Ambivalent aspirationalism in millennial postfeminist culture on Gossip Girl

ABSTRACT

The teen television show Gossip Girl positions classed subjectivities as based on an imagined authentic moral value system as opposed to economic reality, with troubling outcomes for middle-class girls. By combining the postfeminist myths of individuality, choice, and success with capitalist ideology, the show preserves a hierarchy in which social climbing is presented as dangerous to only girls. Gossip Girl suggests that middle-class girls' primary value is in their sexual purity, a notion that works to exacerbate gendered economic instability by positioning girls, according to heteronormative dictates, as dependent on men for economic and moral protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Mean girls
• blogging
• class authenticity
• gender
• teen television

Notes

1. Gossip Girl, DVD, produced by Josh Schwartz (2007–2012; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Television).

2. Nancy Franklin. “High-School Confidential,” The New Yorker, November 26, 2007, 91.

3. In the season 2 finale, several of the main characters graduate from high school and attend Manhattan based colleges, such as New York University.

4. The female students on Gossip Girl attend The Constance Billard School for Girls, while the male students go to St. Jude's School for Boys. The two schools share a courtyard, providing opportunities to comingle.

5. Andrew Hampp. “OMFG! A Show with Few TV Viewers is Still a Hit,” Advertising Age, May 18, 2009, 14.

6. At the time of this writing, all six seasons are available on Netflix.

7. Jake Martin, “The Kids are All Right,” America, October 19, 2009, 21–4.

8. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

9. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet, “Feminist Surveillance Studies: Critical Interventions,” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, ed. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana A. Magnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.

10. Elizabeth McNichol, Douglas Hall, David Cooper, and Vincent Palacios, “Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends,” Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publication/pulling-apart-2012/ (accessed August 14, 2015); Regional Oral History Office, “Slaying the Dragon of Debt,” University of California, Berkeley, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/debt/financialcrisis.html (accessed August 14, 2015); Chris Isidore, “It's Official: Recession since Dec. ’07,” CNNMoney.com, http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/01/news/economy/recession/index.htm (accessed August 14, 2015).

11. McNichol et al., “Pulling Apart,” para. 5.

12. Rebecca Macatee, “Penn Badgley Joins Protestors at Occupy Wall Street,” US Weekly, October 24, 2011, 12.

13. Jason Gay, “Pretty Little Things,” Rolling Stone, April 2, 2009, 40.

14. Nicki Lisa Cole and Alison Dahl Crossley, “On Feminism in the Age of Consumption,” Consumers, Commodities & Consumption: A Newsletter of the Consumer Studies Research Network 11, no. 1 (2009), http://csrn.camden.rutgers.edu/newsletters/11-1/cole_crossley.htm (accessed June 15, 2015).

15. Patricia Mooney Nickel, “Sociology and the Future: Aspiration,” New Zealand Sociology 27, no. 1 (2012): 70–74.

16. Lauren J. DeCarvalho, “Hannah and Her Entitled Sisters: (Post)Feminism, (Post)recession, and Girls,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 367–70.

17. Serena Daalmans, “I'm Busy Trying to Become Who I Am’: Self-Entitlement and the City on HBO's Girls,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 359–62.

18. DeCarvalho, “Hannah and Her Entitled Sisters,” 368.

19. Ibid., 369.

20. Ouellette similarly explores gendered aspirationalism in her analysis of Helen Gurley Brown's advice to women on how to social climb by marrying “up.” Ouellette argues that Brown legitimates sexism and capitalist exploitation of women by offering a “girl-style American Dream that promised transcendence from class roles as well as sexual ones” (Laurie Ouellette, “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams,” Media, Culture, & Society 21 (1999): 360).

21. Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees & Wannabes (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).

22. Rachel Simmons, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (New York: Harcourt, 2002).

23. Both Wiseman and Simmons's books received significant mainstream media attention. Wiseman was interviewed on The Today Show, and her book served as the basis for the 2004 film Mean Girls. Simmons has been on The Oprah Winfrey Show twice, and the 2005 Lifetime movie Odd Girl Out is based on her book.

24. Emily D. Ryalls, “Demonizing ‘Mean Girls’ in the News: Was Phoebe Prince ‘Bullied to Death?,’” Communication, Culture & Critique 5, no. 3 (2013): 463–81.

25. Chas Critcher, “Widening the Focus: Moral Panics as Moral Regulation,” British Journal of Criminology 49 (2009): 17–34.

