Pop Conference 2025

As Prince's influence on popular culture continues to resonate across generations, this multidisciplinary panel offers new frameworks for understanding how his revolutionary fashion and style choices shaped—and continue to shape—visual culture, gender expression, and identity politics in popular music. Kirsty Fairclough examines the stylistic and cultural lineage connecting Beyoncé and Prince, revealing how Beyoncé's fashion and style introduces and reinterprets Prince’s for a new generation. Casci Ritchie proposes "embodied intimacy" as a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between audience gaze and a star's dressed, moving body, using Prince's electrifying performance of "Hot Thing" from the Sign o' the Times (1987) concert film as a case study. Robin Shumays investigates how Prince's style in the early 1990s innovatively merged Middle Eastern fashion, including belly dance costumes, with expressions of African American identity due to the influence of his future wife Mayté Garcia. Finally, Karen Turman examines Sheila E.'s “long fur coat of mink” in "The Glamorous Life" music video as a symbol of wealth, luxury, and social prestige, while also analyzing the complex socio-cultural and political implications of fur consumption. Together, these presentations illuminate how Prince's fashion legacy transcends mere aesthetic choices to encompass broader discussions of culture, gender, race, sex, class, environmental issues, and artistic influence.

Kirsty Fairclough, “Style as Legacy: Examining Prince’s Influence on Beyoncé’s Fashion and Artistic Expression”

Fashion is integral to the identities of both Beyoncé and Prince, embodying more than aesthetic choice and acting as a vehicle for cultural, political, and gender discourse. Prince’s avant-garde, boundary-pushing style positioned him as an emblem of nonconformity, fluidity, and rebellion. Beyoncé, as one of today’s most influential artists, has similarly harnessed fashion as a medium for storytelling, empowerment, and social commentary. The paper will explore the stylistic and cultural lineage connecting Beyoncé and Prince, investigating how Prince’s distinctive style and performance aesthetics have profoundly influenced Beyoncé's evolving visual identity. By examining both artists' use of fashion as a narrative and cultural tool, this paper aims to reveal how Beyoncé has inherited, reinterpreted, and transformed Prince's stylistic ethos to create a distinct visual language that resonates with contemporary audiences. This study will utilise a multidisciplinary approach, engaging in fashion theory, cultural studies, and musicology, to analyse how Beyoncé’s style pays homage to and innovates upon Prince’s sartorial legacy.

Casci Ritchie, “Embodied Intimacy: Studying Prince’s Dressed Moving Body on Screen”

Carol Vernallis (2004) alludes to the tactile immersive qualities of clothing featured within music videos, ‘we hear the music, follow the body, and feel the cloth’ (p.101). Building on film scholars Jackie Stacey (1994); Laura Marks (2000); and Vivian Sobchack (2004); alongside fashion and cultural researchers Barbara Brownie (2016) and Becky Peterson (2024), I propose the term ‘embodied intimacy’ as a means to allude to the relationship between spectator and the moving dressed star body. Audiences can feel an embodied response to the dressed star and choose to express this sartorially (Lamerichs 2018a; 2018b; 2023, Smith et al. 2020; 2021) but this also shifts beyond a literal visual representation to an unseen embodied sense of style. I also use the term to discuss the visceral bodily reactions experienced by the audience when watching the moving dressed star body. These reactions are often difficult to articulate in words and, as such, require a methodological framework to slow the active viewing process and enable a deeper understanding.

Building on my thesis, I will explore ‘embodied intimacy’ in relation to my connection to Prince’s dressed moving body, in particular, a recorded performance of ‘Hot Thing’ from the Sign o’ the Times (1987) concert film. Using a combination of watching and drawing, I demonstrate how to slow down and become aware of our affective response to the dressed moving body on screen as well as document garments thoroughly in response to the scarcity and accessibility of objects outside museums and institutions.

Robin Shumays, “Bedlah Bedlam: An Exploration of Orientalist Fantasy and Fashion via the Lens of Prince Rogers Nelson”

This paper explores the fusion of Orientalist fantasy, fashion, and African-American identity in popular culture, viewed through the lens of Prince’s artistry. Prince’s encounter with professional belly dancer Mayté Garcia during his 1990 “Nude Tour” led to Prince's designers incorporating elements of Mayté's belly dance costumes into his own fashion, subtly infusing Middle Eastern art and attire into his image during the early 1990s. This stylistic transformation paralleled Prince’s personal journey, including his symbolic name change as a protest against the music industry. That protest mirrored African-American engagement with Islamic aesthetics back in the early 20th century, when the Great Migration brought Black communities into contact with Middle Eastern migrants. Jazz musicians like Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and others adopted Eastern musical elements and attire, sometimes crafting new identities to escape racial oppression. Prince continued this tradition on the 1993 O(+> album and 3 Chains o’ Gold video, crafting a storyline with Mayté as an Egyptian princess and blending elements of fantasy and Orientalist imagery. The resurgence of Middle Eastern sounds and fashion aesthetics in the early 2000s will also be examined through works like Truth Hurts' “Addictive,” Lil’ Kim’s live “Not Tonight” performance with its Egyptian-themed styling, and Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U.” The latter video, choreographed by Mayté, echoes Prince's influence, incorporating belly dance attire and movements that further cemented this cross-cultural style in mainstream pop.

Karen Turman, “‘A Long Fur Coat of Mink’: Semiotics of the Fur Coat in Sheila E.’s ‘The Glamorous Life’”

Although credited to Sheila E., Prince wrote the “The Glamorous Life,” which opens with the lyrics: “She wears a long fur coat of mink/ Even in the summertime.” For the music video, Sheila E. recalls in her memoir that “it was a given that I’d wear my long mink coat to match the story line and the lyrics… The off-white-and-gray mink was perfect for the black-and-white sequences.” (p 197). While a seemingly simple choice of wearing a “long fur coat of mink,” this clothing article represents not only a symbol of wealth, luxury, and social prestige in the 20th century, but also a reference to libidinal desire and sexual fetish. In addition, the socio-cultural and political landscape surrounding the consumption of fur extend beyond the limits of projecting and living “the glamorous life,” reflecting the complexities of its semiotics. This paper  will analyze Sheila E.’s iconic mink coat as a symbol in the evolution of fur as a topic of debate in fashion through the intersection of race, class, sex, and of course, environmental issues.

Moderator: Jacob P. Cupps, Washington University in St. Louis
Kim Kattari, “Stylizing Hypnotic and Transformative Musical Experiences”

All of the popular and subcultural musical communities I’ve previously researched
ethnographically – reggaeton, rockabilly, psychobilly, electronic dance music – were strongly
associated with a unique fashion style that defined their particular brand of identity politics …
until now. My current work focuses on drone-based electronic music that produces hypnotic and
transformative experiences for many of its listeners, often designed to engage activist intentions.
There is no common sartorial theme or “look” to which members ascribe. But that doesn’t mean
there isn’t a general “style” reflected within this community. In this presentation, I assess the
ways in which a particular aesthetic framework is created and recreated, despite the perceived
lack of a common fashion style. Comparisons of album covers and social media posts, as well as
ethnographic observations at electronic music concerts, form the basis for this analysis.
I consider the necessary practicalities of style. Durational electronic music is generally
intended to be experienced while lying or sitting down and remaining relatively still and quiet.
Concerts can last several hours, allowing one to fully enter an altered mental state that can lead
to transformative potential. One annual event I’ve documented is a 28-hour long performance of
drone-based music that protests the use of military drones and raises money for victims of the
military industrial complex. Accordingly, most participants dress in comfortable clothes or
pajamas, prepared to spend many hours on the floor in a semi-conscious state, drifting in and out
of sleep.

This paper sheds light on the presence of “functional style” in musical subcultures that
aren’t defined by a discrete fashion style, and considers how it in fact supports the resistant
potentials of the drone-based music community.

Alex de Lacey, “‘Tell Virgil Write Brick on My Brick’: Hip-Hop and Haute Couture”

“Tell Virgil write Brick on my Brick”: Hip-Hop and Haute Couture

Hip-hop and fashion have gone hand-in-hand since its inception. Ostentatious outfits of the 70s made way for Run DMC’s three-stripe theocracy, before the much-fabled “shiny suit era” that closed out the millennium. Krishnamurthy’s Fashion Killa chronicled this latter “ghetto fabulous” flamboyance, with luxury lifestyle brands juxtaposed with tales of adversity (2023: 103). However, a recent turn in rap has resulted in an explicit re-positioning of hip-hop fashion and music as haute couture.

Buffalo-born rapper Westside Gunn founded Griselda x Fashion Rebels (GxFR) in 2012 as a clothing brand.
This soon became synonymous with musical output from his wider rap collective, with physical releases increasingly bearing the hallmarks of high art, accruing substantial sums through surprise limited edition drops and collaborations with the late-Virgil Abloh. 2020’s Pray for Paris solidified this relationship on a larger scale: the cover fashioned by Abloh, its opening skit “400 million plus tax” samples the auction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, juxtaposing renaissance portraiture with bracing lyrics about Buffalo life. This presentation will explore the methods by which artists such as Westside Gunn, and his contemporary Roc Marciano—who works with Josué Thomas of Gallery Dept. for “Art That Kills”—are seeking to redefine the relationship between art worlds in the 2020s.

Luxury brands remain pivotal, but this interface subverts and satirizes tried-and-tested tropes. When Westside Gunn rapped “tell Virgil write brick on my brick” on “Dr. Birds”, he channelled Magritte to offer a critique of artworks’ “reification”, capturing the fickleness with which art gets elevated to a higher status. In contrast to Pharrell Williams’ formalised partnership with Versace, these rappers remix, edit and challenge the aesthetics of the contemporary fashion landscape. Rap and streetwear are at the forefront. In doing so, they are redefining the terrain by which rap and couture enter into conversation.

Cindy Quach, “The Plaza as Paradox: Deconstructing Punk and New Wave Aesthetics”

This presentation is sourced from one section of my master thesis, which examines the aesthetics
and fashion of music goers in Chinatown’s punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The
two venues that made up the scene were Madame Wong’s and Hong Kong Café, and public
history has argued that Wong’s venue hosted new wavers, while the café was inherently punk.
The two venues were situated in Chinatown’s central plaza, just merely 90 feet from each other.
Despite the proximity, there was a clear division and distinction amongst the crowds at Madame
Wong’s and Hong Kong Café, their style was a major visual indictor of their music taste, but also
their politics and worldview. In this presentation, I will be giving a brief history of the two music
venues, but I will specifically focus on how punk and new wave fashion/style localized in
Chinatown. Through this, there will be examinations of how counterculture clothing, hair styles,
makeup, and more were reflective of transnational politics, but were also heavily influenced by
Asian and Chinatown’s aesthetics. To showcase this, I will be incorporating archival
photographs, audio clips, and videos to illustrate how punk and new wave style is manifested in
politics, music, and counterculture ecosystems. Drawing from the title, the plaza as a paradox, I
will be pulling in perspectives from punks and new wavers about one another’s fashion, and this
is where I draw on queer theory to expand on their concepts of “posers” to understand what it
means to pose, what is posing, and who is posing, especially within the context of an ethnic
enclave. I also would like to bring in mini-zines for audience members to take, the zine will just
be a collage of fashion, style, and aesthetics of the punks and new wavers in the plaza; the zine
will be less written content and mostly sourced archival materials.

