First in the series: Today’s Female Role Models
A gendered, raced and classed success story
I’m more than just your average girl.
In her song “Who Says,” Hannah Montana, a White, upper-middle class, heterosexual, teenaged girl, defines success as being “anything [she] want[s] to be” such as “10 feet tall,” having “worldwide” fame, being “Superman” and “president” (ironically both masculine identities, so far), and being “glamorous just like you see in all the magazines.” Her version of achievement is defined by masculine images of success mixed with trendy fashion. She has hit every desirable attribute in a list of sociologically significant and fallacious binaries: White/minority, heterosexual/homosexual, upper-middle class/poor, worldwide/local, tall/short, glamorous/plain, extraordinary/average, abled/disabled, individual/collective. Hannah is the epitome of everything hegemonic in our (mainstream) society. Moreover, she insists on describing herself as a girl rather than a woman, a much stronger image, in my view. She tells us that she can be an ambitious “girl” while not sacrificing her feminine qualities: I can be “soft and sweet or louder than the radio.”
All of this begs the question, to whom is Hannah singing, to whom does she have something to prove? She has all these dominant qualities save that of the adult (White) male. I suggest it is to that platonic, superior, male super-ego that Hannah is singing and performing. As long as you remember you are just a girl and therefore subordinate, the world is your oyster!
Teachable Moments
The textual body of Hannah Montana is a site of power where discourses about gender, consumerism and individual success intersect in ways that support particular cultural practices and ways of thinking. In a talk sponsored by the Klingenstein Foundation at Teachers College (November 14, 2007), Maxine Greene contended that mass media often “throws a blanket over us.” She used this metaphor to argue that popular culture, by its ubiquitous and univocal nature, smoothers our desire to think critically about hegemonic discourses and thereby imposes the silence of thoughtlessness on us. In silence, we accept our powerlessness to resist dominant cultural truths, even as they simultaneously oppress us. It’s high time we throw off that metaphorical blanket and identify some of these cultural myths. Once identified, those cultural myths can be recast as premises to be challenged and resisted. What cultural circumstances make is possible for Miley to be Hannah Montana. Could someone else, who doesn’t share the same hegemonic markers of race and class reach the same popular success? Why must her stardom remain a secret from her peers at school? And why is celebrity cast as an honorable goal?
Often, liberatory discourses appropriated by the dominant class lose their original meaning. In our collective cultural memory, we may recall that 1970’s liberal feminism was perceived as daring and was also empowering for many people. Today however, feminism has become a dirty word in mainstream usage. For example, Sarah Palin, like her or loath her, resisted identifying herself as a feminist, even though she had risen in politics to be only the second woman in U.S. history to receive the nomination for Vice President on the ticket of a major party. In the recent Senate Confirmation hearings, we saw Judge Sonia Sotomayor lectured and interrogated by some Senators for in essence being an uppity Latina. (Please see https://www.groundreport.com/Opinion/Judge-Sotomayors-Meltdown-and-Kay-Corleones-Hyster for my discussion on this topic.)
As Maxine Greene (2000) expressed, “[T]elevision disseminates a myth of liberal triumphs.” She continued:
For all the talk of global citizenship, multiculturalism, social justice and the rest, an untroubled positive-ism (an unexamined split between facts and values) has taken over in too many classrooms (p. 271).
I would add that this attitude has taken over youth culture in general. As educational opportunities spill out of classrooms and into hallways, lunch tables and recess, and as pop culture permeates all aspects of students’ lives in the same spaces, phenomena like Hannah Montana present unintended curricular opportunities. This is the space in which parents can step in and raise the issues conspicuously omitted in Hannah Montana’s songs and sit-com. All of the images to which children are exposed are available for critique and reinterpretation. The main consumers of Disney’s construction of Girl Power are children and adolescents. We need to provide youngsters with the tools to rethink the gender roles available to them and thus unearth authentic possibilities for empowerment.
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