Drew Barrymore's Coming of Age(ncy): The Performance of Addiction and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism

Commenting in Artforum on the New York premier of fashion designer Miuchia Prada’s Miu Miu fall line, Rhonda Lieberman writes:

Drew Barrymore, muse for this Miu Miu line of clothing, models a trend in popular culture that has embraced the notably youthful body of female addiction. In a March, 1994 article for Vogue entitled "Under the Influence," Charles Gandee observes the recent fashion in Hollywood, in magazine photo layouts, in rock music and videos, to push "drug chic." This fashionable addiction is typified by the unsettlingly, underage, skinny girl with short greasy hair, owl-like blackened eyes, and ashen skin stumbling with "her rag-doll-loose limbs each going its own independent way . . . and then she smiles that eerie little smile that psychotics and drug addicts smile--one that says, ‘I’ve got a secret."

This fashion of addiction has followed the growing ubiquity of addiction in American cultural discourse. And, as typified in the Miu Miu fashion show, addiction is represented on the bodies of "others"--the pathological and the perverse, the underage and the aged, the foreign and the feminine. Hence, the visible representation of addiction on the body obliges an investigation into the "image of the other" and is a flashpoint for directing our critical attention to the way the dominant norm reconsolidates itself and maintains its invisibility with respect to visible "otherness." As the Vogue writer implies, the discourse of addiction conjures a sexy "secret"--sexy because it barely conceals the mystery of "otherness." In other words, addiction indexes the "secret" vulnerability of dominant binary valuations of mind and body, male and female, young and old, white and black, and the whole range of oppositions structuring heteronormative discourse. The discourse of addiction, then, circulates at the limits of the signifying economy of phallocentric logic that converts difference into the Same. Since addiction constitutes a crisis in the reproduction of dominant norms (e.g. of race, class, age, sexuality, and gender), representations of addiction become the stage for repeated recoveries of "normality." And, since such dominant ideological fabrication may be just as easily torn open as sutured over, critical responses to these representations are sites of ambivalence.

This chapter is about the practice of criticism and the limitations attendant to a feminist criticism that aims to recover and, hence, foreclose ambivalent possibilities in various cultural narratives that feature addicted women. One of the points of noticing representations of addiction is to better understand the interests and investments of those discourses that have either coopted feminist posturing for anti-democratic objectives or have announced the end of feminism's usefulness for addressing contemporary ideological struggles. As I show, feminist critics employing a recovery discourse and preoccupied with the search for a 'cure' for patriarchal harms have been appropriated for the purposes of an antifeminist offensive. To look through the feminist readings of addiction allows us to check the ways in which some feminist discourses rely on the constitution and continued suffering of the feminist subject. In the main, I will argue that the affirmations of voluntarism or autonomy in the name of feminism rely on the injurious effects of addiction and dependency insofar as they accede to a rhetoric of recovery--a rhetoric that ultimately covers over ruptures in binary logic and adheres to heteronormativity.

As I argued in Chapter One, rather than deploying a compromising recovery discourse, feminist critics might alternatively explore the possibilities of a "performative interpretation" that keeps ambivalence in play, keeps difference circulating, and functions to transform the very objects it interprets. Performative interpretation hypothesizes a "queer agency" that describes the possibility of intersection or combination of more than one established subject position (often cast as being at odds with each other) in a single reader or text. The critic engaged in performative interpretation participates in a politics of enunciation, making fair use of the fact that certain kinds of performative statements produce different meanings, not so much because of what is said, but because of who is saying it and who is reading it. Literate of the enunciations of "queer agents," the critic may specify multiple and contradictory meanings of addiction rather than recovering a single meaning. It is in the pursuit of such a feminist critical practice irreducible to a rhetoric of recovery that leads me to an investigation of the representations of Drew Barrymore; the youthful "muse" conjured as the inspiration for "fashionable addiction." Through an analysis of the popular figuration of Drew Barrymore's addiction, I hope to offer ways in which the feminist critic might recognize transformative possibilities as uncoupled from intention and not dependent on the recovery of addiction’s dominant paired term, voluntarism. This is not to deny feminism’s prerogative to offer strategic critiques of culture, identify allies and enemies, and reflect on its own triumphs and failures. It is to affirm, rather, that feminist critics must devote some thought to developing a critical practice that is not limited to the surveillance of what registers as misogynist and harmful, and remaining suspect of what affirms itself in the name of feminism. This entails a performative critical project that is also an ethics, dedicated to the transformative possibilities of queer agency.

Taking cues from film theory and its approach to the "star" phenomenon surrounding classical Hollywood cinema, I do not seek to find the "true" Drew Barrymore behind the image, neither do I seek to offer her a "real cure" nor find emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug use, nor elevate her to feminist mythological proportions. Rather, I hope to read the ways in which her image is assigned a social meaning and used to do cultural work. In his 1979 study of stars, Richard Dyer demonstrates that the star should be studied as a system of signifiers communicating meaning to a spectator. As Dyer suggests, star images are highly manipulated texts and there is little point to searching for the "true" identity of the star 'behind' the façade. The fact that stars, like Barrymore, are also real people is an important aspect of how they signify, but they are only stars to the extent that they signify in cultural/media texts and not as "real people." For Dyer, star studies is a useful approach to cultural analysis because it often highlights the resolution of ideological conflicts and contradictions in dominant discourses and popular representations. In other words, the star image may often be used to do the hegemonic cultural work of recovering ruptures in a heteronormative logic. But, the star may just as effectively be made to work to highlight those ruptures so as to critique and subvert their dominance. This latter possibility is the promise in a feminist critical reading of Drew Barrymore. I will read the way in which her representation appears at a disruptive opening that might invite possibilities for feminist critics to intervene and transform culture without following the best intentions of ‘curing’ culture of its patriarchal harms. I hope, in this way, to move feminist criticism away from a recovery movement that seeks to retrieve and recuperate a concealed core, an essence, a ‘long lost femininity’" and toward a transgressive performative practice that compels the feminist investigator to actively calculate the humiliations and negations at stake in a given cultural narrative. Careful to resist warranting and, in effect, recovering "unintentionality" as the subversion of phallocentric intentionality or voluntarism, this approach allows for the possibility of an affirmative, active stance that is also at every moment unfixed and open to the unexpected possibilities that emerge from unforeseen sources. Again, I am persuaded by Dyer who instructively emphasizes the "structured polysemy" of star images: "the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they embody and the attempt so to structure them that some meanings and affects are foregrounded and others are masked or displaced." In other words, the point of an analysis of the representations of Drew Barrymore is not to determine a correct meaning, but rather to determine "what meanings and affects can legitimately be read in them." Such a "structured polysemy" is the difference that I hope a "performative interpretation" will keep in play as it resists recovering a singular, stable meaning that might define Barrymore's star image.

