Page 142 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 135
talking about all sorts of complicated issues with them . . . and I think
has actually been quite interesting.
[...]
I kind of get really hot on the collar about Posh Spice being an
unacceptable role model for small girls. Teetering around in high heels
and tiny clothes and never moving her face [imitates]. She doesn’t seem
very natural to me. She doesn’t express herself very well. She doesn’t
seem very at ease with her body [laugh]. Yes, so the Spice Girls has
brought up the whole gender thing for us. And I’m really shocked
sometimes with Yasmin how, I mean I know kids don’t, but when people
ask her sometimes what do you want to be when you grow up and she’ll
say ‘I want to be a shop assistant’ and it’s ‘oh [horror] no, you have to
want to be a doctor’ [laugh]. . . . So I think ...I mean obviously she’s
had that message drummed into her about ‘you can be anything you
want to be, do anything you want to do, go anywhere you want to
go’ you know, and it’s just whatever you want to do and there are no
restrictions. And if you come across them you have to challenge them.
But having said that she’s still very much, she’s still quite girlie, do you
know what I mean?
(Interview 9)

There are different levels of ‘girlie’ behaviour being discussed – they range
from the sexually ‘innocent’ (wanting to wear pink) to the more sexualised
(wanting to wear high heels or behaving like ‘Posh Spice’). Particularly the
latter, more sexualised or feminised behaviour, is classed, and it is suggested
that they are incompatible with middle-class aspirations such as wanting to
be a doctor. The ambiguous position of the Spice Girls in this was high-
lighted by the fact that Madeleine’s aspirational message, which she ‘drums’
into her child, was very similar, at face value, to the Spice Girl’s ‘girl power’
message. Jan also expressed ambivalence about her daughter’s fascination
with the Spice Girls. She did not know how to respond to her daughter
adopting Spice Girls style dress – was her daughter showing courage or being
a ‘tacky tart’?

She wants to go around wearing plastic patent shoes with two inch heels
on being a Spice Girl fan and part of me thinks she looks kind of tacky.
On the other hand she looks fantastic and not many kids her age would
have the nerve to go out of the door wearing that kind of stuff, do you
know what I mean? And so you have to try and get that balance between
applauding her making her mark and being different and . . . looking
like a tacky tart basically [laugh] I mean fashion at the moment I just
think is so tacky! I don’t know.
(Interview 30)

In the case of the Spice Girls, class and gender are acting upon each other