Table Of Content"I'm Not Like Them But I Can Pretend:" A Feminist
Analysis of Kurt Cobain's Gender Performance
A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
August 18,2009
By
Cortney A. Alexander
Department of Women's and Gender Studies
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
2
Acknowledgements
To begin. I would like to acknowledge my parents, Yvonne and Jack Alexander who have told
me since childhood that I had a gift for writing. Though none of us knew where that would
eventually lead me, they always made me feel talented and that my "heart would always make
itself known through my words." Without their emotional and financial support I certainly
would never have made it through graduate school, much less through the arduous research
process.
I want to take this opportunity to thank my thesis committee members. Dr. Melissa Bradshaw
introduced me to queer theory and made me realize the personal nature of this kind of work. It
was wonderful to work with another Nirvana fan who helped me locate myself in this project. I
want to thank Dr. Francesca Royster for giving me the idea for this thesis. Fler English course,
Celebrity, Race and Gender was the first time I considered Kurt Cobain a worthwhile topic for
further feminist inquiry. It was wonderful to work with such an insightful and patient person.
My most sincere thanks to my thesis advisor, Dr. Allison McCracken, for working closely with
me during our independent studies. Thank you for the stacks of books and the hours of time in
your office. And thank you for the regular reminders that this work is a labor of love and that it
should be fun. I had great fun working with you and you have definitely inspired me to continue
on the path to a PhD.
I want to also acknowledge DePaul University's Women's and Gender Studies department,
especially Dr. Beth Catlett whose kindness and patience helped me become a better writer,
scholar and educator. I also want to thank my graduate cohort for being endlessly supportive,
caring and thoughtful. You are some of the smartest women I have ever met and I am privileged
to have had the opportunity to learn from all of you.
I want to acknowledge Kathy MillerDillon and Pew Bose for their support during my
undergraduate studies at UWMilwaukee. Their encouragement and kind words made me think
graduate school was a possibility. Their strength as educators laid the foundation tor what I am
sure will be a lifelong passion for feminist scholarship.
Finally, Erika Turner has been an inspiration and one of the most supportive friends 1 could have
asked for. Ever since we grappled with complicated feminist theories together in our
undergraduate courses, Erika has pushed me to think beyond my own white privilege and to
understand the intersectional nature of oppressions.
Special thanks to my ever patient and giving partner whose motivation and support mean the
world to me.
It has been a great privilege to have these extraordinary people in my life. I can confidently say
that without all of you, this work would not have been possible.
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Part I: Theoretical Foundations 10
Feminist and Queer Theoretical Foundations 11
Media Theories and Historical Context 15
Part II: Analysis of Biographical Texts 20
Cobain's Early Life: Working Class Masculinity 21
Cobain's Life on the Cusp of Rock Stardom: Punk Rock and Grunge Masculinities....37
The Celebrity Life of Cobain: Authenticity, Masochism and Masculinity 51
The Death of Cobain: Race, Celebrity and Representations of Death 68
Conclusions 74
Bibliography 78
4
"Yeah, all Isms (sic) feed off one another but at the top of the food chain is still the white,
corporate, macho, strong ox male. Not redeemable as far as I'm concerned. I mean, classism is
determined by sexism because the male decides whether all other isms still exists (sic). Its up to
men. I'm just saying that people can't deny any ism or think that some are more or less
subordinate except for sexism. He's in charge he decides. 1 still think that in order to expand on
all other isms, sexism has to be blown wide open. Its almost impossible to deprogram the
incestuallyestablished (sic), male oppression... but there are thousands of green minds, young
gullable (sic) 15 year old boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what they've been
told of what a man is supposed to be and there are plenty of tools to use. The most effective tool
is entertainment."1
In 1992, grungerock band. Nirvana took stage at the annual MTV Video Music Awards
ceremony. They had agreed to play their popular tune "Lithium." However, when Kurt Cobain
played the first few riffs on his guitar, fans immediately knew that the song he was beginning to
play was the controversial, as yet unreleased, "Rape Me." Cobain sang two lines from "Rape
Me" before shifting back into "Lithium." At the end of the performance, Cobain threw his guitar
into the speakers behind him and then leapt into the band's drum kit.2 I was 14 when I first saw
this performance being rerun on MTV. Cobain's antiestablishment attitudes appealed to my
own budding feminist political consciousness and even five years after his death, he was still the
epitome of cool to my high school peers and me. Even now Cobain is often credited with
starting the grunge music scene and is also frequently referred to as the voice of Generation X.