My analysis focuses on the hyper-representation of Drew Barrymore in the last decade. In the effort to develop a feminist criticism that takes responsibility for being literate of that which outstrips the trajectory of intentionality, I look to the extra-textual coverage of Drew Barrymore’s past addiction as she became an object of intense fascination among popular fashion journalists in the early 1990s. This fascination accompanied Drew Barrymore's popular "comeback" as a performing site of feminist politics and sexual identity and coincides with the emergence of a suspect third wave rhetoric of "bad girl" feminist opposition. In what follows, I examine two articles appearing in men’s fashion magazines--the first from GQ, and the second from Esquire--that incorporate Barrymore into a feminist discourse while attempting to diffuse feminism’s oppositional force by citing a "bad girl," "sexual agency" agenda and associating it with Barrymore’s pathological addiction. Dyer would categorize these articles as "publicity" material, since they do not appear to be deliberate image-making (as promotion does) and are important in their appearance of legitimacy and 'truth'. This publicity material appears to be out of the control of the studios or the stars themselves and gains its authenticity by capturing the star "unawares." Dyer explains:

The tensions between the 'real' Barrymore and her star image will also direct the critic towards an analysis of her ambivalent status with respect to dominant norms of representation.

In my analysis of the treatment of Drew Barrymore in select publicity material, I remark on the various ways in which the authors personalize the star's public image, invoking Barrymore’s "real life" addiction in order to separate her apart from "normal" women, even as this invocation of addiction manages to reintegrate her into the patriarchal, heterosexual norm. It is in the extra-textual treatments of Barrymore that the crisis of addiction is "managed." As her representation invents and insists on a "real" Barrymore, she is recovered within the logic of heteronormativity. At the same time, both of the articles that I analyze also demonstrate the way the extra-textual functions in the representation of Barrymore to confirm Barrymore's potentially disruptive queer agency. As Barrymore echoes and repeats the popular representation of her own imaging, she responds improperly to the dominant system of representation. Hence, even as Barrymore responds under restrictive circumstances, her response also functions as a critique of the dominant system she echoes. While Barrymore participates in a mimetic logic of truth, she simultaneously marks a moment of rupture in such a logic as her echo resonates ambivalently.

{A} E.T.: Barrymore and the Extra-Textual{/A}

In E.T. (1982), the seven-year-old Drew Barrymore gained notoriety as the adorable little girl who was advised by a home sick alien to "be good." Barrymore’s acting talent came as no surprise to those who acknowledged her as the legitimate heir to the century-old Barrymore acting ‘dynasty’. In the years immediately following her E.T. success, Barrymore went on to star in numerous films as the cute, lovable kid, but never equaling her success as the irrepressible Gertie in E.T. However, Drew Barrymore soon became more widely known for inheriting another Barrymore family "talent," making E.T’s warning to "be good" a prophetic one. Flagrantly defying this advice, she lived an accelerated Hollywood life, as a writer for Vogue describes it: "stardom, drugs, rehab, People cover story, best-selling autobiography, easy punch line, gay icon, comeback." As People magazine disclosed in 1989, "Drew’s precocious movie stardom was accompanied by a more frightening precocity offscreen--a premature appetite for drinking and drugs." The youngest Barrymore’s addiction and institutional treatment by age 14 was made public in numerous exposés and confirmed in her tell-all autobiography.

Between 1992 and 1993, after emerging from rehabilitation, Barrymore made her first "comeback," appearing on the cover of Interview Magazine in a scandalous series of Bruce Webber photos and starring in several movies: Poison Ivy, Gun Crazy, and Doppelganger, which were all directed by women and involved themes of youthful female aggression, revenge, criminality, and pathology. Poison Ivy (1992), directed by Katt Shea Ruben, introduces Barrymore as a teenage, tattooed, parentless, polymorphously perverse, campy, femme fatale who assimilates herself into a family, sleeps with the older professional father, seduces the young social-loner daughter, and kills the sick, depressed mother. The "pathological" Ivy finally falls to her death from the same balcony off of which she pushed the mother.

The same year saw the release of Guncrazy (1992), directed by Tamra Davis. Its appeal was more "art house" than Hollywood and gained Barrymore some critical acclaim. In it, Barrymore plays the fifteen-year-old high school student, Anita, who lives in a substandard trailer home with her estranged mother’s boyfriend and is subjected to sexual abuse by almost all the men she encounters. She falls in love with her prisoner penpal; an impotent convicted murderer whom, after sponsoring his release, she joins in a killing spree, avenging her abusers and sparing those who have been abused.

Finally, the third in Barrymore’s trio of comeback films, Doppelganger (1992), directed and co-written by Avi Nesher, despite its straight-to-video schlock horror genre, offers a powerful feminist critique of psychoanalysis’s treatment of its female patients. Barrymore plays both the provocative but demure Holly as well as her evil, sex-crazed, murderous double. We discover that Holly was sexually abused by her father, causing her to develop multiple personality disorder. Holly’s scheming, opportunistic analyst takes advantage of her sexually and psychologically. But Holly’s abuse is again avenged in the end as she undergoes a monstrous transformation, splitting into two busty, mucous-covered monsters, killing the doctor, and rejoining back into the lovely, cured, Holly.

These three "comeback" films featured Barrymore's character consistently acting in retaliation against patriarchal gender expectations and as such, she appeared to represent the threat of a feminist critique of culture. All of these films variously expose the abnormality written into any elaboration of the "normal" patriarchal family and threaten to make visible the invisibility of such presumptively white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual categories. Narrative closure is achieved in all three cases with the punishing of bad, abusive men who take advantage of young girls, supplying all the movies with an explicit, albeit naïve, feminist spin.

