(Kristin Chenoweth) and Elphaba - Camera Obscura: Feminism ...

Wicked Divas and Internet Girl Fans • 59
recounts the lyrics, then says, “I can honestly tell you that is how
I feel about my best friend. . . . I think the song is rather truthful
about the fact that there are people in your life who make you who
you are and who change the course of your life.” 80 Another says,
“To this very day, we still role play as if she’s G(a)linda and I’m
Elphaba.” 81 When girls find themselves and their friends in the
divas, and when they perform the duets, the enactment becomes
a performative act and the saying/singing is the doing, the thing
done. The relationship grows through its practice. The girls also
serve as each other’s audience. In the singing of duets, as Terry
Castle writes, each character/actor gives “voice to her pleasure, to
reveal herself on stage, without shame or self-censoring, as a fan
of other women.” 82 Through song, Wicked encourages friendship,
loyalty, and love between girls. These discussions and real-world
activities suggest that attending Wicked as a spectator is both the
effect and the cause of grander participation in musical theater
culture. Fandom leads to a new performance.
After Wicked: Musicals and Girls
In The Diva’s Mouth, Leonardi and Pope’s description of the diva
sounds remarkably like that of an adolescent girl. They observe
that “divahood is immature, potentially regressive, merely a stage
on the way to wifehood.” 83 Like divas, teens are passionate, temperamental,
demanding; they are both masculine and feminine.
And the teen, like the diva, is in process. 84 Judith Halberstam
argues that this life stage should be valued, that “preadult, preidentitarian
girl roles offer a set of opportunities for theorizing
gender, sexuality, race, and social rebellion precisely because they
occupy the space of the ‘not-yet,’ the not fully realized.” Moreover,
she asserts, we should consider girlhood, adolescence, and teenness
“not as stages to pass through but preidentities to carry forward,
inhabit and sustain.” 85
When Wicked brings divas and teens together, they perform
a certain queerness by valuing the power of the girl singer, the harmony
of female duets, and the love between girlfriends. Wicked ’s
girl fans legitimate homosocial attachments, create community,