Television imagery was incredibly important in the creation of Elvis’s phenom status. Some critics such as Lawrence Grossberg have described film, television, and video as mere “apparatus” for the music. However, because Elvis first reached a national audience on television, its importance cannot be denied. In fact, according to Carnegie Mellon professor of Literary and Cultural Studies David Shumway’s “Rock & Roll as Cultural Practice,” “a strong case can be made that the visual aspects of these performances were as significant as were the formal features of [Elvis’s] music,” in Elvis’s ascension to stardom (Shumway, 125). In fact, Shumway argues that “rock & roll is an impure musical form; it is not even mainly a musical form.” He goes on to support this assertion by pointing to the “conspicuous failure of rock criticism to develop even the most rudimentary musicological discourse,” (Shumway, 123-124). He further notes that methods for genre differentiation are littered with as many “extra-musical features as musical ones” (Shumway, 124). The importance of these “extra-musical” features in the consumption of Elvis is apparent in the discourse about him. In the previously mentioned quote by Nic Cohn, there is no mention of Elvis’s music; it is his engagement in the feminine activity of dancing that conveys ultra-masculinity. In fact, as Shumway points out, it is the shaking of those hips on The Milton Berle Show, in 1956, which elicited the reaction of critics and moralists alike. The visual aspects of his performance are what led NBC to cancel his next scheduled TV appearance on the Steve Allen Show. It was because of his offensive gyrations that a Jacksonville, Florida court ordered Elvis not to perform on stage. It was the visual sight of these moves that prompted Ed Sullivan to photograph Elvis, only from the waist up. The discomfort people felt over watching Elvis was only amplified by the images of teen girls and young women screaming and fainting and just generally losing control during his performances. This reckless female behavior was viewed as incredibly threatening to the established moral order of the time because it was again a sort of gender role reversal with relationship to object/gaze theory. Elvis, the male, was the object. The girls, who screamed and fainted over him, became the gazers. As reported by David Shumway, contemporary critics of Elvis’s time “hinted at their awareness” that Elvis’s overt sexuality was “a violation of gender codes” (Shumway, 126). Shumway continues:

"in calling attention to himself as sexual – that is in presenting himself as an object of sexual incitement or excitation – he violated not just conventional morality but more importantly the taboo against male sexual display. In violating this taboo, Elvis became, like most women, but unlike most men, sexualized" (Shumway, 127).

In turn, the women who responded to Elvis’s sexualized display became, like most men, but unlike most women, consumers and manipulators of the sexual object on which their gaze was fixed. Unfortunately, such displays of female hysteria over Elvis were captured on film and manipulated via the film medium to reinforce the image of Elvis as subject to which his fans reacted rather than as object from which they gained pleasure. In such an example, the display of female hysteria has been used to reinforce the characterization of Elvis as a supremely masculine being. However, this use of camera to manipulate Elvis to the advantage of men and the disadvantage of women does not overshadow the ways Elvis and other rock stars engage in activities mainstream U.S. culture traditionally associates with the feminine. In fact, it only makes the male attempt to claim him (and by extension rock & roll as a whole) as a display of pure masculinity even more suspect. Furthermore, in the attempt to gloss over the inconsistencies in the association of rock stars with ultra-masculinity, the ways women consume male rock stars, an activity that involves behaviors traditionally associated with the masculine, are overlooked. As such, in the characterization of rock as exclusively masculine, the most fundamentally important aspect of rock, its ability to challenge the very definition of gender, is overlooked and ignored. If rock is truly a masculine form in the American sense, and its roots are primarily located in American music traditions, its male performers wouldn’t invite the gaze of their audience by making a sexual spectacle of themselves by dancing around the stage. That behavior has historically been coded as feminine. In the years that followed Elvis’s success, male rock performers became not only feminine in performance, but also feminine in appearance. Long hair, an outward sign of femininity became a standard of rock star imagery. Many bands also sported tight flashy clothing and facial make-up, both of which are external signs of femininity. For some rock stars, such as David Bowie, challenging gender conventions via the external look, became a conspicuous part of the act. Popular hair metal of the 1980’s was characterized by the marriage of images associated with hyper-masculinity such as motorcycles, drinking, and the attention of scantily clad women with a physical image that included long primped hair and heavy feminine makeup. Even acts that seemed undeniably male such as heavy metal band Metallica sported classically feminine long hair for many years of their success. According to musicologist Robert Walser, by adopting external signs of femininity, male performers may in fact be offering members of the female audience new ideas and associations for their own femininity.