Nevertheless, the forestalling of any feminist readings of these films is attempted extra-textually in the re-marking of Barrymore's addiction. Popular journalists conflate Barrymore's filmic subversions with the singular, named, troubled, addicted identity of Drew Barrymore rather than responding to the cultural critiques offered by these films insofar as they contribute to a feminist critique of culture. This conflation of the "real Drew" with the characters she plays and the recovery of any political consequence that the films might have had is consistent with Dyer's assertion that star images "collapse this distinction between the actor's authenticity and the authentication of the character she or he is playing." As Barrymore is conflated with her filmic character, her star image cuts audiences off from identifying a feminist politics. Moreover, the foregrounding of Barrymore's addiction as her "personal" problem effectively displaces the political stance of the characters she plays onto her pathological personal life. The "problem" that feminist critical discourses attribute to hetero-patriarchy is located on Barrymore’s youthful, addicted body, foreclosing the systemic interrogation of straight, white, bourgeois privilege and the consequences of deviance. Additionally, the affirmation of addiction as the impetus for Barrymore’s filmic violations of patriarchal gender conventions recovers addiction’s paired term, voluntarism, as the failed political promise of feminism. Barrymore’s addiction disqualifies her as a feminist candidate herself or even as an object of traditional feminist rhetorical criticism since she can never function in the realm of intention--the self-assured guarantee of the straight, white, male, bourgeois subject’s dominance. It is to the first of these extra-textual recoveries that I now turn.

{B} Dirty White Girl {/B}

In 1993, following the release of her trio of feminist "comeback" films, Barrymore graced the pages of GQ in a pictorial article entitled "Dirty White Girl," a title that names her as triply unreproductive of dominant norms and making explicit the feminist threat to heterosexual, white, bourgeois, male interests. The author, Pat Jordan, opens the article by referring to the Bruce Webber photo spread that appeared in a 1992 issue of Interview as evidence of her addiction and the enduring stigma of her "past." The Interview cover attracted widespread attention, as it featured Barrymore naked and lounging about with her young male and female playmates "as if she has just emerged from a lost weekend of sex, booze and drugs." By marking her addiction and pathologizing her "bad" behavior, the author of the GQ article attempts to place Barrymore back into the reproductive logocentric logic that her comeback films explicitly challenge, even as the article makes visible the lapses in such logic.

With the term "dirty," the article’s title firstly emphasizes Barrymore’s inverted sexuality and associates it with her incidental "feminist" tendencies. For the author, Barrymore’s "dirtiness" invokes her participation in nonreproductive sex, particularly lesbian sex, that threatens (and maintains) the heterosexual masculine imaginary. The article takes us behind the scenes of the evocative lesbianism in the film Poison Ivy underwritten by Ivy’s aggressive killer instincts, the shameless liaison between the female protagonists, and echoed in Barrymore’s "real" admission to finding subversive pleasure in deep tongue kissing her co-star Sara Gilbert (of Roseanne fame) to the astonishment of the cast and crew. In doing so, Jordan constructs Barrymore as "dirty"--the pathological, criminal, addict and the inversion of "real women," who, the author would reassure us, do not act like that "really." Jordan also interprets her "real" desires, discrediting what she says, as he intuits that what she really wants is "[t]o get married. To have children. To become a Betty Crocker-type housewife." Her desire for women is only for the camera, as the interviewer makes evident when, upon leaving lunch with Barrymore, they see two women in Bermuda shorts and "sensible" shoes holding hands. The author notes that "Barrymore blushes . . .In her real life, it seems she is embarrassed by what she is indifferent to acting out in front of the camera." Here again, the article presumes to show us something "real," something which we can never fully know from her film characters and something that can only be understood by her critics since she is not authorized to say what she means.

Second, the self-conscious articulation of "white" in the article title names what only becomes ascendant through its unspoken, unmarked, invisibility. Whereas "white" is usually the invisible race--maintaining its dominance as the unmarked, unnamed center--here it becomes the category that is made visible. In yet another important work by Richard Dyer entitled White, he argues that "whiteness" is elusive precisely because it attains the property of being "everything and nothing," and thereby gains its representational power. Critical studies of whiteness have held that in the naming of "white," the dominance of the category is modulated, white is made visible, and the discursive operations that mask the invisible omnipresence of white racial privilege are exposed. Hence, to name white and to make it visible would be to effect its dominance.

In the GQ article, "white" is explicitly named in the designation "white trash," which the author uses to describe Barrymore. According to Jordan, despite Barrymore’s aristocratic lineage, she still acts like "white trash," admitting her love for "white-trash food" and affirming that she owns and carries guns and that she would stand in front of her boyfriend if someone threatened to shoot him. Jordan comments:

In this passage, Jordan paints a picture of "white trash" behavior that transgresses gender norms and intersects with discourses of race, class, and location. Significantly, the cultural analysis of "white trash" has followed the mass of recent critical writing centered around white racial identity and the growing interest in the understanding of difference in the construction of whiteness across lines of class, age, gender, sexuality, and location. Cultural theorists of "white trash" argue that the study of such a clearly marked category of whiteness might lead to theories of anti-racist forms of white identity. As Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz write in their preface to the edited volume entitled White Trash:

Hence, as "white trash," Barrymore could be read as a threat to the reproduction of patriarchal families, bourgeois values, white privilege, and professionalism. But this optimism for the transgressive possibilities of "white trash" may not be warranted in every case. While such an inquiry may promise a non-racist understanding of whiteness, it may just as likely reinscribe the centrality of a universal, unmarked white subject. The naming of "white" does not necessarily undermine its categorical dominance. "White" is only made visible on the addicted star body of Barrymore through its rhetorical inversion as white is modified with the designations "dirty" and associated with "trash." By inverting the "norms" of racial dominance, the binary logic undergirding such a reversal remains intact, unmarked, unaffected. As such, the straight, white, male, bourgeois subject remains the unnamed norm exercising its power through its invisible status.

Moreover, the emergence of a category of "white trash chic" (fashion accessory for "drug chic") has suggested that "white trash" may be increasingly more susceptible to hegemonic readings than to anti-racist resistance. It is no coincidence that Barrymore is said to have typified "white trash chic," in her brief stint as the Guess? Jeans girl. "White trash" is recovered as the nonproductive foil to the productive "professional" class through the representation of Barrymore’s exhibitionist, hedonistic, child-like narcissism. As Tad Friend, writing for The New York Magazine notices, "white trash behavior is defined by childlikeness and the headlong pursuit of easy gratification--quite often, sex." And Friend aptly observes Barrymore’s status as an icon of "white trash chic" that covets the "spontaneous authenticity of the poor" and is associated with childishness and naivete. Friend further writes:

So, even if this naming of "white" does effect its categorical dominance, the disruptive consequences of such a naming are hastily recovered and domesticated by the third modifier in the Jordan article: "girl." While this term again racializes "whiteness" by invoking the African American vernacular term of affiliation--"girl"--it also becomes the designation that assures us that Barrymore is not an enduring threat, and driven only by a pre-social, juvenile rebelliousness.

