1999

22.1

As the twenty-first century begins, the definitions and functions of kitsch, nostalgia and femininity are perhaps more contested than ever before. In a postmodern, post-Warholian art world, the slippage between so-called "high" art and the more "degraded" forms of mass and popular culture would seem to have obviated the need for discussion of such "archaic" ideas as the "aura" of Walter Benjamin’s authentic art object; the critic who seeks to distinguish between high and low will seem at best naïve and at worst guilty of replicating the kind of taste "distinction" recognized by Marxist critics as nothing more than a kind of class bias. A discussion of "kitsch," whatever it may ultimately be determined to be, must take into account this breakdown of consensus among artists and commentator-intellectuals.

Simultaneously, however, it must take into account the quintessentially nineties market in kitsch items which are consciously recognized as such and thus presuppose the existence of a category of kitsch; in so doing this discussion will inevitably find itself groping to understand the (coterminous) market in nostalgia, another term which has multiple and sometimes conflicting implications. Kitsch has been inextricably linked to nostalgia in the past decade; in the (still current) market in "retro," nostalgia both evokes a desire for, and is evoked by the presence of, kitsch objects. These objects not only anchor the viewer’s memory of a time that is past but also inspire "memories" of an era whose collective zeitgeist has been so encapsulated as to be readily available, prepackaged, even to those whose individual experiences did not include firsthand knowledge of the phenomena of an earlier decade. The effect—to condense, flatten, and homogenize the discontinuous experiences of a heterogeneous group of people and then to sell these experiences back to them as if they were genuine —is (in addition to being a fulfillment of every paranoid fantasy Guy Debord had while writing The Society of the Spectacle) the inevitable result of the late-capitalist predilection for periodization so ably explored by Fredric Jameson.

Not all of these objects are inanimate, however; women, too, can be commodified and kitschified. While an argument can be made that the link between femininity and the objèt d’art has existed for roughly as long as women have worn clothing and cosmetics, I am speaking here of a very specific historical moment: the final decade of the twentieth century. This article takes as its subject the most recent ways that women’s bodies have been commodified as kitsch objects evoking a past that never existed and which is now inscribed on the body of the present. Finally, it looks at a woman whose own body lays bare the intersections between kitsch, nostalgia, and femininity. Through photographs and artwork in her liner notes, as well as via stage performance, pictures in interviews, and public appearances, Courtney Love, the "bad girl" of the much-trumpeted "women in rock" movement which in many ways defined the music scene of the last ten years, provides a lens through which the all-"grrrl" band and the "post-feminist" label of the nineties can be better understood, and serves as a locus in which the "woman as kitsch object" can be both illustrated and destroyed.

