The politics of female adolescent sexuality in music: a social semiotic analysis of Liz Phair's “Glory”

ABSTRACT

Released in the summer of 1993, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville was hailed by music critics as a landmark indie rock album by a female musician for its depiction of a sexually explicit and subversive feminine persona traversing misogynistic terrain. This article focuses on one song in particular from the album called “Glory” about a teenage girl's sexual experience. Three key semiotic resources in the sound and lyrics (vocal quality, pitch quality and instrumentation) effectively convey her sexual subjectivity, which is regulated by gendered discourses. “Glory” provides specific insights into the emotional, social and political realities confronted by adolescent girls, particularly the subject of their sexual pleasure as a conflicting experience, fluctuating between enjoyment and pleasure versus shame and danger. The song functions as a form of social criticism aimed at the long-standing effects of formal polices regarding adolescent sexual and reproductive health during the Regan era that silences adolescent girls from exploring sexual pleasure and desire.

KEYWORDS:

• Female adolescent sexuality
• music
• Liz Phair
• semiotic resources
• gendered discourses

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous referee's for their constructive criticism, and especially Carolina Sanchez-Palencia for her incisive intellectual and relentless emotional support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dale Moodley is a counseling psychologist and a postdoctoral researcher based in the Department of English and North American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain. He also serves as an associate researcher to the Department of Psychology at Rhodes University, South Africa. His main research interests examine the role of contemporary popular music as a cultural product that produces gendered and sexual subjectivities as a form of social fantasy.

ORCID

Dale Moodley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1151-3093

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) under the Freestanding Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, [grant number 96679].