Retrovisioning chicko roles: Puberty Blues as postfeminist television adaptation and the feminization of the 1970s

Abstract

A recurrent theme in the studies of postfeminist adaptations of popular second wave feminist texts is the diminution at best, or gutting, at worst, of feminist politics in the contemporary remakes. This essay explores whether a similar process occurs in the 2012–2013 television adaptation of the Australian proto-feminist classic, Puberty Blues or whether a more productive relationship between feminism and postfeminism can occur. The television adaptation of Puberty Blues is an ideal text with which to examine Australian postfeminist adaptation, given that its source text is one of the earliest examples of Australian popular feminism, and a rare example of a text associated with Australian second wave feminism being remade. In contrast to many postfeminist adaptations in which feminism is contained, I demonstrate that Puberty Blues expands its popular feminist gaze from surf culture to Australian culture more broadly. Its careful retrovisioning – in both senses of looking back and using retro style – of the Australian 1970s feminizes a crucial era of the nation, and hence criticises a number of semi-dormant Australian cultural mythologies. As a result, it offers a fictional history lesson on the necessity of the Australian women’s movement. And it thus, disturbs postfeminist times with its comforting assumption that women’s inequality has been (smoothly) resolved and women are therefore fully integrated into the nation.

Notes

1. I term it proto-feminist because of the text’s and authors’ isolation from the women’s movement at the time of its composition, as well as its raw feminist political critique, or what Lisa Featherstone (2013, 213) describes as ‘a form of nascent – perhaps adolescent – feminism’. McMahon (2005, 281) notes that it ‘has been designated a “classic” in the fields of both Australian literature and film’; indeed, the executive producer for Channel Ten says its classic status made it ideal for television adaptation (Dillon 2012, 107).

2. Mary Russo provides one of the first scholarly mentions of postfeminism in 1983.

3. Some exceptions are Henderson (2013) and Taylor (2008).

4. Speed (2004, 55) observes, however, Puberty Blues’ relative neglect by feminist critics.

5. In her reading of The Stepford Wives, Elliott (2008, 35) demonstrates that ‘mainstream feminism’s fixation on the housewife’s Sisyphean labors offered a means of narrating the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s’.

6. The chiko roll is an Australian form of junk food – deep fried and filled with unidentifiable contents. It was a favourite of the surfers in Puberty Blues.

7. Schofield (2005, 37), who played the role of Debbie in the film version, dates it as being set in about 1974.

8. ‘Whitlam’ in so many cultural narratives is metonymic of the 1970s as decade of fundamental progressive social change in Australia. Thus, when we talk about the Whitlam era we can be referring to one or more of the following: the Anti-Vietnam War movement, women’s liberation, sexual liberation, large government, political crisis, social democracy, the welfare state, stagflation, Juni Morosi and so on. For my purposes ‘Whitlam’ represents a major era of progress for women’s rights, and a sense of general social progress facilitated by the social democratic state.

9. Negra (2009, 5) explains retreatism as the process by which the career woman heroine leaves her career to find her true self via a return to her hometown and an alternative identity as a mother, daughter or wife.

10. McKee (2001, 105) argues that Number 96 brought permissiveness, that is, the ethos of the sexual revolution to Australian television.

11. In her foreword to the 2002 reissue of Puberty Blues, Germaine Greer (2002, xii) notes the dissonance between the novel’s and Australian soap opera’s versions of beach culture: ‘TV soap opera has sold the seaside suburbs of Sydney to the British public as a kind of working-class paradise … ’.

12. Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo (2011) is another major example. Its second series, Paper Giants: Magazine Wars (2013) extends the feminization process to the 1980s.