26. Sheila Batacharya, “Racism, Girl Violence, and the Murder of Reena Virk,” in Girls' Violence: Myth and Realities, ed. Christine Alder and Anne Worrall (State University of New York Press, 2004): 62.

27. Wiseman, Queen Bees & Wannabes, 25.

28. Emily Bazelon, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014); Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2009); Emily D. Ryalls, “Demonizing ‘Mean Girls’ in the News.”

29. Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick, and Anita Harris, Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power, and Social Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Chesney-Lind and Irwin, Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype (New York: Routledge, 2008); Gonick, “The ‘Mean Girl’ Crisis: Problematizing Representations of Girls’ Friendships,” Feminism & Psychology 14, no. 3 (2004): 395–400; Ringrose, “A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology,” Feminism & Psychology 16, no. 4 (2006): 405–24.

30. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana E. Mastro, “Mean Girls? The Influence of Gender Portrayals in Teen Movies on Emerging Adults’ Gender-Based Attitudes and Beliefs,” J & MC Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2008): 131–46; Chesney-Lind and Irwin, Beyond Bad Girls; Gonick, “The ‘Mean Girl’ Crisis; Deidre M. Kelly and Shauna Pomerantz, “Mean, Wild, and Alienated: Girls and the State of Feminism in Popular Culture,” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–19; Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination & Celebrity Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Ringrose, “A New Universal Mean Girl”; Ryalls, “Demonizing ‘Mean Girls’ in the News.”

31. Simmons, Odd Girl Out; Wiseman, Queen Bees & Wannabes.

32. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture,” in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Tasker and Diana Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–25.

33. Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman, The Communication Review 5, no. 4: 265–84; Tasker and Negra, “Introduction.”

34. Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home,” Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. Charlotte Brundson, Julie D'Acci, and Lynn Spiegel (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997), 126–37.

35. Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon,” 269.

36. Vicki Coppock, Deena Haydon, and Ingrid Richter, The Illusions of ‘Post-Feminism’: New Women, Old Myths (Briston, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1995).

37. Harris, Future Girl, 13.

38. Ibid., 16.

39. Ibid., 13–36.

40. Ibid., 16.

41. Ibid., 8.

42. Stephanie Genz, “My Job is Me: Postfeminist Celebrity Culture and the Gendering of Authenticity,” Feminist Media Studies 15(4): 551.

43. Tasker and Negra, “Introduction,” 12.

44. Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 59–73.

45. Dreama Moon, “White Enculturation and Bourgeois Identity: The Discursive Production of ‘Good (White) Girls,’” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999), 177–97.

46. Hudson is located along the west border of Columbia County, New York. On the show, it is shown to be a short train ride from Manhattan.

47. Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

48. Harris, Future Girl, 13.

49. Ibid., 27.

50. Lorraine Delia Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 2.

51. Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 51; Meda Chesney-Lind and Michele Eliason, “From Invisible to Incorrigible: The Demonization of Marginalized Women and Girls,” Crime Media Culture 2, no. 1 (2006): 29–48; Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia.

52. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

53. Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 113.

54. Tenenbaum, “Through the Grapevine,” PopMatters (2008), http://www.popmatters.com/feature/through-the-grapevine/ (Accessed August 24, 2015).

55. Tenenbaum, “Through the Grapevine,” para. 4.

56. Fahy, “One Night in Paris (Hilton),” 5.

57. Ibid., p. 6.

58. Tenenbaum, “Through the Grapevine,” para. 5.

59. Harris, Future Girl, 118.

60. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 63.

61. In this scene, it is upper-class Nate Archibald who “saves” Jenny, confirming her need to be saved from her precarious position within the UES.

62. Susan Berridge, “Personal Problems and Women's Issues,” Feminist Media Studies 11, no. 4 (2011): 467–81.

63. This is one of the show's only overt references to religion (even weddings typically take place outside of churches).

64. Judith Davidoff, “Government Funding for Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” Isthmus, January 31, 2013, http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=38966 (accessed March 10, 2015); Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009); Jocelyne Zablit, “No Sex Please, We're Daddy's Little Girls,” The Sunday Times, March 25, 2007, http://www.sundaytimes.lk/070325/International/i508.html (accessed March 11, 2015). Purity Balls are dances during which young girls wear white and pledge their virginity to their fathers until marriage. These balls are sponsored by crisis pregnancy centers, which are federally funded through abstinence only education money.

65. Valenti, The Purity Myth, 101–20, 138.

66. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 8.