The Exploration of Feminine Performance in the Spice Girls

There's this really fantastic concept coming out of critical femininity studies called spectacular femininity, which is re-looking at characters who've been dismissed before. Maya Padans done this work on the Spice Girls and like how their aesthetic is actually so spectacular that it connects with this kind of reading of them as drag. And I think that that's actually really interesting when we think about pop stars because so many drag queens actually do reference pop stars. Like a Britney Spears or a Cher or a Diana Ross or a Madonna. There's a performance element in everything that they're doing. You don't come out the womb, just ginger spice. There's construction. There's labor, there's