“A Woman with an Attitude”

“‘A Woman with an Attitude’: Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees” defines Siouxsie’s (1957–) work as a “challenge to patriarchal structures through measured control mixed with playful dismissiveness,” interpreting her work as Gothic both in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense and as a late-twentieth-century genre of music. Edelman focuses on the first ten years of the band’s career, covering the albums The Scream , Kaleidoscope , A Kiss in the Dreamhouse , Hyaena , and Peep Show , fruitfully comparing Siouxsie to Gothic novelists such as Charlotte Dacre to position her within eighteenth-century male and female Gothic, which employs a series of Gothic tropes focused upon women’s social roles and the home, specifically the patriarchal family. Siouxsie, in Edelman’s account, reflects and extends this tradition to include the possibility of freedom, both in fiction and in reality.