Joseph M. Thompson, “No Shoes, No Shirt: Beach Fashion, Condo Country, and Nashville’s
Vacation Obsession”

Country music hitmakers traded their pearl snap shirts for tank tops and went to the beach in the
early 2000s. In 2003, Alan Jackson released “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” a salute to day
drinking that was christened seaworthy by collaborator Jimmy Buffet’s featured verses. Kenny
Chesney embraced his inner Buffet that same year with the single “No Shoes, No Shirt, No
Problem.” The success of that song pushed the landlocked Tennessean to launch a cabana
industry of beach-themed songs, a “No Shoes Nation” fan club, and his own brand of rum.
Dozens of white male country artists followed suit with songs that indulge in what might be
called “condo country,” the trend that celebrates beaches, boats, bikinis, and beer.
Since the 1960s, the country industry has catered to the white suburban consumer. Condo
country has stayed this course by catching them on the way to the beach. Where once country
music celebrated the dignity of labor, condo country songwriters pen odes to not working.

Because most people must wear shoes and shirts in their everyday lives, condo country comes
with its own clothing that signals the suburban escapism sold in its songs. As these tunes
convinced country listeners to take it easy, brands like Salt Life and Tommy Bahama enabled
consumers to live the purportedly laidback lifestyle one UPF-rated shirt at a time.
Exploring why condo country and beach fashion exploded simultaneously among similar
demographics in the early 2000s offers a window into country music’s gender and racial politics.

Melismas, or vocal runs, feature many notes sung on one syllable of a word, and are found
throughout contemporary popular music. Their most popular iterations have their roots in Black
vocal singing, from the gospel and soul singing of artists like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin to
contemporary R&B of groups like Dru Hill and Jodeci. Melismas are a critical part of Black vocal
technique, but they are not simply a technique or a collection of notes: they are a cultural process, a
mode of constructing and amplifying Black life through sound. We are proposing to engage this
cultural process at PopCon through a game show called Name That Run. This show, conceived of
by Richel Cuyler and produced by the Black Sound Lab at Dartmouth College, is an informative and
engaging exploration of Black melismatic singing. The show will be approximately an hour long (a
90 min session would be best for setup and breakdown) and we will solicit contestants in advance.
The entire show runs out of a Canva presentation and can be done in a room with standard A/V
capabilities and mics for individual participants. The show features explanations of melisma and
related vocabularies, questions on naming artists and songs just by melismas,“melisma moments,”
and “vocal run challenges” for audience members to participate in.

Name That Run is the public engagement component of research the Black Sound Lab has been
doing to study Black melismatic singing. The Black Sound Lab is a research space dedicated to
decriminalizing Black life sound and amplifying Black life through digital practice. The show speaks
to this year’s thematic work with style, as we consider melismas and vocal style as a critical space in
which to learn, play, and build the kind of practices that will sustain us in a world of rapidly
advancing generative AI. The Black Sound Lab is working to slow the datafication of Black life,
thinking towards a time in which large language models will be able to recognize melismas and
melismatic genealogies. Drawing on ethnomusicology, digital humanities, data science, and Black
Studies, the lab considers how we might train these models without flattening elements of contour,
timbre, emotional weight, and more. While we recognize that this kind of work is all but inevitable
in the music industry and will lead to the continued mimicry and appropriation of Black style, we are
working to be on the forefront of these conversations in order to prevent as much harm as possible.
Name That Run is but one way to critically introduce (or re-introduce) listeners to the broad stylistic
universe of Black melismatic singing.

Moderator: Blair Smith, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Ya-Hui Cheng, “The Stylish Red Nationalism in C-pop Culture”

Red has historically symbolized luck and ecstasy in premodern China. In modern times,
socialists have adopted red to represent nationalism across all aspects of the humanities and arts
under red regimes, as evident in propaganda entertainment productions. Red movies, songs, and
literature signify a genre that encapsulates socialist nationalism. Traditionally, those red cultural
productions often draw from folklore, illustrated in the musical The East is Red (1964), which
was produced in China as a tribute to Mao Zedong. After the socialist regimes collapsed in the
1990s, stylish red nationalism faded worldwide, except in China. There, leaders adopted
socialism with Chinese characteristics to push socioeconomic reforms forward. China’s success
in reform has helped sustain and promote the stylish red nationalism that has gradually
permeated the cultural industries. More C-pop musicians now create innovative red music, often
blending elements of folk and theater with pop. Some of this music serves as theme songs for
patriotic movies or television dramas. Unlike earlier red productions that primarily focused on
conveying propaganda, the latest red music captures daily intimate activities, binding audiences
with shared sociocultural recollections while showcasing China’s soft power.

As China’s entertainment industry now shapes Chinese mass culture worldwide, these red
cultural productions also reach and engage audiences in the free world. How can these latest pop-
style red productions, with their nationalist themes presented in music and text, resonate with
global Chinese generations? This paper explores stylish red pop musical productions and the
changing interpretation of nationalism in C-pop culture. By studying and contrasting the sonic
components, textual implications, and the use of red nationalism in music productions from
before the reform to now, I demonstrate how the latest notions of stylish red nationalism in C-
pop connect with ancient Chinese glory, promoting cultural sustainability, which transcends
previous socialist nationalism to garner global support.

Wesley Park, “Y2K Is Back! How NewJeans Grabs K-Pop Fans' Attention with 'Attention'”

NewJeans is one of South Korea’s most popular K-pop groups formed by HYBE
Corporation’s subsidiary, ADOR. Its members, MinJi, Hanni, Danielle, HaeRin, and HyeIn have
been catapulted into global stardom with all their songs totaling at least 100 million streams on
Spotify. Listeners may think that NewJeans are just another K-pop group that follows a typical
formula for success in the industry. However, NewJeans did not follow this typical formula and
instead debuted in a way that was brand new to the industry.

To the shock of K-pop fans, NewJeans released their debut single, ‘Attention,’ without
the usual buildup, teasers, or any type of previously released concept. Without any buzz for the
group, CEO of ADOR Min Hee-Jin knew that she had to somehow hook the audience with
NewJeans’ debut music video. As the title of the song suggests, their goal was to grab the
listener’s attention musically and visually as “Attention” is designed to bring in new fans without
buildup or teasers. This is achieved by relating to their teenage audience in Generation-Z with
their trendy Y2K inspired fashion and music concept, a fashion that has not been used by other
K-pop groups beforehand.

NewJeans’ music video features Y2K inspired clothing such as baggy pants, colorful
plastic hair clips, and even an old Yashica film camera and Walkman as accessories. Their Y2K
fashion concept is also represented musically through the song’s R n’ B influences. In my
presentation, I will explain NewJeans’ Y2K fashion concept in their unconventionally presented
debut music video ‘Attention’ and why it is so effective at gaining the support of Gen-Z
teenagers. I will also analyze how the song musically adds to that concept which further gains
their audience’s attention for a successful debut.

Moderator: Moderator: Marlén Ríos-Hernández, California State University, Fullerton
Elena Romero, “Hip Hop and Pink: How the Color Transcended Gender, Sexuality, and Multiple Generations One Hue at a Time”

Whether its bubble gum, Mylanta, hot, or florescent, hip hop has fallen in love with the color pink. While it appears that this is a recent phenomenon, one can trace early roots in hip hop for several decades. Pink, historically coded as feminine in Western culture, has emerged as a symbol of disruption within this framework. This presentation explores the evolving relationship between hip hop and pink, examining how its adoption by artists and audiences challenges traditional notions of masculinity, identity, and aesthetics in urban culture.

From early resistance to pink’s associations with vulnerability and softness to its modern reappropriation as a statement of power and confidence, hip hop has redefined the color’s place in cultural narratives. Acceptability in pink was ushered with Lil Kim and pushed the likes of the Black Barbie herself Nicki Minaj, celebrating 10 years of The PinkPrint album.

While Harlem rapper Cam’ron has been almost synonymous with hip hop’s thrust into pink, it was an Atlanta-based rap duo names Outkast that introduced pink and its Southern flair to fans in 2001 and kept it constant throughout their career. Both Andre “3000” Benjamin (formerly known as Dré) and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton of Outkast wore pink in different ways yet complimented their individual style. Big Boi had a more street, pimp flair while André 3000 had multiple influences – from the late Jimmy Hendrix, the psychedelic period, the preppy era and dandyism, he became the loudest pink dresser of the group. Outkast arrived at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards having Big Boi in furry bottoms. But it would be André 3000, who would push pink to new heights. The color would be infused in their Outkast Clothing Co. brand. One year later, it would be Harlem rapper Cam’ron who would be the talk of the town as he showed up wearing a pink mink fur to a Seventh on Sixth Fashion Shows in 2002. From that moment on, he cemented his pink legacy. This presentation will be adapted from a book chapter co-written by me and Dr. Monica Miller for Fresh, Fly Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style (Rizzoli).

Diana Sanchez, “‘Suciedad Divina’: Tokischa and Embodied Sucia Performance(s)”

Tokischa is a Dominican dembow superstar and fashion icon; notorious for generating controversy
through her explicit lyrics, provocative performance(s), seductive tone, and uncensored display of
queerness. Tokischa’s sense of style plays and integral role to her life and career, it serves as a site for
creative transgression that remixes the lines of respectable gender expression. In 2022 Tokischa and DJ
Marshmello released a song titled ESTILAZO, a term she uses to characterize her eccentric style. I read
the three-minute music video for ESTILAZO as a vehicle to challenge structures of domination through
titillating imagery, vulgar lyrics, and sexual aesthetic excess (Hernandez 2020). In the video, the
protagonist employs a “style of embodied difference” to embark on a journey of transformation (54).
Furthermore, Tokischa’s stylized performance(s) on-stage, in music videos, on social media, and at award
shows demonstrates her dedication to subverting gendered expectations of respectable femininity. For
example, at the 2023 Premio lo Nuestro award ceremony she appeared embellished in a fragmented
corporate suit, with a full face of makeup, and a bushy mustache to compliment her look. In an interview,
she described that her outfit represented the hybridity of masculinity and femininity within us. This paper
understands Tokischa’s manipulation of fashion as a technology capable of transcending logics of
heteronormativity. My analysis is grounded in Jillian Hernandez’s framework of aesthetics of excess and
Deborah Varga’s analytic of lo sucio, wherein sucias exist disobediently and demonstrate the potentiality
to sustain queer joy and futurity. Using textual analysis, I argue that Tokischa recasts suciedad (Vargas
2014) as a source of divine empowerment and pleasure to playfully provoke authority. How does
Tokischa use fashion to agitate dominant narratives that impose racial and sexual difference onto the
Latina body?

