Skeletons in the Closet: The Staging of Female
Adolescent Identity
Marianne McCune
Cast of Characters
"Terri"  I like my friends, unhealthy food, talking on the telephone, shopping,
and going to parties. Sound like your typical preteen? I'M NOT! I also
like to read books + magazines, play my violin, listen to music, and of
course be dramatic about everything.
Anyway, as I was saying about me. I like school this year better, but
there's more to come thisfor this year, so I'm hopeful.
"Lynn"   My birthday is September eighth I was born 6 weeks early, therefore my
birthday is not in October. I play the violin. I haved played since I was
in kindergarten. I also play on a soccer team and have been playing
since I was about nine or so. I also like to read but, lately I have found
myself not having very much time to read (because of homework). (I
would have written more but I kind offorgot what to say. If you want me
to write/tell you anything more just ask Sorry Iforgot!-Lynn)
"Janie"  I'm a normal 12 yr. old. I go to Roosevelt Jr. High. I have alot offriends
including a best friend. I like horror movies, my dog Magic, swimming,
Wynnona Ryder, Axl Rose (Gun's and Roses), Metallica, Nirvana and
my friends. I go to sleep at 9:15-9:30 p.m. to 6:55 a.m. I have alot of
relatives and I hate my little brother. 2 days a week I go to Hebrew
School because I'm going to get a Bat Mitzvahed Hasta luego.
"Katie"  Hi, I am a pretty ordanry brown haired, brown eyed 12-year old girl
who loves olives, plays soccer, loves to swim, quit the violin & crys at
say movies. My name is Katie. It's not like anyone hasn't heard my
name before but its not comon. I have nX nickname. I guess I should
start at the beginning.
Usually, my brother and I do not fight alot. He is really nice. (As little
bro's go!) I have two cats named Buster and Target who usually sleep
on my bed at night. I have braces that I can't stand but will be getting
off in a month. I am usually pretty good in school but I'm not great at
spelling. (As you maybe can see.) My mom thinks being left-handed has
something to do with it but I just smile and say, "Everyone is born
righthanded but only the greatest overcome it!" I have a bunch of really
goodfriends that care about me and what happens to me. Vice-versa
with me. Sometimes I think we (including me!) get too wrapped up in
our sleeves andforget thatfriends are hard to come by these days.
So I wish I had something meaningful to say to wrap this up... But I
don't. I guess your study had definitely taught me somethin 'friends
andfamily are really what count. " Sap-city!!!
Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
Poem written by Janie:
Look into the past
what do you see?
A great group of
friends if seems
to be...
oldfriends, new
friends, and afew
cruelfriends.
Through tough times and
Rough times... Through
good times and better times.
I've hadyou to
turn to.
So I'm sorry to say,
that I have to leave today...
Introduction
While adolescence has often been described as a developmental stage, the staging of
adolescence, as a performance is staged, is only now being explored. The present study
attempts to understand how biological, psychological, and cultural influences combine forces
to stage the dynamic performance of female adolescent identity. I try to illuminate the
processes that link female adolescent ambivalence regarding sexuality and overt authority to
the ways in which girls perform their reactions to that ambivalence. As they turn from the
world of their parents to the world of their peers, they face a re-negotiation of the boundaries
of identity. The opportunity to assert that new identity is acted out in the competitive peer
group and in the realm of style.
Many middle class adolescent girls do not explicitly reject rules and regulations, or
structural authority. In order to assert themselves as individuals they reject overt authority in a
less direct manner; they define their identity in contrast to the identities of their parents and
established norms. But while adolescents attempt to assert their own individual and
generational identities, covert authorities gain influence in self definition. As I will elucidate in
this article, market and mass culture are almost unrecognizable as authorities, hence slipping
past adolescent desire to reject authority. Yet the adolescent performance is constrained by
these unrecognized presences. The performer's critical eye is distracted and complacency
ensues. These are the processes which I intend to make explicit by unmasking some of these
disguised authorities and the ways in which they influence female adolescent development.
The developmental stage will be understood in the context of the theatrical stage of female
adolescence.
In the spirit of Marcus and Fischer, I have tried to respond to the challenge of
"represent[ing] the embedding of richly described cultural worlds in larger impersonal systems
of political economy" (Marcus and Fischer 1986:77). According to Marcus and Fischer,
what makes representation challenging and a focus of experimentation is the
perception that the 'outside forces' in fact are an integral part of the
construction and constitution of the 'inside,' the cultural unit itself, and must
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be so registered, even at the most intimate levels of cultural process (Marcus
and Fischer 1986:77).
I have tried to trace the relationships between the everyday lives of a group of four girls and
the cultural processes that feed and are fed by their adolescent behavior. This paper should
illuminate some of the relationships between the outside forces and the inside dramas of
female adolescence.
Methods
I spent about eight months hanging out as often as possible with a group of four
eleven and twelve year old girls, hoping to understand better the culture of adolescence. One
of the girls, Terri (all proper names and institutions are aliases), has been a good friend of
mine and my family's since she was born. She, at my request, defined the peer group I
observed and in which I participated. Lynn is Terri's best friend, and Janie and Katie are best
friends, relationships which lasted throughout my time with them. They are a group of white,
middle class girls, the daughters of Berkeley doctors, lawyers, writers, teachers, and computer
experts. All of the families are politically liberal, relative to the rest of the United States'
middle class. I consider the girls' residence in Berkeley an important variation of "white and
middle class," in that Berkeley's political leftism and professed intellectual character may
produce a generation of middle class adolescents that is not representative of the general
population of the United States. This is not a comparative study, however, so I leave to the
reader to decide in what ways these girls are and are not representative.
All four of the girls were in sixth grade at Jackson Intermediate School when I began,
and are now in seventh grade at Roosevelt Junior High School. At Jackson, three of them,
Janie, Katie, and Terri, were in the same class (Ms. Baker's class) while Lynn, the fourth, was
in another class. Most of the rest of their social "clique" were in Ms. Baker's class as well, so
that is where I spent most of my school time. I, myself, attended both Jackson and Roosevelt
as a child, so I had the advantage of being familiar with the terrain, and the disadvantage of
being influenced by my own experiences there. The latter, unfortunately, is always a liability
of doing anthropology in one's own culture. I attempted to be equally conscious of the
differences and the similarities between my experiences and the girls'.
In addition to spending time with the girls, I asked them to keep personal journals for
me in which they could talk about anything and everything. I gave no indication of what I
wanted them to write about, not even whether they should write nonfiction or fiction. Toward
the end of my time with them, Katie also allowed me to look at the private joumal she had
been keeping since the third grade. This was especially helpful in that she had not been writing
with me in mind, except perhaps in the final month, when she had already decided to allow me
to read it. I quote often from the journals of the four girls, leaving their spelling and grammar
mistakes unchanged because I feel that the mistakes in the girls' writing help to preserve some
of the idiosyncrasy and character of their discourse. My only insertions are to explain to the
reader something that might be unclear, and then I put my comments in brackets.
I chose to open this ethnographic account with the girl's own words in an effort to put
off adult-erating their realities for at least a few sentences. As Dick Hebdige writes in the
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conclusion of Subculture, "we, the sociologists [and anthropologists] and interested straights,
threaten to kill with kindness the forms which we seek to elucidate" (Hebdige 1978:139). I
have never felt more strongly the desire to just tell endearing stories, with no form, structure,
or 'meanings,' than when I was organizing and writing down my analyses of the lives of four
girls for whom I have gained so much respect, compassion, and caring in the past eight
months. However, my endeavor has not been to write a novel, but to examine cultural
structures and processes and to try to communicate my findings. I only hope the reader will
keep the girls' opening words in mind as she or he reads, and allow it to throw into question all
of the analyzing, organizing, and objectifying that I, "with kindness," impose on the poetry of
adolescent life.
Theoretical Context of Adolescence
Studies of adolescence have fallen into three main categories: the bio-psychological,
the psychoanalytic, and the socio-cultural. The bio-psychological approach has looked to link
the biological origins of puberty and adolescence to their psychological expression, as did
Stanley Hall's adolescent stress hypothesis, which Margaret Mead set out to test in Samoa.
Stanley Hall believed that the moody and rebellious character of adolescence was biologically
determined, that raging hormones brought adolescent scowls and frowns (Hall, in Mead 1928).
Among those using psychoanalytic approaches to the study of adolescence, Erik
Erikson is perhaps the most well-known. Erikson explored adolescence as part of an in-depth
psychoanalytic study of childhood, Childhood and Society, and in a number of other texts.
Erikson writes that the psychoanalytic method is more than the study of neurosis as analogy
for societal phenomena. Instead, he defines it as an historical method, a study of
"psychological evolution through the analysis of the individual" (Erikson 1963:15). Erikson
probes deep into "selected aspects of the end of childhood and of entrance into adulthood
under the changing conditions of industrialization in this country" (Erikson 1963:46). In this
sense, Erikson's psychoanalytic approach resembles socio-cultural approaches to adolescence.
Erikson's work was heavily influenced, for instance, by the work of Margaret Mead
in Samoa. In her most famous and, unfortunately, infamous book, Coming of Age in Samoa,
Mead disputed Hall's "adolescent stress hypothesis," extrapolating from her relativist
conclusions about Samoan adolescents that the sturm und drang of American adolescence was
due to American cultural influences, rather than biology. She blamed the rigidity of American
institutions and the American family for the storminess of American adolescence. Beatrice
Whiting and her colleagues have also done extensive, cross-cultural research on adolescence.
Like Margaret Mead, however, their studies have focused more on socialization by parents and
immediate community, neglecting the mass cultural role in adolescent dynamics (cf. Whiting
and Edwards 1988).
All of these approaches to the study of adolescence help to illuminate it as a stage of
development. However, none of them satisfy the contemporary need for ethnographic studies
of adolescence that address the links between the common conditions of adolescence and the
mass cultural conditions that have become such an important cultural force, especially in the
United States. Erikson, Mead, and Whiting all focus too narrowly on the family upbringing
and institutional socialization of adolescents to be sufficiently expanded to encompass present
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conditions of late capitalism. The dynamic relationship between adolescent identity and mass
cultural processes needs further exploration.
Adolescence as Performance
In an attempt to understand the dynamics of American middle class adolescence, I
have found Erving Goffman's social-psychological account of the performance of self, in The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), useful for understanding the moments of
negotiation between biology, psychology, community, and mass capitalist culture that
comprise American adolescence. Although Goffman did not write his book specifically about
adolescence, his notion of the self as an unstable and inconsistent performative process is
particularly apt for analysis of the interactions of adolescent girls with each other and the
world around them.
Goffman's work, as applied to adolescence, is fairly consistent with Erikson's theory
of adolescence as a stage. Adolescents stand at the threshold of adulthood. This threshold can
be understood as the theatrical stage on which the dynamic perfonnances of adolescence are
held. The content of the performances are constantly changing to find expression for the
varying constitution of the actors and to adapt to varying audiences. Goffinan's concept of self
as a performance adapted to different audiences provides a model for understanding the
staging of adolescent behavior as the negotiated process between biology, psychology,
community, and mass culture.
Goffman describes the self in terms of a series of performances for different
audiences. Each situation in which an individual participates demands "a framework of
appearances that must be maintained, whether or not there is feeling behind the appearances"
(Goffman 1959:242). The self is focused outward, on an audience the performer wishes to
impress in some way, although the audience to whom he or she directs a performance may be
internalized when the performer strongly believes in the reality of her or his performance to
that audience.
In such cases the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be
performer and observer of the same show. Presumably he intracepts or
incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others
so that his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way (Goffinan
1959:81).
Even when alone, behavior may be tailored to some ideal of an audience present in the
conscience. The self is performed to different sets of either internalized or consciously
addressed audiences.
Common Context ofAdolescence
There are two commonly acknowledged conditions of female adolescence that
constitute the context of female adolescent performance, each eliciting confusing ambivalence
regarding that performance. First, puberty brings changes that alter the body of the actor,
demanding adaptations in her performance of self. As the shape and hormonal make-up of her
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body change, she is forced to adapt her performance in response to those changes. At the same
time, cultural meanings of female sexuality influence her responses to these bodily changes,
complicating the re-negotiation of self that the bodily changes necessitate and inviting
ambivalence regarding sexuality and womanhood. Second, adolescence is a time of resistance
to overt authorities. Adolescent girls want to separate themselves from their mothers, assert an
identity of their own. They become resistant to any overt authority, in search of a realm in
which they can feel their own authority. The extent of their authority, however, is limited by
their position as the daughters of their parents, as minors in the state, and as females in a male
dominated world. These limits frustrate their desires for separation and autonomy and, again,
invite ambivalence, this time regarding authority. These two conditions of female adolescence
necessitate complicated negotiations in the performance of a female self.
As puberty arrives and adolescent girls' bodies begin to grow in some places and
shrink in others, the self that they present must be adapted to the new components of their
physical selves. Sometimes they dread the changes and feel that their developing bodies betray
them, and sometimes they eagerly await the changes. Either way, the changes usurp some of
the girls' control over themselves and force them to re-negotiate the boundaries of their
changing selves.
Girls' dread of the physical changes that puberty brings can be partially explained by
the ways in which female sexuality are presented in this culture. The emerging sexuality of
their bodies can be intimidating in a culture where a large portion of representations of female
sexuality emphasize the disempowerment and victimization of women precisely as a result of
their sexuality.
I recently watched a TV movie with Terni in which the main character was a 16 year
old girl who lived with, and was sexually abused by, her mother's boyfriend while her mother
was off working as a prostitute in another city. In this narrative, every sexual encounter was
abusive. The sixteen year old girl ended up shooting and killing her mother's boyfriend, to
which Terri responded, "I think she was right, but she shouldn't have killed him. She should
have gone to the police." Regardless of whether Terri was right about what should or could
have been the 16 year old girl's recourse, Terri's reactions to the scenes in which the girl was
abused were revealing. She was not at all surprised at the girl's victimization. This kind of
image is abundant almost to the point of banality in our culture, and Terri did not show any
sign of outrage or righteousness. It was horrible to Terri, but certainly not unthinkable. She
expressed a combination of fear and distaste and did not want to continue watching the movie
very much longer. It is this cultural presence of everyday horror that translates, on some level,
into fear of the sexual changes that take place in girls' bodies at this age.
Katie writes about a similar fear in her description of an incident that took place at
her sailing class:
We just had capsizing day. It was fun. Then in the dressing rooms, we could
hear everything the boyz said. They were talking about chicks. ['Boo! Hiss!'
is written above the word 'chick.'] We stopped listening. It was gross!
