As #MeToo activism has revealed cascades of famous and influential men to be serial sexual harassers and rapists, the question of what to do about aesthetically pleasing art made by morally and politically disgusting men has received renewed interest and urgency. I identify two different types of feminist responses to this question. The first kind of response modifies post-feminist and post-race approaches to diversity as a kind of beauty: replacing beauty with disgust, these approaches treat sexism and misogyny as individual-level flaws that can be eliminated through appropriate aesthetic judgments. The second kind of response begins from the premise that centuries of white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy have shaped our aesthetic principles and conventions such that sexism and misogyny are systemic problems baked into all works of art. I examine how Angela Davis’s revision of Marcuse’s concept of the aesthetic dimension, Katherine McKittrick’s and Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “emulation,” and Rihanna’s vocal performance choices on her 2016 single “Love On The Brain” are all instances of this latter type of response.

This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine how Annie Clark, who records and performs under the alias St. Vincent, problematized the electric guitar’s gendered address by designing a Signature Collection for Music Man, a subsidiary of equipment manufacturer Ernie Ball. It first contextualizes the industrial efforts to make the electric guitar more accessible to girls during Clark’s adolescence and their limitations. It then analyzes Clark’s promotional strategies for the collection. Most branding opportunities available to female music industry professionals interested in extending their commercial shelf life often affirm conventionally feminine modes of creative self-expression, such as fashion and cosmetics. Clark’s guitar challenges such gender essentialism by highlighting her own virtuosity as a queer musician, songwriter, and producer while giving players a different set of tools with which to create new sounds.

The current study incorporates a radical feminist framework to analyze the portrayal of women in relation to both sex and alcohol in country music. Two coders analyzed the top 50 Billboard country songs for each year from 1990 to 1994, 2000-2004, and 2010-2014 (n = 750) for references to women in association with sex and alcohol. Seventeen percent of the songs referred to sex in relation to women, 20% referred to alcohol in relation to women, and 6% referred to both sex and alcohol in relation to women. Songs in the 2010s were more likely to refer to women in conjunction with sex and alcohol than songs in the 2000s and 1990s. References to women in association with sex and alcohol were more likely to be sung by men, not women, suggesting a pattern driven by patriarchy.