What is kitsch and what is its function in American culture? Most definitions of kitsch are of European origin; kitsch has traditionally been a concern of those outside of the United States. The word itself is generally assumed to have been derived from German and, in fact, there is considerable recent German scholarship on the subject. Gillo Dorfles and Umberto Eco write in Italian on kitsch, which is for both synonymous with "cattivo gusto," or "bad taste." Matei Calinescu is careful to emphasize that in fact kitsch is often a cìs-Atlantic phenomenon, yet it is clear that kitsch can only cross the ocean going one way. The European spectator (he identifies Alexis de Tocqueville as the first of these) "discovers" American kitsch, presumably as an affront to his own aesthetic sensibilities. He is contrasted with the "kitsch-man," a creation of an assortment of Continental critics, including Hermann Broch, Ludwig Giesz (a representative of phenomenology), Dorfles (an aesthetician and art historian), and Richard Egenter (a Roman Catholic theologian). Described as "one who involuntarily makes a parody of aesthetic response," kitsch-man is shown "kitschifying" the Grand Canyon, an obviously American "great sight"; it is clear that kitsch is made in the U.S. and interpreted abroad. Thus, part of the problem with establishing an American definition of kitsch in the contexts established by European theoreticians is that it is often assumed that all American taste is, de facto, for kitsch items. European taste, especially in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries (and Calinescu is careful to avoid suggesting that kitsch might have existed before then, in part because he concedes that we cannot really speculate with certainty about bad taste in more remote periods than these) lends itself more readily to class-bound categories. Good taste is inevitably conflated with the taste of the aristocracy; the artistic preferences of all other social groups, in descending order, are attempts to mimic the cultural practices of social superiors. That these clearly demarcated social classes are based on economic conditions is something obscured by most cultural critics until recently; even the retrospectively identified "bad taste" of royalty, such as that of Ludwig II of Bavaria, who "indulged frenetically in the most luxurious kind" of kitsch (Calinescu 243), can be recuperated into a kind of pleasure in bad taste that is really the hallmark of "good taste," a kind of aesthetic slumming. The American aristocracy does not enjoy the same kind of immunity, however; no matter how much money it has, it will never acquire taste. Taste in the U.S. has historically been very closely linked to a willingness to embrace European cultural exports, forcing Americans who want to consume art in their own country to buy art overseas and bring it home or replicate it. Both activities are interpretable as kitsch consumption, presumed to be motivated by what Umberto Eco, writing of William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, calls "an incontinent collectionism," which doesn’t bother to distinguish the genuine from the copy (22). Of course, one can argue that there exists in the twentieth century a kind of international definition of high art, in which American art takes its place alongside European art; nevertheless, what is unarguable is that the United States enjoys an undisputed dominance in the field of popular (or mass) cultural production and a perceived dominance in that of kitsch production.

I want to stress that kitsch must necessarily be periodized, and that the "neo-kitsch" of the consumerist, post-industrial twentieth century should be differentiated from the kitsch of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie that sought to ape the (European) aristocracy. Kitsch is always mass-produced, whether the mass-production is of tiny copies of the Empire State Building or of Bakelite dinnerware. This is not to say that kitsch items cannot be "hand-painted," "hand-blown," or "hand-stitched"—it is only to say that they cannot be unique. Kitsch objects are also "beautified," even, or perhaps especially, when such beautification is actually entirely unnecessary to the item’s purported purpose or function. Traditionally, such "beautification" has been regarded by critics as defacement; Gilbert Highet argues that kitsch is "everything that took a lot of trouble to make and is quite hideous" (211). Such value judgments obscure the purposes of the kitsch object in multiple contexts, as well as suggesting a kind of transcendent measure of beauty against which all things can be placed to determine their "kitschiness." A more rigorous definition might argue that kitsch objects have in common a desire to evoke appreciation through their ornamentation for something necessarily extrinsic to them; thus, a bar of soap purchased at Graceland and bearing an image of Elvis Presley is designed to evoke perhaps a recollection of a tour of Graceland, or perhaps an image of Elvis in one of his movies or on stage, perhaps even a nostalgic recollection of the soap-purchaser’s first encounter with Elvis’s music. What the object does not evoke is an image of soap. This relationship of the kitsch image to narrative and nostalgia is very important.

Finally, the kitsch object must give pleasure of some sort. This notion of "pleasure" may be the trickiest part of defining kitsch. I do not necessarily mean "pleasure" in the sense that Theodor Adorno understands it; Adorno’s reading of kitsch is that it is a kind of "parody of catharsis," in which pseudo-art gives the passive, working-class cultural consumer a "diversion" which is a parody of true aesthetic experience, which requires an engagement with difficult materials and isn’t "fun" at all. It’s a little too easy to write off kitsch as "easily accessible" to everyone; an object which appears easily accessible to one person may be a perfect enigma to another. It is also difficult to speak authoritatively of the ease with which pleasure may be derived from the contemplation of any object. Kitsch is context dependent, which makes problematic a definition like that put forward by Hans Robert Jauss in his first formulation of "aesthetics reception." To say that "the distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between the familiarity of previous aesthetic experience and the ‘horizontal change’ demanded by the new work, determines the artistic character" (Jauss 25) is to posit a viewer who cannot exist—one whose understanding of the object is not informed by anything extrinsic to the object itself, apart from other, equally hermetically sealed artistic encounters. Perhaps a more precise way of describing the relation between kitsch objects and pleasure would be to say that the objects’ ostensible purpose is to evoke desire, both to own the object in question and for what the object represents, as well as perhaps a host of other related desires, such as the desire to enhance one’s prestige by displaying the object. Above all, kitsch is designed to sell.

