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From Emancipation to Political Emaciation

I saw recently on Fashion TV that, according to various cultural commentators, we are experiencing a rapid return to the greed and apolitical indulgence of the 1980s. The observation takes me back to the first time I saw the new Spice Girls clip "Holler." As a self-admitted fan of the Spice Girls (they did put bums on seats in my feminist philosophy classrooms in the '90s), I was curious. 1999 gave us Mel C's queer-tinged "Never be the Same Again," and Geri Halliwell's Ginger-turns-bimbesque "Ma Chico Latino." The brazen former Spice who, in "Spice Up Your Life" had chosen a military (and presumably feminist) commentator as her phantasy role of the future, succumbed to more conventional women's activities -- blonding her hair, getting toned and tanned, and singing about some Latin guy. This was disappointing.

And so is "Holler," which reverses the feminist Spice Girls of the '90s, so they appear to be more traditional, apolitical pop stars. The Spice Girls now display success as thin, rich bodies, dressed in familiar configurations of desire. They've replaced their political commitment (Girl Power!) with a homogenization of clothes and desires. The Spice characters have all but disappeared, so that they seem forced into a singularity of image and attitude. The Spice Girls' earlier video clips -- "Spice Up Your Life," "Too Much," "Say You'll Be There," and "Wannabe," as well as their film, Spice World -- anchored their success in their heterogeneity. The differences between the Girls were as important as the ability of viewers to chop and change their identificatory practices between the Girls, their moods, and their outfits. Light, yes, even stupid at times (who didn't end up exchanging castration-angst stilettos for horse-hoof Buffalo-brand shoes?), but always fun, always available, and always with an aim to connect with other girls who liked the Spiceys, be they the 8-year-olds touted as the only Spice fans, or the 25-year-old lecturer who liked politics with her pop. The first incarnation of Spice had something for everyone because it presented so much in one band, hence the names -- Posh, Ginger, Baby, Sporty, and Scary. You could dislike one, but it was hard to find nothing interesting about any of them, their songs, or their clips.

In "Holler," the major differences between the Spices are their choices of boy toys. This most interesting scene sees the four Spices sitting in high-tech chairs reminiscent of the alien telescope chair in Bava's Planet of the Vampires, later copied by Ridley Scott in Alien. Virtual reality visors perch in front of the Spices' eyes, through which each visualizes her perfect object of desire. Such a scene heralds the great fear that post-modernism had about the coming of age of the new millennium -- new technology, new bodies, new representations, same old stories. The ultra po-mo Spice Girls, once virile women creating their own future, have settled from one that is not so different from the past. The advanced technology pictured in the clip is matched by the low-tech nature of the desire it presents. Post-human bodies, strange or strong femininities, are not found here. Girl Power has been replaced by Gucci Power. The clothes are less outrageous and so are the lyrics and the politics.

Here the Spice Girls' message ends up not that the oppressed have a voice and strength, but that after a certain point (or bank balance), they no longer need to be concerned with changing systems. The Spices' sexual "revolution" has produced a feminism that is only concerned with the number of studs one can libidinalise in a bizarre parody of owning your own sexuality, as long as it is not queer and the object of desire is theoretically more subjugated in culture than you. Hence the boys in this clip are black.