Pop Masculinities

Pop Masculinities explores the many ways in which twenty-first century pop artists perform masculinity through their songs, music videos, and public appearances. This offers a point of entry for addressing broader gender issues in contemporary popular culture and society.

Kai Arne Hansen is Associate Professor of Music in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is co-editor of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements (2019, with Nick Braae) and Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins (2020, with Eirik Askerøi and Freya Jarman), and he currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Journal of Musicology. His research spans the topics of popular music and identity, gender and sexuality, contemporary media, audiovisual aesthetics, and children's musical cultures.

Introduction: Like Pinocchio
1. Separating the Men from the Boys: New Masculinities, Pop Music, and the Social Politics of Interpretation
2. Good Boy Gone Bad: Fashioning a Post Boy Band Masculinity
3. A Different Country? Lil Nas X, the Sound of the Internet, and Queering the Cowboy
4. Beyond Bieber Fever
5. Dangerous and (In)Vulnerable: Aestheticizing Violence and Dancing in Sin City
6. From Boy Band to Man Band: Take That, Age(ing), and the Display of Self-Irony
Conclusion: Fade-Out
Bibliography
Index