"Androgyny presents, from the point of view of women, a fusion of signs specific to current notions of femininity with musically and theatrically produced power and freedom that are conventionally male. Colorful makeup, elaborate, ostentatious clothes, hair that is unhandily long and laboriously styled—these is the excessive signs of one’s gender role as spectacle. But onstage in a metal show, these signs are invested with the power and glory normally reserved to patriarchy. As usual, women are offered male subject positions as a condition of their participation in empowerment, but the men with whom they are to identify have been transformed by their appropriations of women’s signs. In their bid for greater transgression and spectacularity, the men onstage elevate important components of many women’s sense of gendered identity, fusing cultural representations of male power and female erotic surface. At the symbolic level, prestige—male presence, gesture, musical power—is conferred upon “female” signs, which, because they mark gender difference and are used to attract and manipulate, men pretend are trivial but take very seriously" (Walser, 131).

So, in effect, the presentation of outward signs of femininity by male performers from a literal and metaphorical elevated stage position offers women the chance to identify with that power associated with performance. Female fans likely understand this phenomenon at an unconscious level. But the weight of it can be seen in the writings of female audience members who often describe their attraction to rock & roll in terms of freedom, which, although traditionally associated with the masculine, and further claimed as evidence of rock as a masculine form, becomes associated with the feminine through rock’s gender-bending semiotics. Alas, rock’s androgyny not only makes rock’s characterization as male problematic, it also provides female audience members an entry point for participation in the culture.

While androgyny allows women the opportunity to manipulate rock’s masculine components, the predominance of men in positions of power in the industry cannot be denied. This is discussed in-depth in Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie’s 1978 article “Rock and Sexuality”. Frith and McRobbie first focus on the prevalence of men holding positions of decision-making power in the industry. Then, based on research of certain British music magazines, they claim “it is boys who form the core of the rock audience, who are intellectually interested in rock, who become rock critics and collectors” (376). Their official findings suggested 2/3 of rock’s audience was boys. While this is significant, it doesn’t seem a large enough majority for the sweeping claims Frith and McRobbie make about the masculine nature of rock. In fact, in her 1999 article “Rethinking Issues of Gender and Sexuality in Led Zeppelin: A Woman’s View of Pleasure and Power in Hard Rock,” Social Science professor and musicologist Susan Fast begs the question as to whether we can dismiss the experiences of “such a significantly large minority, especially when it includes women who are very intellectually interested in rock, who are collectors and who—via the new medium of the Internet and through published writing – are becoming critics” (Fast, 3). Fast, whose focus is the band Led Zeppelin, suggests that perhaps assumptions of hard rock as so supremely male are rooted in the writing of “journalists, academics, and others...who have been for the most part men, who have claimed, derided, or otherwise defined it as ‘male.’” She further asserts that the “few women who have written about the music do not seem to be themselves actively engaged in its consumption” (Fast, 2). As such their point of discussion would be based in part on the existent canon, which, as Fast suggests, is largely produced by men; and, even more troubling much of the existent canon has treated the assertions by Frith and McRobbie as gospel.

