“This is What Makes Us Girls,” the last track of Lana Del Rey’s 2011 debut album Born to Die, offers a theory about the nature of coming-of-age femininity. The song imagines teenage sisterhood as a torsion between loyalty and betrayal; a modality of friendship in which an ethos of “putting love first” undoes the bonds of support that sustain young women through the trials of youth. Del Rey’s flippant yet comforting refrain, “Don’t cry about it. It’s all gonna happen,” might be perceived as a betrayal of more sanguine discourses on “girl power” and feminist sisterhood. Yet Del Rey’s provocation also opens up space for affirming feminine (and perhaps feminist) agency while keeping peer-to-peer conflict and romantic passion closer to the center of the definition of “real life” for girls.
Taking its cue from Del Rey’s bad girls pop anthem, this special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online will explore pop artists who, like Del Rey, theorize gender, deploying and redeploying the normative and transformative functions of genre. What can the genre of pop music—and the genres within pop music—teach us about genres of femininity and masculinity in our current moment? How might artists like Del Rey, Janelle Monáe, Mitski, King Princess, Dolly Parton, or RuPaul help us to think through Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it”? Is popular music a utopian site for embracing what philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter has called “our collective agency and authorship of our genres of human being”? Or does the music industry’s mode of racialized and patriarchal appropriation, commodification, and capitalization continue to threaten popular music’s potential to generate images of femininity that are socially equitable and just? Furthermore, what happens to representations of gender in American popular music when they spill over the borders of place, nation, and era? In what ways do pop artists function as arbiters of gender? And how might competing definitions of femininity betray each other across the genre of pop music?