The production of "feminine" beauty may also be profitably examined as kitsch. Femininity is the result of mass production; despite the fact that women’s faces are the premiere example of the hand-painted objèt, the fact that (almost) all are painted in the same pattern using the same palette of colors ensures that they will all be virtually the same. Like the kitsch objects of my description, women’s "beautification" has nothing to do with their function(s) as women; and female functionality alone cannot produce femininity, which exists apart from it. My analysis here of course owes much to Judith Butler’s now well-known theorization of gender as performance. In Gender Trouble, Butler reads drag as a kind of parodic gender performativity that exposes the charade of all "essential gender" by dissociating biological sex from ostensible gender. What is emphasized in drag is the overproduction of femininity, the process by which an appearance of recognizable femininity came to be created; in kitsch, too, what is emphasized is not the object itself, but the object adorned. Indeed, one way to differentiate kitsch from "art" is to note the way that kitsch foregrounds its "produced-ness" while traditional forms of "high art" attempt to conceal it. "True" art is idealized as the result of individual inspiration effortlessly transferred to canvas or marble, while kitsch inheres in a hundred tiny plastic copies of the Arc de Triomphe, each stamped "made in Taiwan" on the bottom. Yet it seems to me somehow insufficient to point to the performed quality of gender. There is a distinct difference between performing masculinity and performing femininity, and I would argue that that difference is explainable in terms of kitsch.

Masculinity is not identified with kitsch for several reasons. The most obvious of these is probably the result of what has been presumed, as at least two generations of feminists have contended, to be the "transparency" of the masculine, its privileged position as that which merely exists, an appearance coterminous with the male anatomical body and arising from it, always visible and with nothing to hide. By contrast, of course, the feminine is a monstrous creation whose purpose is to mask the terrible unknown that is the woman of Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis or the grotesque trickster of popular representation. Yet femininity is inextricably caught up in this process of the production of illusion, of falseness, as Butler’s able reading of the drag performance demonstrates; it is considered a compliment to tell a woman that she is "well put together," while a man’s appearance is carefully designed to look unprepared and "natural." I do not mean to suggest that there is anything more genuine about masculinity than femininity, merely that it has been perceived that way for a very long time; obviously, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which men’s awareness of their selves as constructed entities has constituted what Susan Faludi calls their "betrayal" and precipitated what others term the "masculinity crisis." Yet it is unarguable that, on the whole, men are less willing than women to embrace artifice as necessary, and that fashion trends do not sweep the male population as regularly and thoroughly as the female. Furthermore, "masculinity" encompasses a wide range of practices and "looks," and in general the masculinizing of the body entails revealing rather than hiding it, stripping it bare rather than laboriously adorning it, except perhaps with pumped-up muscles of dubious "authenticity." I would still argue, reversing John Berger, that "women look and men appear"—which is to say that women have a certain look (one which, to be sure, connotes to-be-looked-at-ness) while men are supposed to just appear, like the inspired art work that springs ex nihilo from the artist’s consciousness. If we consider kitsch, as does Calinescu, to be "a specifically aesthetic form of lying," its relation to femininity is obvious; it is worth considering, in this context, the frequency with which kitsch is reviled as evil or denounced as counterfeit. The idea here seems to be that kitsch is guilty of degrading "art" by bringing it down to the level of the everyday object or commodity. Adorno loathes kitsch as an inferior illusion of true art, the implication being, of course, that the "naïve viewer" will be unable to discern the difference between the two things. Without this confusion between "true" and "false" beauty, however, the term kitsch is unnecessary.