Evidently, the sight of girls in wet clothes inspired in everybody, girls and boys, a
consciousness of their developing sexuality. Katie is not particularly "developed" for her age,
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but she seems one of the least comfortable of the group with the changes that are taking place.
She dresses in baggy, unrevealing and very gender-neutral clothes most of the time. Katie's
displeasure at the term "chick" reveals, perhaps, a fear of the potential for objectification that
the curves of her body allow.
While sexuality can thus be fearsome, girls also see their newly sexualized bodies as
empowering, as indicators of their mature womanhood and, therefore, their authority. Because
the ideal of success for women that reverberates through our culture usually includes sexual
attractiveness very prominently (Steiner-Adair 1990), many girls receive their bodily changes
as a signal of success, even while they may be afraid of them. If they feel that their sexuality
allows them the potential to be powerful by attracting boys, then adolescent bodily changes are
something to look forward to. Janie, for instance, was happy to get her period even though she
was one of the very first. She was so eager that, according to Katie, she even claimed once to
have gotten it before she actually had. After getting it, Janie writes in her diary: "I feel so
different doing stuff I used to with my period. Just hanging around and talking. Like now I'm
complete." Janie is also excited about other bodily changes.
At the pool on Friday, I had hair sticking out of my bathing suit. Me and
Natalie are the most matured kids of are group of friend. At least body-wise,
because we are the ones who always where are bras. Terri never does. Today
she was wearing a shirt where she hella [version of "hell of," slang for
"really" or "very much"] needed one.
These anecdotes reflect a pride in bodily change because change indicates progress in the race
toward 'successful' womanhood.
Whether sexuality equals fear or success, or both, it is a cause for alarm and
rethinking of the self that a girl is to perform. The discomfort girls like Katie feel about their
bodily changes may intensify their desire for some stable and continuous identity to counter
the threatening instability of female sexuality. Even for girls like Janie, who perceive the
physical changes as positive or empowering, those changes are still de-stabilizing to the self in
that they alter the ideals of success that feed identity. Sexuality is a reminder of the threshold
tt which adolescents stand. The loss of bodily control and ambivalence regarding sexuality
inspire the desire for a stable and continuous identity that will reconcile the contradictions of
sexuality.
Female adolescence is also a time of resistance to overt authorities. This occurs partly
in reaction to the physical changes that are forcing girls to re-negotiate their identities. They
yeam to reject the authority of their parents and established institutions as a means of asserting
their own autonomy. This rejection, however, is frustrated by the lack of real authority they
have in making decisions for themselves. They feel and desire a self separate from that of their
parents, yet they are still subject to the control of their parents and of institutional authorities.
As a result, female adolescent performances of self include the negotiation of some sort of
authority that does not conflict with the real, or structural, authority of parents and institutions.
As puberty hits, girls begin to resist talking to their parents about events they feel their parents
would not understand. Katie writes in her journal:
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Over the weekend I went to the 'ranch' (near cazerdo) with my family. I
never realized exactly how embarrassing they are. I mean I get along really
well with my mom but we're not really that close. I don't exactly tell her
what goes on at some of our parties. Like Rochelle and Kay daring each
other to kiss boyz....My dad know what goes on at school even though I
don't really tell him he gets the idea. We have kind of a closeness that I can't
really explain. It's like we have ESP for each other... .It's great, but we don't
talk about well that kind of stuff.
Janie writes:
I need someone to talk to. I can't talk to my mom or Laura [her older sister]
or anybody. About growing up. I'm so confused. Friends, puberty.. .etc. you
name it!
To adolescents, parents seem far from authorities on the subjects that are becoming important
to them. The girls are wary of talking to their parents about subjects they perceive as private or
taboo and begin to withhold information from them.
Bothered by the imposition of their parents' authority on their lives, girls seek to
separate themselves from it. Terri's eyes are constantly rolling when she talks about her
mother. Her mother's clothes are wrong, her conversation is boring or irritating-she is
basically a nuisance. Of course, Terri tends to be unusually critical of everything. But this sort
of criticism, a means of resisting the authority of and rebelling against parents and other
power-holders, is very common. Lynn is embarrassed when her parents watch the TV show
Beverly Hills 90210 with her and makes fun of them for telling her that "it brings up good
topics to talk about." Janie fights with her mother and father all the time, and feels she cannot
talk to them about the content of her adolescent life. There is a growing need to see themselves
as different from their parents, an increasing sense of self, that spawns frustration regarding
their parents' roles in the girls' lives and identities.
Adolescents' self-assertion is also frustrated by the ambiguity of their position in
relation to institutional authority. As they begin to hold stronger opinions and beliefs about the
world and their place in it, they are still tied to the authority of the institutions in which they
are obligated to participate. Paul Willis summarizes:
All young people experience one aspect or another of the contemporary
'social condition' of youth: unwilling economic dependence on parents or
parental homes; uncertainty regarding future planning; powerlessness and
lack of control over immediate circumstances of life.. .imposed institutional
and ideological constructions of 'youth' which privilege certain readings and
definitions of what young people should do, feel, or be (1990:13).
Adolescents feel themselves becoming more 'mature,' physically and mentally, yet they are
still expected to obey authorities (even more so than the older age group to which Willis
refers). On the three-day camping trip that Terri, Katie, and Janie's class took, I witnessed
extreme frustration with the necessity of obeying authorities. The first day we went hiking,
almost everybody resisted from the start. Hiking was not their idea of how to enjoy the trip.
They complained constantly, and asserted that it was not fair for the teacher to make them go;
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it should be their right to choose not to go. When they were ultimately forced to hike, they
were very vocal about their frustration over not having a voice in decisions made for them, yet
reluctantly cooperative in continuing on the hike. The contradiction between adolescents'
emerging voices and their lack of actual authority to use them in many situations both feeds
and frustrates their desire to redefine and assert new selves. Their conflicting needs to assert
themselves and still cooperate with the regulations set for them spawn more ambivalence.
While this ambivalence in the face of authority is true for both boys and girls, the
frustration may be stronger for girls in that they also feel and are taught about the marginality
of women in our culture (Gilligan 1990). In one instance of the camping trip, some of the girls
were frustrated when the boys who were supposed to be a part of their dish-washing team for
dinner did not show up. The girls would have liked to assert their authority and evade dish-
washing responsibilities as well, but they felt obligated to stay, especially since the boys were
absent. In this case, the girls' authority was frustrated both by institutional and male assertion
of authority. Carol Gilligan eloquently describes the paradox,
for girls to remain responsive to themselves, they must resist the conventions
of feminine goodness; to remain responsive to others, they must resist the
values placed on self-sufficiency and independence in North American
culture (Gilligan 1990: 10).
Again, ambivalence between responsiveness and independence pervades female adolescence.
For the most part, established authorities are not rejected in middle class female
adolescence. They retain real control over kids of this age. Adolescent girls rarely rebel against
rules and regulations set for them by authority figures, and even seek them out now and then.
One night I ate dinner with both Katie's and Terri's families at Terri's house. I sat with the
kids, Terri, Katie, Katie's brother Tom, and four Zuni girls who were staying with the two
families at the time. Although the kids were given autonomy enough to sit separately from the
adults, when a conflict arose between Katie and Tom and escalated into a problem they were
unwilling to negotiate between each other, they went immediately and without reservation into
the other room to turn the problem over to the hands of authorities, their parents. In general,
these middle class girls have very law-abiding personalities. All except Janie, whose older and
"'wild" sister is an important authority in Janie's life, are still strongly opposed to the use of
drugs, smoking cigarettes, and skipping school. They do not rebel against the rules their
parents set for them and rarely reject their moral stands.
As a result, adolescent girls' authority must be negotiated in other realms: it must be
expressed outside the boundaries of authority that parents and institutions maintain. This
ambivalence about the roles of parental, institutional, and, on some accounts, male authority in
female adolescent identity is important in girls' negotiated performances of self. Like their
ambivalence regarding sexuality, their ambivalence regarding overt authority must be grappled
with as they present new identities. Because they accept a major portion of their parents' and
instructors' regulations and moralities, Terri and her friends must find other modes of asserting
the performance of their own authority.
These conditions of female adolescence produce ambivalence and instability. The
conflicting drives and demands of pubescent changes and cultural meanings of sexuality, as
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well as of adolescent desires for autonomy and parental and institutional authority, push and
pull from both inside and out. Adolescents, as performers, must grapple with these tugs as they
search for an identity that will allow what Erikson calls "continuity and sameness" (Erikson
1963:261).
Response to Ambivalence: Shift in Audience
In response to their ambivalence regarding these conditions of adolescence-sexual
confusion and frustrating power relations-adolescent girls divert their attentions toward the
peer community. As they grow older and sexuality and self-assertion become more important,
the realm of the social life becomes more central. There, they can experiment with identities
autonomous of any overt authorities. The peer group allows them to benefit from the security
of people exploring the same terrain as they, while also allowing them quasi-freedom from the
"institutional constructions of 'youth"' (Willis 1990:13) imposed by overt authorities. A diary
Katie began in the 3rd grade is almost entirely about parties by the time she reaches sixth
grade. Sixth grade is the year that "boy-girl" parties become regularities (including games like
Spin the Bottle that allow them to explore the sexual arena as a group), as well as overnight
parties and get togethers among girls. Among their friends, adolescent girls seek a continuity
of identity without the interference of their parents and institutions. An adolescent world is
constructed wherein there are few overt authorities and many opportunities for self assertion.
In response to the combination of conflicting feelings about sexuality and a strong yearning to
be autonomous, adolescents turn their focus and energies to the society of peers surrounding
them.
The assertion of a female adolescent identity is thus an attempt to create a world in
which the authorities to whom girls are usually accountable have little or no place. They are
still subject to adult imposed regulations, but they are allowed a more independent self
definition. They gain a social network that is entirely separate from their parents. When friends
are not physically present, relations are conducted over the phone where information can be
shared completely privately. I have often seen Terri run for the phone before even the first ring
is finished sounding. They sit at a separate table from their parents when they have dinner with
friends. Their rooms become sanctuaries of privacy, where they are in charge of decor, can
cover the walls with photographs of Beverly Hills 90210 characters, can write in private
diaries, and can tell each other secrets. Terri even does her own wash, and sometimes cooks
her own meals. All four of the girls receive a substantial allowance, $25 a month, and some of
them work as baby-sitters or odd-job workers to increase their incomes. Money gives them a
chance to own some of the things their parents refuse to buy for them. In Terri's case, for
instance, purchases include some fancy shampoo and hair mousse, or in Katie's case, various
teen magazines. They buy rap albums that their parents might find offensive or make-up that
they are embarrassed to admit to wanting. In essence, these middle class adolescents obtain a
substantial degree of separateness from overt authorities. They have a social network, living
space, secrets, responsibilities, media, and material property from hair products to clothes to
calculators or cameras.
In Goffman's vocabulary, this tum towards a society of peers can be translated as a
shift in audience (1959). As the girls reach an age where social interaction outside of the
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family is increasingly important, their consciousness of others and target audience shifts from
parents to peers. While they have partially internalized the audience their parents have
provided since birth, they turn their more conscious energies to their peers, whose authority is
less explicit. Their peers constitute an audience of equals: people whose bodies are also
changing, who also lack real authority, and who are also searching out a new audience. This
audience provides a different and more negotiable set of power relations, allowing for the
boundaries of self to be more supple and the performer more autonomous.
Peer Competition and Symbolic Expression
Adolescent girls act out this audience shift both competitively and symbolically. In
these two realms they seek to assert a continuous and authentic identity in contrast to the
identities of overt authorities. First, adolescent girls perform their rejection of established
authorities by turning to the privacy of peer groups where they may competitively negotiate
authority among each other, ignoring overt authorities. Therein, they find both security and
discord; well-defined cliques provide them with the continuity they desire as well as with more
supple power relations that allow competition for authority. Second, girls' appropriate
theatrical props of identity that symbolize their separateness from established authorities. They
costume themselves in particular aesthetic styles in order to assert their independence from
overt authorities. Neither of these performances of authority threaten the status quo, against
which they generally do not rebel. Their performed rejection of authority, among their peers
and in the realm of the symbolic, does not contradict overt authority; instead, it avoids overt
authority. This avoidance of overt authorities increases adolescents' susceptibility to the power
of covert authorities, those of production and advertising and of mass media, to intervene and
exploit adolescent ambivalence regarding their bodies and authority, and the instability of
adolescent identity.
The Peer Group
Adolescent girls reject the identifying authority of their parents and other overt
authorities through their turn to the apparent solidarity of the peer group. The youthful society
in which they find themselves both reassures them and positions them in a competitive
framework of individuals who are each after some degree of authority.
Adolescent commitment to an audience of peers is partially acted out in the small
groups we know as cliques. Especially beginning around the 6th grade, girls spend more and
more time reinforcing their identity as a group. During spring break, for example, Katie's
backyard became the site of daily picnics involving most or all of the 'members' of their
clique. The loss of intimate classroom structure in junior high makes the importance of a
stuctured social network of peers increasingly pressing (although cliques certainly exist in the
years before junior high). Cliques allow a personal and everyday network of interaction, acting
as an audience for which girls can experiment in their performances of self and providing the
security of group exploration. Erikson writes that adolescents "help one another temporarily
through much discomfort by forming cliques" (Erikson 1963:262). By discomfort, he refers to
the instability of the adolescent process of redefining oneself: "samenesses and continuities
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relied on earlier are more or less questioned again" (1963:261). Cliques relieve some of the
insecurity of adolescent ambivalence, offering some external structure to an internal chaos.
In return for the provision of structure, however, the audience demands consistency
and authenticity from its performer. In their search for sameness and continuity within
themselves, the girls demand it of each other in order to secure the structure of their clique.
Audience members scrutinize their performers for authenticity, checking that there is "feeling
behind the appearances" (Goffman 1959:242) of the performer. For example, in one
conversation between all four of the girls and a fifth member of their clique (Emma), Lynn
claimed to have talked to Jake (Terni's ex-boyfriend at the time) on the phone the night before:
Lynn: He called me last night, and...
Terri: He did?
Lynn:
Terri:
Janie:
Terrn:
Lynn:
Janie:
Katie:
Terrn:
Emma:
Lynn:
Emma:
Yeah, and he said, Lynn, where's Terri?
He wasn'tfucking home last night, Lynn.
That's true.
So you're lying again.
No, he called at like five or six.
Yeah? We called him atfive and he wasn't home.
Cross examination?
Lynn, you do this. You forget what day it is.
