Style Culture and Female Masculinity (reading/screening response)

The majority of the readings seem to take to task the biases of subcultural analyses of style, whether the biases are masculinist disavowals of privilege (McRobbie), the elision and omission of female possibility within the dynamics of space (Fregoso), or the potential of sartorially alternative modes of consumption that disrupt gendered and classed assumptions (Tinkcom, Villarejo, Fuqua). McRobbie’s engagement with what she (among others) almost begrudgingly recognizes as one of the “most sophisticated accounts to date of youth culture and style” reveals more than a few limitations, not all of which can be attributed to Hebdige and Willis’s celebratory discussion of working class escape from the drudgery of familial and capitalistic systems. I simultaneously appreciate McRobbie’s critique of Hebdige’s seeming denial of the violent and patriarchal nature that often characterizes male youth discursive practices and fantasies but also find what appears to be a disturbingly imprecise employment of “sex” and “gender” as she privileges a particularized notion of “feminism”. McRobbie seems to slip too easily between how “highly differentiated according to gender, style is” and that if “we speak through our clothes we do so in the accents of our sex”. (26) (emphasis mine)

McRobbie briefly discusses the spatial marginalization of working class women embedded in British subculture, a preview to Fregoso’s extended engagement with the politics of public visibility that governs the Chuca-Homegirl-Chola’s subcultural style. Fregoso also bemoans the invisibility of the Pachuca within Chicano and mainstream white media culture, performing a similar criticism of the bias seen through films that attempt to recreate Chicano gang life through exclusively male perspectives and spaces. Through praise for Mi Vida Loca’s complication of the public/private dichotomy that often becomes normalized via “gangxploitation” films, Fregoso recognizes the importance of homosocial spaces to the articulation of Homegirl-Pachuca-Chola self-reliance. While Fregoso recognizes the potential for homoeroticism (not quite homosexuality) as a component of the transgressive, oppositional politics in Homegirl social figurations, however, how can we read across their style culture and affect forms of female masculinity that complicate the binaristic virgen/malinche formation that seems to be rooted in forms of femininity?