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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The figure of the Valley Girl experienced a meteoric rise in 1980s popular culture, thanks to Frank Zappa’s 1982 song “Valley Girl” and Martha Coolidge’s 1983 film Valley Girl, which brought its subject and her environment to life. Southern California had already been cast as the epicenter of youth culture, with countless teen-oriented films and television series set in Los Angeles since the 1950s. While Gidget and the Beach Boys helped equate Southern California with the beach in the teenage imaginary in the 1960s, teen media’s geographical touchstone shifted inland in the 1980s to the San Fernando Valley, making the white, middle-class teenage girls who resided there into cultural icons and punching bags. Using rhetoric of infection, popular press accounts suggest the Valley Girl can be found in shopping malls across the country, an epidemic so severe that one speech pathologist promised parents she could “deprogram” their Valley Girl.
Through an analysis of 1980s and 1990s teen film, television, and magazines, alongside popular press coverage of the “Valley Girl” phenomenon, I argue that the Valley Girl is trapped in a double bind. On the one hand, she first emerges as the most popular girl in school, a desirable subject position in the adolescent social economy. On the other hand, she quickly becomes reviled, misogynistically portrayed in popular media as an obnoxious, conformist airhead. She is treated as an ambivalent object representing American culture’s utopic desire for placeless universality while acting as its scapegoat for the shame of rootless inauthenticity.
A Nation of Girls Stuck in the Valley: The Transmedia Proliferation of the Valley Girl
The figure of the Valley Girl experienced a meteoric rise in 1980s popular culture, thanks to Frank Zappa’s 1982 song “Valley Girl” and Martha Coolidge’s 1983 film Valley Girl, which brought its subject and her environment to life. Southern California had already been cast as the epicenter of youth culture, with countless teen-oriented films and television series set in Los Angeles since the 1950s. While Gidget and the Beach Boys helped equate Southern California with the beach in the teenage imaginary in the 1960s, teen media’s geographical touchstone shifted inland in the 1980s to the San Fernando Valley, making the white, middle-class teenage girls who resided there into cultural icons and punching bags. Using rhetoric of infection, popular press accounts suggest the Valley Girl can be found in shopping malls across the country, an epidemic so severe that one speech pathologist promised parents she could “deprogram” their Valley Girl.
Through an analysis of 1980s and 1990s teen film, television, and magazines, alongside popular press coverage of the “Valley Girl” phenomenon, I argue that the Valley Girl is trapped in a double bind. On the one hand, she first emerges as the most popular girl in school, a desirable subject position in the adolescent social economy. On the other hand, she quickly becomes reviled, misogynistically portrayed in popular media as an obnoxious, conformist airhead. She is treated as an ambivalent object representing American culture’s utopic desire for placeless universality while acting as its scapegoat for the shame of rootless inauthenticity.
Bio
Alice Leppert is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College. She is the author of TV Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcoms (Rutgers University Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Television and New Media, Celebrity Studies, Genders, and in numerous edited collections. She serves as the Co-Editor of Celebrity Studies and as the book review editor for Film Criticism.