Queerness in Pop Music

Transposition, 2017

2012

"Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative Capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making. This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author's rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives. Endorsements Taylor’s revised conception of music scenes and thought-provoking case studies provide new insights into the ways music contributes to the production and maintenance of queer social relations. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary book is an essential read for scholars interested in popular music and queerness. Sheila Whiteley, Professor Emeritus and author of Women and Popular Music Jodie Taylor makes us sit up and pay attention to the wild experimentations in culture, subculture and community that can be heard in queer clubs and music venues … Taylor's intricate and detailed ethnography makes an important contribution to recent scholarship on queer music cultures. Claiming that music-making conjures new possibilities for politics and pleasure, Taylor lets us believe in queer rhythm and hear the beat of an exciting elsewhere. Tune in or miss out! Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure"

2020

I extend my thanks to my second reader, Dr. Emily Ansari, for the careful editing and feedback that proved to be invaluable to delivering a quality thesis. To my parents, Bina and Shreekant, I thank you for your continuous love, support and words of encouragement. To my brother, Ghyshan, I thank you for your infectious sense of humor and the hours of laughter you provided during my time in graduate school. Finally, I would like to thank my dogs, Bob and Maya, for their irresistible cuteness and hours of cuddling during difficult times.

2022

In Pop Masculinities, author Kai Arne Hansen investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early twenty-first century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That. By directing particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from these artists' representations of masculinity, Hansen argues that pop performances tend to operate in ways that simultaneously reinforce and challenge gender norms and social inequalities. Providing a rich exploration of these murky waters, Hansen merges the interpretation of recorded song and music video with discourse analysis and media ethnography in order to engage with the full range of pop artists' public identities as they emerge at the intersections between processes of performance, promotion, and reception. In so doing, he advances our understanding of the aesthetic and discursive underpinnings of gender politics in twenty-first century pop culture and encourages readers to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and scholars.

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (Baker, Bennett, Taylor eds.), 2013

"In general terms, heterosexuality is mainstream; queer sexualities, on the other hand, are not. The anecdotal evidence is unequivocal: whether tuning your radio to the weekly Top 40 countdown, watching the chart-toppers on MTV, or browsing the ‘most downloaded’ listings on iTunes, images and narratives of heterosexual love and desire dominate mainstream popular music. With few exceptions, the repetitive performances of hetero-norms manifest as qualities that contribute to the potential mainstream appeal of popular music artists. Following this, the natural province of queer music and those who make it is the cultural fringe. Given the marginalisation of queers within the mainstream, a phrase like ‘mainstream lesbian music’ is likely to be read as a contradiction in terms—dubious at the very least. Yet, a quick scan of the music forum pages on the lesbian pop culture website AfterEllen (afterellen.com) reveals that ‘mainstream lesbian music’ is clearly a ‘thing’; to what, or to whom the phrase refers, is less clear. On many of the publically accessible music forum pages I looked at, members would frequently refer to loving or hating various kinds of ‘lesbian music’, insisting that some lesbian music was more mainstream than others. For example, in a specific thread dedicated to the topic, one member commented: “… I’m not a fan of mainstream, stereotypical lesbian music … there is a thriving, underground music scene of queer musicians that get overlooked … because they aren't being [sic] in the mainstream spotlight” (posted February 11, 2011). Such a comment begs numerous questions, not least, what is lesbian music and how it is positioned in relation to categories such as the mainstream and, what this forum post terms, the ‘queer underground’? However, answering these questions is not a straightforward matter because the parameters of ‘the mainstream’ itself is all too commonly ill defined. Music simply described as ‘mainstream’ (not unlike describing music as ‘lesbian’) eludes identification of explicit musical characteristics, a discrete style or genre of expression. Rather, the mainstream is a value-laden category that frequently—and problematically—derives its meaning in association with its multiple corollaries such as counterculture, subculture, underground, indie, folk, alternative, experimental and avant-garde. When situated in binary opposition to the politically resistant stylised rituals of a potent subculture (e.g. Hebdige 1979), the mainstream garners negative connotations, unhelpfully implying a lax association with an inauthentic, commercialised, normative and depoliticised form of cultural hegemony (Huber 2007). What’s more, incorporating this figuration of the mainstream into lesbian music, which I do in the last section of this chapter, takes us quite some distance from the notion of mainstream lesbian music referred to in the above forum post. As Alison Huber argues in this volume, for a nebulous term like mainstream to function critically in studies of popular music we must first acknowledge that the, or rather, a mainstream is always an historically situated, contingent and contested term. In this chapter, through the lens of lesbian and queer feminist musicalities, I draw further attention to the limitations of the binary structuration of the mainstream vis-à-vis its subcultural Other. I argue that lesbian identity is (re)produced across multiple sites of popular music, concomitantly revealing the multiple strategies, politics, communions and contentions that figure in the musicalised representations of queer female intimacies. Furthermore, I consider the various ways that these representations are positioned in relation to notions of the mainstream, thus revealing the multiple discourses and connotations of the mainstream within lesbian and queer female music cultures, as well as particular abstractions of lesbianism with mainstream pop music. Progressing chronologically, I begin this chapter by outlining the emergence of womyn’s music in the 1970s. I then consider how select lesbian artists situated themselves within the mainstream during the late 1980s and early 1990s, enshrining their status as mainstream lesbian musical icons. To follow, I discuss the riot dyke critique first propelled by post-punk feminist musicians in the mid-1990s and ornament this discussion with localised ethnographic data, which illustrates the contemporary polychromatics of lesbian and queer musicalities. Finally, I will point to what some have termed ‘celesbianism’ or ‘fauxmosexuality’ in the mainstream pop arena of the 21st century. "

