participating in it.
ReplyDelete