Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music

Leigh H. Edwards

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253034205
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Dolly Parton is instantly recognizable for her iconic style and persona, but how did she create her enduring image? Dolly crafted her exaggerated appearance and stage personality by combining two opposing stereotypes—the innocent mountain girl and the voluptuous sex symbol. Emerging through her lyrics, personal stories, stage presence, and visual imagery, these wildly different gender tropes form a central part of Dolly's media image and portrayal of herself as a star and celebrity. By developing a multilayered image and persona, Dolly both critiques representations of femininity in country music and attracts a diverse fan base ranging from country and pop music fans to feminists and gay rights advocates. In Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music, Leigh H. Edwards explores Dolly's roles as musician, actor, author, philanthropist, and entrepreneur to show how Dolly's gender subversion highlights the challenges that can be found even in the most seemingly traditional form of American popular music. As Dolly depicts herself as simultaneously "real" and "fake, " she offers new perspectives on country music's claims of authenticity.

1

“Backwoods Barbie”

Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance

When Parton makes her trademark jokes, such as, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” she frames her own gender performance as being highly staged.¹ To elaborate more fully on the evolution of Parton’s gender performance, it is important to outline the precise ways in which Parton plays on both aspects of her gender performance in her media image, her mixture of the artificial, “fake,” exaggerated appearance and the genuine, “real,” sincere personality. She continues to expose the artificiality of gender through her charismatic excessiveness. While she is, of course, not the only performer to turn herself into a parody of a sex object in a way that both banks on gender stereotypes and critiques them, her folksy country “town tramp” persona is distinctive, constructed with a knowing wink, and we are all in on the joke with her. Ranging from the “girl singer” on The Porter Wagoner Show (1967–1974) to her “Backwoods Barbie” persona (2008) and more recent variations, Parton has navigated gender role expectations in country music in ways that reflect on gender in the genre’s history and in southern regional culture and American popular culture more generally.²

In this chapter, I examine in greater depth Parton’s specific gender performance, how it fits into country music history, and why it is transgressive.³ In particular, I explain how camp, or an exaggerated style of knowingly “trashy” performance, is central to what Parton is doing. After first discussing the origins of Parton’s gender images and dynamics, I go on to explore a particular camp case study and place Parton in the context of gender and country music performance history more broadly. The case study is Parton’s appearance on The Graham Norton Show (BBC) in 2001, where Norton, an out gay male icon who reveres Parton, engaged her in over-the-top play: he had her don fake costume “Dolly breasts,” challenge a Dolly impersonator, and speak to fans through a “Dolly bear” stuffed animal phone. Dressed in a dominatrix-style leather mini-dress, Parton joked with Norton about her being in drag. She performed her folk ballad “Marry Me” in her “blue mountain” style, mixing traditional folk, Appalachian, and bluegrass music. From the outlandish fake breasts to the arch banter, that appearance encapsulates Parton’s camp performance. As I discuss more fully in the final section of the chapter, that performance also speaks to the way she navigates the folk versus mass culture tension, since she was bringing her own folk music onto the mass culture stage there. I conclude the chapter with a fuller case study of the “Backwoods Barbie” song and video, as one of Parton’s most direct treatments of that folk culture–mass culture theme.

As I begin elaborating on my argument here, allow me to place my work in its academic context. Although this book builds on important recent work in the subfield of gender and country music studies, it seeks to fill several gaps in the scholarship on Parton. Parton is often mentioned in academic studies as a relevant example of larger trends in country music, but she has received scant academic attention in greater detail. There is no other academic monograph on her at this time. Her oeuvre, I argue, warrants more sustained scholarly attention and in-depth study. We need to account for the evolution of her entire career. There are popular biographies, of course, and Nancy Cardwell’s quite helpful book of journalism.⁴ But the few examples of scholarly work solely about Parton are in the form of articles or book chapters, shorter pieces that necessarily must have a tighter focus or cannot fully address the detail of her six decades in the music industry.⁵ Most often, she appears as a brief case study among many others in writings that focus not on her but on other genre issues or artists. While the scholarship notes how vital she is to the genre, particularly in broader accounts of the history of country music, critics have tended to cite her as an example in passing. In some cases, she even functions as a shorthand reference, given a quick “read,” with the perhaps unintended implication that her exaggerated gender performance is too surface-level to warrant further discussion—as if to say she is putting on an obvious show and we all know what it is. I instead argue for complexity in her gender performance and that it would be a mistake to sell short the intricacy and importance of what she is doing. While at first glance her exaggeration of gender stereotypes might seem obvious, it nevertheless involves quite convoluted roots and references that require much more substantive analysis and contextualization.