Pointing to Drew Barrymore’s "past," her mark of addiction, and her submission to a "cure" (referring to her stay at a drug treatment center), Jordan seeks to resocialize this discomforting nonreproductive figure and reinscribe her within the law of visible representation--the law of market capitalism which guarantees that the production and reproduction of visibility will yield greater power and privilege to those who enjoy their unmarked status as the purveyors of "invisibility." But as I suggested at the outset, Barrymore’s addiction becomes the symptom of multiple and intertwined relationships and social categories that deviate from the hegemonic subject position. Barrymore’s mark of addiction enables her to both flirt with the edges of what counts as the "norm" as it simultaneously functions as a "symptom" made to mirror and "speak" the discourse of the dominant. And, significantly, as a girl, her social transgressions can be attributed to her youth and dismissed as a 'passing phase' and 'inevitable', 'natural rebellion': Youth, in this way, is the ideal material term on which to displace social discontent, since young people always turn into adults. Youthful rebellion is culturally sanctioned as a 'safety valve' for transgression seemingly without permanent consequences to the dominant "order." But Barrymore's "girl" status has also been retooled by a current in contemporary feminism that embraces the "bad girl" in us all. Barrymore’s pathological addiction, and her "bad girl" status casts her in the (now coveted) role of Lolita and as a model victim of the "Lolita Syndrome." And, Barrymore’s pathologized youth and its proliferation everywhere in American culture will present yet another challenge to feminist critics and will suggest an ethical turn for feminist criticism.

In proposing such an "ethical turn" in feminist criticism, I follow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reading of Ovid’s Narcissus. Psychoanalysis’s monumental neglect of Echo in its theory of narcissism compels Spivak to "give woman" to Echo. Spivak points to the vulnerability of both Freud’s and Lacan’s ethics which reside in their deployment of the Narcissus narrative without attending to its frame (a divine violence against woman and a scene of responsibility and punishment) nor to what lies "outside the frame" (the unrecoverable origin of the repeated utterance). Spivak notices that Echo too served the interests of this narrative as the "talkative girl" who unintentionally distracts Juno while Jupiter plays with nymphs. Echo is a performer although she performs under the situation of duress, as her repetition has been handed down as a punishment. Echo is forced to make a "choice in no choice" as she stands poised and "ready to await the sounds to which she may give back her own words." Even as Echo performs according to her punishment, the possibility for truth outside intention--outside the frame of punishment--arises. As Echo is compelled to repeat these sounds in her own voice, she changes them, transforms them, and critiques them as she returns the words of her male interlocutor with a difference. Similarly, I argue that Drew Barrymore’s punitive performance as Lolita often reproduces the interest of hegemonic stability but her repetition may also echo a difference.

Like Echo, who is obliged to repeat back the words of everyone who speaks, Barrymore imitates not only her white, bourgeois, straight, male interlocutor, but also her own representation as "Lolita," the figure who, I will suggest, is also the inheritor of Echo’s legacy. Spivak claims that Echo’s repetition is imperfect and as such, is the instantiation of an ethical dilemma for the feminist as it compels the feminist to listen to the utterances of the unintentional feminist, or to those who even seem to reify female subordination. As suggested in Chapter 1, feminist criticism is compelled to risk participating in a rhetoric of recovery whenever it engages an analysis of the "disordered," addicted female body. But, feminist critics cannot engage the rhetoric of recovery on the same terms as a dominant discourse that has reduced women's bodies to their pathological difference from men's bodies. The ethical responsibility to listen for the possibility of a truth not dependent upon intention is also the imperative of performative interpretation: an ethics of risk. The feminist critic must risk, while not being reduced to, a discourse of recovery as "an unintentional vehicle of a possible cure . . . is glimpsed, a cure that is one possible case among many" [emphasis mine]. At the same time, the critic must be careful not to valorize punishment as the prerequisite for a performative interpretation and the only position from which woman may speak. Resistant moments that may be available in representations of addiction remain just as susceptible to repression and neutralization by dominant readings as they are to appropriation by feminist readings. The risk of a feminist criticism that is not dependent on recovery is that it sustains, rather than recovers, the constitutive ambivalences of contemporary cultural texts. I do not claim that ambivalence should be maintained for its own sake, for that would be to risk nothing. Rather, the ethical risk of a performative interpretation is to specify the rhetorical scope of available readings by performing what is at stake in both seemingly complicit readings as well as in subversive ones.

A feminist criticism that takes seriously the lessons of Spivak's ethically instantiated embrace of Echo may open the possibilities for theoretical intersections that resist recovery under a singular thematic, performing the impossibility of addiction/voluntarism, dependency/autonomy divides. Addiction then may be understood, as I affirmed earlier, to be a rhetorical exigency for the intervention of feminist criticism since addiction is the trope that indicates profound ambivalence. While I mark addiction as a rhetorical exigence, I do so with an eye to Barbara Biesecker’s rhetorical use of the deconstructive thematic of différance in order to highlight the radically historical character of addiction and to simultaneously unhinge the representation of addiction as a secure and undivided point of origin unaffected by discourse and acting on subjects whose identities are fixed. The différance that I find in addiction is in the imperfect echo that Drew Barrymore returns, even as a "Lolita." She is an historical subject whose autobiographical specificity is important, but only to the extent that it also signifies a contingent cultural context through which such personal histories might be read and are made meaningful. It is to a more extended analysis of the significance of Barrymore's "girl" status and her implication in the recent "Lolita phenomenon" that I now turn. As stated above, Lolita is the inheritor of Echo's legacy and as such, she is obliged to repeat back the words and return the image of her oppressor, but with a différance. Echo performs a critical response to the very discourse that structures her representation and it is the ethical imperative of the feminist critic to preserve the play of différance in her repetition.

{C} Lolita, Sexual Agency, and The "New" Feminist Aesthetic {/C}

As Hannah Feldman astutely observes, the ghost of Nabakov’s Lolita was first popularly resurrected when her name was used to describe Amy Fisher, the ‘Long Island Lolita’ who attempted to shoot the wife of an older man, Joey Butafuoco, with whom Fisher was allegedly having an affair. Feldman writes that "during the high-profile trial in 1992 and 1993, Amy was called a ‘Lolita’ on the grounds that she was an overly sexed, manipulative girl, responsible for all that she got." Not surprisingly, this news event was further exploited in three made-for-TV movies released even while the real courtroom dramas continued. It was Drew Barrymore’s portrayal of Fisher, the ‘lethal Lolita’, which attracted the widest audiences. Barrymore’s role in this movie, however, was often mocked as "too obvious" casting as evidenced by David Handelman, reporting for Vogue, who writes: "Barrymore--who was offered the 'lethal Lolita' lead in all three networks’ Fisher docudramas and starred in ABC’s The Amy Fisher Story, the least appalling and most-watched version--weathers all this with a trouper’s smile. She’s had a lot of practice."

