MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper addresses the ambiguous notion of ‘authenticity,’ the contests of which saturate musical discourse in North American pop culture, and finds a gendered double standard at work. In the criticism of female artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Nicki Minaj as being inauthentic is a disapproval of women in control; women who are in control of their image and ostentatious in their aesthetic expressions are deemed inauthentic in a way that does not hold for male artists. It seems that as a society we hold women in music to a different standard wherein we tarnish their artistic credibility by calling them ‘inauthentic’ when they cross the threshold of how conscious of or (in)vested in their appearance we deem they should be.

In their book The Sex Revolts (1995), Joy Press and Simon Reynolds distinguish between two strategies, masquerade and flux, for female rebellion and participation in rock music on the basis of authenticity. Taking issue with their unexamined deployment of authenticity to exalt the model of flux and condemn the model of masquerade, this paper finds Press and Reynolds to be championing a strategy of ‘authenticity’ that uncritically reinforces harmful gender essentialism and reflects the problematic ideology of authenticity that permeates pop culture.

In contrast to Press and Reynolds, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble interrogates the notion of authenticity in terms of the performance of gender with special attention given to masquerade. Via Lacan, Butler presents two different ways of critically engaging with masquerade, one which reinforces the ideology of authenticity (and mapping onto which I find Press and Reynolds’ account), and one which has the potential to displace it. This latter understanding would phase out contests of authenticity, leaving room for more compelling ways of analyzing music artists and their performances to emerge.