Looking at iconic genders in music videos, I will focus on the queer figures of Madonna, Prince and their contemporary inheritors Hayley Kiyoko and Janelle Monáe. I take queer here to mean a suggestion or activation of non-normative sexuality (outside the range of vanilla, monogamous heterosexuality), and also gender expressions that go beyond the range of hyper feminine or masculine, but here especially androgyny, butchness, and vamp.
We can talk about gender in every social context, but in a music video the gender of the performers is usually the lead singer who interacts with a variety of other band or cast members. Many music videos act out a storyline to guide the viewer in their interpretation of the song. Queer genders can signal delicious deviant sexuality and attract queer viewers, but we must remember that with these iconic musicians of Madonna and Prince, their self-portrayal is always filtered through their celebrity status and persona. Think of Whitney Houston whose blackness and gospel upbringing was downplayed to make her into a nearly white pop star. Hence, I’m not referring to the actual gender or sexual identity of any of these stars, but to their cultivated personas.
However, for us and for them, gender is not voluntary. It is scripted, adapted, adopted and processed as a complex web of expressions that might be repeated, or not. The everyday performance of gender that is sanctioned by one’s social context to be permissible (for example, topless beaches), or not (such as women driving), is doubled in cultural representations – that might literally be censored or break laws.
Music videos allow the performer to test cultural sanctions, but they are also vehicles for selling music. So while Katy Perry’s I kissed a Girl video flirts with the bi-sexy image of the modern day hetero-flexible woman to attract fans, and gain some press through shock, her gender performance is otherwise fairly stable as a femme heterosexual woman.
Typically, masculine actors look and feminine actors are to be looked at. The notion of ‘the gaze’ has been conceptualized in many different ways, but famously by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey who examined classic Hollywood narrative films and tracked how male actors were aligned with the eye of the camera, giving them an masterful overviews of scenes, the ability to look surreptitiously at women, and to stare down masculine competitors. Mulvey called this the MALE GAZE. It splits the visual field into gendered ways of looking and being. This dominant representational script also informs music videos, especially narrative ones.