Zoe-powered pop: Historicizing the feminist new wave of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen

This article repositions Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen at the centre of new wave history, arguing that their creative practices exemplify a feminist, posthumanist reimagining of the genre. While new wave historiography has often marginalized women artists or cast them as eccentric outliers, I propose a gynocentric reframing that situates Lovich and Hagen as vital contributors whose artistry helped define new wave’s fluidity, theatricality and resistance to categorization. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of zoe – a generative life force that affirms multiplicity and interconnection – I demonstrate how their careers mobilized vitality across sonic, visual and cultural registers. Both artists emerged from punk-inflected undergrounds and ascended to international prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their hybrid identities marked by East–West crossings, flamboyant personae and boundary-defying aesthetics. Their performances not only unsettled patriarchal norms but also engaged the broader political energies of their moment, from women’s liberation to animal rights. By historicizing their contributions through the lenses of feminist theory and posthumanism, I argue that Lovich and Hagen’s ‘ zoe -powered pop’ exemplifies new wave’s most vital qualities: hybridity, resistance to fixed forms and life-affirming difference. This reorientation broadens our understanding of new wave as a genre while foregrounding women artists as central agents of cultural and theoretical transformation.