Bitching and Talking/Gazing Back: Feminism as Critical Reading
Courtney Bailey
Abstract: The 1990s marked the appearance of a
particular image of the feminist in mainstream media-the
young, fashion-conscious, pop culture-savvy woman. An
alternative magazine called Bitch: Feminist Response to
Pop Culture takes on this vision of feminism. Being a
"bitch, " talking and gazing back at popular culture, is in
this case a valued/valuable feminist act and is precisely
what Bitch the magazine puts on display. Performing
feminism as an act of critical reading through various
formal and rhetorical strategies, it works to undercut
patriarchal meanings, particularly those surrounding
beauty, and to reinforce/create a sense of feminist
community. In the pages of Bitch, feminism itself is a site
of cultural contest rather than a set of tenets settled on
prior to (and outside of) discourse.
Familiar stereotypes of feminism and of feminists
abound in the U. S. American mainstream news media,
crystallized perhaps most clearly in the image of a hairy-
legged, combat-boot-wearing lesbian with short hair and
big biceps. Although such a caricature is not often evoked
explicitly in the popular press, it does resonate with
common assumptions about what constitutes feminist
dogma, namely that feminism entails being anti-marriage,
anti-romance, anti-male, anti-fashion, anti-sex, and anti-
motherhood. The mid 1990s marked the appearance of
another image of the feminist in mainstream mediathe
young, fashion-conscious, pop culture-savvy, single
woman. Variously referred to as "girl power," "lipstick
feminism," "power feminism," "the third wave," or even
"post-feminism," this woman is well aware of patriarchal
conceptions of femininity and uses them in a parodic or
hyperbolic manner to her own advantage. She is
embodied in such media figures as Monica Lewinsky,
Ally McBeal, and the women on Sex and the City.
Depending on the commentator, she is either an
empowering figure or a sign of complicity with patriarchy
and with the forces of commercialism. (Leibrock;
Stansell; Bellafante; Millman, Shalit).
One material instance from U.S. American media that
seems to have something in common with this newer
concept of feminism is an alternative magazine called
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Bitch is
published quarterly; for the purposes of this paper, I will
focus on the issue from November of 2000 (No. 13). My
reasons for focusing on this particular issue are two-fold:
first, it is representative of the issues and rhetorical
strategies that are typical of the magazine more generally,
and second, it demonstrates a particular reworking of the
concept of beauty. I will discuss this in more detail below,
but for now it is worth noting that this issue's focus on
beauty is one of the central ways in which Bitch performs
its feminist critique, a critique which distinguishes it from
more mainstream women's magazines. It is available in
both independent bookstores as well as selected major
chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, although usually
hidden in the back of the rack behind more mainstream
publications. Although decisions about which magazines
are placed front and center are no doubt influenced by
which magazines sell the most copies,' the relegation of
Bitch to the back racks has consequences for the
circulation of its feminist discourses. Hiding it in this way
limits access to Bitch's performance of feminism,
qualifying its publicness and working to restrict its
circulation to those who might be predisposed to hunt it
down.^
The magazine's public circulation is shaped and
constrained geographically as well. Towards the end of
the issue. Bitch provides a list of the bookstores which
carry it, highlighting the independents most prominently
and mentioning the major chains almost as an after-
thought. Arranged by geographical location, this list
features mostly metropolitan centers in the U.S. and
Canada, including San Francisco, New York, Seattle,
Chicago, and Toronto. Thus, this list maps the commodity
flow of the magazine, highlighting who has access to it
and who does not. By displaying the names and locales of
the independents (as well as reminding us to "support
your local independent whenever possible"), the
magazine encourages its own consumption, even as it
advises us not to support the capitalist practices of
conglomeration represented by the big chains. Bitch's
ideological belief in supporting independent bookstores
has a significant effect on its geographical situation. That
is, the geographical restrictions on its availability have an
important ideological angle, insofar as the magazine's
practice of privileging local bookstores over major chains
shapes its geographical accessibility. Critiques of
commercialism run throughout the whole issue, placing
the magazine itself, which depends on commercialism and
consumerism for its existence, in a rather ironic position.
Bitch's status as an alternative publication restricts
the circulation of and access to its feminist discourse, as
mentioned above. Yet this status is also vital to the
magazine's commercial and rhetorical efficacy, insofar as
it depends on a certain distance from mainstream media
both to sell itself and to facilitate its cultural critique.
Aside from its cover, which I will discuss in more detail
below. Bitch is not glossy; the vast majority of its pages
are done on "regular" paper stock, rather than the shiny
pages typical of many magazines. The lack of "high-
quality" production values no doubt results, at least in
part, from the limited resources that Bitch has to work
with, but it also creates an almost amateurish ethos, a
sense that the magazine is closer to "ordinary" people.