Barrymore’s comeback was redescribed with respect to the "return" of the Lolita, the re-emergence of the nymphet in art and popular culture, and the rise of "bad girl" or "sexual agency" feminism. As Feldman writes:

In popular culture, Barrymore’s "comeback" highlights the identity crisis that Lolita--the alternately savvy child, actively desiring subject, and scorned object of blame--presents to feminism. As a symbol of feminist sexual affirmation maintained by girl-woman teen heroes and the riott grrls phenomenon, this youthful icon of a ‘pro-sex’ feminist agenda promises to override patriarchal hegemony by reclaiming the desires on which patriarchy is purportedly based. Even academics have begun to catch up to the transgressive possibilities of "girl" culture, with "girl studies" slowly overshadowing women's studies as the preferred discipline for publishers and graduate student work, much of it focusing on the precocious sexuality of the ambivalent "girl" subject.

But the currency that the sexualized girl has gained in popular culture, contemporary art, and academics may not be so easily reconciled with a feminist agenda. The critics of such a proliferation of "girl talk" ask: "what kind of power is gained through manufacturing an affirmative sexual identity based on vulnerability and childlike frailty?" One would think that infantalizing women’s bodies would endanger a feminist affirmative stance. What happened to the battle that has been waged in the effort to have women called ‘women’ instead of ‘girls’? The question remains, then, why women now would want to embrace the "Lolita" image and rename themselves "girls." As Feldman notices:

Critics like Feldman wonder how it is possible for feminists to welcome the dominant imagination of Lolita as the hypersexual girl-woman since it reproduces the very patriarchal structure that confirms the irresistible young seductress’ guilt, relieves men of responsibility for their illicit desires, and relinquishes them of liability for their actions.

Such Lolita iconography becomes a further puzzle in the work of a number of American women artists whom Feldman develops her critique around. In her article, Feldman cites three contemporary American women artists--Rita Ackermann, Karen Kilimnik, and Lisa Yuskavage--all of whom seem to lend a subversive tenor to new feminist art with their weirdly cheery paintings of elf-like youths and dark-eyed waifs--naked, posed in "adult" situations, exposed, and often "in trouble." Feldman argues that these artists "adopt Lolita as a positive icon, assuming the position that there remains something powerful in seeing her sexuality as representing not just that of girls, but of women as well." It is certainly easy to see how these images could be read as complicit with dominant norms and, according to Feldman, eroticizing girl-hood sexuality which "allows for and even encourages their visual consumption." Rita Ackermann’s paintings are typically of woodland-nymph-like figures frolicking or lounging about and talking on the phone. Posed in their idyllic settings, they are also shown bleeding, vomiting, smoking crack, shooting heroin, making out, and killing themselves. The impish character’s childish breasts are pushed forward or clumsily concealed by ill-fitting white underwear and accessorized with tattoos, watchman caps, awkward highheels or sneakers. A somewhat different approach is demonstrated in Karen Kilimnik's drawings and paintings that recreate the advertising and tabloid images of "ingratiating waifs" and tragic celebrities. Kilimnik often implicates herself in their extraordinary tragedies, earnestly scribbling copy from tabloids in her own neurotic handwriting and taking the sensationalist, sordid stories very personally.

While Ackermann and Kilimnik are rebuked by Feldman for exalting the nymphet and complying with "the dictates of a Lolita culture where women are told they are more attractive as girls than as autonomous women." Feldman praises the critical stance of the work of Lisa Yuskavage. Feldman argues that Yuskavage critiques the voyeuristic desire to possess and sexualize young girl’s bodies and "expose[s] the limitations of the deliberate uptake of the Lolita image by women and young girls." But, it makes little sense why Feldman would have Yuskavage’s work stand as criticism of the exploitation of women in a specular economy, while arguing that Ackermann’s and Kilimnik’s work complies with that economy. Yuskavage’s portraits have the blank stares, open mouths, and vaginal gashes of blown-up sex dolls and the bodies of adolescent girls. More often than not, the paintings consist simply of figure against ground, as contextless creatures placed in an unlocatable space without clues or other visual references. When objects are introduced, the symbolism is deliberately clumsy. In Faucet (1995), for example, the disturbing doll figure, with her grotesquely adult breasts hanging from a waifish body, shares the pictorial space with a small, phallic water tap. Feldman maintains that the compliant pose of the subject of Faucet "is rendered forced and ridiculous through Yuskavage’s rendition of her almost caricatured unnaturally large and directed breast. The girl’s resistance to this voyeuristic gaze troubles it, denying the pleasure of voyeuristic possession that Ackermann’s [et al.] paintings enforce."

Feldman's critical stance toward this proliferation of "Lolita art" must be checked for a recovery tendency that reproduces the very terms of contention that have been endorsed by more explicitly conservative, anti-feminist critics. In other words, Feldman's critique of the "availability" of the girl-woman image presupposes heterosexual male consumers and redeploys an unnegotiated subject/object binary--the very same presumptions assumed by those whose interests would be best served by representing women as passive, receptive, and in need of patriarchal protection. Feldman's critique doesn't leave room for the possibility of a "queer agency," which would suggest that all consumers at some point position themselves 'queerly'--that is, position themselves within gender and sexuality spaces other than those with which they are publicly identified. To consider queer agency would compel the critic to reflect on the constitutive ambivalence of the Lolita image and to trace its variable rhetorical effects and uses.

What Feldman’s comparison of these painters’ additionally upholds is a problematic structure that opposes a conciliatory stance with a transgressive, critical stance and refuses to enumerate the possibilities in the ambivalent text in context. As Kobena Mercer instructively demonstrates in his rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe, to specify ambivalences might be the only way to counter antidemocratic initiatives. Mercer was moved to revise his own position on Mapplethorpe's photography in the wake of the controversy provoked by the religious Right which led to the retraction of NEA funds from the notorious posthumous Mapplethorpe retrospective and prompted Jesse Helms' amendment that forbids the public funding of art that is deemed "obscene or indecent." Mercer originally read Mapplethorpe's work as racial fetishism--functioning to reinforce damaging myths about black men's sexuality, objectifying them, and making them available for consumption by a racist, white, homophobic majority. But Mercer's social democratic discourse informed the very terms used by the Right to justify their objections to the show, masking the barely hidden homophobic motivations behind their reasoning. Mercer issued his revised position because, he claims, he does "not want a black gay critique to be appropriated to the purposes of the Right's antidemocratic cultural offensive." His revised position asserts that the ambivalence of Mapplethorpe's work may confirm racist, homophobic readings as easily as it can produce antiracist, homoerotic ones. It is this ambivalence which the critic must identify and specify in an effort to effect new knowledges emerging from unexpected sources and negotiate alternative modes of meaning-making.