We didn't call at five or six [to Janie]!
No, he called me last night and said, "Where is... "
I think he did.
Terri and Janie question the authenticity of Lynn's assertion of her phone call, therefore her
friendship with Jake, and then Emma questions the authenticity of Janie's assertion that Lynn
could not have talked to Jake ("he wasn't home"). Each audience member pays close attention
to the authenticity of other clique members performances and each performer tries to maintain
as much continuity and sameness as possible. Members of the audience thus demand
successful, or perceptibly authentic, performances out of discomfort with their own
incontinuity and contradiction.
Goffman uses the term team to define "a set of individuals whose intimate
cooperation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained"
(1959:104). That is to say, a team of individuals works cooperatively to maintain a coherent
performance.
A teammate is someone whose dramaturgical co-operation one is dependent
upon in fostering a given definition of the situation: if such a person comes
to be beyond the pale of informal sanctions and insists on giving the show
away or forcing it to take a particular turn, he is none the less part of the
team. In fact, it is just because he is part of the team that he can cause this
kind of trouble (Goffinan 1959:83).
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According to Goffiman, the mutual dependence of team members gives any member of a team
the power to disrupt the performance by introducing destructive information. Team members
are forced to rely on each other to project an agreed upon definition of a given situation, and
as a result, risk the betrayal of their performance by any of the other team members.
Goffman also addresses the issue of designated roles within a team. He suggests that
if team members are to be cooperative, they should be "unanimous in the positions they take"
in a given situation, hence, well informed about the stand the team is taking (1959:89).
Because consensus and cooperation are rarely achieved without direction and designation of
roles, however, Goffman introduces two dimensions in a team-performance that often guide
the positions within and character of a performance: directive and dramatic dominance
(1959:101). One often finds in a team-performance that "someone is given the right to direct
and control the progress of the dramatic action" (1959:97) and/or someone is "made the star,
lead, or center of attention" (1959:100).
Although Goffman makes a clear distinction between cliques and teams in his
analysis, that distinction is unnecessary in an application of the team model to adolescent girl
cliques. The girls are joined together to assert themselves as identifiably separate from their
parents and other authorities. They are engaged in a group performance of the selves they wish
to present to each other and to the general public. Because they are dependent on the secure
structure of the clique to provide them with an audience of peers, they are mutually dependent
in the negotiation of their performances of self. In this sense, they are forcibly a team in their
perfonnance of the selves of their clique, as well as each others' audience.
Because adolescent girls are engaged in a desire for and process of rejecting
authority, they are resistant to accepting any obvious directive or dramatic dominance from
their peers. They do not want to repeat in the peer group the vertical relations they have with
their parents and other authorities. Their focus on the peer group as an audience for their
presentation of self is a result of their desire to escape overt authority. Hence, when vertical
relations within the peer group arise, there is competition, especially among the more intensely
resistant to outside authority, to act as the authority in the group rather than allow others to do
so. Directive or dramatic dominance (the two are generally interchangeable for my purposes)
are sought out within the parameters of the team.
As a result of their competition, the girls are uncooperative as a team. This may help
to explain the commonly referred to cruelty of adolescent girls to each other. The girls are
dealing with contradictory drives: one, to reap the benefits of a group identity and structure,
and the other, to be autonomous and powerful individuals. They thus find themselves engaged
in a competition for directive dominance in their team performances through disruption of
other team members' directions. Their interdependence as a team in their "presentation of self'
gives each girl a stake in her friends' performances, so she interrupts the performances that
contradict her own projected definition of a situation. Competition for directive dominance
thus discourages cooperation as a team as they try to hinder each other's performances in
efforts to control team definition and role designation. Instead of cooperating, the girls disrupt
the performances their peers define in efforts to redefine the structure and drama of the
performance to their advantage.
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Although my claim that this competition is felt by all the girls, not just the so-called
leaders, may seem contradictory to other theories that clique members fall into categories of
leaders and followers and it is only the leaders who compete for dominance, my observations
of this particular group have led me to a slightly different interpretation. Katie's diary entry
about the idea of leaders and followers helps to explain;
Janie and Terri are leaders. Lynn and I are flowers [followers]. Opsites
attract. Terri and Janie couldn't spend 2 days together with out some kind of
tuffle. Lynn and I work well together though.
According to Katie, and agreed upon by most of the girls, Terri and Janie are two of the most
successful at asserting their dominance over their peers. Their assertiveness, perhaps correlated
with a more intense desire than the others to be seen as autonomous, or perhaps because of
some biological or psychological personality trait, makes them natural candidates for
dominance. As leaders, they try to define and structure the performances in which they
participate to their advantage. Katie and Lynn, on the other hand, often follow Terri or Janie
by adapting themselves to the situations that Terri and Janie define, but this does not mean that
they are not engaged in any competition for authority. For example, their choice of whom to
follow may be a competitive choice regarding who has more solid standing in the clique. The
girls have varying degrees of success in different methods of asserting their dominance, and so
do it in different ways. Their hesitance to challenge the authority of the leaders can be
understood, instead, as a lack of confidence that they will gain any dominance by directly
challenging the leaders.
Because the security of clique, or team, membership is extremely important to all of
the girls (for reasons discussed earlier), maintenance of any position in the clique, whether
dominant or not, is very important. If that membership would be threatened by challenging a
leader, then it is unlikely that a girl will do so. Definitional disruptions are risky if one is not
assured of enough support in the clique. The competition is thus conducted diplomatically.
Riesman's statement regarding the "other-directed person" can be extended to encompass all
kinds of persons. "Because it is approval for which one is competing one must repress one's
overt competitiveness" (Reisman 1953:103). One must compete within the constraints of what
that competition may offer without risking abandonment by the team. Strategy is of utmost
importance.
Competitive Advantage and Institutionalized Discord
The competition among girls for dominance in team-perfonnances is played out in
such a way that the parameters of the team are never challenged, while its internal structure is
constantly re-negotiated. When there is a conflict of definitions and the girls break down into
rival groups within the team, there is no such breakdown of the team itself. That is to say, the
same girls still associate with one another, and identify themselves as part of the same group.
Disruption, rather than cooperation, is the norm, yet it rarely leads to any questioning of the
value of being a part of a particular team. The clique thus engages in a sort of
"institutionalized discord" (Goffman 1953:211), the tenn Goffinan uses to describe the
performance of a court hearing. The discord that competition among clique members spawns
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is normal, as is the discord that ensues in courtroom hearings. The adolescent girl clique is an
institution of competition, discord its long-standing tradition.
The strained relations between Terni and Janie during the study and even since the
third grade help to exemplify the primary ways in which competition for team dominance is
played out without threatening team parameters. Terni and Lynn are best friends and Janie and
Katie are best friends, according to everyone who knows them and regardless of how they are
getting along. Terni's or Janie's directive dominance is derived partly from the respective
support of Lynn or Katie. Conflicts arise when Lynn does not follow Terni or when Katie does
not follow Janie. In order for Terni or Janie or any of the others to attract the support of
followers, to be a leader, she must gain some competitive advantage that allows her directive
or dramatic dominance in the team. There are two primary ways of gaining dominance over
the group: through information control, and through boys and attractiveness. (Other ways of
gaining competitive advantage, such as academic achievement or sports, may sometimes be
factors or correlated with other competitive advantages, but their importance was generally
minimal in my study.) Neither of these two forms of competition threatens the parameters of
the team; the competition is either indirect or the discord caused by direct confrontation is
institutionally condoned.
Controlling, or trafficking, information within a clique ascribes some competitive
advantage in gaining team dominance. Information may be impersonal, such as media news or
knowledge of the lives of older kids, or it may be information, gossip, about people and events
in or related to the clique. Both are used to gain dominance: the first by attracting the respect
or admiration of the other girls and the second by tooling a redefinition of the team structure.
The latter, used most often, is indirectly competitive when the gossip is done behind the
victim's back. When it is expressed in front of the person, it is usually done so within some
institutional tradition, posing no threat to the parameters of the team.
Sharing of information like media gossip or older-sibling inside scoop ascribes
competitive advantage to the teller of information. Respect is paid to anyone who knows what
will happen on 90210 in the future, or what kind of people the stars of that show are. "Scenes
From Next Time," which the girls familiarly call Scenes in conversation, is much more
exciting than the show to the girls, because it provides insider information. Information of that
kind is precious, and if its carrier is one of the girls, she receives honors for sharing it.
Similarly, information about the future is powerful. Janie, because of her two older sisters, has
always been partly empowered by this kind of inside information. When the girls talk about
the history of their friendships, they all mention how Janie lost popularity after fourth grade
when her older sister left Jackson and started at Roosevelt. The obvious connection she had to
the older kids was obscured, and she had to work harder to present herself as "in the know."
But even so, her knowledge of the parties and activities of older kids continues to give her a
certain amount of power in the team. Her knowledge of the future is undeniably greater than
most of her friends'.
More personal information, about people or events related to the clique, ascribes a
competitive advantage to its teller in a slightly different way. It allows a team member to
affirm her position as integral to the team or to gain dominance within the team by bad-
mouthing those team members who threaten her position. Bad-mouthing is almost always
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done behind backs, but the news inevitably reaches the victim of the gossip. This provides a
system of indirect competition that does not challenge the stability of the clique. If bad-
mouthing is done directly, it is usually within some institutional confine, like a game or a joke,
that makes the discord benign to the survival of the group and therefore institutionally
condoned.
The girls see the sharing of information among each other as an indication that they
are integral to the clique. They expect to be told, for example, of events like a clique member
getting her first period. If they are not told, they feel they have been excluded from something
to which they have the right as a team member. Janie, as I discussed earlier, did not hesitate to
tell her friends about her period. Natalie, another member of the group, only told some of the
girls. Terri found out through Katie and Lynn, and had to pretend not to know the truth while
competing to get Natalie to tell her directly. She was distressed that Natalie had not told her
and had told Janie, Katie, and Lynn.
A party Katie gave toward the end of sixth grade provides an example of how girls
may use information to gain dominance within the team by bad-mouthing those who threaten
their standing. During the last month of school Terri and Katie were spending a lot of social
time together. Janie (who is Katie's best friend) began to feel left out and unjustly treated. The
situation between Janie, Katie and Terri became increasingly tense, reaching a climax at
Katie's party. Janie writes in her diary:
What a disaster. Tim came and left. [Tim was part of an entirely separate
conflict regarding his DJ-ing that left Katie angry and in tears and without a
DJ]. Katie was in tears and wasn't paying attention to me. So I started crying
and yelling at Terni. She got upset and left to go home!! I didn't care.
Whenever anybody talked about Katie I made them stop, but not when they
talk about me. She joins in. Well me and Lynn felt the same way. Katie and
Terri were spending too much time together!!
Janie, chagrined at what she saw as Katie's neglect of their friendship (and failure to help Janie
maintain her position in the group by "making them stop" when girls bad-mouthed her),
attempted to reassert her control over the definition of relationships within the team by
initiating a dramatic scene and bad-mouthing Terri as publicly as possible, but behind her
back. When Terni went up to confront Janie, she would not say what was wrong. By crying
and complaining at a party, she was able to attract enough attention to circulate some negative
portrayals of Terri and Katie. The more successfully she could present hers as the actual
definition of the situation aided, of course, by the authenticity that tears suggest, the more
allies she could gain and the more dominance she might have over the team.
A variation on this situation, wherein information was used to redefine the structure
of the team, occurred when Trina, an on-again-off-again member of the clique, wrote Lynn a
note in which she said, "I'm sorry your friends are such bitches." No one ever accused Lynn of
soliciting this comment from Trina in any way, even though it seemed evident that Lynn had
at least expressed anger with her friends. Instead, Terri decided that it was important to tell all
of the rest of the clique what Trina had said. She "felt it had to be spread." Katie and Terni
were together when Terri told me this story, and they seemed to sort of reinforce each other's
annoyance at Trina as they spoke. The piece of information was used in an attempt to redefine
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the structure of the clique, by stripping Trina of any power she had within it. Terni was
particularly threatened by Trina, in that Lynn and Terni are best friends, but Lynn and Trina,
being in the same class at school, had been spending a lot of time together. Hence her desire to
disrupt Trina's performance by sharing damaging information with all of the other clique
members.
In both of these examples, the gossip advanced about a team member was indirect,
behind the back of the addressed competitor. This kind of conflict does not end a girl's
membership on the team. Instead, she may respond in one of two ways: like Terri, who
responds to Trina's gossip by turning it back on her, advocating her own definition of the
situation; or like Janie, who was so criticized by her peers for making such a scene at Katie's
party, among other things, that she refrained from participating in any competition for
dominance for a while. Responses to gossip, then, are either to compete or to behave,if only
temporarily.
A game the girls call Skeletons in the Closet epitomizes the way in which conflict and
competition that is direct, is institutionalized to avoid any threat to the team parameters. For
Janie's birthday, the weekend after Katie's party, she had an all-girl sleepover to which all the
girls in her clique were invited. During the course of the evening, Janie and Trina, the two who
had been the most upset and accusatory at Katie's party, talked everyone into playing
Skeletons in the Closet. In this game, one girl sits in the middle of a circle of girls, each of
whom is allowed to ask one question of her. The girls have to tell the truth or refuse to tell by
saying "skeletons in the closet," which "no one ever says," according to Terri. As soon as
Janie was in the middle of the circle being questioned, Trina asked her whom she hated most
in the room. She answered "Terri," as did Trina, when Janie posed the same question to her.
Terri was later asked that question as well, to which she of course responded, "Janie and
Trina." All of this information was conveyed with nervous smiles and uncomfortable laughs,
but it was all within the rules of the game and, in that sense, did not challenge the
classification as "friends" of those feuding. Janie and Trina used the game to be able to express
their hate for Terri in public and damage Terni's position on the team, either by compelling her
to back down, to behave, or by convincing the others that she was hateful. The "discord" the
girls were engaged in was institutionalized: a game allowed them to express hate toward each
other but protected them from losing the comfort of the clique.
Direct competition is also institutionalized, or socially condoned, when it is disguised
behind jokes or smiles. There were times when Terri did confront Janie about what she was
angry about, and Janie evaded real confrontation by refusing to talk about it with an
embarrassed smile on her face. Terri, more confident about her own position in the group, was
willing to confront Janie more directly, less afraid of the consequences of losing Janie's
friendship. Both girls always left things unresolved and continued the friendship, or
membership, as before. When I asked if things with Janie had been resolved or had just blown
over, Tern always responded, "Yeah, they just blew over." They would continually resume
indirect competition for dominance.