Today, fifteen years after his death, his cultural productions are still consumed and critiqued
frequently. Many have even elevated Cobain to the status of a rock n" roll god.3 Consider the
title of his most recent biography, Heavier Than Heaven4 or the infamous photograph of him
with angel wings on the In Utero tour (see page 42). He continues to posthumously enchant
adoring fans of all ages and to inspire and intrigue music critics and historians.
'Kurt Cobain, Journals, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 177.
2http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=IdvKAFfpwOU&feature=related and
http://www.voutube.com/watch?vr=tY5Pr20MH4g
3Chris Molanphy, Kurt Cobain: Voice of a Generation, (Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2003).
4Titled such because of the 1989 UK tour Nirvana did with Tad. Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A
Biography of Kurt Cobain (New York: Hyperion Books, 2001), 144.
5
I have been a Nirvana fan ever since I saw that 1992 performance but only recently did I
begin to consider Cobain a worthwhile topic for feminist inquiry. Reading texts like Cobain's
Journals and Charles Cross's Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain through a
feminist lens, I noticed the construction of an uneasy masculinity and a rebellious spirit with a
political consciousness. After I decided that I wanted to do my graduate research on Kurt
Cobain's life and celebrity, I asked many of the people in my life what they thought was notable
about him and what they remembered about his celebrity. Most people mentioned the notoriety
he gained as lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana, his widely publicized drug use, his depression
and suicide. Some people heralded him as a voice of a generation while others thought he was a
miserable junkie. Once I started looking at things Cobain wrote himself, reviews written during
his life and biographies and documentaries produced since his death, I realized that the narratives
that have been constructed about his life and work are widely varied. Together they weave a rich
tapestry that tells us as much about ourselves as a culture as it does about the actual life of Kurt
Cobain. An excerpt from music journalist, Chris Molanphy's pictorial biography Kurt Cobain:
Voice of a Generation, taps into many of the widely accepted narratives about Cobain's life.
"[Kurt] Cobain was a mass of contradictions. He could be gentle but also destructive.
Possessing natural good looks beneath his unwashed hair and ragged clothes, he carried
himself with selfflagellating modesty and yet could be selfaggrandizing in the next
breath... He could be stridently political but remained ambivalent about the world and his
place in it. He came of age believing the code of punk without ever losing his love of
pop—a big reason why his music was embraced by such a wide audience... The most
poignant, memorable images associated with Nirvana's music...were ideas concocted by
Kurt. Images of Kurt Cobain are pieces of art in and of themselves. Like his songs, they
are the truest artifacts we have to represent him. unspoiled by myth making—ours, the
media's, or Cobain's. Yet, again like his songs, these photographs invite interpretation:
we project ideas, wishes, ourselves onto Cobain. As he did in his brief life, he absorbs all
of our own contradictions—our need to rebel and our need to belong, our desire to look
cool and our wish to look away.'0
'Chris Molanphy, Kurt Cobain: Voice of a Generation (Barnes and Noble Publishing, Inc., 2003), 10.
6
He was attractive, contradictory, smart, modest yet selfinterested, talented, ambitious,
uninterested in fame, political yet apathetic, widely popular; he was the epitome of cool in the
early 1990s in America. Molanphy writes that we project ourselves onto Cobain and that is
exactly what I wish to examine here. If images, texts and songs by and about Cobain are
reflections of American culture, then they are telling us that gender is not a stable category and
that gender does not determine sexuality. They tell us that masculinity, authenticity and coolness
are fragile and anxious constructions that are never perfectly and completely done. It is my view
that Kurt Cobain was a postmodern character that challenged gender norms through his complex
construction and subversion of celebrity while simultaneously buying in to the institutions that
marginalized him as a nonnormatively gendered individual. In this research, I will lay out the
different 'readings' of Cobain's body and art through an analysis of the narratives and discourses
constructed by popular media like films, books and television.
Since the inception of feminist analysis as a form of academic inquiry, feminist scholars
have spent much time and energy studying constructions of femininity in culture. More recently,
feminist scholars have started considering constructions of masculinity and, more broadly,
gender. Gender here refers to the cultural meaning attached to an individual's body based her/his
biological sex.6 Much like white people often fail to consider that they too have race, some
feminists would argue that white, heterosexual men have had the privilege of not having to
consider their gender.7 This might account for the striking lack of academic work done around
Kurt Cobain's feminism and performance of race and gender at the particular moment in US and
global history in which he gained notoriety. There is an abundance of information available
about the life and death of Cobain, his music and his celebrity status, yet his complex
6Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
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performances of gender and sexuality on stage and in media are seldom mentioned. This gap in
the narratives about Cobain's life and work is an area that necessitates further inquiry.