Mercer importantly points out that ambivalence is not something "inside" the text. Cultural texts are hardly hermetically sealed or self-sufficient and, thus, ambivalence should be read as not only a textual phenomenon, but extra-textual and decidedly historical. Following Mercer, a performative interpretation considers the role of context and its susceptibility to contemporary developments, including a reconsideration of authorship in a poststructural context. For Mercer, ambivalence is "something that is experienced across relations between authors, texts, and readers, relations that are always contingent, context-bound, and historically specific." In other words, ambivalence is circulated in an economy of difference that constitutes subjects differentially. Feldman, however inadvertently, shuts down the play of difference when she presumes a universal, ahistorical consumer that the Lolita images "make themselves available" to. Hence, her critique recovers the binary logic that would designate certain images of women to be "positive" and others "negative." While Feldman dutifully and invaluably redresses patriarchal dominance as the ideological status quo formally enforced by mainstream representations of women, she does not account for other sexual forces and experiences within society. Such a tendency presses the exclusive patriarchal structure onto the world at large and maintains the alignment of male with activity and female with passivity. Hence, Feldman insist on recovering a heteronormative logic that might avail itself to appropriation in the very way that Mercer fears.

But Feldman's miscalculations may also prove to be instructive in formulating a reading of Barrymore's popular representation as "bad girl." Finally returning to the analysis of Barrymore, her "girl" status, and her figuration as a "Lolita," Barrymore's image might be read as neither emancipatory nor conciliatory, neither positive nor negative, but rather as ambivalent. Such an evaluation is not to give up the prerogative for a decisive judgement that would ensure a feminist agenda. But if a star image like Barrymore's is to be transgressive at all, it will surely be so ambivalently, indicating points of resistance as well as managing resistance and anxiety. These ambivalences are most likely structured into the star image in order to satisfy a larger market--as the mainstream media has recognized the feminist as a viable consumer. However, the performative interpretation does not confirm ambivalence on the same terms as it is offered up to an audience by a star image. As critics, our function is to highlight the internal (non-) negotiations, to enumerate the possible readings made available in the structured polysemy of the same text, and to specify what is at stake in those multiple meanings. Again, this is not to privilege ambivalence for the sake of ambivalence, but to affirm (as clearly evidenced by Mercer) that certain evaluations can be differently deployed in order to do specific cultural work. It is the work of a performative interpretation to rehearse these multiple deployments, to discover how critical questions might be formulated otherwise, and to ascertain how they might answer differently to different social and cultural interests. And again, this strategy is not to deny feminist criticism of its affirmative, progressive stance, but rather to describe the most effective interventions that feminist critics might make. What feminism cannot afford is to reestablish a dominant norm that will ultimately default to the pre-established dominance of heteronormativity. Nevertheless, as I discuss in what follows, numerous popular American feminist tracts have recovered such norms in the name of "bad girl" feminism

{B} The Recovery Rhetoric of "Girl Talk": Barrymore and "Do Me" Feminism {/B}

As stated above, the "badness" which Drew Barrymore embodies and that is treated in extra-textual "cures," has also been recovered by discourses of "bad girl," "sexual agency" or "power feminism" that contain female "badness" within a structure that affirms it as proof of men’s innocent victim status. More troubling in its mainstream context, a valorization of silence and pathology has popularly conjoined with a radical/liberal archival approach to feminist criticism, revaluing and recovering the very patronizing attributions that feminisms presumed to redress. The terms of the debate over effective and resonant feminist political commitments are framed in numerous popular American rhetorics that respond to a perceived phenomenon of women’s mass withdrawal from feminism and affirm women’s "feminine" qualities as their strength: the power which they already possess. While Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf have identified this phenomenon as ‘backlash’, writers like Rene Denfeld and Katie Roiphe (and even Naomi Wolf in her book, Fire with Fire) have attributed a feminist retreat to hypersensitivity and Victorian tendencies among their feminist contemporaries. Authors like Denfeld and Roiphe charge theorists of "backlash" with offering a counterproductive agenda of hypersensitive male-hating and a victim mythology that casts women as passive targets of an amorphous collective media conspiracy. The terms of this debate again redeploy the problematic association of feminism with a ‘cure’ and aligned with recovery.

Rene Denfeld, for example, argues in The New Victorians that feminism’s concerns with date rape, pornography and goddess religions have alienated women and lead them towards alliances with the religious Right. She compares the new ‘hypersensitive’ feminist to the dainty, sheltered, chaste Victorian woman of the nineteenth-century. She argues that contemporary feminist theorists of "backlash" reaffirm the values of sexual morality, spiritual purity, and political helplessness typical of the mid-1800s and early 1900s. And, Denfeld argues, today’s feminist antiphallic campaign that condemns heterosexual sex and wages battles against pornography are similarly the battle cries of an elite group of (academic) women who have drained feminism of its formerly vibrant and invigorating voice. Denfeld writes that "today’s feminists are remarkably similar to Victorians in significant ways, and not only in their vision of sexuality." According to Denfeld, these feminists--who generally belong to the middle and upper-classes--are engaged in a moral crusade, putting themselves on a pedestal far removed from the "real" problems of lower-class working women who cannot afford the luxury of non-normative expressions of sexuality.

In The Morning After, Katie Roiphe similarly claims that today’s feminists, with their focus on date rape and sexual harassment, contribute to a culture captivated by victimization. Their paradoxical public demand for confession and intimacy in the rituals of "Take Back the Night" marches on college campuses reflect a Victorian view of sexual politics. Roiphe maintains that the desire for sex in the absence of these accompaniments is not worth the trouble and is ingenuously defended by these new feminists. The hypersensitive politics prominent on university campuses has solidified an image of women as passive, weak-willed, and easily seduced by confused and sexually frustrated men who are the new victims of a feminism that has made all dating uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. Feminists today, according to Roiphe, endorse an impossible utopian vision of the sexual relation: "sex without struggle, sex without power, sex without persuasion, sex without pursuit." For Roiphe, such a vision of the sexual relation is undesirable for the majority of women.