This may suggest that Bitch prioritizes content over style,
but to make this argument would require a devaluation of
style as insubstantial and inconsequential, something that
should take a back seat to content. However, as we shall
see, the magazine is highly stylized in terms of its
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 1
rhetorical strategies, and it is precisely this stylized
quality that makes its feminist content effective.
Bitch also differs from mainstream publications in its
treatment of advertisements. It does include ads, though
these are limited to the beginning and end of the issue,
rather than placed throughout the entire magazine. The
products advertised are almost all feminist- or women-
centered, including ones for other feminist puhlications,
stores, websites, music, and pornography. Like the rest of
the magazine, these ads are not glossy or even in color,
and most take up about a fourth of the page. This
treatment of advertising, on one level, enacts Bitch's
aversion to commercialization, particularly when it comes
to women's bodies and conventional femininity. It also
differentiates Bitch from other magazines like
Cosmopolitan and Seventeen in which ads for cosmetics
are increasingly difficult to distinguish from editorial
content. At the same time. Bitch's own commercial
solvency depends on precisely the sense that it is
different. As a cultural commodity, it creates exchange
value at least in part by distinguishing itself from its
potential competitors.
Moreover, Bitch, like its glossy counterparts, likely
relies on advertising revenues for its continued existence,
and this means that it must engage in the process of
selling its audience to advertisers just as most commercial
media do. On its website (www.bitchmagazine.com).
Bitch provides market data in an attempt to attract more
advertising dollars; it notes the median age of its readers,
highlights the magazine's inclusion of music and book
reviews (which themselves can act as marketing tools),
and provides information on its readers' consumption of
other commercial media.'' The vision of the audience that
Bitch creates here is one of young, upwardly mobile, tech
savvy consumers, which is perhaps not that different from
the vision sold to advertisers by Cosmo and Marie Clare.
At the same time, the website also claims that the
magazine is "used in college courses and subscribed to by
women's studies departments and campus women's
centers from coast to coast." So the young, upwardly
mobile consumers are not just any consumers, but
feminist (or at least women-oriented) consumers.
As this suggests. Bitch is not completely different
from those "other" publications, but also draws on many
recognizable conventions of popular magazines in
general. Its overall format, for instance, is organized into
familiar sections like the editor's letter, letters to the
editor, feature articles, and book and music reviews. Even
here, however, the wit that characterizes much of Bitch's
verbal and visual discourse is evident. Take, for example,
the title of the book reviews section: "Bitch Reads." This
particular phrase resonates with Bitch's logo (the image of
a woman reading a book and smirking at the viewer),
suggesting that a woman who can critically "read"
popular culture is dangerous and subversive. Being a
"bitch," talking and gazing back at popular culture, is in
this case a valued/valuable feminist act and is precisely
what Bitch the magazine puts on display. Running
throughout the entire magazine, such word (and image)
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 2
play is the primary way in which Bitch performs
feminism. Its strategies include irony and parody, the
recontextualization of authoritative symbols,
multivocality, and symbolic inversion, all of which
attempt to undercut patriarchal meanings and to reinforce/
create a sense of feminist community.
In the public discourses of Bitch, feminism emerges
as a site of debate and conflict, and this dissent is directed
both outward and inwardtoward mainstream media and
toward other articulations of feminism. Yet the divergent
visions of feminism expressed in the magazine are also
unified under a shared assumption that they are all in fact
doing feminism, although they may disagree strenuously
about what "doing feminism" means exactly. Thus, the
formal strategies utilized by Bitch do reinforce a sense of
feminist community, as Linda Hutcheon suggests in her
work on irony, and much of Bitch's discourse does
presume what Hutcheon calls a "discursive community,"
a "complex configuration of shared knowledge, heliefs,
values, and communicative strategies" {Irony's Edge 91).
However, in contrast to Hutcheon's claim that irony does
not create communities but rather relies on pre-existing
ones. Bitch also constitutes feminist community in a
particular way, namely around the activity of reading
popular culture critically (although, again, there is not
always agreement ahout what exactly that entails or about
what makes particular readings distinctly feminist).
As my remarks about how Bitch is displayed in stores
suggest, the magazine's feminist efficacy may he
undermined by its spatial and geographical limitations.
Furthermore, Bitch is a product of certain types of
privilege, such as those derived from education,
socioeconomic class, and geographical location; it speaks
to and ahout U.S. American gender relations and
presumes familiarity with U.S. American mass media/pop
culture. All of which is to say that the feminist suhversion
performed in Bitch is not universal, but partial,
contradictory, and contingent.
Parody and The Cover of Bitch
Even as it focuses on U.S. American pop culture.