This distinction is crucial in understanding femininity as kitsch. Like kitsch, the feminine appearance is meant to provoke desire—it is, in some sense, designed to "sell" itself to the (presumed male) viewer, to be "attractive." Yet at the same time, it is always outside the realm of "art," limited by its (always presumed) artifice. Feminine beauty is domesticated in the very act of its being created; placed on the body of a real woman, whatever "art" might inhere in some idealized conception of female beauty is automatically kitschified, in perhaps the same way that, in Calinescu’s example, an original Rembrandt would be kitschified were it purchased by a millionaire and hung in a bathroom. (One might argue that if the accessorized and adorned female body is kitsch, perhaps the naked woman’s body is the locus of feminine "art," but it seems clear to me that the female nude, whether in a reproduction of Manet or an airbrushed Playboy centerfold, is equally domesticated.) This idea of domestication is also intimately linked to a working definition of kitsch; as I have defined it, kitsch must excite the desire for ownership, and suggest "hominess," or the kind of clutter associated with the working-class or bourgeois home in which objects are assembled in an attempt to signify wealth and taste. Unlike the art object which is displayed in the sterile container of the modern art museum, detached from other objects and especially from the quotidian, the kitsch object jostles for space with dozens of other objects, competing with them all for the attention of the viewer in much the same way that the "accessories" that are sold to women to augment their garments clutter the surface of the body. Indeed, from museum gift shops to the Home Shopping Network, kitsch is sold in the form of "household products" and jewelry to women in order that they may kitschify both their bodies and what is still widely considered to be "their" space.

It would seem that no one definition of kitsch is sufficient to contain it, and just as it means different things to different theorists, it also means different things in different cultural contexts. Perhaps one reason why previous definitions of kitsch seem inadequate to explain the uses to which kitsch is being put right now is that kitsch has acquired new dimensions as recently as the last decade. I mean by this that kitsch has, as I mentioned at the outset of this essay, achieved a new prominence among, and a new valorization by, a specific demographic group; it has simultaneously become the rubric beneath which a heterogeneous group of cultural artifacts are subsumed. Newly-identified "kitsch objects" are not kitsch in the terms of Adorno’s, Eco’s, or Calinescu’s formulations. How can phenomena like the "kitsch music" revivals of recent years and appeal of the Brady Bunch movie be explained away as "degraded aesthetic experiences" enjoyed by the masses or, as Alan Gowans suggests, "art for art’s sake which happens to be out of avant-garde fashion"? It’s possible to argue that the shift in meaning is nothing more than the result of the popular bastardization of a term more carefully used in academic circles—that Newsweek doesn’t know what kitsch really is. Yet although kitsch is a "popular" phenomenon, there’s some crossover among those doing the theorizing and those doing the consuming—the consumption of kitsch artifacts is perhaps most prominent among young college-educated men and women whose cultural practices are often difficult to classify. It’s never a good idea, as Michel de Certeau charges in his discussions of Pierre Bourdieu, to suggest that the cultural signifying practices of other groups of people demand appropriation by the intellectual elite because the masses are unaware of the significance of their own actions. In the case of kitsch consumption in the nineties, it would be especially dangerous to do so—the consumers have theories of their own.