Rosa Stern Pait, “‘Then Expul Me’: A Musical Monologue by Kitara ‘George Santos’ Ravache”

Hey you messy bitches! 1 Did you miss your favorite politician to ever spice up CSPAN? America
is so back 2 , and she’s back too - it’s George Santos, on tour in character as his drag persona
Kitara Ravache to finally tell her story - and this time, it’s the honest truth. The setting - backstage at a
run down club, Anywhere, USA. Disgraced former representative Anthony “George Santos” Devolder
lounges in her dressing gown preparing to confess it all night after night. She has spent the long, dreary
years since her expulsion from Congress begging for attention at the newly ascendant Donald Trump’s
table, scrambling for the scraps of notoriety the public is willing to throw her on Cameo, and loitering
around Hermès trying to get offered a Birkin on name recognition alone. Finally, having racked up too
much credit card debt at Ferragamo, she hit rock bottom and decided to return to her true calling.
She’s weary of the pose she had to assume to represent New York’s wealthy 3rd congressional
district. She didn’t want to grovel at the feet of the Republican party - all she really wanted was
fame. When she was a young queen cruising the beaches of Niterói in a fishnet mask, she
thought she was on her way to stardom. But the allure of money and power drew her from her
path into a web of lies and fugly blazers.

Kitara will walk us through a selec

This roundtable proposes an exploration of the iconic queer Los Angeles night, Mustache
Mondays, as a vibrant intersection of popular music, fashion, and creative expression. C0-
founded in 2007 by Ignacio “Nacho” Nava, Mustache Mondays fostered a community where
music, visual culture, and style converged, creating a space for Black and Brown queer
people. Nava’s vision was not just about curating a party; it was about using music and style
to challenge norms and uplift marginalized voices.

Mustache Mondays flourished at a time when LGBTQ+ nightlife was often confined to
spaces that catered predominantly to cisgender, white gay men. What set this night apart was
its embrace of queer and trans people of color, and its celebration of avant-garde aesthetics.
The night became a platform for underground artists, DJs, drag performers, stylists, and
musicians who didn’t fit into more mainstream queer scenes.

At the heart of Mustache Mondays was a fusion of music genres that reflected its eclectic
audience. It drew inspiration from house, techno, electroclash, hip-hop and global diasporic
sounds, all underscored by the DIY ethos that characterized much of LA’s underground
scene. This musical curation not only fostered a sense of community but also offered an
alternative sonic landscape to more homogenized club music.

Mustache Mondays harnessed style not only to reflect the aesthetics of underground queer
culture but also as a site of transformation. Nava embraced avant-garde fashion, encouraging
attendees to express themselves through bold looks that resisted the whitewashed depictions
of LGBTQ culture common in West Hollywood. Mustache became a launchpad for artists
like Kelela and Total Freedom (Bobby Beethoven), where music, performance, and style
coalesced to shape a new vision for queer cultural expression in Los Angeles. Over the years
many musicians came out of Mustache, DJs like Nguzunguzu, producers like Kelman Duran,
and also artists in various realms, like fashion designers Pia Davis (No Sesso), contemporary
artist rafa esparza, and choreographer Ryan Heffington.

In the wake of Nava’s passing, Mustache Mondays continues to resonate as a space where
popular music, fashion, and queer experiences collided, and this roundtable seeks to unpack
its lasting impact on the cultural landscape of Los Angeles and beyond.
Participants will include DJ Josh Peace, Kelman Duran, and Pia Davis, who will share their
perspectives on Mustache Mondays as a site of creative freedom, resistance, and community.
By engaging with these narratives, the roundtable aims to contribute to larger discussions on
queer nightlife, urban space, and the politics of style.

“Punk Feminisms and the Fashioning of an Alterity” includes a listening session of “cacophonous” records
followed by an interview/conversation with the punk scholar and Professor of Gender Studies Mimi Thi Nguyen.
Covering topics from SoCal's punk scene, DIY sartorial practices, to queer BIPOC genealogies of feminisms, we will contexualize punk as a musical genre, a style, and a politics of apposition that does not conform to hegemonic/masculine modes of resistance. We hope to ruminate on how punk as praxis gestures towards alternative modalities of living and being in the world that rupture colonial logics of extractivism, mastery, and self-sovereignty.

Moderator: Abigail Lindo, The Ohio State University

Kwame Ocran, “The Queer Aesthetics of Dionne Warwick: A Fashionable Analysis”
Inducted into the 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at 83, Dionne Warwick is recognized for her popularity as a celebrity and musician. Her musical contributions make her long overdue her academic flowers. Several disciplines including fashion studies stand to benefit from a theorization of Warwick's celebrity; her alternative performances of blackness, interiority, and pop vocalizations immediately come to mind.

While Warwick’s success as an artist refused genre, this paper investigates her style as a queer refusal of overt sexuality. Her sartorial and performative choices demonstrate an opaque interiority existing largely unfettered by the demand for intimate details of our celebrated. Thus, I necessarily turn to Warwick’s peculiar style of dress to listen to her silences.

My work uncovers the queerness of Warwick’s styling as a corollary to the striking quality of her music to transcend genre categorization and artistic performance. Warwick’s refusal to yield to sex to sell is reflected in her wardrobe. Though beautiful, she has never effused the sexual appeal of Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin—a fact that has garnered attention from critics. This study of style examines Warwick's relationships as fashion inspirations throughout her life. It is known that confidants like Marlene Dietrich informed her style evolution; this paper elucidates the extent to which Warwick's kinship ties developed her presentation.

Archives of film, documentary, criticism and text help reveal the sartorial implications of Warwick's image: the sophisticated, romantic grand dame in couture who stops short of the boudoir. Dionne Warwick’s fashion evolution reveals more about her queerness than she may be willing to divulge. Her fashions speak volumes—the meaning of which, when deciphered, address an otherwise opaque interiority that refuses to be laid bare.

Lucretia Tye Jasmine, “Groupie Glamour of the Golden Era: 1965-1978”

This is a paper about glamour from the golden era of groupies, 1965-1978. My original research is based on interviews from my mixtape zine, The Groupie Gospels.

Groupies emerged on the cusp of Second Wave Feminism as the avant-garde of the sexual revolution, embodying the intersection of feminism and music. Colorful companions to the new counterculture royalty, groupies accompanied or followed musicians from city to city, becoming almost as famous as the musicians. 

Groupies stood out with their experimental style. Satin hot pants and platform shoes! Feather boas! Flowers in their hair! Trailing gossamer and gauze and lace-trimmed handkerchiefs, groupies created a style based on thrift store finds, a living history in fashion that endures today.

When Rolling Stone photographer, Baron Wolman, was backstage one night after a concert in the late 1960s, he noticed the stylish groupies, and decided to photograph them. He told me he wanted to take “celebratory portraits of people I admired.” Rolling Stone was going bankrupt, but the 1969 issue devoted to groupies saved the magazine. Groupies, since then fetishized as sex objects for use with their clothes off, actually commanded attention with their clothes on. Musicians wrote songs about them.

Groupie glamour determined the look of music stars. The carnival couture of the GTO’s - known as a "groupie" group - influenced the Alice Cooper Band; GTO, Pamela Des Barres, made shirts for Jimmy Page and Gram Parsons; Betty Davis advised Miles Davis how to dress; Sable Starr and Iggy Pop shared clothes.

Groupies from the golden era challenged convention with their nonconformist fashion. Female fans, navigating patriarchy, expressed their own agency through fashion. They were "stomping down the street with a girl-power vibe", as Holly George-Warren told me. Groupie glamour might well be activism that we need.

Ma'Chell Duma, “Bangs, Bras, and Bags- Pop's High Femme Aesthetics”

The symbiotic relationship between fashion and music is as creative as it is consumptive. Using the visual markers of hairstyles, statement bras, and designer bags we can journey through feminine expression in popular music’s lineage. Though fashion is often dismissed as vapid, there are instances where the seemingly surface is in fact a much deeper story. One such example are Aretha Franklin’s famous oversized luxury bags, always on stage, readily at her side. In my recent 33 ⅓ on Cardi B, I exploded this story, learning that the bags were not a flex, but a sad function of an industry that marginalizes Black women. Having been cheated and stolen from so many times, Aretha insisted on being paid in cash, held in the vast sums in her Louis Vuitton right on stage and in her sight line- Or as I put it in the book “It is out
of necessity, disrespect, and exceedingly good taste that Aretha Franklin invents the proverbial “Money Bag” femme rappers boast of now.

Florence Blackwell, “Baddies…Pose for Me: …”

Baddies are everywhere — in music, television, art, fashion, social media, and on the street — embodying a movement and aesthetic that, as Jillian Hernandez describes, embraces an “aesthetic excess” of hypersexuality and hyperfemininity as a personal and political refusal of white, cis-hetero, middle-class, and ableist norms. These racialized and gendered aesthetics are saturated into our audiovisual cultural landscape, yet the working-class Black and Brown trans femmes and queers who originated these looks remain marginalized, even as mainstream society appropriates their cultural contributions. Without the involvement of trans and queer people of color, contemporary visual and sonic culture would lack its defining glamour and swag. However,their absence has led to the perception of “baddie aesthetics” as inherently anti-trans and anti-queer. This research seeks to illuminate how “baddie aesthetics” is a distinctly trans and queer of color aesthetic praxis.

In this paper, I will trace the evolution of the “baddie” figure through a critical analysis of audiovisual media, focusing on the oft-overlooked role of trans and queer of color innovators who work behind the scenes to shape the aesthetics of famous heterosexual celebrities. I will also examine how historical narratives have erased queer and trans cultural producers and how these artists continue to challenge the cis-hetero sensibilities embedded in “baddie aesthetics.”

