Daily struggle: Gender, work and feminist realism in Clean Bandit, Sean Paul, and Anne-Marie’s “Rockabye”

This article investigates representations of gender and work in the hit 2016 song “Rockabye” by Clean Bandit featuring Sean Paul and Anne-Marie in relation to a new orientation toward care labor and feminine performance we call “feminist realism.” Feminist realism, we argue, is a sensibility that calls attention to the disproportionate labor entailed, and risk undertaken, by performances of femininity, while despairing of structural fixes for these problems. The article assesses these issues of gender, sex and work in relation to music and dance in the “Rockabye” song and music video, arguing that the song’s depictions of exploited feminine and reproductive labor, reflected in its Nordic-British-Jamaican nexus of production, provide a particularly insightful articulation of feminist realism; we also analyze fan reviews to argue that this message resonated with audiences. Finally the article explores Sean Paul’s role as a featured artist on the track and video, drawing out the relationship between his attentiveness to the unsung labor of Jamaican musicians in creating the contemporary dance-pop scene and his support for similarly undervalued women in service work in their “daily struggle” for survival.