Pop & Postfeminism

Focusing on Amy Winehouse, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Lana del Rey, Nathalie Weidhase conceptualises the female dandy as a figure that simultaneously embodies and ruptures postfeminist notions of femininity, such as maintaining a physique that conforms to contemporary beauty standards, constant self-surveillance and self-improvement and the naturalisation of gender difference and heterosexuality.

Popular music is an area where gender, especially femininity, is performed in both subversive and problematic ways, and where women’s contributions are regularly undervalued or simply go unwritten. Structured around four in-depth case studies, Nathalie Weidhase explores music videos as a space in popular culture where politics of the feminine can be articulated, and a space in which female pop stars can be valued as artists with distinct contributions to the field of popular music. Each case study sheds light on different aspects of the postfeminist dandy in popular music. Amy Winehouse makes visible the commodification of the female spectacle in popular culture; Rihanna performs black femininity as postfeminism’s abject Other; Lady Gaga queers monstrous motherhood and celebrates female musical lineage; and Lana del Rey demonstrates how whiteness works as a canvas for postfeminist and postracial fantasies and their deconstruction. The theoretical insights regarding female dandyism developed through the case studies are further explored in the subsequent chapters, where other female artists are also considered.