When stars like Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Nicki Minaj post selfies, their looks and sense of individuality are often praised, yet little attention is paid to how they’ve constructed their “baddie” personas. Lyrics like Beyoncé’s “I woke up like this,” reinforce the notion that celebrities effortlessly achieve their “flawless” appearance, sidelining the Black and Brown queer and trans artists who help form that aesthetic. While the widespread appropriation of “baddie aesthetics” has generated a polyvocal discourse, it also normalizes the marginalization of the trans and queer cultural producers central to it.

Stephen Hudson, “How Metallica Created Extreme Metal: Battle Jackets, Connoisseurship, 
and Cover Songs as Genre Work”

This paper cross-references close analysis of Metallica’s musical utterances (timbres, guitar
techniques, cover songs, and original compositions) with their “battle jackets” full of patches
advertising their favorite bands and their actions and verbal discourse as fans, collectors, and
tastemakers, in order to build a picture of how their thrash metal style and the nascent extreme
metal ideology of progressionism grew out of their selection, imitation, and iteration of songs
and styles from the preceding New Wave of British Heavy Metal. I draw on Eric Drott’s theory
(2013) of genre as grouping, and Diana Taylor’s theory (2003) that performances are “acts of
transfer” for “repertoires” of embodied knowledge that is inevitably changed as it is recalled
and reenacted, to show how Metallica gradually changed the NWOBHM as they cited it. As
fans, Metallica’s members created their own selections of the fastest and heaviest NWOBHM
bands, promoting a heavier and faster vision of the genre before they even recorded a note of
their own music. They then selected some of the fastest and heaviest NWOBHM songs, and
made them even faster and heavier in their own cover versions. I show how their small changes
in speed and articulation of certain riffs and techniques created more substantial qualitative
shifts that gradually became the characteristic elements of their own original compositions, in a
new style that would eventually be called “thrash metal.” By combining and synthesizing
observations about the mundane and musical dimensions of Metallica’s engagement with the
NWOBHM, this paper shows how style change and genre creation can occur gradually and
cumulatively, through the kinds of things that everyday fans and musicians do, rather than
some kind of grand, genius, visionary, big-idea concept.

Akiko Konishi, “Game Changers in Rock: An Immersive Experience in Visual-kei Metal
Music and Fashion”

This session will examine the Visual-kei metal movement as a significant phenomenon in
both musical and sociohistorical contexts. It will articulate how the genre reshaped the concept of
identity in relation to gender and performance art, as bands like X Japan and Luna Sea challenged
traditional gender norms by combining elements of feminine and masculine aesthetics.
Through a hair-to-toe demonstration of customary V-kei metal performance attire, and a piano
performance and analysis of selected works, the session will explore various global and cultural factors
that influenced the compositional and presentational styles of representative artists. In addition, the
session will invite listeners to experience (try on) the outfits and discuss how the genre embraced the
idiosyncrasies of pairing “heavy” music with feminine stage attire, in a similar manner to the traditional
Japanese aesthetics of Kabuki and Noh. Featured artists will include David Bowie, Cheap Trick, Mötley
Crüe, Glay, Buck-Tick, Luna Sea, and X Japan.

Sadie Sartini Garner, “Painted Handmaidens of Death: Black Metal’s Queer Authenticity”

“Only Black is true, only Death is real!!! Gore is trend!” So writes Pelle Ohlin—better known as
Dead, one-time singer for foundational Norwegian black metal band Mayhem—in a letter to a
likeminded fan. “Gore” was how Ohlin and others in the black metal scene referred to what the
rest of the world called “death metal,” the brutal, technical form of extreme music ascendant in
the late 1980s and early 1990s against which bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone defined
themselves. To these young Scandinavian metalheads, the slasher-movie aesthetics of death
metal were nothing more than a passing fad, and, as such, were ultimately insincere, no matter
how disgusting their album covers might be. If the “wimps” who were “jumping on the Death
metal bandwagon” ever saw a real corpse, Ohlin writes, they would “shit their pants.” True to his
ethos, Ohlin was known to inhale the stench of dead crows before performing to keep death in
the fore of his mind.

Black metal’s insistence on authenticity—on treating its music as a kind of social
documentary—would eventually lead to a total erasure of the line between art and reality with
Dead’s death by suicide, Burzum’s Varg Vikernes murder of Dead’s Mayhem bandmate
Euronymous, and the series of church burnings perpetrated by members of the Norwegian
black metal community. Before the carnage, how was this authenticity communicated? In part,
by rejecting death metal’s white sneakers and sweatpants for all-black everything, leather,
chains, spikes—and, most famously, corpsepaint. My essay will examine black metal’s
peculiarly defined—but seriously believed—definition of authenticity, using an existentialist
conception of the self a la Simone de Beauvoir to show how Norwegian black metal musicians
unwittingly queered masculine notions of authenticity by insisting the true self must be
constructed through costuming and makeup.

Marcelo Garzo-Montalvo, “Crushing Colonialism through Black, Indigenous, and (QT)POC Punk
and Heavy Metal”

This listening session will hold a collective space to share our favorite Black, Indigenous, and
(QT)POC punk and heavy metal music. Extreme, underground, and heavy music plays an
important role in our communities – providing an embodied and communal space for liberation,
experimentation, and catharsis amidst a settler colonial and carceral death world. There is
something about loud, dark, abrasive sound that builds communities of resistance and
resonates with our desires for decolonization. Yet, punk and metal aesthetics and communities
continue to be dominated by cis-hetero, white, male identities, imaginaries, and
historiographies. Centering (QT)BIPOC artists and communities allows us to witness how punk
and metal musics have always been important sites of cultural resistance, and have deep roots
in our communities and lineages of struggle. Therefore, this listening session will be a place to
gather these resources and map them together – activating ancestral knowledge systems and
theorizing decolonial futures. Some examples of artists include: Cemican, Alien Weaponry,
Dispossessed, Screaming Toenail, Bad Brains, Death, Los Crudos, Adelitas, I Dont Konform,
Nechochwen, and more. Participants will be asked to share their favorite artists, which will be
added to an ongoing, online playlist, and listened to in real time.

This panel centers Chicana/o and Latina/o punk chola and pachucas/os musical stylings, sonics,
and aesthetics that announce a politics of social critique and refusal. Presenters reflect on the
dissenting potentialities of the pachuco ‘cuban heel,’ the chola fan hair, and the visual noise and
poetics of punk style. These sonic styles are different yet parallel and overlapping as in Michelle
Habell-Pallán’s articulation of “Punk Chola aesthetics,” wherein the various styles of
pachuquismo, chola, punk, and new wave merge (2011). Taken together, the papers in this panel
demonstrate how these sonic and sartorial styles share Chicana/o histories of dissent and enact
strategic refusals of the heteronormative and heteropatriarchal status quo, including neoliberal
proper subjectivity. Silvestre's paper argues that the interplay of visual and sonic elements in
Shizu Saldamando’s artwork emphasizes punk's political capacity to signal futurities.
Highlighting the work of Chicana poet Alma Rosa Rivera, Sepulveda argues how the Chicana
punk musical styles and aesthetics evoked in the poem “Ska y Frijoles” amplifies marginalized
Chicana subjectivities that refuse the status quo. Engaging the “Jalisco” shoe by fashion designer
Willy Chavarria, Galarte’s close reading, situates how style transcends gender boundaries but
more so the potentialities of “heel-ing” masculinity. In Hernandez’s exploration of cultural
productions from the 1990s, she examines chola aesthetics, such as the Chola fan hairstyle that
gained popularity in early 90s beauty salon culture. She argues that these aesthetic expressions
serve as cultural and political forms of resistance, asserting identity against the violence of the
nation-state. The texts discussed in this panel illustrate how the intersecting sonic stylings of
punk chola and Pachuca/o aesthetics engage in an “attitude of distortion and refusal” (Habell-
Pallán 2011) to offer new and creative ways of imagining Chicana/o and Latina/o subjectivities.

INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS

Francisco J. Galarte, “What Heels Chicano Masculinity?”

Chicano fashion designer Willy Chavarria recently declared, “I am the new Chicano Ralph
Lauren, and my clothes are for everybody.” Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired clothing has garnered
him the honor of CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year two years in a row (2023,2024). In this
paper, I engage in a case study of Chavarria’s first shoe design, the “Jalisco,” produced in
partnership with the iconic American shoemaker Allen Edmonds. This study focuses on
Chavarria’s take on the dressy derby shoe and the choice of modifying the traditional shoe design
by adding a 54mm Cuban heel. Chavarria imagines the silhouette as the “new ‘unformal’ shoe
that will transcend seasons, occasions and gender boundaries.” Through a close reading of the
silhouette of the shoe, the sonics of his recent fashion show, and the accompanying ad campaign,
I argue that Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired designs fashion new forms of masculinity informed by
the “stylized and highly visible refusal” of pachuca/o youth (Habell-Pallan, 345).
Moreover, I argue that Chavarria’s design does more than “transcend gender boundaries.”
Instead, his work “heels” masculinity. By invoking the lineage of pachuca/o fashions in these
designs and highlighting the excesses of pachuca/o flamboyance, Chavarria’s garments offer a
new form of racialized, classed, and gendered Chicana/o style. This opens discussions within
Chicana/o style politics as well as new possibilities for Chicana/o subjects to enact a politics of
style that is untethered from regressive heteronormative and heteropatriarchal underpinnings of
the traditional masculine archetypes within Chicano realist aesthetics. In other words,
Chavarria’s heels are designed to keep toxic masculinities at bay and open new worlds where the
wearer can explore the vicissitudes of the pleasure(s) within unbounded brown masculinities.

Bernadine Marie Hernandez, “Your Hair is Infused with Meaning: The Politics, Aesthetics, 
and History of the Chola Backcombing Fan Hair”

This talk examines and interrogates the history and aesthetics of the chola Fan Hair that was
popularized in the early 90’s and took popular culture by storm in the late 90’s. Some call it just
“The Fan,” while others call it “The Aqua Net Wave,” “Prom Bangs,” “Woody Bangs,” “The
Rooster,” or the “Cha-Cha Hair.” Depending on which region you lived in, there were other
names for this hairstyle. The hairstyle required many steps to finish and many tools and products
to produce. It required an intricate knowledge of backcombing to create the perfect fan shape and
a lot of Aqua net aerosol hair spray (and the knock off brands if that was too expensive). It
required beauty salon skills to shape and keep it held up, defying gravity. Where does this
hairstyle come from and why did so many brown women claim this hairstyle as their own in the
early 90s? How is this hairstyle connected to the chola aesthetics?