Bitch also reveals that pop culture is not monolithic or
hermetically sealed off from "other" cultures. The cover
of issue 13, for example, draws on an icon that resonates
both in the United States and Latin America. It also
manifests several of the rhetorical and formal strategies
that run throughout the entire magazine, particularly that
of parody. The cover features a drawing of the Virgin {la
virgen de Guadalupe), a central figure in Mexican and
Mexican American Catholic traditions. This makes her
especially appealing for Latina artists who are interested
in recuperating her as an emblem of female power in
opposition to patriarchy. Bitch's Virgin is reading a book
with one hand and holding a coffee cup in the other, and
she stands on a colorful pile of books. This draws on an
authoritative symbol from the past, while simultaneously
infusing it with a sense of the present, most obviously
through the rather modem-looking coffee cup. Thus, it
performs what Linda Hutcheon describes as parody's
ability to "inscribe continuity while permitting critical
distance and challenge" (A Theory of Parody 102). The
latter comes about through a humorous disjuncture
between the pious Virgin and the act of reading, which in
Bitch's logic is a subversive act (recall my discussion of
the magazine's logo, which is echoed in this drawing). It
is also worth noting the potential anti-Christian dimension
of this image. For some, this cover may read less as
parody and more as blasphemy. At the same time, it could
be argued that Bitch's appropriation of the Virgin echoes
other feminist appropriations that attempt to claim the
Virgin as a symbol of women's spiritual power within
Christianity.
What surrounds the Virgin is also significant. Yellow
spikes (perhaps rays of light?) radiate from her body
against a blue background, all of which is encircled by an
oval of pink and red flowers. This part of the image is
also drawn from prior versions of la virgen de Guadalupe,
but in the particular context of Bitch, it begins to take on
different meanings. For example, one could see in the
combination of the oval shape with the yellow spikes and
the suggestive opening ofthe Virgin's sleeve a version of
the vagina dentata, that infamous symbol of anxieties
about women's ferocious, devouring sexuality. In the case
of the magazine cover, the vagina dentata constitutes
something like the "return ofthe repressed," as the female
sexuality banished from the Virgin comes back to haunt
the very site of its banishment. The threat associated with
the vagina dentata is retained here, but it takes on a
positive valenceit is not so much a threat to be
contained as it is a force to be exploited for feminist ends.
Something similar happens with the word "bitch," as
the magazine reworks a derogatory term traditionally used
to keep assertive women in their place. When juxtaposed
to the image on the cover, the term "bitch" creates a
humorous (or blasphemous) shock, deflating the piety of
the Virgin even as it attempts to recuperate her. It wrests
the Virgin from her patriarchal past and aligns her with an
alternate tradition of powerful, "uppity" women, while
also facilitating the vagina dentata reading that I explored
above. The whore and the madonna are thus brought
together in a single image as different sources of feminist
resistance. Instead of presenting these two female
archetypes as mutually exclusive opposites, which is what
makes them so effective in policing women's sexuality
and agency, the cover image suggests that the madonna
and the whore are inextricable from one another. It
highlights their dependence on one another and changes
their meaning in the process. In this way, this cover of
Bitch "forces us to experience those sides of the object
that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given
style . . . [It] introduces the permanent corrective of
laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the
lofty direct word" (Bakhtin 55).
The parodic use of the Virgin, the vagina dentata,
and the word "bitch" also points to parody's status as an
"authorized transgression:" in order to be recognizable as
a parody of patriarchal conventions, the cover must act
"within the controlled confines authorized by the text
parodied" and must "inscribe the mocked conventions
onto itself, thereby guaranteeing their continued
existence" (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 75). The
closeness of Bitch's discourse to dominant discourse (that
is, the way in which it takes a traditionally patriarchal
symbol and reworks it) means that its parodic aspect
relies on readers' capacity and willingness to ascribe
parodic intent to it. To complete the parodic circle,
readers have to recognize that the cover is intended to be
a parody and a mocking one at that (Hutcheon, A Theory
of Parody 93). Readers must thus be understood and
understand themselves as active co-creators of meaning,
and this understanding can increase their pleasure in
reading, expressed through a knowing chuckle. It can also
encourage them to identity with the magazine and with
the supposedly like-minded people that it speaks to.
The cover itself foregrounds the importance of
conceptualizing reading as an active process. The drawing
ofthe Virgin is encompassed by a picture frame; so what
we see on the cover is not just the drawing, but a
photograph of a painting, and that photograph itself is
framed by verbal discourse telling us the name of the
magazine and some of its contents. We are thus looking at
a representation (the cover) of a representation (the
photograph) that reworks yet another representation (the
painting), which itself draws on prior representations of
the Virgin. Such layering calls our attention to the acts of
representing and of reading and the way in which they are
entangled with each other.