Any definition of kitsch must be historically, contextually and even in some sense nationally contingent. A definition of kitsch that attempts to transcend all of these things will necessarily self-destruct as exceptions to its inflexible rules accrue. It is considerably more productive to examine kitsch as a functional entity. Thus, rather than arguing that for any of several reasons, it is not possible to classify the music of Tony Bennett and Tom Jones as "kitsch," I would prefer to look at why it is. Whether Bennett’s and Jones’s music was kitsch when it was first performed in the 1960s and 1970s is debatable. From the standpoint of the critics I’ve been discussing, all popular music is already kitsch— "easy listening," as the record store classification would have it. What is important is that now it is enjoyed by a group of individuals, classifiable primarily by age and education level, as kitsch. The enormous popularity of Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and Tom Jones among college students is not evidence of the cross-generational appeal of "talent" or "showmanship" — it is, instead, a testament to the contemporary draw of kitsch, whatever that draw may be. It may be that kitsch is attractive precisely because it is beyond the realm of "good taste" (which means, of course, two entirely different things in the realm of "alternative" music and that of the art history classroom or the gallery); kitsch can appeal to a consumer because, as Jules Pfeiffer remarks, it "is there to entertain us on the basest, most compromised of levels. . . . Junk, like the drunk at the wedding, can get away with doing or saying anything because, by its very appearance, it is already in disgrace" (cited in Twitchell, 54.) However, something besides a snide pleasure in one’s own sophistication makes kitsch "work" today— it triggers nostalgia in a group of people whose consciousness has always been mediated by the media and who are perhaps more technologically adept and sophisticated than any other generation that has preceded them. Susan Stewart distinguishes two kinds of souvenir items: those which are "personal" and meaningful only within a specific individual context, and those which have a prefabricated history and have only to be purchased. This second type is more often purchased by children, who have fewer of the first type of souvenir simply because they are younger. But what happens when mass-marketing and increasingly rapid periodization combine to create adult individuals whose nostalgia is for things connoting a time they don’t really remember? The result is a potentially endless consumer pool for items which can be linked either to a vaguely-defined "era" ("the Seventies") or to an extremely specific fashion trend or moment ("a ponytail worn through the back of a baseball cap is so Esprit circa 1984").

There is also a sense in which the current market for kitsch is the result of a breakdown in the rules of taste-making. Contemporary kitsch consumers don’t believe in "art," recognizing that art and money are inextricably bound up in each other. Today’s consumers look to kitsch consumption as a way of rejecting an aesthetic hierarchy forced upon them by economically determined and class-bound interests. I believe, too, that consumption of "retro-kitsch" began as a kind of reaction to the 1980s, a period in which the consumption of "trendy" goods reached a kind of crisis point after which interest in "the latest thing" began to wane. In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich analyzes the effect of the "yuppie" phenomenon on those who were young adults in the 1980s. She argues that affordable "status items" (ranging from Rolex watches to imported, herb-infused vinegars) took the place of now unaffordable "big ticket" items like houses and cars as signs of wealth and success, and that this shift obscured the fact that the middle class was disappearing into the abyss which was rapidly forming between the wealthy elite and the impoverished majority. The market in art cannot be dissociated from this general trend; corporate investment in art reached an all-time high in the 1980s, and private collection of art mirrored corporate interest to a lesser extent. Collections of kitsch, then, are not merely a way to reject an overwhelmingly consumerist society whose insistence on ever-increasing periodization renders new styles obsolete in months or even weeks; they are also economically expedient.