We know that mainstream culture has commodified chola aesthetics as seen by way of Vogue
covering “Mi Vida Chola” as early as 2013, however, how have chola’s narrated this hair style
and taken it up as a ritual against nation-state violence on their own terms and through cultural
production? Beauty salon culture is deeply connected and central to chola aesthetics and while
chola’s may not go into the salon to get their hair done, they are historically connected to beauty
salon culture; from the backcombing of the Pachuca pompadour, the bouffant and/or beehive, to
the Fan Hair. This talk will look at the different iterations of the hairstyle and the history and
politics that are connected to it in the United States, specifically the geo-political spaces by the
U.S-Mexico border. This talk looks at different cultural productions like the song and video
Scandalous by Psycho Realm, the 1993 film, Mi Vida Loca, Mary Helen Ponce’s novel The
Wedding, Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as series, and Miguel Gandert’s photography of cholas in
East San Jose in Albuquerque, NM.

Susana Sepulveda, “‘Weird & Brown’: Amplifying the Poetics of Refusal in Chicana 
Punk Self-Fashioned Styles”

Chicana spoken word poet and punk Alma Rosa Rivera pays homage to Chicana punk, and more
specifically Chicana punk subjects, in her notable poem “Ska y Frijoles” (2016). The themes of
food, gendered and racialized struggles, and punk musical stylings intermingle within the poem’s
stanzas. Through my methodology of travesando that describes the traversals of Chicana punk
research, I conduct a close reading of “Ska y Frijoles” listening to the visual and sonic stylings
and aesthetics of punk embodied by Chicana subjects, or rather the “weird and brown” (Rivera,
2016). I argue that this poetic homage amplifies the everyday practices of refusal that Chicana
punks enact through self-fashioned sartorial styles and aesthetics that are grounded in but not
limited to punk music. I draw on Michelle Habell-Pallán’s framing of “Punk Chola aesthetics”
that describes the stylistic intersections of pachuquismo, chola, punk, and new wave styles that
the art collective ASCO embraced in the early 1980s and “turn[ed] inside out, using sardonic
humor as part of their social critique” (2011). I underscore that this coalescence of styles and
aesthetics continued to shape Chicana punk social formations and cultural productions well into
the 2000s and can be seen and heard within Chicana / Latina literary works. By close reading and
“listening in detail” (Vasquez, 2013) to the literary soundscapes of Chicana punk in Rivera's
poem, I illustrate how it amplifies and renders visible marginalized Chicana subjectivities that
refuse the status quo, including imposed racialized and gendered expectations.

In the 1980s book, Big Sounds from Small People: The Music Industry in Small
Countries. musicologists Roger Wallis and Krister Malm caustically observed: “Sweden
has given the world ABBA (though their music has nothing to do with their country of
origin).” This panel, convened at a time of tariff-talk and anti-globalization, looks at style
through these fundamental issues. Some pop music is aimed at a domestic market, but
much is made for export. That might be from small countries to regions and global
audiences. Or via racial and genre crossover categories. Using the lessons of Motown,
K-Pop, Max Martin, and Quebec, with likely nods to the British Invasion, country music
of various origins and Eurovision, this panel takes as its starting point the idea that
export music is not just a watered-down product. As pop kicked out of the nest, it
explores non- and anti-domestic style, with implications that range from the role of
government to the mediation of identity.

INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS

Eric Weisbard, The “SweMix” of American Pop, from Abba to Spotify

This presentation, focusing on the band Abba, the guild of songwriters and “SweMix”
producers associated with Max Martin, and the audio music streaming corporation Spotify,
will explore how a small, Scandinavian country has for fifty years redefined mainstream pop
worldwide. Lacking a large domestic market, Swedes crafted music for export, fitting the moods
and needs of consumers rather than unveiling a local scene.

But what makes it Swedish? We can marvel at its scope, feel shaped by its anthems, and still wonder
about its plasticity. I will track a commercial success, the “Swedish miracle,” but also revulsion aimed
at that success, whether 1970s anti-Abba prog-rock scenesters or anti-Spotify teardowns right now.
Swedish-American pop exchanges map a space of remixing, where the dominant language is often
people’s second language and the local gives way to a relentless flow of at times alarming, hybridity. Abba, Martin, and Spotify chose to emigrate from Swedish origins to – quote unquote – “pop.” And they built up equity
in that placeless place.

The choice put them in the tradition of Vilhelm Moberg’s series of novels, The Emigrants, which
made an epic of Sweden as the nation that sent the highest percentage of its people to the United States
in the 19 th and early 20 th century. Abba’s two songwriters, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, created Kristina
från Duvemåla, a musical adaptation of the novels. Having claimed a full stake in a world of Chiquititas
and dancing queens, emigrants Benny and Björn wrote home. These back-and-forths will be my theme:
style at the edge between a small, too-stable locale and a big, ambiguous neighbor.

Euny Hong, “K-Poppenheimer’s Deadly Toy: How the South Korean Government 
Manufactured the K-Pop Industry from Scratch”

Just 70 years ago, South Korea was the world’s third-poorest country. Far from having a
global reputation as a producer of music, it didn’t even have its own national anthem,
and it initially had to borrow the tune from “Auld Lang Syne.” Until a decade ago, if you
were to ask any non-Korean to name a K-pop song, the closest they’d get would
probably have been the theme song from the TV show M*A*S*H*. Now, it’s one of the
world’s wealthiest nations and biggest exporters of pop, having re-invented not just
band-dom, but fandom. In fact, its fandom is so unique that Korean record labels had to
invent the word “fandustry,” a portmanteau word combining “fan” with “industry.” The
world has never seen its like. How did we get from there to here? And what bizarre role
did the movie Jurassic Park play? (Hint: everything)

What most people do not know is that “Hallyu”—the Korean Wave of pop culture
led by K-pop—is no accident. It has been brewing in a South Korean government
laboratory (figuratively… but also literally) for the last three decades. It's the most well-
funded, meticulously orchestrated national marketing campaign in the history of the
world. The goal: to make Korea synonymous with cool, with music leading the way.

Just 12 years ago, after “Gangnam Style” broke YouTube records, many thought
K-pop was a fluke. Well, if so, then it’s a fluke that has already endured longer than the
Beatles lasted as a band. Not only has South Korea produced the world’s top boy band
(BTS), but there’s no end in sight, with some gobsmacking stats: Of the top 10 YouTube
music video debuts of all time, numbers one through nine are K-pop acts, with only one
outlier—Taylor Swift’s ME!—occupying 10th place. The most tweeted-about band is
BTS (even though they’ve been on hiatus since 2022), the band with the most
Instagram followers is BlackPink. How did all this happen? How did Korea make its pop
music fully mainstream, when no other non-English speaking nation managed to pull
this off?

Erin MacLeod, “Distinct Society: Quebecois Music Out of Canada”

The tale of CanCon is one that instills fascination in anyone not familiar with the MAPL
system - a requirement that 35% of any popular music played on radio, must fulfill at
least two of the following conditions: music, artist, performance location or lyrics are
defined as Canadian. This has led to niche artists like B-4-4 and Shawn Desman having
a presence as large in Canada as some major American stars, but it also has
undoubtedly propelled the popularity of now massive stars like Justin Bieber and Drake.

But then there is Quebec. The other of the two solitudes has produced artists like
Arcade Fire, Kaytranada, Grimes, and, of course, Celine. But these artists have little to
no connection to the weekly Franco hit parade. Quebec music has always been defined
as having to be, primarily, French language, but the music that grows up in Quebec and
is exported to the rest of the world expands the notion of what Quebec is, much to the
chagrin of the government cultural brokers.

Kevin Holt, “‘I Come In The Club Shaking My Dreads’: Locs and the Formation
 of a New Southern Black Politic”

Locs have a complex and storied history in black style. Often associated with gestures
in reconnecting to mythic black authenticities and Afro-centric political/religious
movements (e.g. Rastafarianism and Ifa), they have consistently announced various
stances along the spectrum of pro-blackness since the mid-20 th century. Today locs are
extremely common among hip-hop artists from Atlanta. I argue that crunk artists
incorporated locs into their fashions, not as a continuation of the earlier movements, but
as a novel gesture in pro-black disrespectability politics, to borrow from Brittany
Cooper’s deconstruction of ratchetness. The gesture of “shaking your dreads” exists as
a multivalent expression of authentic and un-contained blackness that connotes an
affinity with black radicalism and an eschewing of the “respectable” self-presentation
and/or overt political posturing often expected of the predecessors who wore them. My
proposed paper offers an exploration of this dynamic, following artists like Lil Jon, the
Migos, and Crime Mob.

Alfred Soto, “Make It Straight: Hair Involutions and Revolutions in Male UK Glam Rock”

No male singer sported better hair in rock than Bryan Ferry, Thick, dark, lustrous, it had a sheen
like a new Ferrari, which made Ferry the ideal lead singer and songwriter for Roxy Music. Fans
could trace the evolution of Roxy through his follicle revolutions: from the immobile pompadour
of the early years to the moist loosely combed locks of the Avalon-era

I will demonstrate how the coifs of male glam rock icons and their musical choices
complemented each other. David Bowie’s post-mod wet blanket during the Hunky Dory era
matched his quiet subversions of singer-songwriter rock, followed by the magnificent henna-hair
cockatoo of Ziggy Stardust. The insouciant curls and the in-your-face flash of Marc Bolan and
the New York Dolls. As the acts entered the 1980s, I will show how the age offered divergent
paths: a more conservative look for Ferry and in the case of Bowie a regrettable attempt to out-
mullet contemporaries (Bolan, alas, didn’t live to realize his metal guru dreams).

Finally, I will explain the nexus between hair and sexuality. While Bowie’s protean sartorial
shifts suggested polymorphous curiosity, Ferry’s adherence to Old World glamour effaced his
sexual presentation such that he metamorphosed into a Holy Spirit of Tremulous Melancholy by
the time shoulder pads became acceptable fashion for ‘80s men. Things bottomed out at the end
of the decade when Jesus & Mary Chain sang “I don’t care ‘bout the state of my hair” like snotty
kids picking on Grandpa.

Rhonda Nicole Tankerson, “‘I Just Don't Believe It's Fair’: How Black Women Artists 
Use Hair as Symbols of Resistance and Revolution”

“People ask me everywhere, is that really all of your hair? I just tell ‘em if it ain’t, that it sho’ don’t
mean that now I can’t. I just don’t believe it’s fair to judge [a girl] by the length of [her] hair.”
For Black folks across the Diaspora but particularly in America, hair is a subject that has, for
generations, evoked conflicting sentiments of pride, shame, rebellion, and assimilation. In this
funk-laden cut from Graham Central Station’s eponymous 1974 album, bassist and band leader
Larry Graham is likely referencing the Afro–his and others’, one of the most popular and distinct
styles of the 1970s. As Prince would remind us in the mid-2010s, “An afro is not a hairstyle.”
When the Purple One, the Queen of Funk Chaka Khan, and Graham collaborated on an
updated version of the song for Khan’s 1998 NPG Records release Come to My House, “Hair”
took on an even more nuanced meaning being performed by a Black woman musician
renowned for her beautiful, bountiful mane.

