KRISSY HARRIS
they | them
performer | choreographer | educator
How did MTV in the 1980s represent femininity and portray the gender roles of women?
What gender stereotypes were presented to audiences?
What were the women embodying?
Mötley Crüe "Girls, Girls, Girls" (1987)
Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome To The Jungle” (1987):
“If you want it you're gonna bleed but it's the price to pay"
T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get it on)” (1971):
“Well you're slim and you're weak
You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you"
Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" (1987)
"Crazy little woman in a one man show"
"Mirror queen, mannequin"
"Little miss innocent sugar me"
"You got the peaches, I got the cream"
"Do you take sugar? One lump or two?"
AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)
“She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies
Knocking me out with those American thighs"
Judith Butler's "Heterosexual Matrix"
“This is the predicament produced by a matrix that accounts for all desire for women by subjects of whatever sex or gender as originating in a masculine, heterosexual position.
The libido-as-masculine is the source from which all possible sexuality is presumed to come.”
[Judith Butler, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 72.]
Donna Haraway's "belly of the monster"
“This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked
category claim the power to see and not be seen to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and the late White, one of the many nasty tones of the word "objectivity" to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s.”
[Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581.]
