Let’s Talk About Sex: Female Sexuality, Constructed and Performed in the Contemporary Music Video

Abstract

My paper examines the construction and performance of female sexuality within the space of the contemporary music video. Both a form of text and a discursive site, the music video functions as a kind of visual rhetoric through which various models of legible sexuality are articulated and reproduced. I argue that even within a burgeoning group of female artists whose frank, often vulgar sexual identifications contest traditionalized notions of female subjectivity, we still see monolithic representations of “woman” that fix her identity as (often hyper-)sexualized, ready for male consumption, and as having been constructed by an external, male gaze. Using Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks, and Iggy Azalea as case studies, I illustrate the ways in which artists who base their public images in large part on their transgressive sexual points of identification fail, within the space of their music videos, to create a female subjectivity that is truly a contestation of traditionalized modalities of female behavior, desire, and identity production. Specifically, I examine the ways in which these videos reproduce problematic notions of the hyper-sexualized woman, the sexually available woman, and the woman as she is defined by male-authored constructs of legible femininity.