Irony, Guitar World, and "Women in Rock"
Dependence on readers' agency is also a hallmark of
a strategy closely related to parody, that of irony. Both
strategies have a significant evaluative and emotional
component, and both involve Bakhtin's notion of the
dialogic, the way in which "the word, directed towards its
object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled
environment of alien words, value judgments and accents,
weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges
with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third
group" (276). Although irony and parody often work
together, the former has to do more precisely with the
tension between the said and the unsaid.** Irony is a
frequently used strategy in Bitch, allowing the magazine
to take a patriarchal "said" and infuse it with a feminist
"unsaid."
For instance. Bitch contains a section called "Love
it/Shove it," which appears before the feature stories and
comprises a series of brief commentaries on ads, other
magazines, the news media, etc. One such blurb includes
a reprint of the cover of the Guitar World Buyer's Guide
2001, which depicts two blond women in bikini bottoms
and stiletto heels, electric guitars slung across their
shoulders. Next to this image is a brief verbal text written
by one of Bitch's editors, which reads "do women buy
guitars? Or, for that matter, do men whose taste in women
runs to anything but fake-breasted, bleached-blond porno
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 3
 babes? The editors of Guitar World Buyer's Guide 2001
don't seem to think so. So that's what they mean by
'women in rock'" (21; emphasis in original). Irony is
signaled to the audience by the first part ofthe verbal text,
as well as by the juxtaposition of the text to the image,
setting us up to read the ready-made, formulaic phrase
"women in rock" in a particular way. In other contexts
where that phrase is used non-ironically, it typically
signifies female musicians in the rock genre, oflen in a
celebratory manner. Here, however, that meaning is
placed in tension with another, namely the use of female
bodies (and, more specifically, female bodies that
conform to the Westem beauty ideal) to sell guitars. The
inclusive, congratulatory phrase "women in rock" thus
takes on an additional, implied connotation, one of
tokenism and the continued marginalization of female
rock musicians. The text also ironizes the image, as it
undermines the assumption that only men can produce
rock music and that featuring "fake-breasted, bleached-
blond pomo babes" is the hest way to attract a male
audience. This is not to say that the more common
meaning of either the verbal text or the image is replaced
or lost; on the contrary, the ironic power of this example
depends on the reader's ability to recognize both
meanings and to understand which meaning is more
conventional.
Although irony relies on both the stated and unstated,
it is a " 'weighted' mode of discourse in the sense that it
is asymmetrical, unbalanced in favor of the silent and
unsaid" (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 37). The ahove
example, therefore, privileges a particular understanding
of "women in rock" and of the Guitar World cover, an
understanding that complicates the more conventional
sense of that phrase and image. At the same time, its full
feminist impact also requires an acknowledgement of
those more familiar meanings. This is where readers'
inferences become important, as irony will only work if
they assume that the writers and editors of Bitch are
making a particular judgment about the Guitar World
cover and about the phrase "women in rock." This is not
just any judgment, but a feminist one, which means that
the audience must be at least passingly familiar with
feminist objections to tokenism, to the commodification
of female bodies, to the perpetuation of a narrow Westem
beauty ideal, and so forth, if they are to "get" the irony.
This does not mean that audience members who do
"get" the irony either have to agree with its implicit
judgment or identify with its version of feminism (or with
any version of feminism, for that matter). It is conceivahle
that some readers might see the implication that the
Guitar World cover is not attractive to women as
heterosexist, while others might argue that the models on
the cover should not be treated as victims, but as women
exercising their right to he sexual. Still others might
conclude that Bitch's irony in this case merely perpetuates
stereotypes of feminists as prudish and anti-sex or that
this example is proof that feminism really is prudish and
anti-sex. If viewers see the Guitar World cover as kitsch
and thus as already ridiculous, they may paradoxically
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 4
consider Bitch's irony as evidence that feminists can't
take a joke. Such a multiplicity of interpretations points to
an aspect of irony, namely its proximity to the dominant
discourse that it contests, that makes it both powerful and
risky. On the one hand, this proximity, manifested in the
use of the already said or already shown, allows Bitch to
tum dominant discourse against itself and to demonstrate
the magazine's ability to appropriate hegemonic words
and images. On the other hand, as some of the possible
interpretations that I mention above suggest, "intimacy
[with dominant discourses] can also be seen as
complicity" (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 30).
Verbal and Visual Recontextualization
The example of the Guitar World cover is not the
only place where Bitch uses re-contextualization, one of
the magazine's favorite tactics. Recontextualization relies
on entextualization, "the process of rendering discourse
extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production
into a unita textthat can be lifted out of its
interactional setting" (Bauman and Briggs 73; emphasis
in original). Performance is also significant here, as it
"puts the act of speaking on display . . . and opens it to
scrutiny by an audience," which in tum creates the
potential for lifting a text from one context and placing it
in another (Bauman and Briggs 73). Although Bauman
and Briggs are primarily concemed with verbal texts.