I wish to pose the question of whether Cobain can be considered a queer subject. I
believe that he performed a dysfunctional, white, working class, heterosexual masculinity that in
some ways subverted dominant gender roles and in other ways reinforced them, all the while
negotiating a contentious relationship with feminism and other social justice movements. As he
struggled through much of his private life becoming public knowledge, he demonstrated the
social consequences of failed masculinity, thus demonstrating the inherent impossibility of our
socially constructed masculine ideals. Much of the critical work on Cobain's oeuvre is framed in
terms of his authenticity. It is my contention that authenticity, like masculinity and
heterosexuality, is a social construction used to categorize people but that it is ultimately so
uneasily constructed as to be essentially meaningless as a qualifier wielded by music critics and
musicians to exclude certain people and styles. Finally, I think that it is important to consider
Cobain's feminist attitudes, his interrogation of hegemonic gender and whether he ought even to
be considered a feminist under certain theoretical traditions. This question has not been asked in
much of the academic and critical work on Kurt Cobain's celebrity.
To answer these questions I analyze several biographical texts about Kurt Cobain. Some
of the primary sources used are: Kurt Cobain's Journals, Gus Van Sant's Last Days, AJ
Schnack's About a Son, Michael Azerrad's Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Chris
Molanphy's Kurt Cobain: Voice of a Generation, and Charles R. Cross's Heavier Than Heaven:
A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I utilize the method of discourse analysis to understand the
narratives that these texts construct about Cobain as a celebrity in American popular culture.
Heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, discourse analysis is concerned with
constructions of meaning through language and texts and with the underlying structures that
allow certain texts to exist. This type of analysis is critical of the ways in which power is
established and maintained through cultural texts. Foucault's understanding of power as non
authoritarian, nonconspiratorial and nonorchestrated yet still influential in the construction of
social domination and subordination is useful in analyzing Kurt Cobain's texts and the larger
cultural narrative about his life and work within their particular social and political contexts.
The texts to be analyzed here range from lyrics and journals written by Cobain himself to
biographies and fan texts. Some of these texts are considered highbrow, wellresearched canons
or works of art on the life of Cobain while others are simply considered lowbrow picture books.
Foucault's method of discourse analysis does not favor or value one type of cultural text over
another. This method requires us to recognize that all texts uniquely contribute to cultural
understandings of celebrities. Since few of his fans have actually met Cobain. these texts are all
that we have to base our experience of him upon. Further, it is important to note that biographies
are written by particular people for particular purposes. None of the biographies analyzed here
are definitive and complete (though many claim to be); they can only speculate as to Cobain's
actual feelings and intentions. What Cobain actually thought and felt can perhaps be gleaned
from his own writings but even they are subject to multiple readings and varied meanings. The
meaning an individual gleans from a text is highly dependent upon that person's own particular
social and historical location. All of that considered, I do not wish to make any claims as to
Cobain's actual intentions or 'real' feelings, only to analyze the discourses constructed within
biographies, art and journals and the ways in which those discourses construct Cobain as a raced,
sexualized and gendered subject. Part of this will require considering how the stories about
8Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body," Feminist Theory & The Body: A Reader, eds.
Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 252.
9
Cobain make sense in their particular historical and political contexts and how narratives about
him compare to similar nonwhite or nonmale artists at that time.
For the purposes of this research, combining feminist and queer theory with celebrity and
cultural studies sheds insight into the life and work of Kurt Cobain that have not yet been
considered. In the archive of mainstream media images of Cobain, from magazines to album art.
anyone can see that his body was small and. arguably, feminine. He often wore ripped up old
clothes and even crossdressed as a challenge to the heteropatriarchy that dominates American
culture. I suspect that Cobain presented himself in this particular way because he looked at
masculinity from an outsider's perspective, from a stance of marginality, never feeling a part of
the mainstream, which is perhaps why he was able to offer, through his music and art. such
striking insights into its dysfunctions. Kurt Cobain constructed an image of himself that was
highly suspicious of normative, hegemonic gender while at the same time desperately trying to
find a comfortable relationship within socially acceptable gender roles. In order to better
understand his gender play, I first provide tools from queer and feminist theory that will help to
unpack all of the meaning embedded in the texts that will be analyzed here.
Part I: Theoretical Foundations
