This was something I put together a few weeks ago for the nice folks at the music site EAR FARM. So, it isn't timely, but it went up in the days Before I Had a Blog.
Sexuality: perhaps the last frontier in the neuroscientific field of Things Deep In Our Hearts That Confuse And Scare Us That We Have To Confront Someday But Not Just Yet. “Sexuality is not simply an attribute one has or a disposition or a patterned set of inclinations. It is a mode of being disposed toward others, including in the mode of fantasy, and sometimes only in the mode of fantasy.” So says Judith Butler in Undoing Gender, arguing that sexuality and even gender itself are big, fat lies, performances not grounded in anatomical reality—and not just in Bangkok, right here in God’s America. To which I say, where do you draw the line between performed and real, Judith Butler? Date My Mom? Ohio State v. Michigan? Rock Band??
These are questions we in Music Video Studies now must grapple with, like it or not, thanks to Katy Perry. With the June release of “I Kissed a Girl” to the YouTubed masses, Ms. Perry seemingly flaunts her “disposition” in a gold lamé muffin-wrapper dress. In the video, as you see, she’s able to “try on” her newfound mode of being in an environment safe from men, dark colors, and normative sexual constructs. “It’s just human nature,” she coos, unconvincingly. Sounding like an ebullient, beautiful songbird trapped inside a talkbox, Perry prances across two whole sets with a cadre of carefully-selected-to-include-all-the-races women. The camera cuts, at intervals, to close-ups of breasts, bare legs, and the like, helpfully reminding the viewer that there are appealing aspects of women. At 2:08, a pillow fight develops. Pretty anodyne lipstick (or indeed, cherry chapstick) lesbian fare, but that’s all right—we eagerly anticipate the song title’s all-but-promised money shot…er, resolution of the discourse of sexual subject reification.
The rest of the essay here.
1 comment:
Sexuality is as influenced today by popular culture as it would be our own biology. It might even be the case where comfort in one's own shoes is as much influenced by chic "sexuality trends" as natural impulses. Both homosexually and new schoolery seem to increase in frequency as society becomes increasingly more acceptable and progressive. However, Darwin be damned, we are actually not getting more queer, rather the means by which we can express or diagnose this behavior has increased. Thank you Bravo (TV) for capitalizing on the end of the metro-sexual peak and maintaining queer as trendy, and (truly indicative of a progressive social climate) marketable.
For further reading, see whatever Katy Perry's next single will be.
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