Bitch allows us to see how a similar process can occur
with images, particularly with still photographs. In some
ways, such photos may lend themselves especially well to
entextualization, since they have a material, embodied
quality that can seem more obvious than that of verbal
discourses. Photographic images are often treated as
objects with clearly defined and easily recognizable
boundaries, and this treatment not only makes them
available for the feminist recontextualizations of Bitch,
but also facilitates their status as cultural commodities
that can be bought and sold.
Many of the uses of recontextualization in Bitch deal
with this consumerist aspect of images. For example,
another piece in the "Love It/Shove It" section consists
almost entirely of fashion advertisements culled from
various sources and placed together on the same page.
Showing the ads together encourages viewers to look for
continuities among them, as does the verbal commentary
from Bitch that accompanies the collage of ads. The
verbal text includes only two questions, "What is it about
the dead look that designers thinks sells clothes? And
what's with the rash of ads featuring women prostrate
hefore prominent hard-ons?" (22). Although it does direct
our attention to certain aspects of the visual images, the
verbal text also gives the impression that the ads condemn
themselves with little help from Bitch: first, in terms of
the page's layout, the advertising images dominate the
written questions, and, second, the verbal text is in the
form of questions rather than declarative sentences. Taken
together, these two aspects suggest that the similarities
among the ads (and the reasons they are problematic) are
relatively obvious and need little comment from Bitch.
Viewers should be able to figure it out for themselves by
answering the questions posed by Bitch, a process which
also encourages audiences to feel involved in the creation
of meaning and, more importantly, in the act of critical
reading that the magazine presents as crucial to feminism.
Such critical reading is facilitated by seeing the ads
together, a feat accomplished, of course, through Bitch's
recontextualizing intervention.
The magazine recontextualizes not only visual
images, but also whole stretches of verbal discourse. One
particularly telling example involves a Bitch writer.
Heather Gates, engaged in an exchange of letters with
several prominent clothing stores like the Gap, J. Crew,
and Banana Republic ("Three Fat Cats and One Fat Girl"
31-32). Her letter-writing campaign is designed to protest
the lack of larger sizes in the stores, a lack which she
connects to companies' fear of being associated with fat
customers. She provides readers with what is presumably
the entire text of the letters, both the ones that she wrote
to the companies and the ones that they sent in reply. In
between the letters, she comments on her own letters
(admitting, for instance, that she lied to J. Crew about
having a lot of disposable income) as well as on the
replies from the clothing companies (translating their
"corporate speak" into what they "really" meant). For
instance, she gives us the following letter from J. Crew's
customer relations staff: "We always appreciate feedback
from our customers about our merchandise . . . We will
forward your suggestion to our merchandising group for
review." In the next paragraph. Gates concludes, "so
guess what? They don't care" (32). Once again, the act of
reading another text critically, of deconstructing it in a
rather impudent mode, is modeled for us.
By presenting us with the letters from the clothing
companies. Gates also engages in recontextualization, a
process that has much in common with what Bahktin says
about appropriation. He explains that "prior to this
moment of appropriation, the word . . . exists in other
people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other
people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the
word and make it one's own" (294). Thus, letters that
were purportedly designed to placate Gates without
making substantive changes in the company's policies
become evidence of how patriarchy and capitalism work
together to perpetuate discrimination against fat people
and, more specifically, against fat women. We might
make a similar point about how the magazine takes
images from other people and other contexts and turns
those images to feminist purposes, as it does in the above
example ofthe fashion advertisements.
Recontextualizing Public and Private
Bitch's use of recontextualization, particularly when
it lifts entire ads or pages from other magazines, raises an
issue regarding the boundary between public and private,
one that involves the notion of copyright. In her work on
intellectual property laws, Rosemary Coombe argues that
these laws frame certain cultural forms, symbols, and
signs (such as brand names and trademarks) as the private
property of the corporations that are assumed to be their
authors. This in turn "enables and legitimates practices of
cultural authority that attempt to freeze the play of
difference (and differance) in the public sphere" (8).
Appropriation by consumers is seen as an infringement on
the corporate author's ability to control the cultural
meanings of its sign. By taking cultural representations
that legally belong to other (often corporate) entities.
Bitch asserts that consumers do have a stake in the
meaning of those representations, that authorship can be
understood as a public, not simply private, matter.^
Coombe argues, moreover, that intellectual property
rights are not simply repressive, but also productive: "had
intellectual property laws not protected such texts in the
first instance, they would not have acquired the posterity
that makes them such ideal candidates for parodic
redeployment" (11). Part ofthe value of protected signs
lies precisely in the fact that they are protected; cultural
texts owned by corporations may be especially attractive
targets for oppositional forces precisely because of that
ownership. This suggests that the power of Bitch's
rhetoric relies, at least in part, on the perceived authority
and privateness of the discourses, texts, and signs that it
reworks.