It is tempting to see in this apparent rejection of the categories of taste the desire to exhibit one’s own worldly knowledge by appreciating kitsch in the way that Susan Sontag’s "connoisseur of Camp" demonstrates his "dandyism in the age of mass culture [which] makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object" by "sniff[ing] the stink and prid[ing] himself on his strong nerves" (289). There is, of course, always the desire to confound kitsch with camp; Gillo Dorfles suggests that kitsch can be re-valorized when isolated "elements" of kitsch are decontextualized and placed within the confines of a work of true artistic merit, or when kitsch is valued precisely because it is in poor taste, for its gaudiness or excessive ornamentation, a situation he identifies as indicative of a "camp" sensibility. James B. Twitchell obviously valorizes camp over kitsch. In his "Taxonomy of Academic Taste," (a chart in which the dividing line between high and low culture is found running between Ivana Trump, who is evidently more highbrow, and her ex-husband, Donald) "kitsch" is consigned to a position below both The People’s Court and the Super Bowl while "camp" is to be found just above Andy Warhol and just below "The Nutcracker Suite." For Twitchell, the difference between kitsch and camp is one of self-consciousness; "kitsch has pretensions toward taste and camp is just good fun." Of course, this self-consciousness is rooted in a class distinction, a point Twitchell never quite concedes, although he remarks that "‘kitsch’ [comes] from the German, meaning petty bourgeois; and ‘camp’ from the French se camper, a phrase ripe with a history of upper-class English use even before Susan Sontag" (Twitchell 54.) These distinctions are useful in approaching again the question of the difference between men in drag and women performing their own gender; the first is camp, while the second is kitsch. Camp is a sly celebration of bad taste and vulgarity from a position of privilege; in a male-dominated society, men in drag also enjoy a hegemonic superiority that enables them to impersonate the female while remaining male. On the other hand, if kitsch is desirous of attaining true beauty, but inevitably unable to do so, so too is femininity constantly struggling not to parody itself but to be itself.

One of the most insidious features of the past decade’s kitsch phenomenon is its specific application to young women. I have suggested that feminine appearance is always, to some extent, mediated by kitschification—that women’s bodies and faces are adorned in ways that suggest the "evil," degraded kitsch object that strives to signify beauty and artistry but demonstrates only what Susan Stewart calls its "saturation of materiality." But the recent rash of seventies paraphernalia marketed specifically towards women marks a new level in this process. I will pass over a potentially fecund topic— that of the mid-nineties "schoolgirl" look resulting in the sale of "mini" kilts, blazers inscribed with faux school crests, and high heeled penny loafers to women long out of their teens—by remarking only that this trend, as well as that of the "waif look," struck many commentators as part of an anti-feminist backlash, and this seems to me to be not unlikely. Instead, I’d like to focus on the sale of such items as "baby" tee-shirts and Girl Scout and Brownie uniforms at chain retailers such as Urban Outfitters. What is the message behind the sale of a Brownie uniform shirt to an adult? Does it differ from the sale of a poster of seventies teen idol Shaun Cassidy to the same person? There is, of course, the common feature of nostalgia in the consumption of these items. Both might reasonably be considered to be a souvenir more than an item of kitsch, except for the fact that the object was not purchased at the time of its actual manufacture, used, and then saved, but rather is being purchased at the present time as a token of a past that might have belonged to the purchaser and which is now regarded with a mixture of remembrance and ironic distance. The picture of Shaun Cassidy may be cherished by a young woman who cannot remember his albums because she was a baby when they first came out—nevertheless, the poster is valuable as an artifact of a time aggressively marketed to everyone from eighteen to thirty as "childhood." Wearing the Brownie uniform shirt, however, forces the consumer to self-kitschify; a woman in such a garment is engaging in a process of signification that ultimately provokes desire in a viewer nostalgic for his or her own past by evoking memories of an idealized childhood. Like the bar of soap from Graceland, however, what she does not signify is her "function" as an adult woman; indeed, the exigencies of maintaining a grown body capable of fitting into children’s clothing work can help preclude such signification

