Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 49
Abstracts
Panel 7: Gender
18:15 – 18:30
Amplified Meows
From Josie and the Pussycats to Poison Ivy Rorschach
Aline V. Fagundes and Giulia Calloni / University of Caxias do Sul
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
earliest evidence for the word pussycat dates from
1698, in the writing of T. Dilke. The word puss
originally served as a vocalization to call a cat. The
diminutive suffix "-y" dates back to the early 16th
century (OED 2025) and was used to form pet
names and familiar diminutives. Pussycat became
a colloquial term for a pet cat, though its meaning
became gendered, associating it with stereotypical
feminine traits of delicacy and fragility. It was
later adapted as a vulgar term for female genitalia
(pussy).
In the late 19th century, the suffragist movement
in the United States challenged these associations
by re-appropriating the image of the cat. While
anti-suffragists used cats in visual culture to
reinforce the stereotype of women as passive and
domestic, suffragists in both the US and the UK
subverted this imagery, presenting the cat as a
symbol of strength, independence, and empathy
— countering the notion of weakness often tied to
femininity.
An example of this subversion can be found in the
comic series Josie and the Pussycats (1963),
created by Dan Decarlo an published by Archie
Comics, tells the story of an all-female rock band
formed by friends Josie, Valerie and Melody. The
plot elucidates the antics and challenges they face
on a daily basis, especially when it comes to music:
as part of the Archie universe, Josie’s band is
constantly portrayed as a rival to the male-led
band The Archies (Miller 2018), highlighting
gender prejudice and the difficulties faced by
female musicians.
In addition to the band’s name, their
feline-inspired costumes — leopard prints,
cat ears, and tails — evoke both playfulness
and power, redefining femininity through
performance and intersectionality, as Valerie
was the first African-American character to be
featured in a work of this type of media as a
regular protagonist on the scene, and topics
such as gender and race were constantly
brought to the narrative (Miller 2018).
In real life, guitarist Kristy Wallace, popularly
known as Poison Ivy Rorschach, was one of the
founders of the band The Cramps. Like Josie,
she was responsible for incorporating the
iconic feline visual into the band’s outfits,
visually demonstrating a subversion of feline
iconography and its historical construction as
mentioned
above,
representing
the
mysterious, ethereal aura similar to a hiss
emitted by a cat when it needs to assert its
imposing personality.
Songs such as “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog,”
“Confessions of a Psycho Pussycat” and
“Faster Pussycat” are responsible for evoking
the symbolism of the cat in a context that
boasts female abilities and rage by using
euphemisms and irony as a language resource.
The relation between music and cats is
remarkably seen in the riot grrrl movement, as
the writing and pronunciation of “grrrl” was
used to reference a growl in the word “girl,”
symbolizing a sound of anger and fury that
translated the feelings of girls and women
towards the sexism faced in music (Gelain,
2021).
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