Blah, Blah, Blah: Ke$ha Feminism – performance, femme disturbance and slut agency

Posted on August 3, 2012 by michamaya

   

My new article came out this summer in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and it’s titled “Blah, Blah, Blah: Ke$ha Feminism?” The article looks at Ke$ha to consider possibilities of femme disturbance, to take femme seriously, and to take seriously a figure that so many people have denied agency to. The article discusses performance, slut agency, network agency, femme agency and racial critiques of the SlutWalk movement using feminist theories from Saba Mahmood, Jack Halberstam and Fatima El-Tayeb. Enjoy! I’d love to hear what people think about this article. It began in a Feminist Theory seminar with Jack Halberstam as a response to Jack’s concept of Gaga Feminism. In the same issue there’s also a very interesting article on the People’s Microphone by Homay King.

Here is the opening paragraph…

Is Ke$ha more Gaga than Gaga? What can we learn about the status of contemporary feminisms from the performance of Ke$ha across media productions that have been downloaded through YouTube and BitTorrent sites? To see Ke$ha as not political, in contrast to the politics of other artists, is to participate in the delegitimization of certain subject positions, denying their agency, and potentially not seeing the radical visions of political possibility they offer. To begin this article, I approach listening to Ke$ha from the standpoint of using a digital device through which I can delete the most offensive songs on her album, “Grow a Pear” and “Dinosaur,” which are blatantly trans-phobic and ageist. The analysis presented here is not necessarily about Ke$ha, but rather about a possible reading of a selection of her songs. Consider it one way of listening to her album, the conceptual gesture of a playlist.