Paper Title
Boy Crazy? Not Hardly: An Examination into the Phenomenon of Queer Girl Subculture’s Embrace of Male Pop Stars
Location
Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
Keywords
pop stars, popculture, teenage girls, teen girls, queer, queer girls, media
Start Date
April 2016
End Date
April 2016
Abstract
Teen heartthrobs, as so named by the western media, like America’s Justin Bieber and Great Britain's One Direction, rose to fame on the backs of teenage girls and their ability to generate cultural capital for success. To ignore this phenomenon, and its misogynistic undertones inside cultural discourse, as feminist scholars would be ignorant at best, and negligent at worst. To ignore the concurrent subcultural phenomenon of teen heartthrobs being adopted as the objects of desire for queer teenage girl communities would be ignoring the rich habitat for scholarly exploration this happening provides. In this paper, I will examine how mass marketed musicians such as Justin Bieber, One Direction, and their ilk have been adopted into and molded by the desires, preoccupations, and embodiments of this generation’s young queer women and girls. This backdrop provides a vehicle into the subversion of heteronormative and patriarchal ideals placed upon these young men for economic gain, and how that inversion is repurposed by non-heterosexual, predominantly woman-identified young people.
Boy Crazy? Not Hardly: An Examination into the Phenomenon of Queer Girl Subculture’s Embrace of Male Pop Stars
Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
Teen heartthrobs, as so named by the western media, like America’s Justin Bieber and Great Britain's One Direction, rose to fame on the backs of teenage girls and their ability to generate cultural capital for success. To ignore this phenomenon, and its misogynistic undertones inside cultural discourse, as feminist scholars would be ignorant at best, and negligent at worst. To ignore the concurrent subcultural phenomenon of teen heartthrobs being adopted as the objects of desire for queer teenage girl communities would be ignoring the rich habitat for scholarly exploration this happening provides. In this paper, I will examine how mass marketed musicians such as Justin Bieber, One Direction, and their ilk have been adopted into and molded by the desires, preoccupations, and embodiments of this generation’s young queer women and girls. This backdrop provides a vehicle into the subversion of heteronormative and patriarchal ideals placed upon these young men for economic gain, and how that inversion is repurposed by non-heterosexual, predominantly woman-identified young people.