So, given that savvy contemporary consumers seem able to understand the mechanisms underlying their kitsch consumption, how can the kitschified female body be exposed? It is worthwhile to look at the image of Courtney Love, one of popular music’s current stars and the lead singer of a band provocatively named "Hole." One of the much-trumpeted new generation of "women in rock," "discovered" by music magazines about the same time that mainstream news publications announced advent of "post-feminism," Love is an icon of sorts, famous for her marriage to Kurt Cobain, the late lead singer of Nirvana. Love’s stage persona is a mixture of the alluring and the repellent—she became famous for her (often torn and soiled) baby doll dresses, tiny tee shirts, and brief panties. Her bleached hair featured obvious dark roots at all times, while her trademark red lipstick, poorly applied as if with an unsteady hand, revealed both her actual and her "false" lips simultaneously. Love’s appearance, so close to the guidelines of mainstream fashion that it was nearly impossible to tell whether (or what, exactly) she was parodying, became a kind of meta-kitsch production. Her vocals, careening back and forth between a kind of little-girl voice and an enraged scream, seem to mimic her appearance; her long legs display powerful muscles beneath her flimsy short dresses, while her breasts strain against the confines of tee shirts that were clearly manufactured for an unnaturally thin woman whose body more closely approximates the contours of a child’s. Affecting the accoutrements of a spoiled daughter (one of the cover photos of Live Through This shows a "glamorous" Love in a tiara, fur coat and white tights, lighting a cigarette) she is a mocking reminder of the grotesquerie of feminine adornment as well as a shocking subversion of the idea of little-girl chic: Lolita all grown up and still wearing the same dress. The unifying trope of the album is that of the broken doll, reflected in the album cover art, which includes a black and white photo of stuffed animals and a decapitated doll, a tube protruding from her neck, lying in a heap amid weeds. The doll is a perfect, controllable self, "a seamless body," one in which "sexuality and hence the danger of power" are lost and one which "exists not in the domain of lived reality, but in the realm of commodity relations" (Stewart 124.) It is always miniaturized, and thus never "original"; referring always to an idea of beauty which is beyond it; it brings the potential power of the art object within the control even of children, and makes heimlich that which exists beyond the domestic sphere. The doll, finally, is a reference to an imaginary time and place in which women are effortlessly glamorous, beautiful without self-beautification. Love’s headless doll, thus, reveals the falsity of a nostalgic desire to manufacture feminine identity out of "doll parts."

Love’s subsequent makeovers are fascinating follow-ups to her mid-90s look. Following a 1995 profile inVanity Fair , Love began to recreate herself, first as designer frock-wearing movie star, then as soccer mom to her now five-year-old daughter, Frances Bean. Her latest album, Celebrity Skin, is a radical departure from Live Through This; the artwork is overall far more seriously "artistic," featuring grim, colorless photos of Los Angeles, while the music has evolved from punk-influenced alternative rock to slickly produced pop. Love appears regularly in her new "everywoman" guise; a recent Marie Claire cover shows her in a little black dress, sensible shoulder-length hair and neutral lip color, advertising an interview in which "Courtney Love Solves Your Man Problems!" Yet beneath this new look lie the images of her previous selves, unmistakable in the set of her famous mouth, a palimpsestic catalogue of nineties models of the feminine. Love has embodied a decade of the vicissitudes of "post-feminist" femininity, molding herself into riot-grrrl or "do-me" feminist at will; her troubling suggestion is that all of these versions, regardless of their alleged power to "liberate," are nothing more than the kitsch manifestations of an often nostalgic desire. Her mocking mid-decade suggestion that we are all dolls, broken into pieces by the fact of our own adult bodies offered a painfully new reminder of "the masquerade," and insisted that all of her later incarnations be read through the lens of her early critique. Deconstructing, then re-constructing, the multiple mechanisms of her own kitschification, Love forces us to consider the possibility that such trends in "post-feminism" as 1998’s discovery of "the new modesty" are little more than souvenirs of a conveniently remote past whose icons we can inscribe on our selves, obliterating the traces of whatever identity came before. In a decade characterized by a furious deluge of fashions in feminism (the "laddish" women of Bridget Jones’ Diary or the popular television show Sex and the City are perhaps the most recent phenomena trumpeted by a press eager for new poster girls), Love’s is a key intervention in a "post-feminist" era in which women are assured that they no longer need think about (or talk about) their gender because we’re all equally contingent in our giddy postmodern selfhood. In the pre-millennial decade kitsch objects take the place of other kinds of souvenirs of the past, making memory itself into a commodity; Love suggests that for women this is only business as usual, offering her own body as a testament to, and reenactment of, kitsch femininity nineties-style.

Stephanie Brown
Columbia University
New York, New York 10025
 
 

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