“Enter your watchwoman”: Alanis Morissette’s feminist lessons

ABSTRACT

As a feminist medium, Alanis Morissette’s music provides her fans with both a feminist perspective and lessons for living. As a young adult, she used music to uncover and resist the numerous challenges she faced as a female in a patriarchal business and sexist society. She continues to make the experiences and needs of young people a focus of her songs. Overall, Morrisette writes as a voice for many generations of youth, a popular voice that continues to matter. Beginning with a discussion of Morissette’s continued cultural relevance, this article reads the ways in which Morissette offers her fans a feminist vision of themselves as confident individuals and worthy contributors to society. Drawing on her wide body of work and scholarship on it, alongside studies of young people’s relationship practices and use of media, I argue that Morissette’s songs exemplify a feminist ethos that encourages her fans to demand equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Alanis Morissette
• Popular music
• Feminist culture
• Youth and adolescence
• Sexuality

Acknowledgements

I want to extend to the editors and peer reviewers my deepest appreciation for their work on this article; they have made it much stronger than it might have been otherwise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roxanne Harde

Roxanne Harde researches and teaches American literature and culture at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Faculty. A Fulbright Scholar, her current research projects focus on a study of Americana singer-songwriters and another on rape culture in young adult fiction.