Questioning
the Status Quo in Popular Music: Tori Amos's Strange Little Girls as Feminist Revision by
Jessamyn Birrer/Schnackenberg Many
debates have taken as epigraph Audre Lorde's assertion that "the
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
They may temporarily allow us to beat him down at his own game, but
they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Certain postmodern feminisms, for example, take this idea as the
base of their theorizations, argue that it is not possible to subvert any
dominant structure—in this case androcentric ideology—by using or
producing any text within the forms or outlets provided by that structure.
It has been equally argued, most recently by such "power
feminists" as Naomi Wolf, that dismantling is only possible when
those dominant forms and tools are used, that perhaps to operate outside
existing forms (hegemonic though they may be) is, if not necessarily
impossible, undesirable, ineffective, "whiny," or unseemly.
More to the point, though, it is better argued that getting caught
up in the either/or version of the argument between agency and structure
is not ultimately going to help us answer more complicated questions of
power and negotiation. The first step might be, then, to begin by dismantling the
master's tools, and perhaps thereby to reestablish or retrain the eye to
focus again on the presence and constructedness of the master's house, on
the ideological blueprints which inform its construction. Tori Amos, I will argue, has exactly this project in mind in
the creation of her most recent album, Strange
Little Girls. Strange
Little Girls features Amos's
interpretations of twelve songs originally written and performed by men,
songs mainly taking as their subjects the lives or perspectives of women.
Amos revisits these stories—these mythologies of
femininity—with the express intent of challenging gender issues and
concerns she finds ignored or absent.
Similar to the way Laura Mulvey reads films as scopophilic, Amos
seems to read the male-authored songs she has chosen as “graphophilic,”
taking objects under their gaze in song via their pens and voices.
In each song, she recasts the speaker as a woman, or otherwise
inserts via her female voice a counter, female gaze.
The album is not, however, simply a collection of cover songs
reversing the male gaze. Amos also creates a persona and a brief fiction as
accompaniment for each recording—ironic snapshots of the performances of
femininity the songs engender— that make up the jacket of the compact
disk. Finally, Amos has
released several statements and interviews, both via her record company
(Atlantic) and through outside media, articulating her intentions in
creating this "concept" album.
Amos's explicit, stated intentions in producing Strange
Little Girls, combined with the songs's original texts, Amos's
reinterpretations, and the accompanying images and captions, assert a
definitive feminist project. What
is perhaps most interesting about Strange
Little Girls as a pop culture artifact is that it represents a
specific audience reading of original texts, that is, Amos’s reading of
the male-authored songs she chooses.
Amos then reproduces these texts as criticism, simultaneously
reading and producing, creating new texts to be read by a new audience.
In so doing, she achieves what many feminists find essential to a
feminist project: she not only enacts a female voice in relation of
experience, but also represents a female voice in acts of criticism.
This essay, then, is essentially a feminist reading of a feminist
reading. According
to Adrienne Munich in “Notorious Signs, Feminist Criticism and Literary
Tradition,” “one of the first feminist projects was to examine
portrayals of female characters in male-authored texts” (242).
Certainly, this type of reading is the genesis of Amos’s project.
This type of project is limiting, though, in that it typically
asserts that male authors are incapable of “speak[ing] truly of women”
(Munich 242). This is not,
however, Amos’s position, as many of the songs she chooses she finds
empathetic rather than problematic in their representations of female
experience (Horn). More recent feminist literary criticism has been gynocentric
(to use Elaine Showalter’s term) in its focus, celebrating or engaging
women’s access (or non-access) to language (243).
This celebration of women and language is also the focus of much
popular feminism in media and literature, as exemplified by such
“women’s forums” as the recent Lilith Fair concert series and in the
teen girl power music scene. Certain
aspects of Amos’s album reveal this celebratory inclination.
The challenge of such “celebratory feminism,” of course,
is that though it does focus on and foreground women’s voices, it
does so by reinstating social categories of gender (Munich 243).
But this, again, is not where Amos’s project halts. If
Amos had simply criticized her collection of male-authored texts, her
project would certainly have been limiting.
