Review: Stan Hawkins: Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality (Routledge Studies in Popular Music)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: Professor Stan Hawkins’s latest book, Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality, takes up the queer aesthetics and politics of performance within pop music as its subject. Over the course of seven chapters, Hawkins invites his readers to “partake in his own experiences, delights, and impressions” (Hawkins 2) of such figures as Madonna, George Michael, and David Bowie. This volume joins recent works in analyzing the political and social dimensions of pop music and its performers as Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012) by Jack Halberstam, Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars (2013) by Kristin Lieb, and Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity (2013) by Sheila Whitely. Drawing on his training as a musicologist, Hawkins’s work emphasizes how performers in pop music foreground a queer sense to normative representations of gender and sexuality. It is this queer sense, the author argues, that helps unsettle dominant social conventions and provide new frameworks for imagining the future.