In addition to the fractional data about rock’s intellectually interested, record collecting audience, one of the central points to Frith and McRobbie’s argument that rock is all-masculine, is that audiences at live rock performances, consist largely of men. Unsurprisingly, they characterize rock performance as a form of male sexual exclusivity. “Its euphoria depends on the absence of women,” they assert (375). As Susan Fast notes, there is no solid evidence for this claim (Fast, 3). Even before Susan Fast’s research, Bitch magazine co-founder Lori Twersky questioned Frith and McRobbie’s assertions. In “Devils or Angels? The female teenage audience examined,” Twersky, irritated by “another reference to a ‘surprising number of females’ (Lloyd Sachs, Rolling Stone)” attending a Ted Nugent concert, asserts that the assumptions and generalizations made by male rock critics about the musical tastes of teenage girls are simply wrong. Male writers, she claims, tend to “judge rock-loving females from the samples provided by backstage areas and hotel rooms” (178). When male writers report the activities of this small and unrepresentative sample of rock’s female audience, it effectively intimidates many girls, who don’t want to engage in backstage antics, from attending shows. As a result, Twersky asserts the use of concert audience statistics to support the assumption that girls don’t like rock, is simply not an effective way of tabulating the true gender breakdown of rock’s audience. She also suggests the higher female attendance at Van Halen and Ted Nugent shows can be directly attributed to the fact that these bands have successfully used magazines like 16 and Teen Beat to court the attention of teenage girls. As such girls know other girls will attend the concerts; this “safety in numbers” allows girls to feel more comfortable participating in the live music events of bands they like. She further asserts that if more heavy metal bands actually courted the attention of these girls, thus allowing these girls to feel more comfortable publicly demonstrating their love or rock, the female presence at rock shows would increase.

So, Twersky’s article questions whether evidence of female presence at rock shows, evidence central to Frith and McRobbie’s assertion that rock is driven entirely by masculinity, was necessarily representative of the depth of female interest in or consumption of rock; and since Frith and McRobbie’s assertions became a primary source of background information for the theoretical discussion of gender and rock, it seems a wise choice to re-examine the direction of that discussion.  Susan Fast, for one, insists the definitions Frith and McRobbie use to categorize what is male and what is female must be more critically examined. Specifically, she questions “the interpretation that what is being produced at a performance by a male rock band is solely “male sexual performance,” that who is doing the consuming are males, and that both males and females perceive sexuality and gender in the way that Frith and others suggest” (Fast, 4). She also insists “issues of gender and sexuality in this music culture are more fluid than the existing literature suggests” (Fast, 2). This is where the interpretations forwarded by rock’s female audience can offer insight. For even Frith, who stands by “Rock and Sexuality’s assertions about “who controls and consumes music” and the role music plays in the “organization of adolescent gender roles,” noted in 1988, a certain unexplained embarrassment that the article was still so frequently cited in the academic discourse surrounding gender and rock. Rock’s female audience is needed to offer the counterpoint…to affirm or deny the claims made for and about them.

Norma Coates might attempt to argue how the “feminine is expunged, incorporated or appropriated,” in all of these circumstances, thus rendering a final product that maintains its codification as “unmistakably phallic” (Coates, 50, 52-53). Even if she was able to create a convincing argument for the absolute masculinity of each of these examples, it would be difficult to account for the various ways women might read and draw meaning from the examples regardless of their gender codification. These contrary readings are just as important in defining the genre as readings of its misogyny and masculinity are. As Janice Radway’s says in her close examination of romance novels and their consumption titled Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature:

"Had I looked solely at the act of reading as it is understood by the women themselves, or alternately, at the covert significance of the romance’s narrative structure, I might have been able to provide a clear-cut, sharp focus image. In the first case, the image would suggest that the act of romance reading is oppositional because it allows the women to refuse momentarily their self-abnegating social role. In the second, the image would imply that the romance’s narrative structure embodies a simple recapitulation and recommendation of patriarchy and its constituent social practices and ideologies" (Radway, 209-210).

Radway’s conclusion about women and romance novels is applicable to critical discussion on rock & roll. Academic discourse has addressed issues of the rock form’s covert significance. But, it has not fairly included a consideration of the way the form is understood by the women who consume it as Radway’s work does for romance. By only focusing on the masculine constructs of the art form, and by denying attention to the subversive ways rock can be read and consumed, it is easy to draw the conclusion that the art form is exclusively masculine. However, it is un-informed to suggest the pleasures female audience members gain from their own experiences with rock & roll, are mere ignorant participation in their own objectification. This lack of information has created a gaping hole in the discourse about rock. The inclusion of female audience accounts would, in part, begin to mend that hole. To be sure, such accounts complicate the discussion, but they are necessary to truly understand rock’s significance in re-creating and manipulating gender roles and expectations in current culture. In the following two chapters, attention will be turned to such accounts with the aim of demonstrating their significance in developing a more informed discourse on the subject.