Black women’s hair is an eternal site of tension, empowerment, political thought and action.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Black women artists’ follicular expression: from The
Supremes’ perfectly styled wigs to Patti Labelle’s sculpted crown, to Tina Turner’s golden rock
goddess tresses to Chloe and Halle’s majestic locs. For decades, Black women practitioners of
gospel, blues, pop, R&B, funk, and hip-hop have set the trends, embraced and rejected
conventional beauty expectations, and advanced critical conversations through their hair. Black
women musicians’ hair functions as fashion, art, and documentation of the socio-political climate
of the times, and perhaps foreshadows what is to come in entertainment and commerce. In this
presentation, I will explore how Black women music artists’ hair serves as a source of resistance
and revolution.

Alex Diaz-Hui, “Makeup, Hair Salons, and Style in Reggaetón and Latin Trap”

This listening session focuses women and queer emcees in reggaetón and Latin trap
who develop their musical identities through makeup, hair, and fashion. We will begin
with Ivy Queen, often known as La Reina de Reggaetón (The Queen of Reggaetón),
whose performances and interviews often center on her extravagant nails and outfits.
Critics have acknowledged how the political and social critique of Ivy Queen’s music
comes from the interplay between her lyricism and a look centered on her nails and
makeup. Scholars also consider how these looks rely on a contradictory relationship
with anti-blackness in Puerto Rico. Our discussion of hair and makeup in reggaetón and
Latin trap will consider how the genre’s origins come from different sites of musical
circulation that have conflicting traditions and perspectives. Regardless of these
contradictions, Ivy Queen is regarded as one of the early women emcees to receive
airplay on the island and its diaspora. Her work juxtaposes her nails, hairstyles, and
outfits with songs that speak out against police violence and men who pressure women
at nightclubs. Her song “Quiero Bailar” (“I Want to Dance”) has since been used as an
anthem for feminist movements throughout Puerto Rico because of its call for women to
dance without feeling pressured to go home with the men they dance with. This listening
session begins with Ivy Queen’s early performances, both in The Noise and selections
from her debut and sophomore albums, En Mi Imperio and The Original Rude Girl. We
will focus on music videos to “Quiero Bailar” and “In the Zone” to grasp the range of
looks that defined her rise as one of the key icons of old-school reggaetón. We will see
how “Quiero Bailar” inspires makeup trends on TikTok that have channeled recent
attention to her work throughout North America.

The second half of the listening session will focus on Ivy Queen’s contemporary
performances, collaborations, and influence on women in developing scenes in Latin
trap between Puerto Rico, Chile, and Argentina. “Mami” by Paloma Mami interpolates
lyrics from “Quiero Bailar” to narrativize rejecting a man’s advances. Latin trap
superstars Young Miko and Villano Antillano have both discussed Ivy Queen’s role in
their musical upbringing and often allude to makeup trends in the early 2000s. Ivy
Queen also has collaborated with women in contemporary Latin trap, including Maria
Becerra. We will discuss how these artists use the form of the music video to visualize
Latinidad through makeup, fixing one's hair, and the act of getting ready for a night out.
We will compare these looks and ask how they are inspired by, and sometimes
appropriate, aesthetics from hip-hop and American popular music. Time will also be
given for the group to share songs that resonate with these concerns of style, gender,
and rebellion in modern music, including Princess Nokia, and Kali Uchis, among others.
Participants are welcome to bring makeup.

This panel explores how female musicians in our contemporary moment have
developed various “feminist styles.” It argues that deploying a “feminist style” through
fashion allows these musicians to subvert traditional norms associated with gender. This
panel demonstrates how such subversions have led to the fashioning of new forms of
performance and narrative, as well as genre and identity. It concludes that “feminist
styles” shift how popular music sounds and looks, and who it is understood to represent.

INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS 

Izzy Fincher, “Guitar Girls in Bikinis: Sexual Objectification, Performative Masculinity, 
and Feminist Fashion on Guitar Magazine Covers”

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, became the fifth woman ever featured on the cover
of Guitar World magazine in 2017. With her signature Ernie Ball guitar, St. Vincent
poses in an oversized bikini print t-shirt – a feminist fashion statement intended to
highlight the hypersexualization of women in guitar magazines. In guitar trade
magazines, women are primarily depicted as groupies or glamour models in
advertisements and media content, illustrating the use of sexual imagery to appeal to
male consumers and reinforce the masculinization of the instrument. This paper
investigates the sexual objectification of female guitarists on the covers of two widely
circulated guitar magazines, Guitar World and Guitar Player. The cover artists featured
in this study include Nita Strauss, Sophie Lloyd, St. Vincent, Orianthi, Joan Jett, Susan
Tedeschi, Kaki King, and Bonnie Raitt. Through the framework of a feminist critical
visual analysis, this study investigates the intensity and degree of sexualization found in
photographic representations of female guitarists through the lens of objectification
theory, gender performativity, and performative masculinity of electric guitar.

Dan DiPiero, “‘(Revolution) Girl Style (Now!)’: Crushes and Femme 
Performativity in Indie Rock”

While the idea of “girl style” came to national prominence with the advent of the riot grrrl
movement, what came to be known as “indie pop,” “C86,” “cutie,” or “twee” music had
been coalescing aesthetic expressions around traditional markers of adolescent
femininity at least since 1983. Arguing for a reading of indie pop as “soft femme”
expression (Andi Schwartz 2020), this paper traces the status of the crush in indie rock
from the 80s through today, arguing that the queer and feminist artists at the forefront of
the contemporary indie revival deploy and manipulate romance narratives in a variety of
ways that draw from the past in order to continue subverting hegemonic norms. Actively
aware of rock history and the role that masculinity has played in overdetermining
cultural imaginaries of the music, bands like that dog., The Softies, SASAMI, and Black
Belt Eagle Scout self-consciously and creatively work with romance narratives using a
variety of strategies as a part of their larger reshaping of the genre, a renegotiation that
has shifted how indie rock sounds and who it is understood to represent.

Resisting longstanding assumptions that treat women and queer folks’ romantic lives as
inconsequential, the first part of this paper outlines a turn to the “crush” as a
methodological perspective in popular music studies. Subsequently, I trace recent
developments in queer and feminist indie rock, particularly along the affective
orientation I have called “Big Feelings.” Finally, I analyze three techniques
contemporary bands use to subvert traditional romance narratives in rock music.
Ultimately, I suggest three categories of analysis for considering work by bands working
in the tradition of what Kate Siegfried calls the “grrrl crush,” (2019) including love songs
that undermine heteronormativity, love songs about objects other than romantic
partnership, and ostensible love songs that artists insist actually aren’t.

Kate Grover, “Revolution ‘boy’ Style: boygenius Fashions the Self-Aware Supergroup”

It’s safe to say that boygenius, a collaboration between musicians Lucy Dacus, Phoebe
Bridgers, and Julien Baker, are aware of their status as an all-women rock band.
Whether dressing up as 90’s rockers Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone, paying
homage to The Beatles’s Ed Sullivan Show performance during their SNL musical guest
spot, or referencing the gendered parameters of genius in their group name, Dacus,
Bridgers, and Baker utilize various platforms to bring attention to their difference from
the male-dominated pantheon of rock history. At the same time, boygenius revels in
contradictory gender expressions, using queer embodiments to question gender norms
and make fun of rock culture’s reverent posturing. Like the feminist bands of the 1970s
who parodied cock rockers’ macho, and the Riot Grrrl punk rockers who encouraged
women to start bands as a means of disrupting the status quo, boygenius deconstructs
rock and roll’s assumed “maleness” to create space for fellow girls, gays, and theys. In
this paper, I examine how boygenius’s use of fashion, rock iconography, and tongue-in-
cheek performances of “female masculinity” situate the band within a linage of feminist
rockers critiquing the genre’s patriarchy.

Ajitpaul Mangat, “‘spill ur GUTS’: Olivia Rodrigo, Merchandise, 
and Asian American Women Who Holler”

Cathy Park Hong, in Minor Feelings, describes coming across a new kind of Asian American woman during her teaching: Hong contrasts the “self-hating” Asian American women of her generation who “sat there meekly like mice with nice hair” with the Asian 2.0 woman who is “empowered and politically engaged and brilliant.” In this paper, I argue that Filipino American singer, Olivia Rodrigo, embodies the Asian American women of today who, as Hong puts it, are “ready to holler.” I begin by considering how Rodrigo’s development as an artist reflects Hong’s assertion that she herself “struggled to prove herself into existence:” I chart Rodrigo’s transformation from representing “minor feelings” (to borrow Hong’s term) on her first album, Sour, to expressing “rage and dissatisfaction” on her second album, Guts. I focus on how the t-shirts that Rodrigo sells as merchandise for her Guts World Tour exemplify her burgeoning voice: these t-shirts feature variations of the slogan “spill your guts,” with some depicting Rodrigo spilling her “guts” while shouting. Such a slogan is far from empty, I demonstrate, as Rodrigo has used proceeds from her tour to support her charitable organization, Fund 4 Good, and “community-based nonprofits that champion girls’ education, support reproductive rights and prevent gender-based violence.” I contend that this clothing has contributed to the creation of a political space during Rodrigo’s tour performances within which young women are empowered to voice their solidarity with other women. Such a space, I emphasize, is intersectional, with Rodrigo creating t-shirts featuring a phrase, “Perfect All-American Bitch,” that mocks her status as a “model minority,” an identity that has been used to isolate Asian Americans by pitting them against other minority groups. Rodrigo can thus, I conclude, be understood to use clothing to respond to Hong’s urging of young Asian American women “to talk.”

Moderator: Frank Meegan

Jacob Cupps, “Countersurvelliant Sampling in King Vision Ultra & Algiers’ SHOOK WORLD”

From the use of AI for sample detection to the admission of rap lyrics as evidence in
criminal trials, the last decade has seen a renewal of surveillant attitudes towards hip-hop’s
cultural practices, concurrent with a right-wing authoritarian shift in US politics. This paper
examines one type of disruption in the face of this return, emergent in the musical practice
of the Brooklyn-based DJ and producer King Vision Ultra. Theorizing in dialogue with the
artist, I combine my interviews with KVU and close readings of several tracks from his LP
SHOOK WORLD (2023), a collaboration with the post-punk band Algiers, to demonstrate
how sampling within the “sonic lineage” of a hip-hop tradition can at once affirm and protect
the cultures most directly impacted by this authoritarian shift while agitating and
undermining its attendant logics.

