Overview

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 listeners to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and scholars.

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Kai Arne Hansen is associate professor of music in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is coeditor of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements (with Nick Braae) and Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins (with Eirik Askeroi and Freya Jarman), and he currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Journal of Musicology. His research spans the topics of popular music and identity, gender and sexuality, contemporary media, audiovisual aesthetics, and children's musical cultures. Born and bred in the USA, James R. Cheatham has literally been around the world and back again. James is a retired military veteran, and has been to war four times. Now, he narrates audiobooks full time. He started back in 2018 with some divine direction, and is absolutely loving it.

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