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.
About the presenterLauren S Riccelli
A fifth year doctoral student at the University of Miami working in the areas of gender/sexuality and 20th century American literature, Lauren is completing a dissertation entitled “Out of Time: Queer Temporality in the works of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Langston Hughes” that examines issues of queer time in modernist writing. She has been the recipient of several competitive fellowships, the Composition Fellowship in 2013-2014 and the Summer Research Assistantship in 2014, and has presented critical work at conferences including the Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference at Ole Miss in 2011 and The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 in 2013. She teaches literature and composition courses at the University of Miami focusing on gender, sexuality, queer theory, and American literature. Her review of Richard Rupert Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde is forthcoming in Joseph Conrad Today.