The sharing and manipulating of information, then, is an extremely important means
of gaining support, or dominance, in a given performance. Because losing the team would
mean losing an audience, the "information game" (Goffman 1959) allows the girls to compete
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with one another within a structure that goes unchallenged; the team remains consistently
disruptive, but consistently in existence. The competition is either indirect, and
unacknowledged as such, or direct, wherein the discord is institutionally condoned. The
internal structure of the team is in constant flux, with perpetually changing power relations. Its
parameters, however, remain solid and unchallenged.
A second way of gaining a competitive advantage on the team is by attracting boys.
Of course the motivation for seeking a boyfriend may not only be to gain dominance within
the clique, and attracting boys may not always be intentional. However, regardless of
intentions, the attentions of boys ascribe directive dominance to their recipient. As sexuality
becomes increasingly important, the degree of competitive advantage stimulated by the
attentions of boys grows. In a community of girls where fantasies of boys and romance are
increasingly significant, staying on the team of a girl who has boy connections is almost as
inviting as having your own boyfriend. As a result, there are two kinds of competition at work:
competition to attract boyfriends and sexual experience and competition to be friends with
girls who attract boyfriends. I use the word attracting here because getting a boyfriend does
not have the same implications. Girls who are attractive attract boyfriends, while girls who are
not might still get a boyfriend if they pursue him. My purpose is to point out the centrality of
attractiveness as the underlying competitive advantage, even if there is no actual boyfriend to
prove it.
Terni's dominance on the team was greatly buttressed by the fact that she had a
boyfriend and was liked by more than one of the other boys in sixth grade. She was considered
very attractive in the fifth and sixth grade. As a result, she was almost always able to win more
directive dominance than Janie, whose strength was more rooted in information sharing. Katie
describes an instance in her journal wherein Tern and Jake (her boyfriend at the time) were
"dared" to French kiss.
Chris dared Jake to French kiss Terni in the bathroom but you see they didn't
really french kiss they just kissed on the lips for about 2 seconds... .I had
some fun but I think Terni will use her "kiss" as sinority [seniority] over me
and Lynn.
Katie's fear that Terni will "use" her kiss reflects the power of boys and romance to ascribe
dominance to those who have experience with them.
Here, competition is also indirect, this time in a slightly different way. Because
attractiveness is the underlying advantage, competition for the attention of boys is based on
trying to be attractive, not trying to get boyfriends. It is a passive, rather than active, quest for
boyfriends. The girls spend substantial amounts of time getting ready to go to parties and
trying to look as attractive as possible. Terni once mentioned the stress of going to parties
because "you never know whether someone is going to have a better outfit than you."
Presenting oneself attractively and therefore competitively means having a "better outfit" than
the others, thereby indirectly competing for the attentions of boys.
Indirect competition regarding boys evades overt confrontation in another way. There
are rules that discourage direct competition. For example, once a girl likes a boy, he becomes
her property unless someone is willing to challenge her authority, test her dominance on the
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team. In order to preserve the team, regulations regarding who can like whom are overtly
respected. For example, Katie talks constantly about Jake in her private diary all through fifth
and sixth grade. She writes how many times she has danced with him at parties, and how much
she has enjoyed being so close to him, yet she never fully admits to liking him. Terri and Jake
were boyfriend and girlfriend on and off throughout the fifth and sixth grades, and Terri even
became jealous of Katie's relationship with Jake at one point. Katie writes:
Any way, back to Jake. We slow danced a lot. Which made Terni mad. But
she should't be mad because she broke up with him. She really needs to
loosen up! Thats not my problem.
In another entry that begins with a discussion of the fact that Terni is still "going on about
Jake" even though it has been three months since they broke up.
And Jake hate her now. I don't blame him... .They [Terni and Sarah] don't
seem to understand that I don't like anybody. Each person has a person who
they like. But they get mad at me if I like them.
Katie seems to have a crush on Jake, but she does not act on it overtly, or even admit it to
herself. She does not think she would win a direct competition for him, or even for the right to
like him. She denies even to herself that she likes Jake. Instead, however, she may compete for
him indirectly, passively, by trying to seem attractive to him, by subtly flirting with him, or by
being platonically close to him, instead of romantically. This is not necessarily "covert" action
on Katie's part, but rather the outcome of a social structure that prohibits her from competing
overtly. If Jake flirts with her, she feels good about herself, presumably closer to her ideal of
attractiveness, and she gains power within the group.
Because attracting boys is, like information control, a talent at which some will have
more success than others through traits like appearance, charisma, or flirtatiousness, those who
are not successful at attracting boys share information about them. That is, they can gain a
certain amount of authority by involving themselves in their friends' relationships, securing
their place in the information circle. When I first began spending time with the girls, an
enormous portion of what they talked about was Terri's relationship with Jake. Their focus on
Teri in discussions with me may have been partially attributable to the fact that I was
introduced to the group through Terri, having known her for a long time. Yet, their interest in
Terni's and Jake's relations was not only for my benefit. As Terni's best friends, they were
actually involved in the relationship in many ways. Janie, for example, was responsible for
setting up Terri and Jake at least two of the times they went together. Katie writes of one of
those incidents in her diary: "I don't know why Janie set them up because she likes Jake!"
Apparently, being involved in the relationship by setting Jake and Terri up was worth
minimizing her chances for going with Jake herself. Katie also writes in her diary of one of the
times Jake asked Terri to go with him:
He mouthed to her Will you go with me? And she nodded. Then she
wispered to me 'Oh my god I'm going with him!'
Terni's and Jake's relationship was consummated by Terri's recounting the event to Katie.
Katie thus had an important role in the relationship and an indirect liaison with Jake.
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Further involving the whole clique in the relationship, Jake would often call Terri's
friends on the phone to talk about what was going on with her when they were in a fight, or
what he should get her for a present, and so on. None of Terri's close friends had boyfriends
during this period. When Tern was in an off-Jake phase, he called her friends so often asking
why she wouldn't go with him that they began to see him as a pest instead of a signal of their
involvement in the relationship and therefore the clique. On one occasion, Lynn made fun of
Jake asking her "what Terri said," and mocked a sarcastic response.
Well, she took a deep breath, then she scratched her nose, then she took
another big breath.. .hold on a second, I wrote it all down!
Katie writes in her journal:
Don't tell Terri this, but I am getting really sick of Jake. Yes, he is nice to
me and all that, but all he talks about is how much he likes Terri. I have
never known a k  to do that... .It would be nice if he was quiet about her
for just 5 minutes. I know Terri is getting sick about all this too but I just
don't know.
Janie commented, "I think Jake uses us to find out stuff about Terni." The girls' feeling of
involvement in the relationship becomes less rewarding if Jake talks about Terri too much and
is not flirtatious with them. It becomes too obvious that Jake is only talking to them because of
Terni, and their fantasies of attractiveness and participation in the relationship are untenable.
However, even while complaining about the situation, they would never have considered
telling Jake not to call. He was an indicator of their position as a part of the team; he was team
property.
Boys thus offer a competitive advantage as individual property and as team property,
and attractiveness becomes central in ascribing team dominance to girls. Girls compete
indirectly for the attention of boys in their efforts to attract, rather than get, boys. Rules about
overt competition limit confrontations regarding boys in order to maintain the parameters of
the team, and therefore protect the important security of the clique.
Because the security of the clique is so important to adolescents in face of their
internal confusion, the competition in which they engage to assert their authority is performed
in such a way that the performers' team affiliation is never threatened. Girls' desire to assert
some authority without rejecting real structural authority results in a constant process of
indirect or institutionalized disruption of each other's performances without disrupting the
parameters of the team. Indirect competition and institutionalized discord are normative. The
girls undermine each other indirectly or they conflict with each other within accepted
traditions of discord. They thus learn the traditions of what Paul Riesman calls "antagonistic
cooperation" (Riesman 1953:103), and which could equally be called a performance of
complacent competition. The authority regarding their own identities that adolescent girls wish
to escape is displaced, rather than evaded. A competitive group structure and established ideals
of attractiveness replace the authority of parents and of the recognizable status quo.
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Aesthetics
The second realm in which girls act out their rejection of overt authority without
rebelling against the structures and regulations set by those authorities is that of the symbolic.
Through cultural taste and style choices, aesthetics, girls assert their autonomy from their
parents and previous generations, as well as act out their commitment to their peers. Aesthetics
are the props of their performances of self, identifying them as individuals separate from their
parents and other overt authorities, and simultaneously concretizing their commitment to each
other.
Adolescents' symbolic rejection of authority demands the materials of what has been
called the "generation gap," the way in which generations are supposedly different from and
misunderstanding of each other. Generational aesthetics are symbolic expressions of a
generational self, one that is in contrast to the selves of previous generations. Obviously, there
is no one self that can represent a whole generation, but there are ideals of how the self should
be presented that are widely circulated and widely conformed to. It is these ideals that both
produce and are produced by adolescent desire to reject established institutions and identify
themselves with newness. Aesthetics are part of the commonality that binds a generation
together and differentiates adolescents from other generations. They simultaneously provide
youth with materials of rebellion and of cohesion; they delineate the "gap" between
adolescents and their predecessors.
Integral, then, to the adolescent aesthetic is the newness it must suggest in the eyes of
youths. They feel that they are on the frontier of aesthetic expression, and scorn what is old.
One day, a couple of the girls were singing the lyrics to what I know as a Lou Reed song,
"Take a Walk on the Wild Side." I asked them how they knew about Lou Reed and his music,
and they responded chidingly, "No, no, no, no, no. That's Marky Mark. [chanting] 'Take a
walk, on the wild side of the land."' Another day, Terri chided Katie for using some "old-
fashioned" piece of slang. "That's from the fifties! 'Fresh.' That's from the nineties." Little did
she know that the word "fresh" has already been in slang use for at least two decades. When
Color Me Bad, a pop band, played in an episode of 90210, the girls complained that Color Me
Bad was out. Katie explained that
They were really popular a couple months ago, but they need to come out
with a new record. They were probably popular when they shot this episode.
The importance of the newness of cultural tastes reflects the girls' general concern with
autonomy: they wish to rebel against established aesthetics, and assert their own differential
aesthetic as a means of asserting themselves.
Some of the aesthetic choices adolescents make suggest a desire to express anti-
establishment sentiment without actually rebelling against the established institutions. Rap and
the culture that surrounds it is very central to contemporary adolescent aesthetics, as are some
other anti-establishment styles, like punk and hippie. Adolescents adopt these aesthetics as
props for their performances, symbolically expressing their opposition to the establishment.
The most popular music among the girls and their friends is mainstream rap. I say
"mainstream" because the rap they listen to is generally a tame, commercial version of the
more militant rap for which the audience tends to be some combination of inner city residents
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and middle class college kids. When these adolescents listen to the radio, it is "Wild 107," a
station that especially targets young Black-identified, but mainstream audiences. At parties,
rap is played constantly, except for an occasional "slow song." Because rap music is relatively
new in the mainstream (Samuels 1992) and is commonly perceived as a voice arising out of
oppression to speak for itself, it easily fits into the aesthetics of youth's symbolic rebellion,
regardless of the ethnicity or class of its listeners. While rap may be partly a music of
empowerment by providing a voice for those who are not benefited by the establishment, it
has been appropriated by the sons and daughters of the establishment, and mainstreamed. This
has occurred not so much because the young white consumers empathize with the hardship of
the people who introduced and continue to produce rap, but because they respond to the
illusion of empowerment rap offers them. They, like rappers, want to rebel against the status
quo and assert themselves as power holders. This might help explain phenomena like the
extreme popularity of the rap group Kriss Kross, whose members are only 13 or 14 years old.
Their emergence out of racial and cultural oppression and adolescent powerlessness gives
Kriss Kross all the more clout and honor among adolescents for empowering themselves,
making themselves heard. They are models of real empowerment through rap, fueling
adolescents' illusion of empowerment as they listen to the music and lyrics.
Although more than half of the students at Jackson are Black and many come from
neighborhoods similar to those that produced rap, the popularity of rap music at Jackson is not
a question of exposure or accessibility to rap music culture. Recent statistics show that rap's
largest audience are white, suburban kids (Samuels 1992:25). There is, especially among
adolescents, a strong attraction to rap among all ethnicities. The embrace of rap culture and its
anti-establishment aesthetic by white middle-class kids may partly be an attempt to detach
themselves from the guilty history of their class and race. David Samuels, in his controversial
article on white response to rap in The New Republic, posits that
rap's appeal to whites rest[s] in its evocation of an age-old image of
blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against
which the norms of white society are defined, and, by extension, through
which they may be defied (Samuels 1992:25).
Rap carries the symbolic potential for a rejection of established "norms" of the middle class, as
well as an exploration of sex and power, and thus acts as a vehicle of rebellion for middle class
adolescents.
As a result, rap and the culture that surrounds it have become a large part of current
youth's generational identity. Rap infuses almost every realm of adolescents' symbolic
expression: the way they dance with, or "freak" each other at parties, the lyrics that they chant
together, the language they use, their tones of voice, their clothing, and their class
consciousness. This generation is the first group of young adolescents to grow up with the
MTV show, Yo! MTV Raps.
Yo! MTV Raps debuted in 1989 as the first national broadcast forum for rap
music. With Yo!, rap became for the first time the music of choice in the
white suburbs of middle America (Samuels 1992:28).
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Not only did rap become the music of choice, but the clothes rappers wear, the way they
speak, and many more of their aesthetic choices became integrated into the culture of choice.
Teens' language, both verbal and physical, is highly reflective of the influence of rap
culture. Words like "fresh," a contemporary version of "groovy," are common in rap songs
and are now ubiquitous in the language of adolescents. Terni and her friends used the term
"jungle fever" to describe a sudden plethora of interracial couples in her class, totally unaware
of its negative connotations. In their diaries, two of the girls write "boyz" in place of "boys,"
mimicking street gangs' appellation of their fellow gang members. Katie and some of the
others consistently used the word "prerogative," which was popularized as a sort of slang in a
very successful Bobby Brown song called "My Prerogative." They now use it as an assertion
of individual autonomy and choice. Katie writes in her journal: "Jake is a really good friend
and could be more, but I don't think so because he still likes Kay. And that's his progritive."
The tone and stance many of the kids adopt when they express themselves is also rap
influenced. For instance, their slang is often very powerfully expressed, as when they "cap" or
"rank" on each other, spouting insults in as condescending and distanced a manner as possible.