A Diversity of Voices: The Uses of Multivocaiity
The next rhetorical and formal strategy employed by
Bitch that I will analyze is the use of multivocaiity.
Switching among multiple speakers is common
throughout most of the magazine. For instance, many of
the feature articles in this particular issue are interviews,*
which are organized as a back-and-forth between two
different voices. Aside from the interviews, one of the
strongest examples of multivocaiity occurs during a
roundtable discussion among three Bitch writers over
whether the film American Psycho can or should be
considered feminist (74+). There is considerable
disagreement among the three participants over whether
the film's violence, much of it perpetrated against women,
can be reconciled with feminism. Their discussion
foregrounds cinematic conventions, questions of how
much influence the filmmaker's intent has on audience
reception, and what makes a film feminist in the first
place.
The roundtable is thus a meta-commentary about
feminism, cultural representations, and practices of
audience reception. Like Gates' article, the three
discussants model for readers the act of reading mass-
mediated popular culture, including Bitch itself, in a
critical, active, and feminist way. What exactly it means
to read American Psycho in a feminist way is very much
up for grabs, as the debate among the three writers
illustrates, but there does seem to be an implicit
agreement among them that they are all engaged in
feminist activity. The three writers act as surrogates for
the larger audience of both Bitch and American Psycho,
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 5
presenting opinions that audience members can agree
with, disagree with, modify, etc. The roundtable, in short,
provides a case study for the process of audience co-
construction that is at the heart of Bitch's feminist
performance.
A Diversity of Voices? Redux
The roundtable discussants also frequently refer to
reviews of American Psycho from other media sources,
and Bitch includes a collection of quotations from movie
critics and from anonymous reviewers on Amazon.com,
offering a range of opinions on the film (78). Once again,
the writers highlight their position as consumers (of both
the film and other reviews) and as producers of cultural
discourses. Their disagreements also work to refute the
notion that feminism is a monolithic orthodoxy with no
room for dissent. The inclusion of other reviews gives the
impression that feminists are willing to and interested in
hearing from those who do not necessarily identify as
feminist. This works to counter popular conceptions of
feminists as insular and intolerant of anyone outside the
movement. At the same time, the multivocaiity present in
Bitch does not extend much beyond Anglo-American-
centered media (with the exception in this particular issue
of a brief blurb on Oprah Winfrey and a one-page article
in the "Love it/Shove it" section devoted to critiquing
Home Girl, a magazine from Vibe that targets African-
American women). From a certain perspective, the
"diversity" of voices in Bitch still looks awfully white and
middle-class.
For instance, two of the feature articles focus on
female sexuality, but neither examines the ways in which
race shapes our notions of that sexuality. One, entitled
"Your Miss America," deals with the experience of a
female sex worker named Annalise Ophelian. The article
switches back and forth between the writer's life as a
prostitute and what she calls her "dewhoreification
process," in which she becomes "the anti-ho" (50). These
switches are formally marked by changes in the font,
going from a "regular" style to italics as she shifts
between her two identities. Ophelian challenges both
patriarchal and feminist assumptions about prostitutes,
arguing that she deploys her contradictory identities in a
strategic way and that feminist attitudes about sex
workers can be just as oppressive as patriarchal ones. She
claims that "because it [dewhoreification] is a conscious
and performative effort, it is also about the way in which
my dominatrix and Gwyneth Paltrow selves are both big
drag shows" (51). This echoes arguments made by
scholars like Judith Butler, who see progressive potential
in foregrounding the social constructedness of femininity
(146). Of course, the ability to adopt a "Gwyneth
Paltrow" persona depends on a woman's ability to
approximate the young, white ideal embodied by Paltrow,
not to mention access to things like cosmetics,
fashionable clothing, and a gym membership, all of which
require a certain level of financial resources.
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 6
If Ophelian's article is a celebration of the whore,
then an essay by Carson Brown takes up the other half of
the female sexuality dichotomy, the virgin. Both articles
work to destabilize the assumed mutual exclusivity of the
two sides of that dichotomy, but they approach it from
different angles. Brown positions the female virgin as
"the new sexual deviant," complete with a parody of
scientific classificatory schemas. This points to the role of
the medical establishment in policing women's sexuality
and pokes fun at the notion that virgins and other sexual
"deviants" are a breed apart. Brown argues against all
forms of sexual tyranny, both those that insist "sex will
ruin a woman" and those that claim "lack of sex will
curdle her" (71). In her parody of scientific nomenclature
and typologies, she claims that "all races are represented."
