Hardly that kind of girl? : on female representations in mainstream pop music videos

Abstract

Music video is a particularly powerful medium for showcasing pop artists, offering up a site where images and sounds come together to shape alluring representations. This thesis explores a selection of mainstream pop videos from a poststructuralist perspective, linking the representations of selected female artists to notions of gendered identity, sexuality, and ethnicity. As technological advancements open up new representational opportunities, current trends seem to showcase the female pop artist through hyperembodiment and appropriations of the post-human. The study focuses on four overarching questions:

1) How does pop music contribute to the ways we perceive and understand gendered identity, sexuality, and ethnicity?

2) How does the negotiation between mainstream culture and pornography materialize in both musical and visual aesthetics of current female pop artists?

3) What is at stake in female articulations of the robotic/monstrous/post-human?

4) What relevance does hyperembodiment have for female representations in music videos through technology?

These questions are approached from the interdisciplinary field of popular musicology, which involves addressing theories from fields of research such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and media studies. Notably, the study does not attempt to provide definite answers to the key questions. Rather, the purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the dynamics of female representations in contemporary pop videos, illuminating processes of construction from a range of perspectives.