This sort of "attitude" is an important part of their verbal and physical vocabulary, with both
positive and negative connotations. Terri describes a girl in her class, Kenisha, whose attitude
intimidates her a little. "Kenisha can be pushy....She struts around like she's the queen, ...
puts on airs." But when Terni is with people she feels she can top in attitude, she finds it
empowering. For example, during an evening we spent with all the adults of both of our
families, she expended much energy in sneering and rolling her eyes at the "out of it"
comments of the older generation. Katie, during a "boy-girl" party she held, kicked a boy
named Tim out of the party with a burst of attitude that surprised me. Attitude furnishes girls
with a mode of self-assertion that is sometimes in great contrast to the more established,
middle class forms of expression.
A similar anti-establishment aesthetic is reflected in the girls' apparent scorn of
conspicuous expense. However, just as many rappers contradict themselves in their
simultaneous anti-establishment message and embrace of conspicuous consumption of goods
produce by established institutions, the girls express their own contradictory feelings about
conspicuous consumption. While at Jackson, for instance, the girls expressed a certain scorn
for families who chose to send their kids to a local private school which some of their friends
attended. Mention of the school often evokes imitation of snobbish accents or some other
critical teasing among the Jackson girls. Terni constantly talks about the price of everything,
always implying that she cannot believe anyone would spend so much money on material
items. She mentions the prices of her mother's new clothes, of Trina's new shoes, of a
"firestorm victim's" house, and on and on. All four of the girls exhibit a certain pride in being
public school kids, constructing images of themselves as kids without all the amenities of the
private school kids. However, when Terri wanted a pair of $80 shoes, she did not hesitate to
begin lobbying her mother. And Janie, while talking negatively about displays of wealth in
others, buys new clothes constantly, provoking the others' scorn and criticism when she is not
around. The anti-establishment attitude is not so much practiced as postured; the girls see
others' consumption as conspicuous but do not question their own consumer desires.
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This year, in the 7th grade, the girls are also beginning to embrace some anti-
establishment aesthetics that are not rap-rooted. Terri is begging her mother to buy her a pair
of Doc Martens and she is beginning to cut the necks out of her T-shirts, both of which are
styles that were born out of the punk rock subculture in England (Hebdige 1978). One day
Terri was also wearing a peace symbol necklace, a remnant of the anti-establishment hippie
movement and flower power.
The anti-establishment sentiment of rap and the culture surrounding it, as well as the
sentiments of other anti-establishment cultures, thus pervade adolescent expression. They are
transformed into the symbols of rebellion for middle class adolescents who wish to avoid any
structural rebellion but want to feel the power of rejecting the status quo. White, middle class
youth welcome the anti-establishment symbols of rap or punk culture, regardless of their
inherited position within the establishment.
Coexistent with these postured anti-establishment aesthetics are less overtly rebellious
symbols within the spectrum of adolescent generational aesthetics. Differential aesthetics mark
youth by allegedly distinguishing them from other generations. This set of aesthetics is mixed
in with and certainly influenced by the stronger anti-establishment aesthetics discussed above,
but they are much less symbolically militant. Take, for example, the popular Gap jacket, which
both Janie and Terni own: it has the same shape as the hooded Raiders starter jackets worn by
Crip gang members, but it is offered in organic, muted colors with complementing stripes on
the wrist bands, only vaguely reminiscent of the gang aesthetic. Instead of anti-establishment,
this one-step removed aesthetic is a statement of more benign distinction. These are the
aesthetics that belong to their generation. They are symbols that are only rebellious in that they
differentiate adolescents from the authorities they wish to reject. Adolescents have their own
property, and are rebels simply through differentiation.
Gap clothing is one of the first aesthetic choices the girls point me toward if I ask
them what is "in." I have more than once been out with all four girls when each of them was
wearing at least two Gap items. They were the first generation to benefit from Gap for Kids, so
their identification with Gap even reaches into their earlier childhood. The following is an
excerpt from a conversation between the four girls and another of their friends, Emma:
Emma: Everybody goes to Gap now.
Terri:  All the boys wear Gap now.
Me:     Why do you guys think Gap is so popular?
Emma: It's just got really 'in' clothes, kind of.
Terri:  Cause they have fresh clothes!
Katie:  They just have really basic clothes.
Lynn:   I like their colors.
Terri: . So do I.
Katie: This is all Gap.
Lynn: Me too.
Terri:  Me too.
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While they do not explicitly claim that Gap is representative of their generation, they talk
about Gap as if the clothes are produced in consideration of their aesthetic tastes and ideals of
"self' presentation.
Another component of the differential aesthetic that helps define their generation is
the girls' participation in the set of generational fantasies reflected in the media they consume,
even while they overtly criticize and mock TV shows and magazines in demonstration of their
media savvy. They may make fun of the character "Donna" for having a nose job, but Beverly
Hills 90210 arguably plays a very prominent role in their fantasy lives, perhaps as in a major
segment of youth in the United States. The show has broken all kinds of records in television
ratings and viewership polls since it began in 1990. Three out of these four girls plaster their
rooms with pictures of 90210 actors, and watch the show every week. Sometimes Terri and
Katie call each other during each commercial break, discussing what has happened and what
they think will happen. During the spring, Terri's friends often likened her to one of the
characters, Brenda. Sometimes they would say sincerely that she looked like Brenda,
sometimes they would tease her for trying to look like Brenda. Terri, while denying that she
was trying to be like Brenda, was thrilled at their comments. When I watched 90210 alone
with her, she was much less critical of and more sympathizing with the characters, and would
get a very far away, fantasy-world expression on her face while watching. Once, when she and
Katie were watching together, they began going through their friends, deciding which of them
would be which 90210 characters, projecting themselves into the fantasy realm of the show.
These sorts of fantasies are a part of the girls' "aesthetic" in that the girls' consider them a part
of the property of their generation: fantasies and characters tailored to their desires.
The fantasies played out in shows like 90210 both respond to and define the desires
of adolescent girls, a notion I will address thoroughly in the second half of this article.
Fantasies similar to those depicted in 90210 are found in much of the other media the girls
consume. There is a best-selling teen novel series called Freshman Dorm, one of which Terri
loaned me entitled Freshman Choices. The Fox network has gone on a major campaign to
serve younger audiences, creating a whole network of shows that speak to adolescents. The
marketing techniques they use propel the idea that young adolescents have their own identity,
fantasies, and modes of communication, and need narratives that speak to them exclusively.
Teen novels and magazines are also sold as the private property of the adolescent generation.
The girls think of what they watch and what they read as their own, part of their private
generational aesthetic.
Anti-establishment and differential aesthetics are part of the commonality that binds
adolescents together and differentiates them from other generations. The symbols can be as
anti-establishment or different as the generation demands, allowing for adolescents to obey
real authority while they simultaneously feel a sense of assertion of their own authority. Their
performance of an anti-establishment and differential identity may be as "authentic" in their
minds as it seems superficial from .a distance; they reject authority symbolically as they
comply with authority in action. In this sense, adolescents are especially susceptible to the
covert authority of producers that market their commodities as anti-establishment, or new and
different, thus defining and designing an aesthetic that adolescents will adopt and perceive as
their own.
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Covert Authority
In their efforts to competitively and symbolically reject the overt authority of parents
and institutions, adolescents fail to evade the influences of covert authorities. Covert
authorities, in this case, are those forces of capitalist production, advertising, and mass media
that adolescents do not recognize as authorities and therefore allow to slip quietly past their
resistant front. These covert authorities design the ideals of identity that adolescents are
attempting to define for themselves through their rejection of overt authorities.
In the previous sections, I have outlined some of the conditions and traditions of
adolescence: the adolescent desire for ambivalence regarding differentiation and assertion of
self; the development and processes of indirect competition and institutionalized discord
between adolescent girls; and the channeling of adolescent resistance into symbols, such as
private property. The remaining sections are an attempt to illuminate how capitalist culture
dialectically responds to and produces these conditions and traditions under the guise of covert
authorities. It is to the advantage of market culture to maintain the existence of these
institutions of adolescence; institutionalized discord is part of an uncritical environment that
discourages questioning of covert authorities and encourages indirect competition. Indirect
competition perpetuates female adolescent desire for products of attractiveness. Symbolic
rebellion, in place of critical resistance, supports an economy of symbols of rebellion (as, for
example, in the case of the mass production of X hats) that may have little to do with an actual
desire to activate a change in the status quo. By looking to the outside forces of which Marcus
and Fischer write (1986), I try to reveal how the processes of adolescent rejection of authority
are usurped by covert authorities to encourage complacency in lieu of the critical thinking that
adolescent ambivalence might invite.
Material Culture: Identifying Props
The character of middle class, female adolescent resistance to overt authority allows
for a great degree of susceptibility to another, less tangible authority: production and
advertising. While their rejection of authority and assertion of self is channeled into indirect
and institutionalized competition and symbolic resistance, the props of that adolescent
performance of self are provided by the market. The symbols that girls desire in order to assert
themselves as autonomous of overt authorities, as part of a generation, as part of a clique, and
as dominant and attractive individuals are most often sold to them. Not only the material
property, but also the ideals of success that the props are supposed to achieve are constructed
more for them than by them.
For example, considering the history of the clothing store The Gap and the number of
"generations gaps" it has bridged, it is ironic that one of the symbols these adolescent girls
identify most vehemently as the property of their generation is Gap clothing. The Gap store
was begun in the seventies and began by selling only Levi jeans and belts. It expanded so fast
that, by the eighties when the Levi company was no longer willing to meet its demands, the
chain began producing its own line of clothing. The name 7he Gap refers to the generation
gap, the supposed difference between a parent generation and the generation of their kids that
prevents them from understanding each other. The Gap could either signify the bridging of the
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generation gap through clothes that everyone can wear, or the provision of clothing suited only
for the newest generation, separate from the old by a generation gap. Terni, Katie, Janie, and
Lynn subscribe to the latter interpretation, the one the Gap advertisements evoke, and consider
themselves members of the Gap generation. The Gap, by contrast, has eagerly served every
generation since the seventies, defining each as an exclusive Gap generation and serving them
all simultaneously. The Gap thus plays a role in producing as well as catering to the so-called
generation gap by convincing all of its customers that they are exclusive members of a Gap
generation.
The following is a more thorough discussion of how market production and advertising
act as covert authorities in adolescent identification by selling the ideals of identity along with
the technologies that are supposed to achieve those ideals. To extend Goffman's terminology to
analysis of market and advertising forces in the performance of self, these pages are an
exploration of how the performance of identity is staged. In order to sell the props of the
performance, the market and advertisers also sell theatrical roles, exploiting the ambivalence and
needs of adolescent girls. Roles are conflated with props. My purpose is to reveal the ambiguity
of the meanings of these three terms and the ways in which that ambiguity is used and abused.
In his book Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Daniel Miller (1987) suggests
that integral to the study of any material culture, from lipstick to virtual reality technology, is
"the phenomenon of certain mundane objects becoming so firmly associated with an individual
that they are understood as literal extensions of that individual's being" (Miller 1987:119).
Technology has always been a part of how humans construct their identity, as currently
exemplified in a TV commercial for a type of car. In reference to the car, a wonder-mom
explains, "I couldn't be everything I am without it." Although only an actress in an
advertisement, she evidently appeals to an audience susceptible to the idea that the van is a part
of her identity. It is a component of her perception of herself. Miller summarizes this
relationship: "the 'self objectified in the object will be differentially constructed according to
the cosmological content" (1987:119). The object, according to the different cultural meanings
accompanying it, identifies the person with whom it is associated.
Material culture is often perceived as a technology of identity. It is a public expression
of differentiation from or affiliation with an identified group. Miller explains,
The object may lend itself equally to the expression of difference, indicating
the separate domains to which people or aspects of people belong, and to the
expression of unity, connecting otherwise diverse domains (1987:130).
It may provide social cohesion among individuals or it may differentiate individuals from one
another, often both. According to Miller, "one of the many results of the rise of material culture
as a mode of cultural form was its ability to multiply and keep apart a plethora of hierarchies and
diverse spheres" (1987:153). Because adopting the use of a particular object provides
membership to a certain social group and exclusion from another, material culture can be seen as
a tool of boundary maintenance, separating different "hierarchies and diverse spheres." So in
addition to the more often referred to role of technology as "proclaim[ing] or deny[ing] a
distance from nature" (Miller 1987:115), technology maintains boundaries between different
social groups.
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Meanwhile, the boundary between the object and the subject becomes blurred. Material
things signify particular social identities and, in the process, becomes intertwined with private
identities. Objects that are part of our visual representation of self exemplify particularly well the
potential blurring of boundaries between material object and the self. They are extensions of the
physical body as well as of public identity. Not only does the object become a component of our
identities, but it is also a semi-permanent extension of our bodies, and is seen as part of our
representation of self in the public sphere. For instance, a woman whose hair is dyed blond and
who wears dark mascara might be perceived as a beautiful blond with long eye-lashes, even if
her natural hair color is brunette and her biological eye-lashes are ordinary. Appearance-
enhancers thus confuse boundaries between objects and the body, as well as between objects and
identity.
Advertisements for various appearance enhancers found in magazines directed toward
adolescent girls illuminate, through exploitation, their confusion and ambivalence about
boundaries between objects, the body, and the self. Because adolescents are at a stage of growth
in which their bodies are rapidly changing, and raging hormones can obstruct the possibility of
consistency of self, they are hungry for some clarification and continuity. Products related to
appearance provide them with an illusion of clarity and consistency by allowing them some
control over their bodies and their presentation of self. By manipulating these things, they can
manipulate their identities, or so they are told in the magazines; hence Janie's focus on clothes
and make-up. The advertisements found in teenage magazines usually promote their products as
technologies of identity more emphatically than as enhancers of appearance. They are objects
which seem to allow adolescents control over their bodies and their selves. Advertisers thus
make use of the haze over boundaries between object, body, and identity by mixing and
matching all three categories to sell their products. But what kind of control over identity do
these products really allow?
Implied definitions of identity are in constant flux in advertisements for appearance
enhancers, especially in media addressed to a teenage audience. In the April and May issues of
'Teen and Sassy magazines, I noticed four advertising strategies illustrative of advertisers'
exploitation of the widespread mix-up over object, body, and identity. The ads are savvy to
adolescent ambivalence over how the object relates to the body and the self, or identity.
Advertisers use that savvy exploitatively.