Denfeld and Roiphe should be credited for noticing the ways in which gains in feminism, and particularly academic feminist theory, have produced a situation in which authoritative affirmations of a female identity suffer harsh critique and often dismissal. But, by identifying this situation as a feminist failure, they engage in self-retracting critique and redeploy a rhetoric of recovery. Denfeld and Roiphe charge feminists with stifling dissent while they themselves characterize the excesses of feminist responses to pornography, date rape, and abortion as divisive and diversionary. They disclaim the counterproductive deployment of victimology as they simultaneously offer a conspiracy theory where feminists dominate the media and universities, duping defenseless women, casting spells, and manipulating those who fall prey to their feminist trickery. Denfeld and Roiphe condemn the therapeutic language of the new feminist’s Victorian valorization of illness, even as they reinforce a recovery model of feminist response with their notion that feminism must be healed and cured of this epidemic of male-bashing, overly-sensitive, intellectuals. Finally, they are limited to positing female agency in terms that guarantee the maintenance of heteronormative dominance by recovering dominant ideals of femininity and the majoritarian icon of "woman" as straight, noconfrontational, and complicit in her own subordination.

Female "badness" has also been juvinilized within this current of a "third wave" rhetoric accompanied by the emergence of "bad girl" feminism and the proliferation of "girl talk." This recovery rhetoric is evident, for example, in Naomi Wolf’s deployment of the "bad girl" in her book Fire with Fire. Wolf claims that women need to use their power for social change, calling for a "radical heterosexuality" and repudiating a feminist advocacy influenced by the academic feminist thought that she believes discriminates against men, straight women, and women who assert their financial interests. Wolf offers a therapeutic plan for women to come to terms with their sexual agency and calls it the "bad girl’s route to equality" as she implores women to recover their "inner bad girl" and their juvenile innocence. But, by invoking this self-help discourse of the "inner child," Wolf commands women to look inward for the source of their oppression and thereby forecloses systemic critique. Additionally, Wolf’s order for women to recover their "inner bad girl" places them in the role of child in need of patriarchal protections. Bad girl feminism, at least in Wolf’s terms, is then fully consistent with patriarchal prerogatives. And, as such, it has been coopted by these anti-feminist interests to assert the victim status of men, to reify homophobia, to justify racial and sexual violence, and to make invisible men’s relation to patriarchy.

Wolf's theory of "radical heterosexuality" insists on a defense of men and a redefining of heterosexual identity in a ‘positive’ way. She argues that feminist identification with lesbians has "led many heterosexual women to stay away from the movement" and therefore feminists must affirm a majoritarian image that politicizes heterosexual desire. Wolf argues that "not all women can economically afford to be seen as gay--and if they are not gay, the misidentification is a financial, emotional, and physical risk few are willing to run" Wolf is not alone in her disturbing condemnation of feminism’s excesses in the visible signs of homosexuality. Susan Hoff Sommers similarly argues that feminism’s association with "ugly" lesbians is part of the agenda of those Sommers refers to as "gender feminists" whose raison d’être is to find and point to more and more abuse. Here, the lesbian is revealed as the source of anxiety for this "bad girl" feminist agenda, exposing the heteronormative interests of this third wave "girl talk."

By repressing all visible signs of homosexual "excess," Wolf and Sommers maintain, feminism might insinuate itself into a mainstream, dominant, discourse. Feminism’s success is gauged by monitoring its member's approximation to dominant patriarchal representations of women. Such logic would tell women who find themselves exploited or rebuked that they simply need to conform more closely to dominant ideals of femininity. This reworked feminism finally becomes a replication of the status quo in feminist terms--championing anti-feminist platitudes about women and turning away from politics and towards a depoliticized movement that can embrace everyone with an individual vision of "self-help." By capitulating to dominant norms in fashion, behavior, and policy and repudiating feminist "excesses," "bad girl" feminism reaffirms these dominant norms and allows the white, bourgeois, straight, norm to remain unmarked, unnamed, and unthreatened.

The ultimately masculinist agenda of "bad girl" feminism has been noticed and appropriated explicitly for anti-feminist interests who newly dubbed it "do me" feminism in the now somewhat notorious February, 1994 issue of Esquire. Significantly, this new "do me" feminism that insists on the proactive function of sex, valorizes the "bad girl" image which turns out to be complicit with patriarchal capitalism’s investment in the production and reproduction of visibility and has also serviced the commercial success of fashionable addiction. The term "do me" feminism was coined to name what the author, Tad Friend, understands to be the new generation of women thinkers who can be loosely lumped together as "power feminists" on a platform of empowerment through "sexual agency." This article, entitled "Yes," profiles a number of popular and controversial writers from Katie Roiphe and Rene Denfeld to Susie Bright and Pat Califia (ironically grouping together "power feminists" with out lesbian advocates of anti-homophobic projects). The article opens by introducing Naomi Wolf as celebrity avatar of "power feminism." In the Esquire article, Wolf begins by proposing a number of sexual invitations (hypothetical) to "show men how sexual aggression feels." Friend worries that this "new breed" of feminist politicized promiscuity highlights the importance of sexual pleasure and, if not satisfied these women will abandon men to become "fabulous lesbians who love couture and rough sex."

Friend emphasizes the sexual forwardness of his interview subjects and asserts that feminist demands come down to the demand for men to be more dominant sexually. He invokes Lorena Bobbitt’s Freudian snip as paradigmatic of sexual agency feminist logic; that bad sex is the only legitimate feminist complaint and the "do me" feminist battle cry. As a result, Friend reinscribes male sexual dominance as the transformative possibility of the new feminism. It is men, not women, who carry the traditionally feminine characteristics of vulnerability and passivity, and it is men who are in need of patronizing protection. But finally, it is the straight, white, bourgeois man who is once again the agent of change in this "do me" feminism since they are the ones responsible for the "doing." "do me" feminism becomes a sort of "men’s movement" that places feminism in the service of patriarchal interests. By focusing his explanation of "sexual agency" feminism on male sexual abilities, the Esquire author construes feminism with the enactment of male, heterosexual privilege. But, Friend did not need to engage in very subtle rhetorical manipulations to transform "sexual agency" feminism into a male-centered "do me" feminism. As I've noted, when feminist criticism engages in recovery discourse it avails itself to appropriation by the very discourses it opposes. Hence, "sexual agency" feminism marks a site where the panic discourse of recovery is deployed and feminism might be coopted for antifeminist interests. "Sexual agency" feminism responds to the categorical crisis of an ambivalent cultural terrain in which difference is contingent and undecidable and affects, among other things, the possibility for determining a unified feminist agenda. The "sexual agency" response to this ambivalence is to manage it and recover it. But, the price of such a recovery is the surrendering of feminism to racist, classist, homophobic, and sexist interest.