Instead, however, Amos chooses not only songs which offer material
for critique of male colonizing of women’s stories (Eminem’s “’97
Bonnie & Clyde,” Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”), but also
chooses songs that she finds empathetic to women’s experiences (the
Commotions’s “Rattlesnakes”), and songs that reflect male engagement
with the problematics of gender (Joe Jackson’s “Real Men”). Her album not only examines portrayals of women as
ideological constructs, but celebrates women’s stories from both male
and female (her own) perspectives. Further,
it engages in conversation and critique with the limitations of the
traditional sex-gender system. As
Munich goes on to state in her essay, “Unless gender
definitions—sexual differences as enforced by culture—are explicated
by feminist critics, traditional texts will remain encrusted with
patriarchal interpretation, and civilization will continue to be
enthralled by them” (243). Amos
seeks to dissolve the crust of patriarchal interpretation, and in so doing
establishes her album Strange Little
Girls as not only an important cultural project, but a compelling
voicing of feminist reading as well. Articulating
the Project: Amos and Authorial Intent "Music
is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the
culture. If you're singing
songs that are about cutting women up, usually these guys are tapping into
an unconscious male rage that is real, that's existing —they're just
able to harness it. So to shut them up isn't the answer. They're a gauge;
they're showing you what's really happening in the psyche of a lot of
people." --Tori Amos, MTV
Online Amos
seeks to point out the commonplaces of women's nature and women's roles as
articulated by established male voices, specifically as asserted in the
realm of popular music, to point out the tools used by those voices to fix
or establish a particular female existence.
She seeks to then dismantle these tools in such a way as to
reposition women in these texts. The tools as well as the arena for these texts are popular
music. By revealing how
popular music employs these tools to continually maintain the dominant
mythologies of femininity and masculinity, Amos is then able to use the
tools in subversive ways—men's words in woman's voice taking on
different meanings and intentions. This
subversive retooling is the foundation of Amos's project in feminist
revision. Amos then goes a
critical step further: beyond simply reversing the gender roles, or even
simply making the master's tools her own—steps in and of themselves that
suggest empowerment only, without direction—Amos uses her retooling to
highlight the absurdity of what, in their initial function, the tools
worked to construct. Amos, in effect, points out the flaws in the master's tools
to point to the flaws in the master's house.
In so doing, she draws out the constructedness of both, and
encourages her audience to question how they are incorporated and
constructed by these forms themselves. It
would be convenient here to argue the "death of the author," to
focus only on Amos's resulting text(s) under the supposition that meaning
is a construction created between a reader and her text.
Amos herself assumes this position in her readings of the original
songs she chooses to revise. But I believe it would not only be inappropriate but perhaps
even irresponsible to avoid a discussion of Amos's authorial intent in the
production of Strange Little Girls.
The compelling originality of this popular project—its
representation not only of female voice and perspective but also its
nature as audience analysis (Amos’s readings of popular texts)—begs
such engagement. And because
the arena here is popular music—and because Tori Amos is, within this
arena, not merely a singer but a cult music heroine—what Amos the woman
has to say about Amos the performer creates the actual persona embraced by
fans. It would be
disingenuous to separate the "author" from her text(s). Not
only is Amos very much alive, but her biography, her interviews,
and her press releases greatly inform her audience's
interpretations of her music. The
majority of Amos's audience are not mere listeners (Amos has never
received the level of radio airtime as, say, a Britney Spears, or even an
Alanis Morisette, nor much popularizing attention from media outlets such
as MTV), but are avid—and active—fans.
At the most basic level, fans are aware of and often identify with
Amos's biography; in magazines such as Rolling
Stone and Spin, as well as her many official and unofficial fan sites, her
life, interviews, and missives to fans form the touchstone for fans’s
engagements with her music. Her
most cited song, "Me and a Gun" (from Amos' first album, Little Earthquakes), was embraced by many women for its emotive
confessionalism and its bald, honest presentation of Amos's own experience
of rape. This identification,
this "understanding" of Amos on a human level, informs her
audience's reception of these and other songs of hers as seeking a voice
and recourse for women in a male-dominated world.
Most fans are also aware of Amos's social advocacy, most clearly
evident in her creation of RAINN (the Rape And Incest National Network), a
free 1-800 number women (and
men) can dial and be connected to their local rape crisis hotline.
This awareness of Amos's social affiliations further encourages and
endorses specific audience readings of Amos's musical texts. On
another level, the fan sites devoted to Amos and her music cite
interviews, public statements, and fan memories of "things Tori said
in concert" as often as they cite her lyrics.
It is clear that, for fans, the music is only one level of the
"Tori Amos experience." Amos,
in fact, encourages her fans to identify with her beyond her songs.
She is famous for responding to any and all voices shouting out to
her from the audience at her concerts.
Also, When the occasional male audience member shouts out a
suggestive address to Tori (though she is by no means simply a "chick
singer," most of Amos's audience is female), Amos invariably counters
the male voice with a nod and a wink to her audience, offering on the
female audience’s behalf scathing or playfully emasculating rejoinders.
These quips function as a unifying identification with her female
audience, a sort of "there they go again" eye-rolling meant to
remove power from the male voice and re-empower her female audience.
Because the figure of Tori Amos as an individual is so linked by
her fans, and even her critics (who cite her biography as often as lit
theorists cite Plath's to qualify discussing her work), to the texts she
creates, it would be inappropriate not to look at authorial intent in
Amos's cultural project. When
we do look at what Amos says of her intentions with Strange
Little Girls, we can see her acknowledging several specific tools of
androcentric ideology at work in popular music.
Though her language does not contain an academic vocabulary of
feminist theory, it certainly reveals a popular vocabulary of feminist
authority and intent. In various interviews, compiled on her Atlantic Records
website, she calls into question the "script" offered women by
men, seeks to identify "what's on the other side of the camera,"
and articulates the need for silenced women to "find a voice."
Her intent in Strange Little Girls, then, is to "flip the script" (as
she puts it in a September 2001 interview in Elle), reverse the male gaze
in popular music, and give women a voice where they were initially denied
one. She reclaims the stories
of female experience as put forth in the male-authored texts—the little
girls lost of “Strange Little Girls” and “Rattlesnakes,” the
silenced wife of “’97 Bonnie 7 Clyde,” the showgirl of “Enjoy the
Silence”—and introduces irony to their mythic assertions of
femininity, caution to their depictions of violence, and subjectivity to
their objectified characters. Amos
is acknowledging that all of the songs she chooses to cover are missing
some critical perspective (typically female), that such missing
perspectives create misleading "scripts" for cultural behavior,
and that she aims to draw attention to those scripts by reversing, and
thereby revising, their communicative imperatives.
Her use of the word "script" suggests that Amos is aware
that the songs not only present a limited perspective, but also that they
construct specific, and rigid, roles to be played.
Amos's vocabulary mirrors much of existing feminist
writings—indeed, it's likely Amos is well read in this area—and her
intent to create a cultural artifact that functions as more than art or
commodity but as social argument strongly supports at least the intended
reading of Strange Little Girls as a feminist text. Critical
Reading: An Analysis of Amos’s Revision of Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie
& Clyde” “Let's
understand the power of our pens. I'm all for people writing what they
believe in. But this is about
then saying that you don't believe in it--that ‘it's only words.’
You cannot separate yourself from your creation.
You can't. You have to be responsible for the shit you put out
there.” --Tori Amos, Spin Magazine Amos
is not simply covering male-authored songs on this album, nor to censor
them; she is attempting to highlight the effect those songs have on the
audience. Amos's intentions
in producing and constructing her album are expressly feminist.
She wishes to point out the tools of women's silencing and
positioning, to subvert the uses of those tools, and to use this
subversion to point to the constructedness of the house the tools
continually build and maintain. First,
she gives a voice to an absent or marginalized female perspective in each
song by covering and recasting the speaker.
Second, she critiques the cultural scripts traditionally offered
women by rearticulating the songs via different artistic and musical
interpretations. Third, she
draws out notions of femininity as cultural performance and encourages a
redirection of the scopophilic nature of such constructions by extending
her textual critique to include visual retellings of the songs's
mythologies (in the CD jacket images and liner notes).
These revision strategies are perhaps best illustrated by examining
Amos's interpretation of Eminem's song "'97 Bonnie & Clyde." In
a recent interview with Teri van Horn of MTV, Amos argues that "[you]
take a man's word, you take his seed.
So let's take his seed, let's plant it here, consummation.
Man's seed, woman's voice."
She seems to be arguing against some feminisms's assertion that
man's seed can only yield man's voice.
Rather, Amos argues, revoking or revocalizing "man's
word" using woman's voice can create a more complete, more consummate
perspective on a given situation. In
this interview, Amos is referring specifically to her cover of Eminem's
"'97 Bonnie & Clyde," a song in which Eminem projects a
"fantasy" of killing his wife and taking his daughter with him
to dump her body in Lake Michigan (his daughter is the Bonnie to his
Clyde). While Eminem performs
his song from an exclusively male perspective (complete with mimicking the
diction of his wife's babytalk and real recordings of his daughter), Amos
recasts the speaker as the dead wife herself, speaking to her daughter
from the trunk. As she put it
in a press release from Atlantic Records, "when you talk about
killing your wife, you don't get to control whom she becomes friends with
after she's dead. She had to
have a voice." It is
clear from Amos’s statement that it is not just possible to read Amos's
cover as granting a muted woman a voice, but is Amos’s express intent.
By putting Eminem's words in a woman's mouth Amos demonstrates how
they are actually quite hard to swallow, and she does not yield any
inevitable male perspective. The
aim and result is subversive: silenced woman is given a voice, and,
furthermore, male violence is unmasked, revealing fantasy as reality by
reintroducing the victim of domestic violence as a central figure. It
was, in part, the disturbing popularity of Eminem's song that encouraged
Amos's project: "When I first heard the song . . . the scariest thing
to me was the realization that people are getting into the music and
grooving along to a song about a man butchering his wife.
So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on
their sneakers" (Atlantic). What
Amos recognizes here is the power of certain ideologies to employ such
tools as popular rhythms or musical genres to create a "rhythmic
justification" (Amos's term) for violence against those subject to
the ideology. So, Eminem is
able to rap all he wants about domestic violence, or making a child
complicit in her mother's murder, as long as he keeps objections at bay by
providing a lulling or exhilarating musical misdirection. Amos
addresses the challenge of popular justification in her musical
interpretation of Eminem's song. The original is danceable and disturbingly playful, employing
the classic refrain “Just the Two of Us” (most recently sampled by rap
artist Will Smith in a love song for his son) half-ironically, and using
babytalk almost exclusively. He
also brought his daughter into the recording studio with him, to capture
her babbles and whimpers on the track.
Though directly involving his daughter in the studio process (and
thereby making her complicit in the song’s recording) may well raise
eyebrows, his intertextual play with sampling a popular song typically
identified with family values helps misdirect a less attentive
audience’s reception of his underlying message (one of the necessary
violence of male dominance), and helps dissuade a more attentive
audience’s criticisms by proffering the text as “harmless” irony.
Amos's cover reverses this popular codifying.
Her interpretation of “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” has little
background music (a dramatic, edgy violin the only constant presence) but
has, rather, atmospheric and
disquieting filtered sounds layered under Amos's stifled and whispered
reading—not singing—of the lyrics.
In fact, it was revealed in a 2001 interview with ICE Magazine that
Amos recorded the vocals for the song inside a small box constructed to
mimic a car’s trunk, seeking to reproduce in recording that sensation of
being bound and trapped. The
resulting musical interpretation is far from danceable—arguably far from
musical at all—and through its new voice suggests counterreadings of the
various images suggested by Eminem's lyrics. When
spoken by Amos's embodiment of Eminem's (fictionally) dead wife, the
lyrics take on new, critical and subversive meanings.
When she whispers to her daughter, "Sit back in your chair
honey, quit tryin to climb out/ . . . I told you it's okay . . . /No more
fightin wit dad, no more restraining order," ideas that originally
seemed celebratory or smug now resonate a haunting resignation to the
violent circumstances of the victim's life, and her numbing to the pain of
knowing her daughter is left to deal with the fallout.
When Amos whispers, "you know your mama, she's one of those
type of women that do crazy things,/and if she don't get her way, she'll
throw a fit/ . . . /See honey there's a place called heaven and a place
called hell/A place called prison and a place called jail/And da-da's
probably on his way to all of em except one," the original misogyny
and bitterness is reversed, laced with irony, highlighting the lack of
justification offered for the original speaker's complaint and revealing
the dominant rhetoric of women's need to be submissive. Recasting the speaker in this and other songs, Amos creates
critical counterreadings of the established mythologies of femininity and
masculinity. Reinterpreting
the song musically, Amos further subverts its power, removing it from idle
or superficial engagement as pop song and revising it to disquieting,
dramatic argument. Amos,
in an interview with Elle magazine, reinforces the need to look at the
missing perspective in given cultural myths (such as the myth of male
dominance suggested by the Eminem song): "The view changes depending
on where you're standing. I
had the opportunity to flip the script."
Again, Amos is targeting the presumed authenticity of the dominant
scripts of female experience, and the danger of the rigid roles they
create. For example, the
lyrics of Eminem's song suggest that a woman who is not so
"crazy" as to be concerned with getting "her
way"—who, by extrapolation, understands her place in relation to
men—will not meet with male violence.
The script suggested here is that women be submissive and inhabit
only traditional roles of "the good mother" and "the good
wife," and that men be dominant and in control of "their"
women's lives and relationships. By
revoking the male voice and revocalizing the script with a female voice
(specifically that of the violently silenced woman), Amos criticizes not
only the rigidity of the constructions of gender offered, but underscores
the critical link between the oppressive ideology and violence against
women. Finally,
Amos creates in the context of her CD jacket an accompanying image of the
specific gender role offered women by Eminem’s song, deconstructing it
using ironic captioning and storytelling, highlighting not only the
absurdity but also the exigency of the challenge faced by such cultural
constructions. In fact, in
each of the image-texts accompanying the songs of Strange Little Girls, Amos is demonstrating the performative nature
of gender roles to her audience. Clearly,
none of the images is "Tori," and the audience is therefore
keenly aware of the role-play being engaged—that Amos is clearly
"putting on a costume" for her audience works to highlight the
performative nature of the gender role assumed. In the photo for "'97 Bonnie & Clyde," Amos’s
character is a gentle-looking, almost angelic mother-figure.
She wears a long-haired, impeccably groomed blonde wig and is
dressed in soft shades of white and pink.
She holds out a birthday cake (to her daughter, by inference, but
perhaps equally to her husband, to male voyeurs, to her female audience)
above the caption, "She wonders what her daughter will do."
The costume itself provides the traditional model of unassuming
woman- and motherhood: softness, weakness, nurturing.
The expression on Amos's face is static, somewhat unreadable, but
gently smiling, her lips closed. The
role suggested is one of passivity and silence.
Amos's performance of the role in this way, beyond her textual
revision of the voice and music in the song, is a key element to
establishing her project as feminist.
Judith Butler suggests that in order to subvert traditional gender
roles it is necessary to "reconceptualize identity" as
performance; this is what Amos, by creating visual personae to accompany
these songs, seeks to do. It
is in taking this step beyond retelling to re-presentation that Amos
achieves an effective feminist revision. The
caption she provides her persona for "'97 Bonnie & Clyde"
reinforces the deconstruction of the gender role proffered.
On a first reading, "She wonders what her daughter will
do" operates as a typical signifier of good-motherhood: the mother in
the picture is extending all her hopes and wishes for her daughter to her
(carrying the unstated assumption that every mother is of course always
able to meet such hopes and wishes).
On a second reading, the caption (and thus the image) is rendered
obviously ironic, casting the murdered mother of the song as struck by the
fear of what will happen to her daughter in the world the song creates, in
a world where the mother no longer exists to protect her daughter from the
violence regularly visited upon women by patriarchal ideology.
On her website, Amos adds to the caption: "She [the mother] is
holding a cake, in her death. It
is the cake she was always going to bake for her little one.
Maybe they would have mixed it together."
This added story creates a more lasting, haunting indictment of the
image; it implies a failed action, an impotence stemming from the limits
of the gender role being played, and a recognition of the constraints put
on both her (the mother's) and her daughter's lives.
It also encourages Amos’s audience to engage her authorial intent
along with her textual product. Typically,
as Nelly Furman argues in “The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender
Principle?” “what is taken for granted in the study of images and
their relation to experience is that the ‘picturing’ of experience is
gender-neutral or free of ideological value” (67).
As images and stories in literature picture experience in ways
often overlooked by critics, so, too, do the images and values proffered
by popular music often get overlooked.
As in the case of Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,”
Amos’s main challenge is not that Eminem should not be able to write
such a song, but that it is disingenuous for critics and listeners to
pretend to the idea that no gendered ideology is being put forth.
So, through vocal recasting, musical reinterpretation, and visual
performance of gender role in the recording and accompanying images, Amos
creates a revision of "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" that highlights
the problem of violence against women in popular music and culture, the
simplification of women's worries and challenges by popular media, and the
limitations of available or acceptable gender roles offered in American
society, where patriarchy is still the dominant construct. Challenges
and Conclusions "I made an album that's a commentary
on our time, and unfortunately it's on target." --Tori Amos, MTV Online Of
course, Amos’s project opens itself to some criticism of its own.
Amos’s analogy for her revision—the consummation of man’s
word by “planting” it in woman’s voice—is both metaphorically
appealing and logically problematic.
On a certain level, it demands a reexamination of language and the
way that language typically inscribes male domination and superiority, or
at least male traditions. I’m
not speaking here of some need to write “women” as “womyn,” but
rather looking at the ways in which dominant male ideologies are seen as
the norm or the universal, and the ways in which female ideologies or
voices are constructed and received as “other,” existing in relation
to and so gendered in ways male voices are not.
Amos’s vision for her project reflects a desire to see these two
languages, these two frames of references brought together, perhaps to get
at a more holistic language. For
DIY feminists, the “girl power” set, and certainly many of Amos’s
female fans, this reinvestment of language with female perspective is a
powerful progress. And it is.
Certainly, finding a voice in a language that is not originally
your own is a feat in itself. But the analogy proffers some discomfort as well.
First, it quite clearly posits a heternormative metaphor of
consummation, and casts both men and women in traditional roles of sowers
and soil respectively—man creates, woman nurtures.
Second, it suggests that the simple act of re-voicing male speech
can, alone, negotiate power in a world of inequalities.
Of course, by no means do I mean to suggest that re-voicing is
really a “simple act”; it is, in fact, an act still largely resisted
and criticized by the academy, and by the seemingly ubiquitous number of
“anti-feminist” groups in America and elsewhere.
It is a powerful first step, but only one element of what might
truly dismantle the status quo. It
could also be argued that Amos’s indictment of Eminem’s danceable
homicide could easily be levied against her own album.
Many of the songs on Strange Little Girls are rhythmically charged and popularly
accessible. This is a
challenge met by virtually any popular culture medium; to some degree it
has to perform the function of entertainment in order to be disseminated,
in order to be sold. Invariably,
this aspect of the pop culture product which makes it profitable, and
therefore a viable product to distribute, simultaneously mediates its full
potential as subversive text. It
may also be argued that some of the songs she covers, while garnering her
audience’s identification with a first-level reading of female
empowerment, might equally lull her audience into believing that personal
empowerment, or reclamations of stories, is empowerment enough—an
argument which plays out similarly to the argument against, for example,
advice columns in women’s magazines.
It is, always, a difficult work to create a space for emotive,
personal identification with a societal problem without encouraging the
audience to ignore the systemic underpinning.
But it is equally arguable that without proffering entertainment,
Amos’s album would never reach the public, and that a mediated voice is
preferable to no voice at all. What
is perhaps unique about the entertainment offered by Amos’s album is its
critical aesthetic, its musical logos—it is clear which songs Amos finds
compellingly responsive to women and which she seeks to create an argument
with. Thus, when covering songs she finds empathetic, the music and
vocalizations is closer to the original, and generally more musically
“pleasing,” as seen in her cover of “Rattlesnakes,” “Real
Men,” and Tom Waits’s “Time.”
When covering songs dealing with violence, voyeurism, and the like,
such as “Enjoy the Silence,” “I’m Not In Love,” and “’97
Bonnie & Clyde,” Amos’s interpretations are, well, unnerving.
Her voice takes on guttural tones, raspy apathy, whispered anxiety.
The music takes new, darker shapes in minor chords, minimalism, or
dramatic orchestration. Perhaps
the only “failure” on the album, in this sense, is the title song,
which is pictured in the CD jacket and in music video as eerie and a
likely object of criticism, but is the only “hit single” of the album,
and perhaps the most popularly accessible, danceable piece. Ultimately,
Amos has no choice but to submit at least to some degree to the conditions
of the dominant structure in order to voice anything at all.
She cannot, finally, dismantle the master’s house.
What she can do, and, I think, has done, is skew the picture the
public receives of that house, draw attention to its blueprints, and
disseminate the first step to breaking down its means of construction.
For feminist critic Julia Kristeva, “to the extent that any
activity resists the symbolic . . . it is revolutionary. Women’s strategy should be neither to adopt masculine modes
of power nor to flee encounters with the symbolic, but to assume ‘a negative
function: reject everything finite . . . loaded with meaning in the
existing state of society. Such
an attitude puts women on the side of the explosion of social codes . .
.” (ctd. in Jones 86). If
nothing else, Amos’s Strange Little Girls not only assumes this negative function, nor
merely reintroduces the female perspective where it was lacking, but
reinstates the potential of popular music to articulate feminist readings,
responses, and criticisms of the patriarchal world.
Works
Cited Official
Tori Amos Website.
26 February 2002. Atlantic
Records. 08 April 2002.
<http://www.toriamos.com>. Furman,
Nelly. “The Politics of
Language: Beyond the Gender Principle?”
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