Wild Girls Gone Gaga: Representations of Women in Pop Music.
Jeannette Bello Mota
Universidade de Vigo
Popular culture and mass culture, as terms which have recently become almost
synonyms, are both inextricably linked to a neoliberal capitalist discourse. This latter
has established its consumerist dynamic not only over the economic sphere but also
over the social and the cultural. In each of these cases, popularization is carried out,
primarily, through advertising and the media and it is constricted by the language used
in them –both verbal and visual. These are seldom fit to offer anything but a glimpse
into more complex ideas, specifically ideas regarding culture and identity.
In a time when most formerly distinctive and discernibly different discourses
and identities are merged into a multiplicity of compounds and configurations that
seemingly stand for diversity and/or plurality, I seek to interrogate questions about what
is left of such clearly defined –and most of the times restrictive and exclusive—
distinctions? And, moreover, are these new popular identities really multiple and/or
inclusive?
This paper will analyze the influence the mentioned tendencies in popular
culture have over issues of gender, race and identity through the analysis of some of the
recent works of popular female pop, soul and R&B singers like Christina Aguilera,
Rihanna, Beyoncé or Lady Gaga. These artists and others have become the most played
and visible female personae in today’s main media outlets. This paper will explain how
ideas and discourses are abbreviated and adapted into mainstream popular music and
what the effects of such cultural reductions are in the representation of women and the
uses of allegedly counter discursive practices, especially feminism, by analyzing the
videos and lyrics of these popular songs. While these examples apparently stand for
visualizing and liberating forms of expression they have become moulds that regulate
social and cultural behaviours which are at the same time underpinned by traditional
power structures typical of patriarchal and supremacist discourses.
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