The most common strategy used in advertising evokes the paradoxical idea that
products are necessary for beauty, but that they should be made invisible so as to preserve the
illusion that the body is pure or authentic. The Cover Girl ads for a line of make-up called Clean
Make-Up employ slogans like, "BELIEVE IT: When your make-up looks this natural, you know
it's Clean." Over an image of an elated Christie Brinkley reads:
One look says it all. Natural. Believable. Beautiful. That look is Cover Girl
Clean Make-up. So good to your skin. So clean. With pure Noxzema
ingredients. For healthy color. Honest coverage. The look of great skin.
That's the believable look of Clean Make-up.
The syntax comically recalls Arnold Schwarzeneger in The Terminator, invoking the image of a
cyborg hidden behind human flesh; emphasis on words like natural, believable, Clean, pure,
healthy, and honest imply that products are contrary to these organic qualities, and that Cover
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Girl brand is the exception. An ad for Clarion blush reads, "Finally. Blush believably. For
hours." Again, the word believably implies that a technological blush is inauthentic and should
be made to seem natural at all costs. The boundary between culture and nature is simultaneously
reinforced and transgressed in both of these ads. Products are not natural so they must be hidden,
yet achieving believable and natural beauty is abetted by the use of these products.
Some of the ads for menstrual absorption pads and tampons also play on the desire for
products to be invisible. Although pads and tampons might not immediately be considered
related to appearance, the advertising strategies for these products emphasize appearance, not
utility. An Always maxi-pad ad depicts four women, from midriff to knees, wearing "skin-tight"
clothes. The caption reads: "Pop Quiz: who's wearing the tampon? Nobody. They're wearing
'no-show' maxi." Quel horreur that we should actually see and know that a woman, or a girl,
wears a pad to stop blood from staining her clothes! Tampax's latest slogan is "Trust. It's
knowing no one will ever know you've got your period. Period." Ironically, all of these
advertisements promote the idea that the products must be hidden in order to preserve the natural
look, while in fact controlling and hiding what is natural.
The most striking of this set of ads is one for Finesse hair shaping products. In the right
hand corner of a two page ad, we read:
the how-to-be-totally-obsessed-about-your-hair-until-it-looks-absolutely-
amazing-at-the-prom-but-you-look-like-you-didn't-even-think-about-it guide.
Here, not only the product itself must be hidden, but the mental and physical effort a girl puts
into her appearance must also be camouflaged. The rest of that side of the page gives a list of
Prom Coifs one can achieve with Finesse. "For Prom 1992, all you really need is Finesse," as
long as you can keep it a secret. The other half of the page promotes "the hold that loves to be
held," and shows a man running his fingers through a woman's hair. The ad boasts that this
hairspray "keeps hair touchably soft," so the product cannot be detected even through touch.
These invisible products claim to allow teens to transcend the limitations of their natural bodies,
yet maintain an illusion of the authenticity and naturalness that beauty and success evidently
require.
An ad for Love's Baby Soft cologne spray narrates a boy's obsession with a girl, Ashley,
in which he ends by saying, "I love her Love's Baby Soft," and the ad responds, "Underneath it
all, she's Baby Soft." The object is so successfully naturalized, incorporated into her, that the boy
equates it with Ashley: she is Baby Soft. In this advertisement, as in the others of this first
category, women and girls are made out to be inherently inadequate and thus in need of these
products. However, if the technology can be hidden, naturalized, no one will dis-cover their
inherent inadequacy. Hence, the title Cover Girl may be understood on multiple levels: as the
girl on the magazine cover, and the girl whose inadequacy is covered.
A second set of strategies of advertising imply that the products being promoted are
actually reflections of a girl's insides, her individuality, rather than supplements to or alterations
of her identity. Esprit runs an ad that asks, without apparent reference, "what would you do?,"
and then gives the idiosyncratic response by, one assumes, the teenager pictured opposite. "I'd
clean up the planet ... but not my room." (Janie has a Esprit T-shirt with this slogan on it). The
ad only correlates the individuality and wit of the girl in the picture with her Esprit clothing. It
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claims no causal relationship between the advertised object, the clothes, and the girl's apparent
attractiveness. However, because objects are the materiality of identity, the ad implies that
emulation of this girl by wearing Esprit clothes means that one must be an individual of her
caliber and status. Similarly, the Converse shoes slogan reads, "it's what's inside that counts,"
and displays photos of the shoes alone, implying that the shoes validate a girl's inside and will
reflect her individuality. The buyer of these shoes is told that she must be the kind of individual
whose inside counts.
Ads of this type imply, on one level, that the girls and women depicted are inherently
successful instead of inherently inadequate. The objects are portrayed as merely a reflection of
the success of these individuals. However, the ideology of individuality is paradoxically
irreconcilable with advertising. The ad has the aim of speaking to as many individuals as
possible, and enticing them to conform with each other in buying the advertised product. This
means that the individuality proposed by the ad is improbable if the product is successfully sold.
So while less obviously defining women as inadequate, these ads are internally contradictory and
hypocritical. Individuality is an oxymoron in a market economy.
A third strategy among advertisements for appearance enhancers employs rather
explicitly the theme of differentiation between social groups. This is a strategy of boundary
maintenance. In one hair spray ad, differentiation between past and present generations is
emphasized. Superimposed over a photograph of an upside-down woman are the words, "if it's
FLIP-it's HIP!," and "if it isn't BOLD, it's OLD!" Miller holds that what makes an object
fashionable is "its ability to signify the present" (1987:126). The Bold Hold hairspray ads play
on adolescents' desire to be part of contemporary definitions of success, thus differentiated from
past generations. The ad threatens that if they do not use this product, they will be old, part of the
past and the wrong generation.
A Ten-O-Six skin cleanser advertisement exploits the contemporary focus on pollution
and the environment by implying that their product will prevent new generations of adolescents
from suffering the negative effects of pollution, perpetrated by past generations of adults. Over a
photograph of a blue sky and sierra mountain scene, the ad reads, "TEENS HAVE TAKEN THE
FIGHT AGAINST DIRT AND POLLUTION INTO THEIR OWN HANDS," and after a long
description of how it cleanses and is the ultimate pollution-fighter, it repeats, "Ten-O-Six.
Helping teens everywhere win the fight against pollution." The ad twists the actual meaning of
fighting against pollution, usually connected with intentions of saving the environment, into the
idea of defending oneself against a polluted environment in order to maintain a fresh and
flawless face. The implication is that by using Ten-O-Six, one becomes a member of a new
generation immune to the detriments of a polluted environment. The ad perversely exploits an
important and menacing social and global issue by differentiating teenage girls from older
generations and absolving them from unattractive responsibility for the environment. By
providing them with a group identity based on an innovative ability to protect themselves from
the problems of Qlder generations, the ads discourage instead of encourage teen action in
response to pollution. "It's a dirty world out there," the ad threatens, and by taking Ten-O-Six
"into their own hands," girls can become a member of a cleaner and gentler nation. The ad
projects negative qualities onto older social groups and professes to provide, through objects, an
alternative niche for the strong and innovative teenagers described. Boundaries are maintained
between the teen body and pollution, and between teen identity and all others.
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[Just as] nation states define themselves, in part, in terms of what they are
not.. .by setting themselves in opposition to alternative degenerate or ideal
societies (Miller 1987:123)
these appearance enhancers, advertised as identity constructors, constitute differentiating
boundaries that encourage girls to define themselves "in terms of what they are not." Particularly
for teenagers, differentiation between groups is important. Angela McRobbie, in her study of
British teen magazines in the eighties, argues that
beauty products articulate a symbolic space in the transition from childhood
dependence to teenage independence... .The soaps and lotions and tonics and
the freedom of choice exercised by the girl in purchasing these items play
some role in effecting this transition (1991:177).
Differentiation, then, implies independence for girls at this stage of maturation. The ad for
Playtex tampons reads, "PSST... it's not your mother's tampon." Although this product is not
advertised through appearance, as the earlier tampon and pad ads were, it is presented as an
extension of the body that differentiates the identity of teenage girls from that of their mothers
and thus provides the illusion of independence. Girls are encouraged to assert their independence
by criticizing and differentiating themselves from those upon whom they have been dependent.
All of the ads of this set promote differentiation and boundary maintenance.
The fourth strategy of advertising important to definitions of object, identity, and the
body, is that of defining appearance-enhancers as tools of representation that endow girls' with
power over their presentation of self. The product is explicitly recognized as a product, rather
than naturalized or individualized. Perhaps the clearest example of advertisements that embrace
appearance enhancers for their own sake is seen in the current ads for Maybelline products. They
feature the tall, dark, and beautiful Maybelline model next to varying versions of the following
excerpt:
When it comes to eye lining some women seem to do it all. Even if it's a
different look every day. Just clever? Nah. Expert Eyes. Liner by
Maybelline.
At the bottom of the page in a bold, black and white box-strip, the slogan touts, "MAYBE
SHE'S BORN WITH IT. MAYBE IT'S MAYBELLINE." These ads essentially deny that the
images of beauty and success pictured in their pages are natural" individual, or a part of the
identity of any social group. Instead, achieving this look is simply a matter of using a product to
attain a certain result. The product is spotlighted, and expert skill in using it is admired, as
opposed to those ads that advocate hiding the product as well as the skill and effort required to
use it. Here the words in bold lettering are eye lining, do it all, Expert Eyes, and MA YBELLINE.
In other ads of this series, the bold words are fuller, get noticed lashes, Great Lash, and shadow,
wver loses impact, Expert Eyes. The article is either named or described, and expressions like
get noticed lashes and never loses impact focus on the visible effect. These ads seem to reflect a
trend among women towards embracing material culture. Technology is coming out of the
organic closet and identity is gaining the freedom to incorporate "a different look everyday."
Janie is overweight, according to sixth-seventh grade standards of beauty and success.
One week I took her and her friends on a picnic, and at the end of the day, we stopped at her
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house so her friends could rummage through the huge pile of clothes she was giving away. Later
I learned that she gives her clothes away all the time, either because they don't fit her anymore
or because she just doesn't like them anymore. The rest of the girls told me that "her mom just
buys her new ones." They were happy to have the free clothes, but incredulous that Janie could
just give away her sixty dollar jeans when they were hardly worn. I began to detect a little bit of
scorn in their voices. Janie was abusing her privileges. She was trying to maintain her dwindling
status in the sixth grade hierarchies through wearing the right clothes. And if those did not work,
wearing a different set of right clothes. And she wears make-up, too. More eye-rolling.
Janie embraces material objects as a means of achieving physical attractiveness. Her use
of clothes and make-up corresponds with the ideology set forth in the Maybelline ads.
Consciously or not, she treats them as tools of social identity. But, according to her peers and to
herself, she does not succeed in their social hierarchy by making endless trips to The Gap and
department stores. Her performance is perceived as inauthentic. The cycle of buying clothes,
giving them away, and buying new ones again reveals her lack of satisfaction with each
successive mode of self-representation. Evidently, she continues to feel inadequate, herself. In
her journal, she writes:
I know Katie ignores me. This weekend instead of doing something with her
"Best-Friend" quote-un-quote she does something with Princess Terri, and
Princess Lynn and poor old peasant Anne. But hey who is poor old "fat"
Janie to expect her best friend to be with her. Who would want to hang out
with a LOSER!!
Janie describes a social hierarchy of princesses and peasants, in which she apparently places
herself somewhere below the rank of peasant. Her social rank is inextricably linked with her fat,
according to her. Under all her products, she is still stuck in her inadequate body, unable to
successfully cover it with clothes and make-up.
Meanwhile, her friends sense her attempts to cover her inadequacy with products and
seem to disrespect her for it. Their attitudes match the ideology of the first category of ads I
discussed. They see Janie as lacking natural success, and her attempts to manipulate her body in
order to achieve a more successful social identity are too obvious. Not only is she unsuccessful at
hiding her body, she is unsuccessful at hiding her products. By contrast, I once watched Terri get
ready for a "boy-girl" party. She used three different kinds of hair products, namely gel, mousse,
and environmentally safe spray, to make her hair do exactly what it had been doing before she
used the products. At the party, no one knew she had used these products and her dominant
status in the social hierarchy went unchallenged.
Even if Terri's hair products had been noticeable, she might not have been chastised.
Terri and Lynn are naturally much closer in appearance to the sixth grade ideal than Janie is.
They are thus less dissatisfied with their social identity. While they still feel compelled to buy the
right things in order to maintain their membership in their peer group, the products are not the
initial cause of their success within that group. They understand these objects as a sign of the
success they already have, recalling the ideology based on the insides of the second group of
advertising strategies. So Janie, by using the material culture of the model identity to which she
aspires, places herself at the bottom of the social hierarchy constituted by that ideal of identity.
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She achieves association with a social group through symbolic expression, but her success within
that group hinges on the desirability of her natural identity instead of her technological one.
The effect is a catch 22. There is an ideal of appearance to which most of these girls
aspire which includes the use of certain technologies. If a girl's natural appearance is not already
close to the ideal, desire for products to cover what does not match it intensifies. But use of it is
ultimately dissatisfying. Appearance enhancers do not get rid ,of the body beneath it, and the
body still holds a fundamental role in identity. Objects may signify membership to a social
group, but they do not necessarily denote success within that group, as the advertisements imply.
For these adolescents, individual identity is bodily based, reflected in objects but not defined by
them. The object is an authentic part of a successful identity only if the body has enough of the
natural components of the consensual ideal of beauty.
Imagine a world where all adolescent girls and the society they belonged to did embrace
the overt use of products, saw them as an authentic component of identity. Every adjustment to
natural appearance, from clothes and make-up to plastic surgery and liposuction, would be
warranted as fair play in authentic expression of identity. The girls would be empowered by
objects to control their identity, as is advocated in the Maybelline ads.
But the idea of empowerment by material culture is deceptive in a world where
advertising plays a primary role in defining what is desirable in identity. Gloria Steinem writes
that "the myth that advertisers simply follow readers is very strong" (1990:24). While the objects
might empower girls in their efforts to achieve success, ideals of success are still largely
controlled, not followed, by advertisers. Steinem describes "the seamy underside of publishing"
(1990: 20). Addressing the difficulty of publishing women's magazines without catering to the
demands of advertisers, she discusses a publishing world in which a woman's magazine cannot
attract advertisements for products like cars and electronic technology, because the agencies do
not believe that women buy these products without the aid of men. Conversely, a woman's
magazine cannot attract advertisements for women's products if it does not accompany these ads
with complementary copy, editorials or articles that advocate the use of the advertised products,
sometimes even naming the brands.
