Review: Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in the Twenty-First Century Popular Music, by Kai Arne Hansen

In Pop Masculinities, Kai Arne Hansen examines the unique representational affordances of contemporary pop music’s theatricality that “give[s] rise to a mosaic of potentially contradictory meanings that reflects the multiple, often conflicting dimensions of gendered experiences” (6). The musical codes and audiovisual aesthetics of music video work as the primary site of Hansen’s musicological and textual analysis. These readings stage a negotiation of the subsequent media narratives that emerge from these sonic and filmic representations to further contextualize the persona-construction operations of “aesthetics, ideologies, and power relations” inherent in pop music’s spectacular cultural productions (6). Hansen, therefore, uses the performance and reception of pop masculinities as a starting point in his examination of twenty-first-century gender politics to demonstrate “how masculinity functions not only as a social location but equally as a set of ideologies and practices that regulate the cultural distribution of power and social resources” (5). Pop Masculinities...