‘Your new smart-mouthed girlfriends’: postfeminist conduct books

Abstract

Postfeminist popular culture celebrates women's entitlement to makeover and female sociality. This article examines the confluence of body image and expert girlfriendship in the conduct books, What not to wear (Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall) and Skinny bitch (Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman). These co-authors brand themselves ‘best friends’ and market this female relating as evidence of expertise. Extending their friendship to their readers, they create an intimate female site in order to guide the reader into making normative choices around body image. In particular, they employ strategies of policing and surveillance, appealing to self-responsibility. The girlfriends write the body through an ethical code, employing the rhetoric of guilt, punishment and humiliation if the consumer fails to conduct herself and those around her correctly. I ask what happens when policing is applied to female friends: how far is female friendship, or girlfriend culture, governed by the neoliberal market forces into privileging the mechanics of makeover? What is the significance of having women dictate how other women relate? How far are women involved in the public shaming of other women?

Keywords:

• body image
• female friendship
• makeover
• misogyny
• postfeminism
• self-help

Notes

1. I refer to the title of these conduct books rather than the name of the authors. Barnouin and Freedman refer to themselves as ‘Skinny Bitch’, and in both Skinny bitch and What not to wear the two authors become subsumed under their postfeminist brand.

2. I discuss these films in the forthcoming (2012) article ‘“We can have it all”: The girlfriend flick’, Feminist media studies, 12 (1).

3. There are some positive aspects of girlfriend culture which mirror the political force of second-wave feminism. I discuss these in more detail in my forthcoming book, Girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood (Palgrave 2012).

4. I use the label ‘conduct books’ because it is my working assumption that these texts belong to a specific literary tradition whose objective is to govern gendered behaviour. I use govern in the Foucauldian sense which defines government as the conduct of conduct: ‘the more or less deliberate attempt to shape the actions of others and of oneself’ (Dean 1999, p. 198). As a noun, conduct refers to behaviour, but as a verb it implies guidance; as a self-reflexive verb – to conduct oneself – it gathers a moral imperative (Dean 1999, p. 10). These three uses of the term are pertinent as these textual girlfriends promise to guide the reader into making appropriate and normative choices in the maintenance of an ideal body. In other words, these conduct books advise women how to behave themselves in an image-based and consumer-driven society (Rose 1996, p. 27).

5. Barnouin and Freedman both worked in the modelling industry, and Trinny and Susannah gain much of their cultural capital through class (McRobbie 2004).