Please don’t call fangirls silly. They have more power than you think.
Of course, it didn’t start with Taylor Swift.
Superfans, in particular fangirls, are nothing new. Think of the photographs of young women screaming and fainting at the sight of the Beatles or Elvis. In her exuberant historical romp, “Swoon,” Bea Martinez-Gatell goes back even further, to the overheated admirers of the attractively unavailable Lord Byron. Though the objects of affection may have changed, the perception of the fangirl has not. As Martinez-Gatell puts it: We typically see her as “either a sexually aggressive monster or a vapid, clueless idiot.”
Her book makes a convincing case that the fangirl is neither and in fact has more influence than we think. Through six case studies — Lord Byron, Franz Liszt, Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles — Martinez-Gatell shows how these exuberant devotees have helped drive cultural trends and shape art, and how coming together over something seemingly trivial has created communities and empowered women to express themselves.
Martinez-Gatell begins with Byron, who was deluged with fan letters, many anonymous, suggesting that the married author knew a discreet place to meet. Some women were more emphatic: Lady Caroline Lamb sent Byron a locket containing her pubic hair, an endearment you might expect from a Led Zeppelin fan but not an aristocratic lady. In 1813, there were no means of creating celebrity familiar to us, such as photography and the internet, but portraits of Byron, especially the one where he’s dressed in traditional Albanian costume, were enough. His good looks, his sexual reputation and, above all, his clever and risqué writing sent upper- and middle-class women spinning. In the next century, his avatar would appear as Rudolph Valentino.
Though Bryon’s fame rested on literary panache and adventurous behavior, musical performance is the environment we associate most with swooning. In 1831 London, women were fainting and screaming over violinist Niccolò Paganini. Elsewhere in England, and in Berlin, Franz Liszt worked his own celebrity-as-troubled-genius act so well that one newspaper declared him dead. When he reappeared, his hair was longer, his piano “convulsed” and he sat sideways to his audience so they could see his face. Women rushed to kiss his fingertips, cut his hair, grab a broken piano string and collect his cigar butts. Martinez-Gatell acknowledges that much of Lisztomania could be myth, but she shares these details regardless, arguing that the myth exposes real contemporary concerns about the overtness of women’s passionate responses.
By the mid-19th century, the “Matinee Girls,” groups of young women who visited theaters — places traditionally associated with rowdy men and prostitutes — openly gazed upon male bodies on the stage and, later, on the screen. Theater owners capitalized on this new cultural power by creating female-friendly shows in the evenings and the Saturday afternoon movie matinee. If some teenage girl left her seat and lunged at an actor onstage, so be it. Hollywood would soon learn of what else such a fan is capable.
The chapters about Valentino, Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles bring readers into familiar territory. Popular culture was on the rise, and stars were visually available to everyone through multiple media sources. The Roaring Twenties and access to birth control fueled women’s fantasies in ways some found troubling. “The Sheik,” a silent blockbuster from 1921 starring Valentino, set off explosions of passion not only in its female viewers but in society at large. The actor’s smoldering portrayal, along with the film’s kidnap-to-love plot line, challenged received beliefs about female desire and White male dominance: Valentino was Italian; the Sheik was an Arab; they both wore eyeliner. When Valentino died in 1926, women rioted.
They rioted for Sinatra too, in 1944, and the female teenager has ever since been a force with which to reckon. The second volume of the Kinsey Report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” was published just a year before Elvis wiggled his hips onstage at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis. For teenage girls, seeing Elvis, Martinez-Gatell writes, was a “physical experience” that exposed the difference between Sinatra’s “enchantment” and Elvis’ “untamable electricity,” giving staid 1950s America another worry about female sexuality.
The momentum of swooning and its social ramifications is indisputable, and, unfortunately, so was the misogynistic commentary that accompanied it. We may expect that from the 19th century, but it took a long time for those perceptions to change. The criticism of Sinatra fans was harsh: Band leader Artie Shaw called them “morons,” and one source attributed fan frenzy to “increased sensitivity due to mammary hyperesthesia.” With Elvis, the rhetoric was more brutal. One newspaper wrote, “If any daughter of mine broke out of the woodshed … to see Elvis … I’d kick her teeth in.”
The cataclysm of the Beatles was so vast, far-reaching and well-known that Martinez-Gatell’s final chapter about the band reads like the calm after the storm. The Beatles phenomenon exceeded all that came before, and focus on the screaming girls at the beginning gave way to examinations of a society ripe for change. It’s safe to say that “Swoon” would not have been written were it not for the Beatles, as they soon transcended their entertainment value to become the subject of serious historical and cultural exploration. Martinez-Gatell delves into various aspects of Beatlemania, particularly where it suits her thesis about fandom and empowerment. “There are countless stories of Beatles fans who were inspired to pick up pens, guitars, paintbrushes, cameras and laptops,” she writes. “Fan letters became music journalism. Fan clubs became careers.”
Martinez-Gatell’s argument is a vital one: that women’s increasingly public presence combined with new freedoms, such as women’s organizations and a move into heretofore off-limits spaces (the workplace, entertainment venues), accelerated displays of fandom. “The world was changing, and performers and fans now seemed to be evolving together and learning from each other,” she writes. “Whether it was the rebellious spirit of rock, the soul and empowerment of Motown, the political activism of folk or the gritty authenticity of the British blues revival, fans were now aligning themselves with artists who spoke to and for who they were.”
With its jaunty, often in-your-face-with-one-hand-on-her-hip writing style, “Swoon” is highly readable and educational. As a fangirl myself — I was lucky enough to see the Beatles live, though I did not scream — I appreciate Martinez-Gatell’s enthusiasm as well as her concern. “Everyone has something they fangirl about these days, which is wonderful. But there’s a discomfort that lingers,” she writes. “We say it with a curious fusion of earnestness and irony, as if passionate enthusiasm is us being reduced to the silly, irrational excitability of a young girl. It’s a subtle reminder that we haven’t fully escaped the gendered devaluation of enthusing.” What, she asks, would cultural history be “if we acknowledged that emotion is not separate from meaning-making but central to it?”