Drew Barrymore appears on the cover of this issue of Esquire dedicated to "The 21st Century Fox" as the extra-textual phantasm of "do me" feminist recovery rhetoric. She is topless and the caption under her folded arms asks "Drew Barrymore: Role Model?" The succeeding copy poses a multiple choice question: "Drew Barrymore is: (a) A dishy pinup; (b) A gritty, neorealist thespian; (c) A paradigm of the postfeminist celebrity; (d) Cooler than Madonna . . ." The answer provided to all these questions is an affirmative: affirming that she is "Girlish" and "still only nineteen," invoking her "tragic addiction to drugs and alcohol, the painful rehabilitation and the spiritual renewal"; announcing her then upcoming role in the "troubled lipstick western" entitled, coincidentally, Bad Girls; and implicitly discrediting an academic/poststructural feminist embrace of Madonna’s stylistic challenge. Barrymore’s appearance on the cover of this issue gives her poster girl status for the "sexual agency" every-man feminism that champions a masculinist agenda and purges feminism of its radical edge.

I still maintain that Barrymore's indeterminate representation can be articulated and appropriated into the political discourse of the Right as easily as it can into the Left, but at this point, the latter reading seems less and less viable. Again I return to Dyer's instructive analysis of the "star" phenomenon in order to think through the possibilities for a reading of such ambivalence and its attempted foreclosures. Dyer privileges the phenomenon of the "subversive star" as the figure that might disrupt the dominant ideological inscriptions that overwrite the star image. He shows that some stars, far from managing contradictions "either expose them or embody an alternative or oppositional ideological position (itself usually contradictory) to dominant ideology." In his discussion of "subversive star images," Dyer maintains that "stars embodying adolescent, female, and gay images play a crucial role." These embodiments, I have shown, are the very ones proliferated in the image of Barrymore. And, I think Dyer would agree that these embodiments of the subversive star image are just as likely to neutralize any resistant identifications that might be made available in that same image that opens the possibility for disruptive readings. Certainly, a constitutive indeterminacy is, in part, a function of the "structured polysemy" of the star image that Dyer theorized. The range of readings that might be produced by the same image are determined not only by the text but extratextually--by the role of context as well as by the reader--specifically by the way the reader attributes intentionality to the author. But, given Barrymore's addicted star persona, she is never understood to be author of her own image. Intentionality or voluntarity is the very thing that is denied of both the addict and of the star. Any residual subversive politics that might be available in Barrymore's dubious "do me" feminist stance seem to have been foreclosed by Barrymore's star image and are made aspects of her addicted personality. As Dyer notices, any obvious politics that a star might be associated with are obscured by the star image that functions "unavoidably to obscure the political issues they embody simply by demonstrating the life-style of their politics and displaying those political beliefs as an aspect of their personality." While the star's life may be "in crisis" this undefined state of crisis appears independent of any social contexts. The repeated references to Barrymore's addiction then appear to be attempts to diffuse Barrymore's political impact by personalizing it, linking feminism with her pathological lifestyle. But, these repeated references to Barrymore's addiction also redeploy the structuring ambivalences and anxieties proper to addiction and reopen the possibility for multiple resistant and complicit readings to be made.

In the mid-'90s, Barrymore, still marked with addiction, was cast in film and television roles that continued to reproduce her own history and most were explicitly about women acting out in retaliation against dominant culture’s gender expectations, but with a "sexual agency" spin. In the crop of films that appeared between 1994 and 1995, she again played a murderous temptress. Barrymore was cast in roles that repeatedly paired stories of women acting together with themes of accidental criminality. She co-stared in a revamped Western as a prostitute on the run from the law along with her fellow prostitute buddies (Bad Girls, 1994) who protect one another from retribution for the crime of inadvertently murdering an abusive male lover. She also joins an ensemble cast as the pregnant accidental murderer of yet another abusive boyfriend and is again sent on the run with a black lesbian and a single white woman with AIDS (Boys on the Side, 1995). She is then the manic depressive-cum-accidental-fugitive when she and her preppy boyfriend flee the oppressive constraints of their domineering, overprotective parents (Mad Love, 1995). In all these roles her character's rebellions are recuperated into a straight white patriarchal order as narrative resolution is achieved with her contentment in the arms of a protective man. Dyer anticipates the recuperation of her "rebel type" star images as he effectively summarizes the narratives of all the above movies that Barrymore appeared in:

Individualizing the "problem" of Barrymore's character can consistently be seen in each of the films; where she is respectively a prostitute, an unmarried pregnant woman, and a clinical manic depressive. A feminist viewer is directed to pay attention to the moments that act in resistance to narrative conventions even if a regulated, mainstream Hollywood closure is remains intact. However gratifying these moments of resistance might be, the feminist viewer may be just as disappointed by their typically racist and homophobic accompaniments. Hence, this next cycle of Barrymore film roles must also be checked for the ambivalences and anxieties structuring the films' logic.

Coinciding with these mid-'90s character roles, Barrymore also boldly graced the covers and pages of Playboy, Interview (again), and Rolling Stone in addition to numerous fashion and popular entertainment magazines and independently produced and distributed fanzines. She even performed a now notorious strip tease for David Letterman when she was a guest on his show, unexpectedly hopping up on his desk, lifting her shirt, and proving that she was now, indeed, a "woman." And while the contest over the ambivalent meaning of Barrymore's image seems to have been won, it is never fixed. A feminist rhetorical critic must observe that Barrymore’s representation in all these instances appears at a disruptive opening that calls the question of feminism. And, as Barrymore’s performances of addiction have been appropriated by discourses of "do me" and "bad girl" feminism, her appearance highlights the shifting terrain with which the feminist critic must negotiate at every moment. Even near the close of the century, Barrymore’s representation remains a site at which to interrogate and name what is at stake in the production of the addicted woman as well as the production of the "normal." Barrymore is a ceaseless site of antagonism and ambivalence, amusement and aggravation for the feminist critic. But the feminist critic must remain open to the possibility of a ‘cure’ while resisting the therapeutic metaphors that reduce feminism to a recovery discourse. It is in the effort to counter such a reduction and in the search for an elaboration of additional possibilities, that I now turn to autobiographical instances of the intersecting matrices of race, class, and ethnicity in the discourse of addiction and the feminist rhetoric of recovery. It is to the consideration of the problematic structure of choice and identity that the feminist rhetorical critic must address that I direct my comments towards in chapter three.