Advertisers who demand such "complementary copy," even in the absence
of respectable studies [of female consumer groups], are clearly operating
under a double standard. The same food companies place ads in People with
no recipes. Cosmetics companies support The New Yorker with no regular
beauty columns. (Steinem 1990:25)
This ad-edit linkage secures advertisers' roles in defining, not following fashion. Just as the
contents of the magazines are controlled by advertisers, the contents of the culture surrounding
these magazine are controlled by the images and articles advertisers make abundantly available.
bnages of what men, women, teenagers, and children should be, according to advertisers of the
objects of these identity groups, are accompanied by articles and editorials advocating
achievement of these identities.
It's all so familiar. A writer trying to make something of a nothing
assignment; an editor laboring to think of new ways to attract ads; readers
assuming that other women must want this ridiculous stuff; more women
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suffering for lack of information, insight, creativity, and laughter that could
be on these same pages. (Steinem 1990:28)
Advertisements define and perpetuate identity groups and maintain communities of consumers
In order to understand this science of advertising, it is helpful to apply Bruno Latour's
conception of how scientific communities gain respectability and power (1990). According to
Latour, the production of knowledge is an attempt to dominate what he calls the agonistic
situation, wherein different interpretations of the world are in competition. Domination of this
competition is achieved through the mobilization of resources, and consequently, of a
community of allies. Latour says that by inscribing perceived elements of nature in writing,
images, charts, models and indices, one is able to buttress one's interpretations of the world
through cascades of simplified representations of those ideas. In other words, the more simple
and superficial representations of an idea one is able to circulate in the world, the more allies one
will be able to mobilize. The representations attract communities of allies who then perpetuate
the production of similar representations (Latour 1990).
The science of advertising mobilizes allies in the same manner. Advertisers' agonistic
situation is a competition over different interpretations of identity. Whoever dominates the
powerful knowledge of Iidentity is allowed to define it in such a way that it requires use of the
products being advertised. Domination is achieved through inscribing perceived elements of
identity and then circulating those inscriptions, or representations. So advertisers circulate as
many images of their definitions of identity as they are able to. We see them in magazines, on
billboards, on TV, in newspapers, in store windows, in catalogs, and now, even "movies and
books are being commissioned by companies like Federal Express" (Steinem 1990:28). The
images are so abundant and consistent that we are convinced of their authority over the meanings
of success. Because they depict silent, uncomplicated, and internally consistent worlds, it is
difficult to question the validity of the nominal knowledge they convey. Ideal men are strong,
rich, heterosexual, and mostly white; ideal women are fashionably dressed, heavily made-up,
sexy, happy, heterosexual, and mostly white; ideal teenagers are independent, pure, individual,
thin, clear-skinned, heterosexual, and mostly white; and so on. Individuals that subscribe to the
identities defined by these images are "mobilized" into communities that then perpetuate the
production of these identity groups. Hence, the science of advertising and of identity
construction.
Because there are only a few ways to legally commodify the actual organic body,
commodified technology remains the most direct channel of control over definitions of
identity. Instead of selling bodies, advertisers sell desires for ideal bodies and identities and the
objects associated with them. The Hungarian scholar Ferenc Feher describes the economy of
recently fallen Eastern European communism as a "dictatorship over needs" (Feher 1978). In
the American market economy, it is not the government, but the production industry and
advertisers who hold a dictatorship; a dictatorship over desires. By defining the ideals and
boundaries of identity, advertisers virtually dictate adolescent desires based on the products
that producers supply. Once they buy the objects of the desired identity, suppliers and
advertisers reinvent their desires, and they are convinced to buy again, as adolescents, as
young women, and as adults. Because objects are tools used by individuals, it is difficult to see
how they are used on individuals. By focusing attention on how individuals may use the
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products being marketed, advertisers detract attention from the larger picture and discourage
adolescents from asking themselves why they desire what the products purport to offer.
The advertising strategies reviewed in this section show how adolescent desires and
ideals are influenced by the covert authorities of advertising and production. Even some of the
most basic common assumptions about adolescence, like the desire for authenticity and
continuity, or the security of group membership, can be seen as dialectically related to
advertising strategies: these desires may originate in certain bio-psychological or psycho-
analytic processes, but they are then perpetuated by the market. This perpetuation discourages
critical thinking and adaptive change in face of unfavorable cultural conditions that
adolescents might choose to change if they were recognizable as authorities. Complacent
competition and symbolic rebellion replace thoughtful redefinition of self.
Media: Strategies of Containment
Media narratives also act as covert authorities in the definition of adolescent selves.
Because the meanings of television texts or teen romance novels are not always explicit, and
sometimes contained by more explicit meanings, even adolescents who reject the overt
authority of the media are affected by the covert meanings the media often communicates. The
television show Beverly Hills 90210 provides an illuminating example of the covert authority
of the media.
Alert to overt authorities, contemporary adolescents act saawy about television, and
reject its authority. While watching TV, adolescent girls maintain a constant stream of
criticism of whatever is flashing before them. Their criticism reflects a thorough knowledge of
what goes on behind the scenes, and therefore, an understanding of everything as inauthentic.
For example, when Donna, a character in Beverly Hills 90210, made her first appearance on
one episode, Katie and Terni immediately started in on her: "the only reason she's on the show
-is because her father is the producer," and "nose job city!" followed by peels of laughter. At
one point during another episode, Katie began very accurately predicting the camera
movements and music cues, "O.K., now zoom in and cue on the music." All of the girls are
experts in predicting the action, a game they seem to enjoy even while they criticize the show
for being too predictable. They also criticize commercials for being stupid or transparent, or
even political debates for the inauthenticity of the debaters. Paul Willis talks about the media-
realing skills of college-age British youth;
no other group is considered as discriminating, cynical and resistant to the
"hard sell." Furthermore, no other group is as astute at decoding the complex
messages, cross referencing and visual jokes of current advertising (Willis
1990:49).
The generation after the one he denotes, the one that includes these girls, has an even greater
degree of media savvy and cynicism.
However, even this generation's media savvy is somewhat superficial, and today's
television programs are covert in their communication of authority. The meanings behind
contemporary mass media narratives are often obscured by what Mimi White calls "strategies
of containment" in her essay on ideological analysis (1987). These are strategies which
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explicitly address one aspect, while implying much more about other such aspects. Even while
they criticize and scoff at 90210, the girls come back every week to sit, glazed in front of the
TV. The ambivalence and instability that adolescent girls feel regarding sexuality, authority,
competition, and symbolic expression are easily tapped by the show, and their desires are
channeled directly into the idealistically consistent and rewarding community of Beverly Hills.
The 90210 cast provides a second, more cooperative community of peers to which its viewers
may perform internally. When I asked Terri what name she wanted me to use in place of hers
for this piece, she immediately replied, "Brenda," a primary character on 90210 (of course I
could not use Brenda's name because it would confuse my discussion of the TV show). As
much as she criticizes, she simultaneously embraces the fantastical stage on which 90210
allows her to perform.
Like advertisers and producers, media narratives also play a dialectical role in
defining desires. 90210 both responds to and contributes to adolescent desires for autonomy
and simultaneously channels those desires into complacent acceptance of the status quo. By
addressing and resolving everyday contradictions within the same structure that spawned
them, 90210 contains deviance, subtly discouraging ideals that might include critical thinking
as part of their consequence.
Beverley Hills 90210
Kelley: At least I don't have to clear it with my mom before I ...
Brenda: I think we are going to need a raise in our allowance.
Kelley: It all depends on whether the doorman thinks you're cute or not.
Donna: Yeah, well if this is the real world, you can have it.
In an essay titled, "The End of Childhood," Neil Postman argues that "with the
assistance of other media such as radio, film, and records, television has the power to lead us
to childhood's end" (1988:154). Tracing the origins of our distinction between childhood and
adulthood to the spread of literacy, Postmnan claims that children became children because of
the instruction and learning required in order to become literate. Since the arrival of television,
discernible differences between children and adults have begun to vanish. "The symbolic form
of television does not require any special instruction or leaming" (Postman 1988:154), as do
reading and writing. No preparation or education is necessary to understand television. No
critical thinking is necessary. Furthennore, television does not segregate its audience. We can
no longer keep any secrets from children because television "forces the entire culture to come
out of the closet" (Postman 1988:155).
According to Postman, a new kind of person has emerged both on and off the
television screen: the adult-child. The adult-child is somewhere between the ages of twenty
and thirty, independent of overt authority figures, yet childlike in desires and behavior. He
writes that television
promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with
childishness-for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a
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lack of concern for consequences, an almost promiscuous preoccupation
with consumption (1988:157).
The behavior of adults and children is suddenly indistinguishable.
Although I disagree with many of the conclusions Postman draws about television's
general role in our society, some of his ideas are clearly applicable in the case of one of
cwunent television's most popular narratives: Beverly Hills 90210. During the hour between
nine and ten o'clock every Thursday night, one can revel in the exciting and gratifying lives of
a group of adult-children. The show collapses the differences between adults and children,
reconciling what viewers love and hate about each. In fact, 90210 promulgates an ideology in
which a number of important conflicting desires can coexist harmoniously. The program
skillfully uses what Mimi White calls "strategies of containment" (1987).
Minority positions or deviations from the mainstream are introduced but are
framed and held in place by more familiar, conventional representations
(White 987:156).
All is resolved before there has been any chance for the audience to think critically about the
issues brought up. Through strategies of containment, 90210 attempts to reconcile and direct
its viewers ambivalent and conflicting feelings not only about adults and children, but about
wealth and poverty, surfaces and substance, and fantasy and reality.
At least I don't have to clear it with my mom before I...
Role-reversals between parents and children in Beverly Hills 90210 is well
established in the very first scene of the first episode of the show. The Walsh family, of which
the twin son and daughter are named Brenda and Brandon, has just moved from Minneapolis
to Beverly Hills. Their belongings are still strewn all over the house on the kids' first day of
school, and when Brandon comes down for breakfast, he cannot find the toaster. "Mom,
where's the toaster?," he asks. Her response is to grab the toaster out of a cardboard box and,
with a stubborn pout on her face, hurl the toaster onto the floor. Brandon, calm and collected
in face of his mother's tantrum, just shrugs and says, "I guess breakfast is out of the question
this morning." Immediately in the narrative, a reversal of parent-child relations is established:
the parents throw tantrums and the children try to remain calm and deal with their problems
maturely.
Conversely, any assertion of parental authority is scorned among the 90210 crowd.
Kelly, the blond bombshell of the group, makes this explicit in her criticism of Donna for
having to "clear it with [her] mom" before doing something. In the first episode, Brenda is
thoroughly humiliated when her mother accompanies her out to her new friend's car on the
night of Brenda's first 90210 party. Not only is she forced to admit to her new friends that
indeed she does have a mother who wants to be introduced, but she must endure the public
disgrace of an argument over her curfew. The other girls are apparently unfamiliar with that
word. From here on out, curfews are constantly an issue between the Walsh parents and their
kids, and it is evident in their contestations that parents do not derive any natural authority
from their status. They must negotiate their authority, instead. If they say 12:00, Brenda says
12:30, and they respond with 12:15.
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In their compromise, the Walsh parents sound desperate to maintain some
authoritative stance, yet they seem to know that if they do not negotiate, they will lose the
respect and love of their children. In this sense, authority is shared on the basis of a logic that
validates both positions in the argument. Because all of the members of the Walsh family are
sympathetic, viewers see both sides of the argument as reasonable. Brenda and Brandon are in
a new city, where in order to be somebody they need to conform to the norms of 90210 kids;
their parents are in that same new city, enormous and ominous, and they are afraid of losing
track of their children and giving up the midwestern familial intimacy of their background.
Throughout the Walsh's adaptation to Beverly Hills, viewers on both sides of the authority
question are reassured. Children win ultimate authority on most issues because they prove
themselves worthy of autonomy. Brenda repeatedly reminds her parents that she always
behaves well. Hence, adult viewers are assured that if they allow their children autonomy, they
will make the right choices, and child viewers are assured that they are independent and
capable, deserving of the authority their parents unjustly try to maintain. The adult-child
reigns.
Of course, there are episodes in which Brenda, or one of the other kids in her group,
does do the wrong thing. In a recent episode, Brenda denies her parents authority by lying to
them and spending the weekend in Baja with her boyfriend, Dylan. While even her peers and
brother discourage her from going, she is compelled to rebel against her parents' ultimatum
because they offer no rational reason why she should not go. The structural discourse of the
show implies that she is justified in her rebellion against her parents, but that her mistake is in
lying. During her secret weekend in Baja she finds out that Dylan lied to her a year ago, when
he went to the same motel with another girl. The viewer is sympathetic with Brenda's anger at
Dylan, and lying becomes the villain of the episode. If Brenda is really responsible enough to
be independent, she should be able to negotiate and defend her position against her parents, as
she does with her curfew. So although Brenda's decisions are overtly presented as wrong in
this episode, she learns lessons from the experience which she would not have learned had she
not gone. Implicit is the idea that parents' ultimatums prevent children from learning the more
important lessons of experience. Brenda summarizes in a complaint to her brother, "How can I
prove that I'm responsible if they won't let me do anything?"
While Brenda has the maturity to forgive Dylan for lying once he admits his mistake,
Brenda's father is unable to do the same for Brenda and Dylan when Brenda is caught in her
lie at the border, having forgotten to bring any identification to Mexico. The border control
calls her father and he comes down to get her, furious at both her and Dylan. Once Brenda has
expressed her regret and she and Dylan have apologized, Mr. Walsh's anger is seen as
irrational and unjustified. He becomes the child for not being mature enough to forgive, like
Brenda was with Dylan. Even Mrs. Walsh regards her husband's anger as excessive, and, in
the last episode of the season, makes her own attempt to smooth things over by asking Dylan
to overcome his anger at Mr. Walsh's betrayal and try, once again, to apologize and make
amends with him. But Mr. Walsh is stubborn and childish in his anger. His resistance to
Dylan's apologies is made to seem almost neurotic. The importance of honesty is buttressed by
the importance of forgiveness. The show tells viewers that mature adults are honest with each
other and forgive each other. Again, mature adults does not mean older people. In these two
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episodes, both child and adult learn lessons about honesty and forgiveness. As long as we are
all open with and forgiving of each other, we can all be mature adult-children together.
When guidance or authority is called for, it is often institutional support that regulates
the masses of adult-children. Brenda and Brandon are warmly received by their principal at
West Beverly, and when Brenda's grades begin to slip because of an affair she is having with
an older man, the principal omnisciently intercedes and forces, her to communicate with her
parents about what is happening. Dylan deals with his alcohol problem by going to Alcoholics
Anonymous; almost all of the kids and adults see, or have seen, psychologists; Brenda is
forced by the border control to admit her lie about Baja. Authoritative parents are unnecessary
because institutionalized guidance interferes with unacceptable behavior and forces everyone
to be responsible.
