In this section of Rebels, Medovoi attempts to answer where the girls were by tracing various examples of female rebels in Hollywood film, thus arguing that the “bad girl” and the “tomboy” were the equal counterparts of the rebellious bad boy. I full-heartedly agree with him because I don’t see it possible that the bad boy culture, charged with rebellious sexuality and promiscuity, could exist without a female counterpart. While I was fascinated by Medovoi’s close readings of Imitation Life, Girls Town, and Gidget, I was a bit disappointed with the similar conclusions to each unique female rebel, which is that, in the end, all rebels, both male and female, return to domesticity and the social system form which they deterred: “Transformed by Gidget from a bum into an aviator, Kahuna—now returned to his original name, Bert—even succumbs to the suburban gender philosophy espoused by Francie’s mom” (301). Likewise, Gidget also must revert to the accepted social system because “for her [Gidget] to remain a surfer would thus condemn her to a kind of eternal prepubescence, in the film’s ideological terms as always too young for romance” (299). For this reason, because it’s linked to maturation, the return to the system seems obviously inevitable. What would happen to the rebellious males and females who abandon domestication never to return? In anticipation of this answer, whatever it may be, I think it’s obvious why the rebel eventually succumbs to the system after having a bit of good teenage fun. What I was left wondering is what does it all mean? Does the return suggest a complete return to the rigid gender roles that the rebel culture threatened, and what, if anything, was gained or lost? Did the female rebels of the 1950s become second wave feminists of the 1960s?
In terms of emerging identity politics, I found Medovoi’s analysis of how the “Other” was the key to determining good and bad behavior to be most interesting in that Sarah Jane is excluded from the rebel culture in which the white male or female rebel appropriates blackness but does so among a white social circle. There is certainly a clear distinction between enacting blackness and being black. In Medovoi’s analysis of the film, it seems that for the white rebel, “whiteness”=conformity, “blackness”=rebel but for the black rebel, “whiteness”=rebel, “blackness”=exclusion. Such distinction creates an ongoing identity crisis for Sarah Jane, who wishes to disown her black heritage, and calls herself white, but cannot escape her black identity for as long as her mother is living proof of her blackness. In that sense, Sarah Jane identifies herself with the white bohemian rebels, and yet when her race is revealed, her ability to create her own identity is co-opted by her white counterparts because of her mother’s skin color.
In addition to the identity issues faced by Sarah Jane, Medovoi distinguishes two outlets for female rebels: sexualized femininity and female masculinity. With these categories in mind, I found myself asking who is the true feminist—Tomboy or Lizzie? Medovoi raises a few questions and problems with female sexuality and female agency through the bad girl and the tomboy. I particularly took issue with the two rape scenes. On the one hand, we can argue that women acquired a sense of female agency through the exploration of their sexuality. However, the rape scenes suggest otherwise; Lizzie embraces her sexual desires and undermines the double standard that men are naturally promiscuous and women pure, only to have that double standard reinforced when she is gang-raped because she “like[s] doing it with lots of boys” (310). This scenario seems to suggest that if a woman is too open with her sexuality, mimicking male sexuality, ultimately getting raped shouldn’t come as a surprise. Likewise, Mary Lee of Girls Town finds herself in a similar situation and Medovoi argues that “the film makes it equally clear that when girls play the sex card they leave themselves exposed to dangerous boys” (270). They leave themselves exposed suggests that the woman is at fault for her rape. The double standard regarding male and female sexuality and its linkage to “anticipated” rape is a social problem that many late 20th-century feminist authors extensively criticize.
On the other hand, Tomboy, who completely rejects femininity and promiscuity, “must keep at bay not only the desires of the other boys but her own” (306), thus denying her an outlet for female agency. However, the “safety” in which the Tomboy finds herself from the dangerous boys seems to suggest that the successful female rebel must cross into the realm of homosociality (and arguably homosexuality) and stay there. Gidget and B.L. cross into the homosocial realm but, ultimately, Gidget abandons it for a domestic heterosexual relationship with Jeffrey, a.k.a Moondoggie. The ideal, then, would be Tomboy and Lucky’s relationship, which manages to remain in the “homosexual” realm. Even with all the possibilities of rebellion and sexual exploration, female sexuality remains a stigmatized issue that second wave feminists would surely address. Furthermore, one problem with the portrayal of the sexually promiscuous girl as “deb” (rebel failure) and the masculine female as “tomboy” (rebel success), I think, plays a critical role in the development of feminist=butch dike, and the negative connotation associated with feminism and feminist objectives seen in late 1950s, into the 1960s and probably beyond.
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