Feminism in Popular Music

On June 7, 2019, pop provocateur Miley Cyrus released "Mother's Daughter," the lead single from her EP _SHE IS COMING_. Throughout the song, described by Cyrus as a "feminist anthem," the singer characterizes herself in rapid succession as "a witch," "a Nile crocodile," "a piranha," "nasty," and "evil." Yet her introduction of these slurs with the exclamation "hallelujah!" indicates that Cyrus, who has publicly identified as pansexual and gender-fluid, intends to reclaim them in celebration of her rejection of heteronormativity.  In addition to such textual allusions to Christianity, the music video for "Mother's Daughter" draws on medieval iconography: in moving portraits, a crowned Madonna breastfeeds her child and Cyrus, dressed in armor and raising a sword aloft, rides a saintly white stallion. Here, Cyrus' femme knight plays not only on the familiar image of a Christian crusader or Prince Charming come to rescue a damsel in distress, but also that of the genderqueer warrior-saint Joan of Arc. 
Although Joan is not referenced explicitly in the lyric, this paper will argue that her inclusion in the video invites a reading of the entirety of the song as medievalist. In addition, the music video includes close-up shots of Cyrus' tear-tracked face, her anguish laid bare as she weeps. These close-ups appear to reference Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, in which actress Renee Maria Falconetti conveys Joan's suffering through similarly framed shots of her stricken face. Cyrus' self-identification with Joan of Arc frames her experience as the target of homophobic, misogynist media scrutiny as a kind of martyrdom, using the language of medievalism as a feminist vocabulary.

Touted as the world's most successful "girl group" TLC's three singers present epitomal musico-sexual roles: Left Eye's raunchy raps contrast both with Chilli's sweet feminine lyricism as with T-Boz's lower "husky" belting. The singers' relative stability is compounded and confused by the multiple personae each performer suggests lyrically, often keeping the same vocal quality while exchanging pronouns and even self-referencing. In this sense, TLC's vocals tug at the limits of what, in the 1990s, would have been socially acceptable for black girls. Collectively, TLC therefore articulate many possibilities of performing girlhood that are irreducible to the contributions of any one of the three performers.

This paper revisits the track "I'm Good at Being Bad" off TLC's _FanMail_ (1999), valorized today as "one of the first pop records to aestheticize the internet." Featuring a sample of Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" (1975), the song exemplifies TLC's typical singing roles but simultaneously problematizes any stereotypical one-dimensionality that could be distilled as Black women's sexuality--a one-dimensionality central to Patricia Hill Collins' critique in _Black Feminist Thought_, whose second edition was issued a year after _FanMail_'s release. Donna Summer's and TLC's respective hits each capture a moment of the "Love to Love" youthful energy, such that the continuity between Summer and TLC could be, as Robert Fink and Jon Stratton have independently shown in analyses of Summer, a matter of succession via what listeners imagine as their sexual proximity extended via musical sampling. And yet, with each incarnation the message is given new meaning.

This presentation will show how Summer composed her tune and how it was developed in TLC's subsequent adaptation. The paper then problematizes previous analyses of Summer's song premised on the performer's presumed sexual availability by incorporating Black feminist scholarship regarding sexual choice and refusal. In distinction from previous analyses exploring a notion of "inherited" sexuality, my analysis focuses on samples of _sex_, i.e. sexual acts (perceived or real), that do not necessarily amount to any understanding of how these behaviors typify any particular demography or qualification of "sexuality" as a kind of identifying or orientational category. That is, the notion of sex I examine is not dependent on any singular interpretation of how performers engage in sex; rather, this analysis identifies many simultaneous and competing co-constructions of how, by whom, and for whom sex sounds are created and performed.

This paper examines how Beyoncé Knowles Carter's and the Dixie Chicks' "Daddy Lessons" disrupts country music culture and practices. Through intertextual references to country music's traditions and musical heritage, the song, video and subsequent performance at the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Country Music Association Awards critique the racial politics that govern the genre's history. The CMA performance effectively "schooled" the industry on country music's origins through its cross-genre collaboration between Black and white female musicians- musically and visually departing from the industry-promoted narrative of "southern exceptionalism" (Malone 1985/2017). Audiences responded negatively to this performance, questioning the place of an R&B/hip-hop artist on their sacred stage (Hudak 2016). These reactions were magnified by Beyoncé's choice of the Dixie Chicks as collaborators: a trio ostracized by the industry for their political beliefs (Watson & Burns 2010). 


Genre theory (Frow 2006; Holt 2007; Brackett 2005) offers a critical foundation for considering reactions to "Daddy Lessons" within the framework of white fragility (DiAngelo 2011). By moving outside of the genres she is "supposed" to perform, Beyoncé's musical actions function as a form of feminist "talking back" (hooks 1989) to white audiences and the country industry, both showing discomfort, even rage, at this performance. At its core, the debate surrounding whether or not "Daddy Lessons" is country concerns genre identity, and who is "permitted" to perform country music. Through an examination of intertextual references in the song, video, and collaborative performance, this paper addresses how "Daddy Lessons" challenges the raced and gendered constructs of country music culture.