Let me be precise about what my book contributes to the scholarship: I demonstrate in her oeuvre as a whole that Parton is truly transgressive in the sense that her gender performance makes a substantive critique of gender norms that is not coopted or contained, thus I establish a more subversive dynamic that is present in Parton’s gender performance and can be traced through her entire career. I show that she has a specific model of gender performance where she plays dominant and marginalized versions of femininity off of each other in a way that can change based on context. She achieves her gender performance precisely through her critical authenticity narrative, which depends on her distinctive bridging of the folk culture–mass culture tension in country music. Moreover, my work brings in new critical contexts when I link Parton’s persona to the evolution of star discourse in US film and television, including more recent developments like reality TV. Likewise, I show how she incorporates recent media techniques, particularly new media interactivity and participatory fan culture, and I provide an in-depth study of her fandom.

In this chapter, as part of my case for how Parton is transgressive, I elaborate on her use of camp. Here, I differ from earlier key readings of Parton because while several critics have noted that her exaggerated gender parody shows gender to be arbitrary and performative, they have concluded that she is ultimately trapped by her own sexual objectification. In her important early article on Parton, media studies scholar Pamela Wilson assesses how Parton mediates conflicting social identities related to gender, class, and region. She argues that Parton’s gender parody does rise to the level of a gender critique, but that the critique is undermined because Parton is constrained by her own sexual objectification.⁶ In cultural studies scholar Pamela Fox’s key book on rusticity, in which she traces gender as a vehicle for race and class identities in country music, Fox addresses Parton in a chapter on gender instability in female country star memoirs, including those of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Sarah Colley Cannon (Minnie Pearl), Naomi Judd, Reba McEntire, and Parton. Fox avers that in her autobiography, Parton successfully uses her gender performance to critique class-based objectification, but that she is ultimately confined by gender objectification, thus she does not achieve a critical gender parody.⁷ Meanwhile, in her brief discussion of Parton in a study of gender in popular music, musicologist Sheila Whiteley maintains that Parton’s gender parody does not achieve the level of critique because of the exaggerated, stereotypical femininity content that Whiteley believes fails to challenge dominant gender codes.⁸ Differing from such arguments, I read transgressiveness in Parton’s gender parody and trace it in detail throughout her entire oeuvre and career; I show it to be a gender critique that is not recontained, and one that she makes through elements such as her use of feminist camp. I tell the full story of what I see as a more subversive strain in Parton’s gender performance.

It is only fitting that the function and meaning of Parton’s gender parody would be a matter for more debate. It is common in popular music for female singers, from Madonna to Beyoncé to Lady Gaga, to play with sexual objectification and criticize it while also trying to use it, and scholars tend to disagree widely on how successfully female singers can use sexual objectification without being imprisoned by it.⁹ Thus Parton is an important model of gender performance within country music but also in popular music more broadly, because she does offer paradigms of critique. While other performers have used parody and exaggeration for critique, what Parton is doing is distinctive within country music performance history.¹⁰ Her distinctiveness comes not only in the features of her specific gender performance, which I have been detailing, such as how she combines different gender images from country music performance history and is the only country performer who has explicitly modeled her look on a prostitute. She has also had the unusual longevity of over sixty years in the music industry and a high level of stardom. As a result, she has become her own singular icon of gender performance.