What emerges is a community of individuals who are all equally susceptible to
mistakes and equally equipped to do the right thing. All ages are leveled into a horizontal mass
of people whose problems are all the same. Both parents and children struggle with the
temptations and difficulties of affairs, alcohol and drug addiction, sex, sexual assault,
pregancy, disease, and so on. They deal with these temptations and difficulties by remaining
in constant communication: everything is public information. A large majority of the scenes of
each episode involve more than a few of the members of the 90210 peer group, and many of
those scenes take place at their house of commons. There are constant reaction shots to reveal
the usually consensual feelings and ideas of the community. Problems between people are
dealt with through openness, and resolutions are achieved through forgiveness.
Because no one has any hierarchical authority over anyone else's life, however, they
only participate in each other's decisions through advice, never ultimatums. Responsibility and
maturity are learned through mistakes. In this way, the show is able to reconcile responsibility
and irresponsibility, maturity and immaturity, the adult and the child. Because learning to be a
responsible, mature adult requires experiential learning, the behavior of irresponsible,
immature children is seen as inevitable and even necessary. To repeat the words of Neil
Postnan:
[90210] promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with
childishness-for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a
lack of concem for consequences, an almost promiscuous preoccupation
with consumption.
By implying that irresponsible and immature behavior usually leads to the revelation of the
rights and wrongs of adulthood, the show is able to advocate irresponsibility and responsibility
simultaneously, appealing to both the adult and the child in all of the adult-children watching.
Kelly's advice to Brenda, "have a good time, that's what I always do," is validated as
an ideology. Having a good time will gratify us in the immediate, and teach us how to do the
rght tiing in the long run.
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1 think we are going to need a raise in our allowance.
Beverly Hills 90210 also attempts to reconcile conflicts in the American
consciousness over the meanings of wealth and poverty. One of the music-accompanied
opening sequences of the very first episode reveals the unbelievable wealth among students at
West Beverly High. The shots are self-consciously exaggerated, emphasizing the difference
between these kids and most viewers. Teachers at the high school arrive in small cars,
contrasting with the flashiness of the students and establishing them as outsiders to the wealth
within the text. The two most important outsiders within the text, however, are Brenda and
Brandon, who, upon arrival at school, agree that they are going to need raises in their
allowances.
Brenda's and Brandon's positioning as outsiders to this community of wealth is
extremely useful in positioning the viewer in the text. At first, we are allowed to associate
ourselves and gawk with them, as outsiders. As they adapt to their new lives and wealth in
Beverly Hills, however, we adapt along with them. Brenda and Brandon act as characterized
fictional readers, who guide us in our understanding of the text, and consequently, our
understanding of extreme wealth. As they explore the world of West Beverly High, they
discover for us that although wealthy people seem different on the surface, they are really just
like us.
Brandon's romance with the richest girl at West Beverly in the first episode sets up
Brandon's, and our, initiation into the zip code of wealth. He meets her because they are both
alone at what he later finds out is her own party; their loneliness in the midst of hundreds of
people brings them together. Because Brandon is attracted to her body and mind before he
knows her reputation and wealth, he does not just assess her as a rich and beautiful party-girl.
Instead, he gets to know her through her problems, her loneliness and confusion over who she
is, and is ultimately touched by the difficulties being rich entails. Marianne is presented as
victimized by her wild and wealthy sixties parents who pressure her to lead an even wilder life.
The implication is that the rich are just as oppressed as the poor and we should not, as even the
rich kids at West Beverly do, resent people like Marianne.
To further deflect any resentment of the rich, Marianne's oppression is skillfully
presented as the fault of "excessive" sixties parents, not Marianne's money itself. This is
extremely important in a period of history during which people are finally beginning to
express resentment of the widened gap between rich and poor that developed during the
Reagan and Bush eras. Excessive wealth needs to be accounted for in cultural texts, and 90210
needs to treat the subject while still encouraging its viewers to consume. Marianne is both rich
and a victim, allowing viewers to sympathize with her. Yet her oppression is really caused by
the excesses of the liberal sixties, not those of the conservative eighties. Hence viewers'
resentment of the wealthy is subdued because they see that the wealthy are also victims of
oppression, and at the same time, viewers' desires to consume and be wealthy is maintained
because the problems of the rich are not actually caused by wealth.
The character Andrea provides a second angle on the reconciliation between wealth
and poverty. She is relatively poor, and does not live in the 90210 zip code. Even though she
is less affluent, she manages to make a place for herself among the West Beverly kids. In the
last episode of the season, she is still insecure about her belonging to the group when she
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incorrectly believes that she is not invited to Kelly's mom's wedding. This constant insecurity
that she is really an outsider allows the program to deal with the viewer-outsiders' insecurities
that they, too, could not really belong to such a wealthy group. In this case, Andrea acts as a
characterized fictional reader. Her doubts allow the narrative to reassure her, and viewers, that
her belonging to their group has nothing to do with money. The implication is that you do not
need money to mingle with the rich kids. Andrea's determination to go to a good school and
her hard work are enough to bring her into that circle. Everyone, even the less affluent, has
access to the benefits of 90210.
The contradiction between this ideal of equal access and Brenda's and Brandon's
decision to demand higher allowances in order to fit in reflects an ideology that contains ideas
which challenge the meaning of wealth. Everyone feels they have the potential to be a part of
the world of 90210. All they have to do is demand more money from their parents.
It all depends on whether the doorman thinks you 're cute or not.
The importance of appearance in 90210 is rarely contested. For the most part, the
show seems to revel in surfaces, and appearance is embraced as one of the most important
components of identity, especially for women. As Kelly explains, "it all depends on whether
the doorman thinks you're cute or not."
However, there is some attempt to incorporate an understanding of identity that
focuses on what's inside. Marianne and Andrea are, again, both examples of this shot at
reconciling conflicting ideas over what role appearance plays in identity, while containing the
threat of substance to surface. In Marianne's case, it is not only her money, but her sex appeal
that gives her a reputation as a party-girl, and even compels her to act the part. Because
Brandon gets to know her as a sensitive person instead of as a party-girl, he reveals that she
has a beautiful inside, as well as body and face. Similarly, Andrea is not quite as beautiful as
the rest of her friends, but she is still accepted among them, and Brandon even dates her now
and then. Her intelligence, rather than her appearance, is the substance of her character.
This rare focus on substance rather than surface is fairly forcefully contained,
however, even in episodes where appearance and identity are overtly addressed. For instance,
during Brandon's and Marianne's hot-tub conversation about the depth of Marianne's identity
reaching beyond her party-girl appearance, Brandon does not allow her to go so far as to
transgress gender boundaries, which are an important part of the appearance and identity
connection. When she suggests that they take off all of their clothes, he objects, supposedly
because he does not want to objectify and exploit her. However, in objecting, he refers to her
aggressiveness as an inappropriate role-reversal. Even while the depth and complexity of
Marianne's identity are being explored, she is not allowed to transcend the passive role of
woman. In Andrea's case, the importance of intelligence, instead of appearance, in her identity
is contained by the fact that she wears her intelligence. That is, she is allowed to be
appreciated for her intelligence only if she incorporates it into her appearance. She wears
snart clothes, smart hairstyles, and smart glasses.
Ultimately, 90210 encourages viewers to understand appearance as an integral part of
identity while still incorporating the minority position of it's what's inside that counts. In one
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classroom scene in the first episode, a girl who is dramatized by the music and reaction shots
as fat and ugly, searches for a seat in class. Everyone throws bags and books onto the seats
next to them in hopes that she will not sit there. Kelly tells the fat girl that the seat across from
her is saved, and she is in turn rescued by Brenda, who walks in just as the fat girl demands to
know for whom the seat is saved. Viewers already know that Brenda is worried about making
friends on her first day of school, so it is difficult to resist being relieved that she finds a seat
with someone friendly and beautiful. Because Brenda has already been established as a
sympathetic character, even if one objects to the treatment of the fat girl, one cannot help
being happy that Brenda, who's insides and outside are attractive, gets to sit there instead. In
an appeal to materialism, 90210 constantly validates a focus on appearance and surfaces, even
while claiming to explore possible contradictions between appearance and identity, surfaces
and substance.
Yeah? Well if this is the real world, you can have it.
Related to containment of the threat substance poses to surfaces is 90210's attempt to
contain the threat reality poses to fantasy. The most important thing the show must do is keep
its ratings high. In other words, 90210 wants its viewers to keep watching. In order for them to
keep watching, viewers have to believe in the merit of fantasy, or the world as seen through
the television screen. Reality outside of the television is a threat.
One episode provides an illuminating example of how reality is contained in 90210.
A well-known band, Color Me Bad comes to Beverly Hills and Donna, Brenda, Kelly, and
David decide to try to meet them. In essence, they try to turn the fantasy of the fame, glory,
and sex appeal associated with the band into a reality for themselves. Kelly is at first hesitant
to buy into the fantasizing of fandom, but she finally gets talked into going to the hotel where
Color Me Bad is staying, and is ultimately rewarded for it.
One of the first scenes of their search for the band is presented as a music-
accompanied, video-style detective scene. They have already begun to participate in a fantasy,
sunglasses inside and all. During the course of the evening, however, Kelly is the only one
who makes it in to see the band. Donna, by contrast, runs into her mother, who is having an
extra-marital affair. She, Brenda, and David, her boyfriend, go home together. There is much
talk about how imperfect everybody is, and how it does not mean anything about their love for
their children. Donna goes home to embrace her mother and forgive her, although still upset.
Meanwhile, Brandon and Brenda have a conversation in the bathroom discussing the
woes of being human and fallible: "you think you know where your life is headed, then you
get off an elevator on the wrong floor [where Donna discovered her mother] and, bang,
everything's different," says Brandon. And Brenda responds, "Yeah, I mean it's so surreal.
This morning she was Donna and now she's Donna, but a completely different Donna." At this
point, the wise father interjects, "same Donna, more complicated world." Later, they all meet
at their regular hangout, to deal with Donna's problem communally. As Donna is leaving her
house with David, she complains, "I never knew what it was like to have problems," to which
David responds, "Welcome to the real world." Donna, uncomforted, retorts, "Yeah, well if this
is the real world, you can have it."
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Later in the show, things seem a little brighter. Then Kelly arrives with the band.
Donna is dumb struck, "I can't believe they're here, and their eating hamburgers!" As they
break into a song directed at Donna, of which the lyrics are "Dream on, dream away," Donna
leans over to David and chides, "Weren t you saying something about the real world?"
This episode reconciles the contradictions between fantasy and reality while clearly
advocating the superiority of fantasy. It begins with the kids efforts to turn a fantasy into a
reality by meeting a band whose members are of the highest star status. The plan backfires
when reality interferes. Donna's mother's affair becomes an obstacle to fantasy, a reality too
powerful to transform. Reality is suddenly perceived as surreal in its inconsistency and
fallibility, and the world seems more complicated than it should be. Donna can only think of
escaping the horror of reality. When Kelly arrives with the band, reality is transformed into an
infinitely more engrossing and satisfying fantasy. They could not succeed in turning fantasy
into reality, so, instead, they turn reality into fantasy. This part of the episode is so implausible
and dream-like that it is as if they are all dream[ing] away as an escape from the dissatisfaction
of real life.
Implicit is the idea that this is not the real world, but it is easy to replace one's real
world with this sort of fantasy. All you have to do is turn on the television! The layers of
fantasy and reality are made very complex in 90210: the actors and producers of the show are
involved in the actual Beverly Hills scene in reality, simply by virtue of being actors; the
characters are involved in the Beverly Hills scene because they live there, and consequently,
they are involved in the scene of producers and actors; in interviews of the actors, the actors
sound very similar to their characters; and, in interviews of Beverly Hills High School
students, the students sound very similar to the characters. The show could almost be called a
documentary. And yet the documentary is about people for whom fiction is fundamentally
important. -In watching the show, reality is transformed into fantasy, which is presented as
infinitely more rewarding than real life. Its narrative structure provides consistency and
resolution. The threat of reality is contained by the ideology of fantasy.
All of these strategies of containment, prescribing a framework for conflicting ideas
in which a dominant ideology is favored over the minority position, are components of what
seems a concerted effort to defend the values of the eighties against rising criticism. Viewers
of 90210 are told that, deep down, all face the same problems and all are equally equipped to
escape those problems. Adolescent audiences are encouraged to subscribe to an ideology of
individual wealth, appearances and surfaces, and most importantly, fantasy, and to
unabashedly cultivate their desires for those temptations. Unequal access to control over the
sources of satisfaction is denied, and the audience is pacified by the show's positioning of its
viewers as a horizontal mass of people whose problems are equally grave. Beverly Hills 90210
places its viewer in the consensual community that meets at The Peach Pit every Thursday
night, a community in which harmony is derived from autonomy, materialism, superficiality,
and denial.
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Conclusion
I have tried to show how the female adolescent processes of rejecting overt authority
are intertwined with mass culture in contemporary American society. This paper has
illuminated the links between the biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and mass cultural
influences on adolescent identity formation, in addition to demonstrating the difficulties of
distinguishing them from one another. The processes of adolescence are dynamic, and while
the temptation is strong to pin blame, to match each effect to a cause, the resulting inaccuracy
will only further obscure the fickle truths.
Still, it remains important to recognize that with changing times, different authorities
discussed in this paper have greater and lesser influences. While perhaps in the fifties, overt
authorities were less contested, in the eighties, covert authorities seem to go unrecognized and
are therefore extremely powerful. The eighties have spawned a culture of denial and escapism
in which compulsive consumption distracts most citizens from the problems intrinsic in what
and how they consume. This denial and lack of critical thought allows market and mass culture
to expertly exploit those who are not in positions of power: for example, adolescent girls. The
ambivalence and insecurity of adolescent girls is recognized, responded to, and perpetuated by
market and mass culture, more so now than ever before. The status quo of capitalism gains
strength by offering superficial remedies to those whom it does not adequately serve.
The covert forces that absorb youthful resistance and guide youthful redefinition can
be awesome. If market and mass culture were recognized as perpetuating as well as responding
to cultural conditions, some of the needs that seem inevitable in adolescence might dissipate.
Covert authorities rendered overt would allow adolescents to think more critically about the
choices they make, and reduce their tendencies to reject authorities simply because they
recognize them as such. There are skeletons in the closet of this culture that, upon emergence,
might inspire adolescents of all ages to favor action over complacency.
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