Yet her article does not explicitly acknowledge that
virginity can mean very different things for white women
and for women of color. As bell hooks argues about (the
pop singer) Madonna's performance of both sides of the
virgin/whore binary, "the very image of sexual agency
[Madonna] is able to project and affirm with material gain
has been the stick this society has used to justify its
continued beating and assault on the black female body"
(160). White women can "get away" with playing with
their sexuality; their purity is assured through their
contrast to already "fallen" black women. Taking Bitch as
an unqualified emblem of feminism reinforces both the
universality and invisibility of whiteness, as well as the
notion that feminism is primarily for, about, and by
Anglo-American women. This not only renders invisible
the feminist activism undertaken by women of color,
working class women, and women outside the U.S., but
also erase the ways in which feminism sometimes upholds
race and class hierarchies.
Symbolic Inversion and "Real" Social Change
Some observers have critiqued the kind of feminism
represented by Bitch, not so much for its potential racial,
class, or national exclusions, but for perpetuating the
worst tendencies of contemporary identity politicsan
excessive focus on discourse, cultural representations, and
symbols of the body, at the expense of "real" political
activism. Jenny Bourne sums up such objections in her
work on Jewish feminism: "the distinction between idea
and act, between individual and structure, between the
real world and its representation was completely lost.
And the way to fight oppression was not so much to
challenge power directly as to challenge discourse" (3;
emphasis added). Concerns about contemporary
feminism's involvement in cultural politics also surface in
popular discourses, even prompting Time to ask in June
1998, "Is Feminism Dead?" The Time article bemoans
contemporary feminism's "obsession" with fashion,
sexuality, and the mass media, longing for the good old
days when feminists regularly churned out "tomes on the
glass ceiling" (Bellafante 56).
Such criticisms operate under the assumption that a
focus on signs, symbols, and discourse cannot affect
"real" social or political change, and, in that respect, they
are much like traditional theories of symbolic inversion,
the final strategy utilized by Bitch that I discuss.
According to Barbara Babcock, symbolic inversion "may
be broadly defined as any act of expressive behavior
which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion
presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes,
values, and norms" (14). Among many memorable
examples, including the glorification of bitches/bitching,
one of the clearest uses of symbolic inversion in Bitch
comes in a feature article entitled "The Roseanne
Benedict Arnolds: how fat women are betrayed by their
celebrity spokespeople" (43). The authors single out
various celebrities, including Ricki Lake, Oprah Winfrey,
and Roseanne, praise them for their initial efforts to
advance the cause of fat women in the media, and
admonish them for subsequently losing weight and
demonizing fat people. The article employs some of the
rhetorical strategies discussed earlier, such as irony: "in
1991, Oprah proudly told People that her loss of 67
pounds on a liquid fasting diet was 'the single greatest
achievement of my life.' Screw breaking the glass
ceilings of race, class, and gender to become a bona fide
media mogulI stopped eating for four months!" (46).
The authors thus reverse the cultural value assigned to
weight loss and thinness, while also exalting fat women as
powerful, attractive, and assertive. In doing so, they
upend conventional, contemporary Western female beauty
standards that prize a slender body.
Scholars have traditionally treated such reversals and
symbolic inversions as temporary spaces for hierarchical
orders to adjust and reassert themselves without enacting
fundamental change (Davis 153). After all, outside the
pages of Bitch, the slender ideal still rules, and fat people
are repeatedly chastised for being unhealthy, unattractive,
and morally suspect. If that were not the case, the Bitch
article would not be nearly so provocative and amusing.
On the other hand, symbolic inversion should not be
dismissed as simply the system's "safety valve," for such
a view discounts the rhetorical force of cultural
representations and of popular culture, their ability to
affect changes in societal attitudes and actions. Bitch may
not be able to completely overturn the cultural equation of
thinness with beauty, health, and morality, but it does
provide resources for the struggle against that equation.
Natalie Zemon Davis addresses this issue in her work on
the practice of placing "women on top" in early modem
Europe, both in festivals and in images. Davis contends
that, although these symbolic sexual inversions did
reinforce conventional hierarchies, they also "kept open
an alternate way of conceiving family structure . . . [and]
made the unruly option a more conceivable one" (173-
175). We can think of Bitch as a modem continuation of
the tradition that Davis identifies, making the image ofthe
"unruly" woman not only conceivable, but also
desirabledesirable not because it ultimately serves
patriarchy, but because, from another perspective, it
insists on the importance of feminist discourses and
activism.
Conclusion
As I have argued. Bitch performs feminism as an act
of critical reading and of critical engagement with U.S.
