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Qualitative Inquiry
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Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Performing the Mediated Self

Jessica Sawrey

Indiana University

What are love, happiness, and youth? Can questions such as this be answered in a song? This article explores the connection between the consumption of popular music and the process of performing the author’s identities, the author’s realities. Using the work of Roland Barthes, Simon Frith, Richard Schechner, Helene Cixous, and others, this autoethnographic textual performance explores how popular music, with its embodied hegemonic metanarratives and mechanisms of social control, becomes somehow necessary, even desirable, to the process of performing the author’s everyday life. Through the reflexive writing process in which the author interacts with her journals, songs, boyfriends, theorists, supermarkets, music, mirrors, the mysteries of travel, and her various writerly selves, she strives to deconstruct the elusive affectations of youth, love, and happiness as gifted to her in The Beach Boys’ song "Wouldn’t It Be Nice."

Key Words: autoethnography • performance • Beach Boys • personal narrative • popular music

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 5, 789-807 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800405276814
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