This chapter considers how gender identities and gendered meanings are explored in popular music. In the evaluation of popular music, supposedly ‘masculine’ qualities – authenticity, originality, innovation – are often privileged over ‘feminine’ qualities – the formulaic, inauthentic, superficial and banal. These hierarchies go back to the aesthetic tradition and the art/entertainment contrast, a contrast that has reappeared in popular music as the hierarchy of rock over pop. Although these conceptual hierarchies create difficulties for female popular musicians, many of them have creatively re-negotiated these hierarchies, amongst them Kate Bush and Madonna, both discussed in this chapter.

Sociology Compass, Vol. 7(3), 2013

For both the heterosexual and queer subject, subcultural participation and stylistic modes of cultural production and consumption, including popular music, are critical mechanisms aiding in the construction and expression of identity. Yet, in spite of abundant empirical examples of queer music cultures, subcultural studies scholars have paid minimal attention to queer sexualities and their concomitant stylistic modalities. In this article, I claim the importance of queer subterranean music cultures by synthesising significant literatures from various fields of inquiry including cultural sociology, popular musicology and queer studies. To begin, I will briefly clarify to whom and about what queer (theory) speaks. I then go on to offer an overview of subcultural and popular music research paying particular attention to the subaltern queer subject and surveying queer criticism within each field. Accordingly, I discuss various sites of popular music production and subcultural style such as punk and hip-hop, to show how non-heterosexual subjects carve space for resistant queer sexualities and merge queer sensibilities with pre-existing cultural forms. This article consolidates interdisciplinary approaches that will benefit scholars invested in the study of queer subcultures and popular music.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research. Edited by Allan F. Moore and Paul Carr. Bloomsbury Press, 2020

As an artistic form that circulates widely, rock music shapes and reflects social and cultural values, communicating powerful stories about the ever-shifting dynamics of human agency in society. 1 Douglas Kellner writes that "Radio, television, film and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of 'us' and 'them. '" 2 In the context of popular musical expression, artists adopt strategies for the representation of gendered and sexualized identities that are bound up with the social values, workings of power, and norms of the musical genres in which they operate. Our cultural understanding of these representations are grounded in an appreciation of the specific genre contexts, production and industry factors, as well as aesthetic, performative, and formal features. As social constructs, the identity categories of gender and sexuality are shaped and reshaped by cultural, political, and economic forces that vary over time and across social spaces. This chapter explores a number of analytic approaches to gender and sexuality in scholarly writings about rock music, with the aim of offering a critical review of the primary concepts raised in the interpretation of gendered subjectivities and representations in popular music. The field of inquiry emerged in the 1980s with the pioneering work of scholars such as Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode, whose analysis of vocal expression led to understanding artist subjectivity as residing in the musical materials, and E. Ann Kaplan, whose work on music videos offered tools for the interpretation of visual representations and narratives. 3 During the 1990s, the field burgeoned when authors opened up a range of reflections upon gendered identities and social practices in a variety of popular music genres, upon analytic methods for musical texts, as well as upon theories of reception and postmodern criticism. 4 From the field of gender studies, the seminal writings of authors such as Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam positioned gender performativity as a negotiation of gender categories. 5 The new millennium saw this line of inquiry firmly established with writings dedicated to the subject of popular music and identity, bringing forward the manifold ways in which individual artists navigate the politics of identity in 28

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016

Why are lesbian fans of popular music persona non grata, the apparitional queers of the popular music press and academic studies on fandom and of popular music? Are lesbians somehow disruptive to popular music’s gendered and sexual paradigms and inversions, not to mention the foundational conceptions of girls’ studies? Does the mythic lesbian subject, especially in her young masculine form, disturb too easily the beloved generic fault line between “cock rock” and teenybopper confections and the always-already heteronormative trajectory of girlhood? “Teeny bopper” or pop idols like Bieber—or the Backstreet Boys or Sean Cassidy or the Bay City Rollers or even Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson—have often flirted with androgyny or had suspect claims to normative masculinity and heterosexuality. In other words, the male teen idol and pop star has always been considered a bit queer. Yet, while critical discussions of popular music, tween and teen culture, and “girl” fan culture do address why their predominantly female heterosexual audience might be attracted to the queered or ambiguous gender of male stars like the Beatles, few touch on how lesbian or queer female fans engage with them, and none argues that these pop idols could be creating performances of gender and sexuality that specifically mark them as a kind of lesbian iconography. This article hopes to address this neglect of lesbian fans in the critical discussion of popular music by considering the interrelation between the queer performance of one male pop idol—Morrissey—and its consumption by lesbian fans, which in turn will intervene in traditional scholarly discussions of girlhood and girls’ cultural practices that also for too long have neglected the queer potential and practices of girls.