The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

Abstract

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.

Keywords:

• Girls Gone Wild
• Agency
• Carnivalesque
• Neoliberalism
• Postfeminism
• Television
• Guys Gone Wild

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Tucson, AZ, and at the 2005 International Communication Association Conference in New York, NY.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Tucson, AZ, and at the 2005 International Communication Association Conference in New York, NY.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Marjorie Jolles, Mark Andrejevic, Michael Albrecht, and her colleagues at the University of Iowa, as well as the CSMC editor and the two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Tucson, AZ, and at the 2005 International Communication Association Conference in New York, NY.

1. According to Joe Francis, “Occasionally we pay if they ask, but 95 percent of the girls just get a tank top” (quoted in Navarro, 2004, p. 1).

2. All of Francis's camera operators are required to be under 30, male, and single. Men are not permitted to join women on-camera for GGW (Grigoriadis, 2002).

3. This logic has recently been appropriated by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority; their “Vegas Freedom” campaign targets middle-class professionals, and promotes tourism by capitalizing on the popular mantra, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” (“Only Vegas,” 2005). A recent spate of promotions for the non-stop pleasure atmosphere of Las Vegas emphasizes escapism and deviation from one's “normal” behaviors. In one commercial, a woman introduces herself under a false name every time she meets a man at a bar; another features an embarrassed woman and her laughing friends, in what appears to be the morning after a long night out. An interactive feature of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's website (www.onlyvegas.com) called the “Alibi Generator” is designed to “help you create your Vegas alibi” by providing information on apparently innocuous activities, such as dining, shopping, golf, and entertainment.

4. The definition of third wave feminism itself is contestable and has had an uneasy reception in academia. As a term that co-exists with poststructuralist emphases on deconstruction and indeterminacies of meaning, the notion of a discrete definition of a third wave branch of feminism limits the concept at the outset. GGW aligns with third wave feminism through the popular characterization that third wavers are adventuresome and playful, often making use of the pleasure, danger, and definitional capabilities of existing power structures (see Heywood and Drake, 1997). Third wave feminism is characterized as highly individualistic—absolved from the responsibility of the collective—and with a penchant for embracing contradictions, especially insofar as those inconsistencies have the ability to startle or shock (Shugart, 2001). Finally, many third wavers locate the beginnings of their struggle in themselves and in politicizing their bodies. The body becomes a primary site for practicing personal resistance (Fixmer & Wood, 2005). In this way, the momentarily transgressive, pleasurable, and potentially liberating practice of stripping in public/on camera for GGW can align with some tenets of third wave feminism.

5. According to the Guys Gone Wild website (www.guysgonewild.com), six titles of this series are in circulation. Titles such as Guys Gone Wild: The Big Easy and Guys Gone Wild: Spring Break suggest the footage was obtained in locales similar to Girls Gone Wild. All references here to Guys Gone Wild videos come from the first of the series, Introducing … Guys Gone Wild (2004).

6. Guys Gone Wild is described as a likely “gag gift,” or “bachelorette kind of gift” (quoted in Lemire, 2004), and is currently marketed as such in late-night commercials on the We women's network; however, gay men have fast become a lucrative market (Vargas, 2004).

7. As of this writing, I was unable to locate exact sales figures for Guys Gone Wild.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen C. Pitcher

Karen C. Pitcher is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa