Gazing at the Spice Girls: Audience, Power and Visual Representation

In considering the current Spice Girls phenomenon, how are we to regard their huge girl fan base and the ways in which these fans gaze? Do we see this audience as passive consumers duped by the marketing machinery of late capitalism, or as active participators in the promotion of new models of female subjectivity? How are we to account for the ways in which young girl fans view the Spice Girls if current theories of the gaze seem inadequate?

While it is difficult to describe the identification process, Diana Fuss suggests that "In perhaps its simplest formation, identification is the detour through the other that defines a self" (1995, 2). In sociological studies of fans, especially young females, it has been found that a large part of the appeal of fandom has come from relating to other girls who are also fans. For instance, Sheryl Garratt has said that the greatest motivation for her and her group of friends in following the Bay City Rollers in the 70s was a "desire for comradeship" (144). Such comradeship has often been expressed in the bedroom culture described by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber: that sometimes safe interior space formed, in opposition to male street culture, as a permissible place in which female adolescence can be negotiated (220). This is borne out by a study of young girl fans done by the University of York, which concluded that "girls thought that girl power was about having fun with your friends" (Spice Girls… 1). Such comradeship is achieved through rituals of identification, such as those produced through interaction with the musical products of the star/s.

In the case of the Spice Girls, such identifications are produced in very specific ways. The girl fan's viewing position is complicated by the fact that the most common representations of the Spice Girls appear on television, "a medium which has been seen as 'feminine'" and one in which the division between image and audience is much more blurred (Joyrich 40). As a medium which is also "intimately tied to consumerism", television is most often viewed as "low culture", and its audience theorised as passive (Joyrich 40). The music video clip can be seen as an extreme example of television’s dominant qualities. Functioning as both product and promotion, it is commonly fragmented, inconclusive and polysemic. As viewers of music video clips, Spice Girls' fans are placed stereotypically as passive objects, the ultimate consumers. Though the group has been heavily marketed, this in itself is not enough to account for the extraordinary success it has had. What then are the elements from which the audience has made such resonant meanings for themselves?

It is possible to see the Spice Girls as conventionally sexualised female figures, fulfilling admirably Laura Mulvey’s notion of "to-be-looked-at-ness" (19). The TV special, "The Spice Girls Live At Istanbul" features their song "Naked", during which all five women sit astride chairs which are placed so as to give the impression that all of them are, in fact, naked. 1 This program was followed immediately by "Playboy's Really Naked Truth, Part One", reflecting the apparent view of the programmers that the two shows would have a similar audience. 2 Certainly the differences of representation between the song "Naked" in particular and the Playboy show were a matter of degree, rather than style of representation. (The Playboy show contained more full frontal female nudity than I have ever seen on free-to-air television in Australia.) So can one argue for ambiguity in the representation of the Spice Girls? And, importantly for the purposes of this paper, how are we to theorise the position of their vast fan base, a large number of whom are preadolescent girls?

The first Spice Girls hit, which was not only number one in the UK but entered the US charts at number one (as no other British debut single has done before), was "Wannabe", and it presents a very particular version of the pop song romance, especially as presented by female performers. For a start, the style is assertive. Not only are the first few lines spoken, almost shouted, but they put the desires of the female first: "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want". These words are repeated, especially "I wanna", so that both the tone of voice and the lyric build up an image of female self-assertion. There is an ascending circle of chords which adds to the level of excitement and the number of voices also creates a sense of power in the chorus. The other aspect that is asserted both lyrically, musically and visually is the value of female friendship over the heterosexual bond: "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends/ Make it last forever friendship never ends". While these sentiments might be commonplace in the work of radical female artists such as Ani DiFranco or Liz Phair (though less simplistically put), they are not common in the mainstream pop world, where romance follows much more traditional patterns. It’s what "he" wants that is generally the concern of both male and female artists, because all she wants is him. Likewise female bonds are an unspoken element which never threatens the centrality of heterosexual romance in mainstream romantic songs.

More recent UK female groups like All Saints and Eternal negotiate the potentially threatening image of four aligned women with a number of strategies. Some of those evident in the All Saints' hit song "Never Ever" include the placement of the singer in a vulnerable and self-doubting position lyrically, in which she considers herself completely to blame for the break-up (and because a full minute of the song features spoken lyrics, they are more prominent in this song than is often the case); filming singers individually, rather than in a group; filming singers in positions which connote submission (such as eyes downcast, head-canting, hair across eyes) and above all, showing all the women to be in a state of lack because of the absence of the male. As they sing the performers walk through a house in which everyday items explode and machine gun fire peppers the walls behind them. These threats to their physical safety encode them as vulnerable, reinforcing this representation of the romantic female as weak, needy and lacking. They also appear to be objectified in terms of the display of their bodies, with much of the visual continuity provided by the constant display of cleavage. In its negotiation of the romance plot, "Wannabe" is in stark contrast to this. The fact that both songs have been so successful shows that both carry a discourse which has found resonance in their audiences. "Wannabe" is energetic, self-assertive, brash and expresses a confident independence which is not reliant on the male for its continuance. How much is the audience response a welcoming of the representation of this style of female subjectivity which up until the Spice Girls had only been seen and heard in independent recordings, and thereby largely been inaccessible to the young female? The fact that the response has been so overwhelming could be taken to indicate that the representation of such a subjectivity is long overdue for this audience.

In the hit single, "Stop", the young female audience is very particularly addressed and cultivated. This is primarily achieved through the visual, though lyrically the song calls for a slowing down of the courtship process, another potential appeal to the younger girl as the female bonds are not threatened. The video is set in a working class British street, and rather than being the zone of young men, it is shown to be a place where girls play at hopscotch, skipping, cat's cradle and pat-a-cake. Not only are the young girls' activities represented, but the group are shown joining in, with the interactions of the Spice Girls mirroring that of the girls. This is a rare affirmation of girl culture in the music industry, still renowned for its "blokeyness". Visually it is female to female contact and activity which is predominant. At the same time the setting as a whole is an assertion of the local, commodified to serve the global promotion of the Spice Girls as product. The locals are depicted as working class simpletons who attend the local fair or drink in the pub, and who too can be coopted into enjoying the group's performance in the local hall.

Males rarely feature in Spice Girls' clips, and when they do they are never portrayed as something that would destroy the solidarity of the all-female bond of the group. This counter balances the impact of the romantic preoccupations of a number of the songs' lyrics. An extreme example of this is the clip for "Say You'll Be There", which features the group as a band of female techno-warriors, who use martial arts and high-tech Ninja influenced weapons to capture a hapless male who happens to appear in his pick-up truck. Though the clip is presented as a narrative, with movie credits at the start introducing the Spice Girls as fantastic characters, this never develops beyond demonstrations of their skills. The shots of male bondage are unexplained, and function as symbols of male disempowerment, just as the rest of the clip serves to assert the power and fighting abilities of the women. In contrast to All Saints, these performers move confidently, demonstrate their own physical power, and don't display modes of bodily submission such as head canting. It's brash, it's assertive, and should the viewer have any doubts about its gender politics, the confused apparent pursuer is carried off on the roof of a car as a trophy. The song's ostensibly heterosexual and romantic lyrics are undermined by the show of combined female power and by the visual absence of any potential romantic male leads.

Such representations of female supremacy would be dull indeed if they were done without a sense of irony, but this is not the case. As in many representations of the Spice Girls, the irony comes from the knowing intertextuality of the piece. One of the better jokes in the movie is the casting of Meatloaf as the bus driver, and giving him the lines "I'd do anything for the girls, but I can't do that". In this clip's desert location and aggressive female personas, it draws on the imagery of the Tank Girl, thereby evoking a less mainstream feminist iconography (Driscoll 1998). It also refers to another icon of popular culture, in its allusion to a scene from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in which the character Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), tells the character Vincent Vega (John Travolta) about a TV pilot she has made called "Fox Force Five". The clip of "Say You'll Be There" seems to be an illustration of the five feisty women described by Thurman, characters who never made it into the realm of popular culture other than in a filmic conversation. This scenario must have a particular appeal for the Spice Girls, or for one of their consultants, as there is a direct steal from the dialogue of Pulp Fiction in Spice World: The Movie, again on the same theme, this time transmuted to "Spice Force Five". In this recuperation and celebration of popular culture, the Spice Girls play with the notion of the female warrior, taking on the heroic role that has been reserved in such culture for the male hero.

This sense of play in the exploration of subjectivities presents a greater range of possibilities for ego-ideals than is often the case in the area of popular culture and women and girls. The fact that there are five Spice Girls (at least in the first two albums and movie), each projecting a very specific persona, adds to these possibilities, a fact that groups have exploited for decades. In spite of this, are traditional ways of looking really disrupted by representations of the Spice Girls? Are they breaking ground or are the Spice Girls just reinscribing dominant modes of representation such as the to-be-looked-at-ness of women? In the negative, it is hard to deny that they project themselves as sexualised figures, who dress, at times, for maximum erotic impact. This was especially so of ex-Ginger Spice, Geri Halliwell, the former Turkish game show hostess, but is also true at times of all of them. Despite the apparently powerful personas displayed in the clip of "Say You'll Be There", the performers at times enact stripper-like moves, caressing themselves and leaning forward to expose maximum cleavage. Apparently pandering to the male gaze has undoubtedly facilitated the group's exposure in the male-dominated entertainment industry, though it has not won them any credibility with the media as a whole. However, the question of whether the sexualised woman is necessarily a subordinated woman remains, and it provided the impetus for much of the academic debate around Madonna as a figure in the 80s. 3

One of the aspects of the representation of the Spice Girls which has the greatest impact on the gaze of the viewer is the function of the return gaze. The employment of direct address in many of the Spice girls' clips means that some of the viewing power and sense of subjectivity remains with them. Sally Stockbridge has claimed that the direct address of music performers always disrupts the functioning of the male gaze, because "both male and female stars can 'look back' at the audience" (103). The dominance of the male gaze is also undermined by the "construction of rock stars as stars to gazed upon, irrespective of sex, by fans both male and female" (105). In contrast to groups like All Saints, the Spice Girls gaze out confidently at their audience, in a look which can be seen to signal both playfulness and power. However, while direct address may add to the power and authority of, for example, a news reader, does it always add to the power of a performer? Direct address has different functions depending on its context. If that context is a porn movie, for example, direct address can induce a fetishistic gaze which empowers the gazer rather than the performer. It could be argued that "Say You'll Be There" functions successfully as porn, with its futuristic scenario and the direct and erotic address of its performers. It also functions convincingly as a model for the female heroic, however, suggesting that there is no one preferred reading of this clip, but rather that at least two viewing subjects are produced by it. There are, in Graeme Turner's words, "Different readings of the same text" (125). I believe this kind of ambiguity has contributed to the success of the Spice Girls, who have had to be seen to satisfy conventional ways of looking, while at the same time creating new points of identification for the adolescent female viewer.

Unlike Madonna, however, the Spice Girls do not make specifically erotic or sexually transgressive clips. Early in her career, as Brian Longhurst has stated, Madonna was "seen as an inauthentic product of the culture industry who was involved in the exploitation of others for the gain of that industry" (123), a description which is remarkably close to the way in which the Spice Girls are seen most commonly today. Madonna's sexual identities, which were initially viewed as exploitative, were later celebrated as forms of postmodern play in which differing subjectivities could be explored. Why is it that we are not prepared to see the Spice Girls in this way and that any media mention of the group is not complete without a joke at the expense of their supposed inauthenticity? Have we lost our sense of postmodern fun, or is it their girl audience that makes us feel they are "less than" in the popular music field? Madonna, though she explores different kinds of sexualities in her music clips, never entirely dispenses visually with the male lead as the Spice Girls have done so regularly, thereby providing a point of ego-identification for the male. Are the negative reactions to the Spice Girls a reinscription of the old rock/pop binary which valorises the musical passions of young men and denigrates the musical enthusiasms of young girls? And if they are seen as inauthentic, are we, in fact reinscribing the modernist notion of the artist as a gifted individual who, individually produces "art"? Are we attempting to reinstate divisions between "art" and "commerce" which would set apart some products of the music industry as high culture?

Certainly in the world of popular music, such divisions are quite current, even if they have been broken down largely in older fields. Motti Regev has argued convincingly that the way popular music attains the status of art is through two main attributes which are generally spoken of in terms of "the jargon of subversiveness and authenticity" (87). The difference between the way in which Madonna’s sexuality functions in her music, her clips and in her publicity, is that this provides the site of her rebellion and subversion. Though early in her career her sexuality was seen to be a sign of her inauthenticity, its subsequent encoding as subversive in fact gave her credibility in the popular music world. The issue of authenticity is a complex one, but the history of popular music being what it is, very few women have been able to cross the boundary from mere pop to authentic rock performer. If they have done so, it has generally been via the display of attributes usually seen as "male". In Madonna’s case, though she is not universally seen as high art in the popular music scene, she has managed to convince the music audience in general of her creative control, and is seen as a "self-contained unit of creativity" (Regev 92). She is thus perceived as both subversive and authentic. The Spice Girls have so far failed to achieve this. Though they are given first song-writing credit on all of their songs, it is assumed by both music public and rock press that they are mere puppets in the production of musical product, thereby lacking authenticity in terms of the way popular music has come to be valued by both its practitioners and its critics. However, the young female audience is not necessarily concerned with such criteria. The almost entire exclusion of female performers from the popular music canon may be one of the reasons for this. The Spice Girls have achieved success with their audience by appealing to other criteria, which has not won them fans in the rock press, but has won them the devotion of millions of girls around the world.

If the Spice Girls do not use their sexualities as a site for subversion, do they merely reinscribe traditional ways of viewing? Most of the objectification occurs through the display of their bodies through dress, and this need not be seen as simply sexual, or as traditionally satisfying the male gaze. Each Spice Girls dresses in a distinctive way, with everything from the Marilyn Monroesque cum Playmate outfits of Ginger, to the Umbro tracksuits worn by Sporty. In between is Posh in short designer dresses, Scary in leopard skin pants and bikini tops and Baby in powder blue, pigtails and with a Chupachup accessory. Collectively, the effect draws attention but does not necessarily imply subordination. As Kaja Silverman has suggested, Western fashion "challenges the assumption that exhibitionism always implies woman’s subjugation to a controlling male gaze" (139). Fashion can be seen, as it has been in connection with Madonna, as a means of exploring subjectivity and asserting the self. If, as Silverman asserts, "clothing is a necessary condition of subjectivity - that in articulating the body, it simultaneously articulates the psyche" (147), then the brash and collectively exhibitionist clothing of the Spice Girls can be seen as the expression of confident and innovative subjectivities. Their clothing marks them as female, even feminine (though not always, especially in the case of Sporty). In asserting themselves as females worthy of success, the Spice Girls have to negotiate terrain faced by female figures in other forms of popular culture. If they give up the markers of femininity, will they still be seen as women succeeding, or will they become substitute males? In asserting a brash and confident femininity, the Spice Girls leave no doubt about their subjectivity as women. Their clothing indicates that they are definitely not substitute males, though as women they do explore traditionally male roles. A big part of the way in which the young female fan views the group’s clothing styles is as a form of play. This is made clear when visiting the semi-official Spice Girls internet fan site. Maintained by 15 year old Simon Dixey, it features pictures of would-be Spices from around the world, competing to look the most like the originals (Dixey). These pictures of fans, some of whom are pre-schoolers, show just how much fashion can be a sophisticated form of dressing up. That the fans understand this aspect is shown by their responses, and suggests that their gaze may not be so concerned with the sexualisation of bodies as with the sense of play in the dress. "Play" is an important part of the Spice Girls' appeal. In their response to viewing the Spice Girls, many girl fans "play out" their gaze, which is both an expression of their identification and of the fact that their gaze often has a very practical and bodily expression. My own observations, anecdotal evidence from others, and the University of York study, suggest that when young female fans, especially pre-teens, watch the Spice Girls, they do so in order to learn both lyrics and dance moves. Their activities together centre on "dancing, role-playing and singing" ("Spice Girls…" 1). The gaze of these fans has a bodily expression in which they "do" the Spice Girls themselves, and viewing pleasure is played out in the bodily pleasures of dancing, singing and dress.

The displacement of heterosexual, and indeed, sexual relationships can be seen to be part of placing this music into the sphere of the young girl, who is either pre-sexual or more comfortable, if adolescent, in holding the whole sexual process at bay for a little longer. This is confirmed by the University of York study, which concluded that "The more adult aspects of the Spice Girls go over the heads of younger fans, who do not include notions of adult sexuality in the term ‘girl power’" ("Spice Girls…" 1). While the girl fan can be seen to be in preparation for heterosexuality, her current erotics appear more concentrated on the bodies of both herself and her female contemporaries, as demonstrated by the preponderance of female images in adolescent girls' magazines. How young girls might be said to view the Spice Girls is similar to the way in which they might read Dolly or Girlfriend 4; such publications can be seen to be contributing to the internalisation of the male gaze by training girls to conform to a particular narrow model of femininity. However, while a case like this can be made regarding some of the ideological work achieved by both band and magazines, I believe that more is going on in both instances. While Mulvey's thesis can serve to explain how representation in film constructs a male viewing subject, can this account for the predominance of images of females in both women's and girl's magazines? A glance at Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Vogue or a dozen other similar publications reveals a preponderance of apparently erotic images of women and for women. According to Diana Fuss, women's fashion photography "provides a socially sanctioned structure in which women are encouraged to consume, in voyeuristic if not vampiristic fashion, the images of other women, frequently represented in classically exhibitionist and sexually provocative poses" (1992, 713-14). Such a tendency is also obvious in girls' magazines. Fuss suggests that though the text accompanying such images directs its audience toward identification rather than voyeurism, the images nevertheless invite a desiring gaze. She then goes on to postulate a third way of looking, "a position that demands both separation and identification, both a having and a becoming - indeed, a having through a becoming" (1992, 730). This

Vampiric identification operates in the fashion system in the way that the photographic apparatus positions the spectator to identify with the woman precisely so as not to desire her. But in order to eradicate or evacuate the homoerotic desire, the visual field must first produce it, thereby permitting, in socially regulated form, the articulation of lesbian desire within the identificatory field (1992, 730).

In magazines aimed at teenage girls, similar images abound, but often include images of girls together, leading Catherine Driscoll to assert that such photography not only "eroticise[s] looking at women" but also "relations between women" (1995, 192). This is evident in the advertising in the October 1998 Dolly, which features many images of girls embracing and text in which they reflect on their relationships. Regular features such as "Friends Forever", which celebrate female to female relationships, continue this trend (Dolly 124). Like Fuss, Driscoll concludes that "Rather than being repressed, the homoerotics of these images and this Girl are an ‘open secret’" (1995, 195), but one which is contained by an understanding that heterosexuality will be the destiny of the viewers, whatever pleasures they may be taking in the now. However, girls are not the only images to be eroticised; erotics flow into the commodities themselves, so that images of girls become another of these. In this way, the Spice Girls could be seen as just another commodity aimed at a young female audience. Like many of these commodities, images of them are eroticised, and the homoerotics could be argued to be somewhat incidental to this process. However, given the 'open secret' regarding the erotics of girls' magazines, and the fact that the young female fans are well versed in reading such images, a homoerotic gaze would seem to be part of what it means to gaze at the Spice Girls.

There are issues of ambivalence surrounding not only the group's bodily representation but also the issue of the group's relationship with feminisms of various sorts. In their evocations of Tank Girl, use of various slogans like "Girl Power" and "What part of no don't you understand" in their lyrics, interviews and net sites, the band appears to draw on strands of contemporary feminism. (A highlight of their 1998 US tour is a rendition of "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves" performed by Sporty and Scary). The celebration of girl culture, the relationship between daughters and their mothers, and the promotion of female friendships is done at the expense of the heterosexual relationship and the romance plot, both of which are gestured at but not given the same emphasis, especially visually. Even the movie plot, such as it is, turns on the issue of female friendship and is capped by the birth of a girl, which, in terms of the movie, is an all-female event. In the movie's denouement, the band overcomes the forces of evil, in this instance concentrated in a partnership between an Australian media mogul and a member of the paparazzi, both male. While it is possible to see these as just empty gestures, or even a commodification of feminism itself, the preponderance of "girl culture" elements suggests that this is a large part of what the Spice Girls are about. As ego-ideals, they offer a new form of identity which is less implicated in the dominant operations of power as they pertain to gender, class and age. They promote girl power, not women power, and they flaunt working-class accents with confidence. Theirs is not a radical subjectivity, but is does mark a shift. Popular culture is not usually the place to find radical subjectivities for girls; they can be found in the independent recording artists, the riot grrl bands and their net sites. Nevertheless, as "a zone of contestation", popular culture can be seen to be the site of a shift in the representations of female subjectivity as exemplified by the Spice Girls. These subjectivities represent new possibilities in viewer identification for girl audiences. If, as Fuss has said, "identifications are mobile, elastic and volatile" (1992, 8), we can expect new ego-ideals to appear, and audiences to change. However, we can read the Spice Girls as a shift in the battle for hegemony in the representation of females and female subjectivity in popular music, however small a shift it might seem.

Notes

1. Spice Girls in Istanbul was the biggest selling music video in Australia in April 1998. Spice Girls Vol 1 was number three (Australian Wednesday June 10, p.10).

2. Both shows were screened on Channel 10 on November 18, 1997.

3. See for example Desperately Seeking Madonna, ed. Adam Sexton, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed 3. Cathy Schwichtenberg, and John Fiske's Reading the Popular.

4. Robert Goldman, Rosalind Coward and Annette Corrigan all raise some of the issues and apparent contradictions around the viewing positions occupied by the consumers of women's magazines. Internalising the male gaze is one of the simpler of these positions.

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