Camp Contexts

Parton makes her gender critique by uplifting a negative image and linking it to a positive one, mixing the country music trope of the innocent and virtuous “mountain girl” with her “hillbilly tramp” persona. In juxtaposing the two, she reveals both to be artificial images and uplifts the demeaned, “fallen woman” image, in effect critiquing how the “hillbilly tramp” stereotype has been used to reinforce gender and class hierarchies. She reclaims a rural, southern, white, working-class stereotype in order to critique white middle-class norms of domesticity. More generally, in different ways at specific moments in her career, Parton also mashes up a privileged version of femininity with a marginalized one, criticizing the very stereotypes of emphasized femininity that she is performing. As she combines the two, she uses the privileged version of femininity to question how the marginalized one has been stigmatized.

Parton’s media image uses elements of camp, burlesque, satire, parody, and irony to critique gender. Her “Dolly Parton” character is a flexible symbol that she adapts to different audiences and sociohistorical contexts, generating multiple meanings. While she markets a version of herself as a sexualized object, playing into dominant gender stereotypes, she at the same time embraces subordinated, campy versions of femininity. Many of her signature lines speak to her sense of camp gender performance in her own look, such as her references to being like a drag queen.¹¹ Parton inhabits both dominant and marginalized gender roles at the same time. Through such complex negotiations of gender expectations, she gains cultural currency.

Because her gender performance is complex and depends on context, it is not always subversive; some of her enactments could sometimes reinforce stereotypes. Nevertheless, I do see substantial transgressive elements in some uses of her persona. Her star image does not simply profit from the gender codes she parodies; it also destabilizes them, particularly because her camp and artificial elements have only increased over her career. Her multilayered engagement with feminist camp and gay camp speaks to how camp can have complicated cultural politics, sometimes used in service of political critiques of the status quo and sometimes appropriated by mainstream culture.¹²

Camp can be defined as a style and performance mode in which a performer presents exaggerated, over-the-top, ostentatious, theatrical artifice meant to be amusing to a sophisticated, in-the-know audience precisely because it is framed as tacky, trashy, or outlandish. Camp historically grew out of twentieth-century gay subculture, with elements such as a knowing address to a gay audience, often a performer’s purposefully failed aesthetic presentation of the self, and knowingly “bad taste” content.¹³ It has since the 1980s in some instances been appropriated by mainstream culture in a way that commodifies it and empties it out of critical political content. Examples of the more general camp mode include drag queens and female-female impersonators whose excessive performances of femininity are parodies. There are also key expressions of gay camp and feminist camp that do make political critiques of power hierarchies involving gender and sexuality. Indeed, even though camp is cheesy and can be consumed ironically, that does not mean camp performers and audiences are not serious about and deeply invested in the styles, behaviors, and subcultures they reference in the performance. When Parton presents herself as a country drag queen, she is an instance of what Susan Sontag termed “deliberate camp,” because Parton knowingly performs a tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated femininity, one that she describes as tacky or trashy.¹⁴

However, just because Parton is doing a send-up of what she calls “poor white hillbilly trash” does not mean she is delivering ridicule via outlandish stereotypes. Rather, she is making a marginalized image of femininity visible, because she parodies the stereotype but is nonetheless engaging seriously with it. Additionally, her approach to gender politics is always tied to her autobiographical authenticity narratives. For example, she often calls her approach working-class “Appalachian feminism” rather than aligning herself with the middle-class liberal feminist movement, particularly in the 1970s when she and many...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dolly Mythology
• 1 “Backwoods Barbie”: Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance
• 2 My Tennessee Mountain Home: Early Parton and Authenticity Narratives
• 3 Parton’s Crossover and Film Stardom: The “Hillbilly Mae West”
• 4 Hungry Again: Reclaiming Country Authenticity Narratives
• 5 “Digital Dolly” and New Media Fandoms
• Conclusion: Brand Evolution and Dollywood
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author