Description
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.
About the Author
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 co-editor of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements (2019, with Nick Braae) and Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins (2020, 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.
Reviews
Hansen's conclusion is both an homage to masculinity in popular music studies and an invitation for future pop scholars to join him in this ever-expanding field of gender and performance. * Paxton Haven, The University of Texas at Austin, Journal of Popular Music Studies *
Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they may seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us. * Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities *
We often forget that men have gender too. And despite what a patriarchal ideology might frame as a natural structure, boys, no less than girls, struggle to forge their own subjectivities amid the many cultural pressures confronting them. In this dazzling and nuanced study, Kai Arne Hansen analyzes the ways several prominent young male entertainers have publicly negotiated their own coming of age by means of music, lyrics, fashion, and self-presentation. A beautifully written and deeply compelling study. * Susan McClary, Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University and Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA *
Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they sometimes seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us. * Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities *
In Pop Masculinities, Hansen draws together a range of perspectives-age, class, race, sexuality, and more-to consider the complex manifestations of masculinity in twenty-first century popular music culture with an impressive intersectional nuance. He interweaves close readings of sonic and visual artefacts with a rich cultural-theoretical framework, to offer a timely analysis of the gender politics of commercial music culture. * Freya Jarman, Reader in Music, University of Liverpool *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190938802
Author Kai Arne Hansen
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 236mm * 14mm
About the Author
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 co-editor of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements (2019, with Nick Braae) and Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins (2020, 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.
Reviews
Hansen's conclusion is both an homage to masculinity in popular music studies and an invitation for future pop scholars to join him in this ever-expanding field of gender and performance. * Paxton Haven, The University of Texas at Austin, Journal of Popular Music Studies *
Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they may seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us. * Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities *
We often forget that men have gender too. And despite what a patriarchal ideology might frame as a natural structure, boys, no less than girls, struggle to forge their own subjectivities amid the many cultural pressures confronting them. In this dazzling and nuanced study, Kai Arne Hansen analyzes the ways several prominent young male entertainers have publicly negotiated their own coming of age by means of music, lyrics, fashion, and self-presentation. A beautifully written and deeply compelling study. * Susan McClary, Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University and Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA *
Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they sometimes seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us. * Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities *
In Pop Masculinities, Hansen draws together a range of perspectives-age, class, race, sexuality, and more-to consider the complex manifestations of masculinity in twenty-first century popular music culture with an impressive intersectional nuance. He interweaves close readings of sonic and visual artefacts with a rich cultural-theoretical framework, to offer a timely analysis of the gender politics of commercial music culture. * Freya Jarman, Reader in Music, University of Liverpool *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190938802
Author Kai Arne Hansen
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 236mm * 14mm
