Fashioning Pop Personae - Gender, Personal Narrativity, and Converging Media in 21st Century Pop Music

Abstract

With a specific focus on contemporary pop music, this dissertation frames a range of gender issues within an examination of audiovisual aesthetics and personal narrativity. Entering from the field of critical musicology, I argue that pop personae operate across disparate modes of expression that span intersecting spaces and ask how we deal critically with the performative implications of gender representations in pop.

The dissertation is submitted in an article-based format, consisting of an extended introduction chapter and four individual articles. The articles are united in attending to the primacy of the artist persona in pop music contexts. This is manifested in how each of the articles addresses personal narrativity, authenticity, and artistic agency, in turn relating these matters to sound recordings, music videos, and other aesthetic objects. I argue that the signs and symbols dispersed by pop artists over multiple platforms are aggregated in the experiences of listeners, viewers, and audiences, and thus bear a strong influence on perceptions of sound recordings and music videos. With this in mind, I explore the staging of the gendered body through audiovisual production, which entails addressing the creative realization of music-related technologies as part and parcel of gender performativity in pop. Ultimately, I demonstrate how pop artists negotiate their subjectivities and showcase their personae through musical and visual codes in ways that activate vast networks of connections and meanings.