American popular culture, particularly the mass-mediated
kind. Through various formal and rhetorical strategies,
such as parody, irony, recontextualization, multivocaiity,
and symbolic inversion. Bitch puts this vision of feminism
on display, making it available for public scrutiny. The
question of who exactly constitutes that public and how
individual readers may respond to the magazine and to its
feminist performance is an important issue, but beyond
the scope of this particular paper. Following Linda
Hutcheon's work on parody and irony, I argue that many
of Bitch's rhetorical strategies do presume a certain body
of shared knowledge between the writers, editors, and
readers. This knowledge involves not only the referents
towards which the magazine's discourse gestures, but also
the communicative norms that allow readers to recognize
and activate its ironic, feminist edge. In this sense, then.
Bitch both relies upon and invokes a particular discursive
community, which means that the ability to engage in its
vision of feminism depends on certain privileges, such as
those accruing from education, socioeconomic class, and
geographical location.
Bitch does not simply reflect a pre-existing feminist
community or identity, however. It also offers a particular
constitution of that community and identity, one that
revolves around reading pop culture in a highly stylized
way. Just as the various writers for Bitch do not all agree
about what exactly makes up a feminist reading (or what
makes up feminism), we should not expect readers of the
magazine to necessarily agree with its conclusions about
feminism or pop culture more generally. As work in
reception theory and audience co-construction has pointed
out, no speaker or text can completely determine or
monopolize its own meaning. By including multiple,
often dissenting voices in its pages. Bitch tacitly
acknowledges this insight. In the process, the magazine
suggests that feminism itself is a site of cultural contest
rather than a set of tenets settled on prior to (and outside
of) discourse. By foregrounding the act of reading pop
culture critically. Bitch emphasizes the audience's role in
creating meaning as well as the feminist potential of this
role.
One of the most striking features of this particular
issue, and the magazine as a whole, is its concem for
cultural conceptions of beauty. Specifically, it contests the
confiation of beauty with thinness that is a hallmark of
contemporary U.S. American culture. We might thus see
Bitch as a feminist response to the images of beauty that
populate mainstream women's magazines, even as that
response is literally smothered on the shelves by those
very magazines.' Bitch continues the work of feminist
scholars who have written extensively about the ways in
which conventional beauty standards contribute to
women's oppression (Brownmiller, Wolf, and Bordo).
Rather than jettisoning beauty altogether. Bitch provides a
space for re-imagining beauty in more progressive.
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 7
feminist directions. The magazine attempts to re-articulate
beauty in a more inclusive fashion, so that it can
encompass fat women in particular. This re-articulation
does hone in on a significant aspect of contemporary
beauty standards in the United States, namely body size.
However, it fails to make explicit the racial and class
dimensions of those standards (not to mention the fact
that prejudices against fat women often rely on racism
and classism, for instance in the persistent belief that fat
women are fat because they don't display the proper work
ethic). I would argue that we also need to open beauty up
for women of color and women who cannot afford the
accoutrements of conventional middle-class femininity.
There are those who would wam against forgoing
"real" political activism in favor of the type of feminism
presented in Bitch. In response, I would suggest that we
don't have to choose either one or the other. In an era of
supposed "backlash" against feminism, it would behoove
us to multiply the sites of feminist activism, rather than
insisting that some are more valid than others. At the
same time, it's important to acknowledge that Bitch's
vision of feminism is limited in certain ways, especially in
its almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American media. I
for one wouldn't want this to be the only model of
feminist activism available. By the same token, more
"traditional" feminist activism has its own peculiar
advantages and disadvantages and is certainly not
insensitive to concems about cultural representations. The
particular contribution that Bitch might make to a viable
feminist movement involves the way in which it helps its
readers to revision culture. Bitch's discourse is both
deconstructive and reconstructive; it demystifies in order
to imagine other possibilities.
Notes
Conversely, one could argue that whieh magazines sell the most
copies is influenced by which magazines are placed front and
center.
According to statistics on Bitch's website, its latest issue will have
a print run of 35,000, and the website further estimates its
readership at 122,500 people.
1 include this infonnation not to promote the commercial interests
of the magazine, but to place it within a commercial context.
Doing so is important because Bitch's status as a cultural
commodity has consequences for its accessibility and its degree of
"publicness." It also helps us understand both the similarities and
differences between Bilch and other, more mainstream, women's
publications.
Women and Language, Vol. 26, No. 2, Pg. 8
4 For more on the overlaps and differences between irony and
parody, see Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, particularly Chapters 2
and 3.
5 This type of appropriation may also leave Bitch vulnerable to legal
action. In this case, its status as an alternative publication with
limited circulation may help shield it from sueh lawsuits, insofar as
it does its work "underground."
6 The relatively high prevalence of interviews is not limited to this
one issue. It is also typical ofthe other issues that I have managed
to get ahold of.
7 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
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Courtney Bailey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. She
invites questions and comments about this essay via e-mail
(cwbailey@indiana.edu). She wishes to thank the editor and anonymous
reviewers for their helpful suggestions.