LIVING THROUGH THIS MATERIAL WORLD: HOLE, CONSUMERISM, & VISIONS OF VIOLENCE More often than not, a feminist lens reveals the tendency to transform women into objects. There is, of course, a rhetorical danger in such objectification, but it also poses a more immediate physical threat to the female body. On Hole’s Live Through This, we see this tendency realized in the image of the “doll”—the collection of “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs / [and] … doll arms” that make up a woman. But, for all the attempts to reduce the female body, Courtney Love—Hole’s frontwoman—responds with fierce resistance. Love seems to have a proclivity for labels. She readily brands herself a “kinder whore” and could often be seen with phrases like “witch,” “slut, “diva,” “butch,” or “mom” scrawled on her body in lipstick. Love seems to engage with such gendered stereotypes to not only provoke the sexist confirmation biases of the press, but to also destabilize and deconstruct the cultural narratives of femininity. With a biting irony, she presents herself in a package of femininity we’re comfortable with—one bound to familiar stereotypes and labels. What Love then accomplishes is not the willing reduction of her identity, but rather the weaponization of her body to effect a critique of the dominant culture. For Love personally, as for Live Through This, the female body serves as a stage for a rebellion against systems of power and control. Throughout the album, Love foregrounds the essentialist functions of the female body—the most base cycles of production and consumption—but she uses these biological processes to uncover a far more insidious cultural system. While early 1994 finds Courtney Love a widow, mother, and verified celebrity in her own right, the year also finds the country in a whirlwind of its own materialism and consumer culture, in the trenches of late stage capitalism and all its attendant anxieties. Love’s personal narrative and the nation’s broader cultural condition seem to converge in Live Through This, and the result is a work at the intersection of gender and economics. And, for Love, the commonality is violence and exploitation. Films like Fight Club and American Beauty, both released in 1999, explore the effects of the decade’s consumer culture and hyper-materialism, identifying a capitalist system as a critical impetus for personal crisis. And yet, while these films locate a key sociocultural concern, they focus almost exclusively on the anxieties of and threats to contemporary
white masculinity. What Hole executes five years prior on Live Through This is a scathing exploration of the same culture with an important, and necessary, difference—an interest in the wellbeing of women in such a society. What the album points out is that a materialist culture does not end at the consumption of commercial products, but further extends into the ravenous consumption of the female body. Those 1999 films sparked an important national discussion on the consequences of excessive consumerism and the dangers of an implicit, passive trust in the capitalist system, but they come out with the wrong victims. The threat posed to the middle-class white men of Fight Club and American Beauty is sedation, but, as Hole points out, the threat that women encounter is physical, sexual, and emotional violence. The album concerns itself with many of the traditional motifs of femininity, and, written in the wake of Love’s recent motherhood, is particularly interested in the image of milk. Milk is a symbol of the nurturing woman, an essentialist confirmation that women are meant to provide sustenance and life, and yet here we see it poisoned and dried up. Milk makes Love “sick,” milk is “sour” and “dye[d],” and by the time we reach “I Think That I Would Die,” Love is violently screaming “there is no milk!” The album offers an intense focus on the female body as a site of production, but, for Love, there still remains a striking hollowness at the heart of modern femininity; we find a woman left so empty that there remains “nothing left to suck,” a woman who “eat[s] ether” only to “thr[ow] up all the time,” a woman who’s physically emptying herself. Pioneers of feminist criticism Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss the tendency of the woman writer to feel such an “emptiness” upon the “recogni[tion] that in an essential way she has been defined simply by her purely biological usefulness to her species.” Is milk itself not a symbol of a woman’s “biological usefulness”? A resource to be “empti[ed]” and mined from the body? But Live Through This goes further, extending the impulse to “suck…dry” the female body from a hungry child to an androcentric society. And here we edge closer to the album’s central contention: to a consumer culture, women, seen essentially as producers, are therefore meant to be consumed.
