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Description
The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media outlets misinterpreted the artists' cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. These male and female artists, rebelled against binary gender conventions by performing queered and Camped identities, that were commercially misinterpreted, packaged as "grunge", and sold to the masses. Consequently, in spite of commercial praise and success for their music, the many gender provocateurs in grunge have been widely overlooked by scholarship and activism. The female grunge artists have had it the worst; lacking the recognition as both gender-fucking performers and as serious contributors to a unique music movement that saw more female-led bands with mainstream airplay, high album sales, and more concert tickets sold, than ever before in rock history. This thesis, in order to exhume the untold history of grunge, discards the old categories and cultural trappings created for the genre and instead explores the performative value of its abstractions, contradictions, and abjections as feministic expressions. To begin to disinter the marginalized female grunge artists, it is necessary to begin with unequivocally, the most marginalized and chastised female of all, Courtney Love. Love's legacy has been so distorted that her counter-culture feministic expressions have been subsumed. This thesis aims to illuminate the physical and lyrical hypertext deployed by Love to create her personal evolution of her punk feminism, grunge, into a new queered feministic expression examined through her albums Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994).
