ABSTRACT
The familiarity of the tropes entrained about Brenda Lee practically renders her invisible and mute at the very point where her exceptionality is most marked. Brenda Lee was a child star who grew through adolescence to young adulthood during this period of musical and cultural transition. At fourteen, Lee recorded one of her most suggestive songs, "Sweet Nothings," her first real chart success. While the attraction to cute children is undoubtedly in part biological, fostering a protective instinct, the performing child presents particular problems of both subjectivity and objectivity. The whiteness of the ideal eroticized child is obviously inherent in the racial aspects of blonde hair and blue eyes, but in the Victorian literature and English working class of Kincaid and Walkerdine, it is an essentially "empty" or "null" category in and of itself. The term "rock and roll" itself is a sort of sexualized "emptiness." Rockabilly is androgynous, infantile and sexualized, sinful and sanctified.
