Sitcom’s sonic sisterhoods: pop and punk as playful challenge in Girls5Eva and We Are Lady Parts

Woods, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8901-6524 (2025) Sitcom’s sonic sisterhoods: pop and punk as playful challenge in Girls5Eva and We Are Lady Parts. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 13675494251403875. ISSN 1460-3551 doi: 10.1177/13675494251403875

Abstract/Summary

This article explores how music performance is presented as a space of freedom and collective creativity in two comedies centred on female musicians. The punk band of We Are Lady Parts and the pop girl group of Girls5eva are part of television’s intermittent engagement with stories of musicians, and employ the elastic realities offered by the musical genre. Both comedies offer satirical jabs and sceptical gazes at social norms of womanhood. We Are Lady Parts positions its Muslim female punk band within a cultural legacy of riot grrrl and punk as do-it-yourself spaces of female fury and communities for challenging gendered social constructs. The programme offers a comic play with the gendered norms of British Muslim identity and the band’s struggle to maintain their punk ideals. Girls5eva is part of a recent cultural reckoning with 1990s and 2000s white post-feminist pop culture, and follows the indignities experienced by a failed manufactured girl group who attempt to reunite in middle age. It presents a satirical reconsideration of their youth spent in an exploitative pop machine and renders the mundane everyday of mid-life womanhood through the comic absurd. Both programmes use music as an expressive device to explore those who sit outside of television’s dominant comic model of ‘imperfect’ womanhood, the white middle-class messy millennial. In centring Muslim and mid-life women, respectively, We Are Lady Parts and Girls5eva offer performance and collective creativity as a space for their comic quartets to play with and push against social and cultural expectations of womanhood in a range of forms.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/127784
Identification Number/DOI	10.1177/13675494251403875
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Film, Theatre & Television
Publisher	SAGE Publications
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