My analysis highlights the diversity of sampling’s discursive functions. On SHOOK
WORLD, some “stolen” instrumental samples pay homage to a musical artist or style while
others aesthetically indict the artist that recorded them; some spoken samples espouse
beliefs congruent with the artists’ decolonial, collectivist worldview while others document
the various ideologies justifying the forms of state violence increasingly carried out in the
New York subway system. None of these sampling practices are new, per se: indeed,
foundational hip-hop studies texts document these overlapping discursive functions during
digital sampling’s adolescence (Rose 1994; Schloss 2004). However, their continued use
attests to hip-hop’s current subcultural practitioners’ ability to retain some capacity to thwart
cultural forces of surveillance and authoritarianism, even as hip-hop has attained its own
form of cultural ubiquity. Although narrating this dominant/subcultural split risks
romanticizing hip-hop as an ever-insurgent cultural practice, I alternatively conclude that this
dissonant coexistence supports Greg Tate’s (1996) observation that hip-hop is “perverse
logic of late capitalism pursued by an art form.”

Frank Meegan, “Freak Fashion and New York Independent Music: 
Utopias of Obscured Identity”

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the New York independent rock scene has
metamorphized to host multiple genres at the same venues, including rock, electronic, and
experimental music. Despite the scene’s mutations, New York independent musicians and
organizers continue to forge connections in art and fashion worlds. Many New York musicians
are visual artists and, in recent years, some Brooklyn music scene participants have adopted
freak fashion as a creative expression. Nightlife-goers known as “freaks” dress in extreme
garb and cultivate aesthetics drawn from performance art, while celebrating gender
inclusivity and racial diversity. These revelers sometimes wear clown face paint or
makeup that subverts human features. Some have body-modifications and others wear
grotesque outfits influenced by science fiction. Freak theorist Renate Lorenz argues that
freak fashion can be seen as a radical practice within queer and camp cultures as it
challenges and obscures foundational assumptions, norms, and limits of the self, of
identity, and of the body.

This paper contributes to freak theory by considering the relationship between
freak fashion, artistic expression, and musical practice in New York. Local scene
participants use new media platforms like Instagram to promote their fashion
experiments, which can dovetail with musical careers and record promotion. Musicians
perform at Do-it-Yourself (DIY) venues that exhibit sculpture, painting, and multi-media
performance to foster an elevated and unconventional atmosphere that confounds
spatial and temporal norms. I feature musician and costume designer Lust$ickPuppy,
whose music practice and fashion design challenge conventional identity as they create
music that redefines punk. I show how freak fashion, visual expression, and music
practice embody utopian ideals that manifest at DIY venues, in the local New York
scene, and online.

Chi Chi Thalken, “Dystopian Swagger: The Style of New York’s Underground Hip Hop 
Scene in the ‘90s”

When independent New York hip hop trio Company Flow dropped their album, Funcrusher Plus,
in 1997, a lot of new things came to the forefront – business models, production techniques,
lyrical subject matter, and flow. Another aspect that deserves just as much discussion is the
look of this new branch of hip hop. From the sci-fi/dystopian artwork of artists like Matty Doo,
who designed the covers of Organized Konfusion’s Extinction Agenda and Company Flow’s
Funcrusher Plus, to the incorporation of comic art by Keo X-Men for Operation Doomsday, to
the minimal abstract art of M. Sayyid for Antipop Consortium, there was a distinct look within
this new branch of hip hop that both paid respect to hip hop’s roots while also pushing it in new,
unexplored directions. In this presentation, I will be examining the look of Underground hip hop
in New York’s scene of the mid to late ‘90s, talking with both the graphic designers, graffiti
artists, and musical artists who helped shaped this new niche of hip hop and give it a visual
language that matched its audible style. We’ll dive into the unique influences that converged to
make all this happen, but also explore the set of circumstances around technological
development that also shaped the look.

Victor Szabo, “‘People Who Mess With Weird Sound’: Hearing Personal Styles of DJing 
in the Contemporary US Rave Underground”

While some music writers (e.g. Thornton 1995, Reynolds 2011) have discredited undergrounds
as untenable in late capitalism due to porous cultural boundaries and ubiquitous media, the term
“underground” continues to circulate in global EDM culture as an evidently meaningful descriptor
of DJ practices and club/rave scenes, often without imputing purity or authenticity to them. Notably,
writers have long substantiated dance undergrounds through reference to DJs’ styles of programming
and mixing, which marked distance from “professional” standards, and which sanctioned spaces of
safety for minoritized participants (Harvey 1983, Hadley 1993). Music scholars have since mapped
out stratified underground(s) relative to egalitarian attitudes, DIY ethoses, and avant-garde aesthetics
(e.g. Hutton 2006, Harrison 2009, Graham 2016, Garcia Mispreta 2023).

This presentation expands upon the aforementioned scholarship by examining how styles of DJing cultivate contemporary US rave spaces as undergrounds, and indeed perform a regulatory function for them relative to EDM mainstreams. To do so, I draw on my interviews with, and analyses of sets by, self-described underground DJs ADAB, Carlos Souffront, CCL,Furtive, Jake Muir, Kiernan Laveaux, and Yessi, constellating their stylistic tendencies and ways of understanding them. Taking a page from Sontag’s “On Style,” I describe how these DJs make audible their idiosyncratic personalities by troping on generic conventions of programming and mixing, charging their work with a sense of historicity, or what they commonly call “intention.” Ironically, these musical personalities emerge through attitudes of self-humbling and spiritual reverence, in contrast to mainstream DJs’ demonstrations of technical mastery and physical power. Moreover, these particular DJs’ personal styles sanction spaces of freedom and belonging for diversely minoritized participants by becoming legible as both psychedelic and queer, expressive cultural matrices that have enlivened EDM undergrounds—and kept out the squares—since disco.

Lulu Le Vay, “DJing As a Form of Resistance: The Importance of Visibility and Ageing 
As a Woman in Dance Music Culture”

The dance music scene, with its roots in countercultural movements, has always been a space for challenging norms and embracing diversity. However, one critical conversation remains underdeveloped: the visibility of ageing women in this industry. This proposal seeks to explore the significance of ageing visibly as a female DJ, framing it as an act of resistance that is essential for dismantling prejudices and fostering inclusivity.

Ageing in dance music, particularly for women, is often seen as a limitation rather than a strength. The culture’s emphasis on youth perpetuates a narrative that sidelines older artists, devalues their contributions, and reinforces societal ageism. For female DJs, this creates barriers to creative development, as they are pressured to conform to narrow, age-based expectations. By continuing to perform and thrive visibly in the scene, ageing female DJs challenge these stereotypes.

This act of resistance is more than personal. It is a cultural imperative. When ageing women are visible, they create a ripple effect: inspiring younger generations, normalizing diverse representations of women, and providing a blueprint for sustained creativity. Moreover, this visibility contributes to safer and more inclusive environments where women of all ages feel valued and supported in their artistic journeys. The current and historical landscape has sady witnessed a number of women in dance music and dj culture who have chosen to end their lives through suicide. This emphasises the importance to exploring the pressures women are under in this field, as well as the importance of discussing these issues within inclusive and supportive research environments.

The paper will examine key examples of female DJs who have defied ageist norms, analyze the structural barriers they face, and propose actionable strategies for shifting the narrative. In making the case for ageing visibly as resistance, this presentation will affirm that inclusivity in dance music isn’t just about who is present but also about who feels empowered to stay. This shift is essential for ensuring a thriving, equitable, and creatively limitless future for all artists.


Raymond Kyooyung Ra, “Deep Inside”


Merriam-Webster defines “whack” as a verb that means “to strike with a smart or resounding blow.” A formal movement used amongst gay men in the 1970s Los Angeles underground punk dance scene, “whacking” involved the dancer’s visual and textural translation of club music beats through their body – an embodiment of sound and energy, a corporeal representation of the onamonapia. The sharp arm strikes that came to be called whacking by their originators later crystalized into a disco genre of its own while retaining elements of the punk dance such as the dramatic poses inspired by films and theater, as well as elaborate arm twirls that stylized action sequences from martial arts films and gymnastics techniques. As the dance garnered national popularity with exposure through the variety television show Soul Train and mainstream musical artists such as Diana Ross, dancers began using the alternate spelling “waacking” instead of whacking in order to semiotically disassociate the genre from its gay origins, the sensorial and affective messiness of queer nightlife and dance floor, as well as the word’s salacious connotations to lunacy or male masturbation.

Returning to what I have referred to as the “texture” of sound – as many dance and movement artists
have interpreted the term ‘musicality’ – I propose a showcase of the Los Angeles-local queer art form waacking
for Pop Con 2025. I envision this performance to be accompanied by an approximately 3-minute edited track
of Hardrive’s “Deep Inside.” Using the simplistically sophisticated and iconic house beat structure, as well as
the sampled vocals of Barbara Tucker, I want to highlight the labor of the body that can transform the technology of music into new feelings, sensations, and “energy” or the materiality of queer dance. And as queer dancers have historically expressed on dance floors and Tucker sings, maybe “all we need is love” at this time, when we most need something to dance for and about.

Abigail Lindo, “Jungle’s Choreosonic Liveness: Black Acousmaticity 
and Memory on (and Beyond) the Track”

UK band Jungle saw great commercial success in 2023, with the release of their song “Back on 74,” which
featured vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Lydia Kitto. Band members Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland
founded the band in 2013, and quickly gained a following from their grandiose dance sound captured in recorded tracks interweaving funk, (neo)soul, and disco to produce something that simultaneously sounded futuristic while ushering the past into the present. This temporal distortion is supported by recording techniques that communicate era/age and transformation as an aspect of songs– something further created using dramatic, one-shot music videos furthering the sonic aesthetic as a visual reality – I argue, with specific capitalist-driven aims.

This panel brings together scholars exploring Chicanx/Latinx experiences at the
intersections of music, fashion, and identity across diverse subcultures and
geographies, emphasizing how sound and style become tools for negotiating belonging
and resistance. In their own musical world, each paper underscores how sound and
style are the building blocks of building and rebuilding Chicanx/Latinx identity at the
personal, collective, and transnational horizon. Together, these papers explore the diversity
of Chicanx/Latinx music and fashion interests and the nuances of how music and fashion act
as mediums for finding yourself and “your people,” even if those people are outsiders or on the
other side of the planet.

INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS 

Eddy F. Alvarez, Finding Sequins in the Rubble and Sonic and Style Memories
of Jotería in Los Angeles: An Autobiographical Perspective

Reading Richard T. Rodriguez’s book, A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic
Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022) inspired part of this paper, the
author’s sonic memories transporting me to my own childhood and teen sonic
memories, and to what Francisco Galarte calls “style memories” ( 2015). Using the
concepts of “jotería listening” or listening queerly and carefully to present and past
sounds, music, and memories, through a queer Latinx lens, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s
“autohistoria-teoria,” I stitch together memories of my nine-year-old self listening to both
English language artists like Madonna and Stacy Q as well as Mexican pop bands and
singers like Flans and Gloria Trevi and Mexican regional music like Los Tigres del
Norte, memories of how I created extravagant fashion designs on cardboard paper or
put together outfits with my sister to recreate music videos, memories of Jonathan, a
precocious awkward, queer Central American kid and my neighbor, a few years older,
who dressed like Prince, talked to me about the new wave scene, and allegedly went to
parties where he met Prince and Apollonia, and memories of my high school days,
listening to house music, going to Arena nightclub, and shopping for polyester shirts,
golfer pants, mechanic shirts, and furry coats at vintage stores like Goodwill, Salvation
Army, and Aardvark’s on Melrose Ave. These musical, sonic, fashion and style
memories are central to the autobiographical foundations of my theorization of “finding
sequins in the rubble” a framework for how jotería in Los Angeles find joy, love and
community in the midst of and despite violence, trauma, and debris of many forms.

Kristy Martinez, Finding Emo in the S.G.V. 

I will explore the fashion and impact of subcultures in the San Gabriel Valley in Southern
California, with special attention on the revival of the genre of Emo (emotional hardcore)
in the early to mid-2000s. Emo fashion typically rejected gender stereotypes-- an
androgynous style with band t-shirts, red flannel, black eyeliner, femme skinny jeans,
canvas shoes, chunky skateboard shoes, cowboy boots, or sneakers. Popular
accessories of emo include snakebite lip rings, bracelets, studded belts, and scarves.
Scene hair was either teased, side swept heavy bangs, straight jet-black dyed hair,
raccoon streaks, razor severely cut hair, extensions, and bright colors. Themes in emo
lyrics, imagery and its fashion include fatalism, birds, roses, and broken hearts. Post 9-
11, there was a theatrical, goth and vaudeville element with bands like Avenged
Sevenfold, My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. I argue that emo in the
2000s was the antithesis of the colorful palette of Y2K style, which has made a
comeback recently--Von Dutch wear, Ed Hardy, velour, reality television, bubbly pop,
and heiress/debutante obsession. In regard to displaying the fashion, I look to social
media platforms (still here or gone), such as MySpace, Photobucket, LiveJournal,
Facebook and the ever popular Los Angeles and Inland Empire nightclub photos.
I will use the work on emo in Mexico by scholar Marissa Lopez and explore how
households of color rejected or embraced emo. I include the Black emos that inspired
me, living in Moreno Valley with my grandparents.

Jose Anguiano and Nicholas Centino, Rolas y Garras de Nipon: Listening for the
Chicanx-Japanese Cultural Bridges in Music and Fashion

The globalization of Chicanx culture represents a cultural bridge and opportunity for reciprocity between Chicanx cultural makers and Japanese audiences and consumers in Japan. A subset of Working-class and middle-class Japanese youth immerse themselves in Chicanx cultural production by embracing lowriders, Cholo fashion, barrio iconography, tattoos, and music. Recent media coverage about Japanese affinity Chicanx culture brought accusations of cultural appropriation. However, the music scene championed by Shin Miyata represents a mutually beneficial relationship and cultural exchange between Chicanx musicians and their Japanese audience. Anguiano argues that music generates a different type of relationship because music is less reliant on static images (open to stereotypes), and the efforts of Miyata have produced a more direct relationship and not just a distant consumption of cultural products. Nicholas Centino will discuss how fashion functions as a unique medium of embodied cultural exchange. This multi-layered appropriation speaks to the unique ways in which the memories of historic intercultural exchanges can either be deployed or ignored in self-fashioning practices of dress and style. From the 1940s “pachucos” and “pachuke” to today’s contemporary fashion artisans of greater Los Angeles, Chicanx-Latinx/ Japanese fashion vocabularies continue to intermingle in uniquely hybrid ways. Thus, a focus on music and fashion expands our understanding of cultural exchanges and the boundaries of Chicano culture.

Rudy Aguilar. ¿Hecho en Mexico?: Rupturing the National, the Transnational, and the
Hemispheric in Ya No estoy aqui (2019)

As 21st century Mexican society embraces neoliberalism while policing culture within their borders, this paper pays close attention how the Mexican subculture Kolombia ruptures cultural “hecho en Mexico” sensibilities when Monterrey youth adopt Colombian musical identities. Kolombia youth find themselves in opposition to normative articulations of Mexicanidad and are criminalized by greater Mexican society. Their fashion choices and hairstyles place them outside the national imaginary of respectable Mexican citizenry. Yet, it is their unique mutations of Colombian soundscapes which place Kolombias at the center of a two-fold cultural debate. Kolombias’ fusion of Colombian and Mexican sensibilities, including cumbia rebajada, poses challenges to Mexican methodological logics in Mexico and its extended U.S. immigrant communities. The second component of this debate relates to altering Colombian aesthetic beyond recognition to many Latin Americans. This essay explores these ruptures with a close reading of the film, Ya no estoy aqui. I highlight how the Kolombia subculture, as depicted in the film, generates contemporary articulations of rupturing conventional Mexican identities, resulting in what I call Hemispheric Mexicanidad. I argue that Ulises and his Kolombia peers in the film produce a hemispheric Mexicanidad that stimulates excitement and anxiety across the Americas by calling into question static, one-dimensional articulations of Mexican youth identity.

Em Catlett, “Un-silencing Lucille: Unpacking Gendered Narrative Tropes in Contemporary Country Music”

Kenny Rogers’s 1976 “Lucille” models a specific gendered narrative trope found in
country music lyrics: a man meets a woman in a bar, infers that she is in a crisis, and proceeds to
speak on her behalf. The crisis most often involves the woman’s former partner. Regardless of
his physical presence, the other man hinders the narrator’s ability to thoughtfully engage with the
woman at the story’s center. Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City” presents a foil to Rogers’ “Lucille.”
Rather than silencing her emotions, the “Fist City” narrative trope holds a megaphone up to them
by expressing the woman’s desire to commit physical violence.

Susan McClary defined music as “a medium that participates in social formation by
influencing the way we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities.”
(1994) She has challenged scholars to consider emotionality with the same zeal they would
around “faith, ideals, mortality, rebellion, and class.” (1989) In other words, scholars must regard
art about women as inseparable from their lived experience as women. Combining McClary’s
frameworks with feminist scholarship by Barabara Tomlinson and Sarah Ahmed, I interrogate
two contemporary country songs that demonstrate the “Lucille” trope (“She Won’t Be Lonely
Long” (2010), “Blue Ain’t Your Color” (2016)), and two that demonstrate the “Fist City” trope
(“Cowboy Cassanova” (2009), “Gunpowder and Lead” (2015)). Combining poetic and musical
analysis, this paper demonstrates how the “Lucille” and “Fist City” tropes reveal an aesthetic
trend of dismissal and retaliatory outbursts of women’s emotional experiences within the country
music genre.

Xavier Sivels, “‘Ain’t I Pretty?’: Secular Aesthetics and Alternative Performances 
of Black Masculinity in the 20th Century Sanctified Church Movement”

“‘Ain’t I Pretty?’: Secular Aesthetics and Alternative Performances of Black Masculinity in the
20th Century Sanctified Church Movement” looks at how, between 1920 and 1960, three charismatic
leaders in the Black “sanctified church” movement—Bishop Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace,
Prophet James F. Marion Jones, and Bishop King Louis H. Narcisse—mixed over-the-top
public personas and charismatic Protestantism to establish followings primarily popular with
working-class African Americans. Specifically, they adapted ostentatious fashion elements associated
with Black, secular cultures in blues, early rock n’ roll, and R&B to develop successful careers
as religious leaders. In their roles as religious leaders, Grace, Jones, and Narcisse developed cult followings
based on performances of Black masculinity that transgressed mainstream understandings of race,
class, gender, and sexuality in sacred and secular arenas.

Skyler Jones, “‘Faking a Straight Line to Suit Yourself Too Soon?: English Glam Rock,
Déclassé Dandyism, and the Subversion of the Suit

In some of the earliest academic writing on 1970s English glam rock, Dick Hebdige
expressed skepticism of glam’s potential for legitimate cultural rebellion due to its evasive turn
toward “disguise and dandyism.” 1 Yet Hebdige’s critique highlights two of glam’s key strategies
of subversion. This paper considers the relationship between English glam rock and dandyism,
focusing on the symbol of the suit. The archetypal dandy is a fundamentally ambiguous figure
that blurs normative categories of gender, sexuality, and social class—and does so dressed to the
nines in lavishly embellished and accessorized suits. What Susan Fillin-Yeh calls the
“destabilizing aesthetic enterprise” of the dandy can be in part located in this subversion of the
suit, a garment that often operates as a normative symbol of capitalist and patriarchal power. 2 By
queering the suit—making it ornamental, non-uniform, with ambiguous gendered and sexual
coding—the dandy threatens the integrity of these categories.

Glam rock’s threat to both dominant culture and earlier (straight, working-class, male-
dominated) rock music cultures lies in its disguise and dandyism. In placing visual and sartorial
“surface” on equal footing with musical “depth,” glam dandified rock; in a dandy embrace of
ornamental fashion, it disguised its working-class origins beneath an ironic performance of
opulence. While glam fashion is most immediately associated with overtly theatrical
costumes—feather boas, platform boots, space-age attire—the nonstandard suit is central to
glam’s visual aesthetics. From Bryan Ferry’s debonair, perpetually suited look to the ice-blue suit
in David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” video, dazzling, bespoke suits call attention to glam rock’s
place in a dandy lineage. Pulling from queer and Marxist theoretical traditions, I read the glam
suit as a costume of class drag: a camp, déclassé, proto-punk remaking of the suit that
destabilizes both conservative class posterity and traditional working-class politics.

Madalyn Pridemore, “Only A Woman Knows How to Treat a Woman Right:
Chappell Roan and the Queering of Femininity”

Chappell Roan’s music first captivated mainstream audiences’ attention
at a point in her discovery of personal identity where she confidently
affirmed her queer identity in her songs and public appearances, a
development which would continue in her subsequent releases. Her
increasingly uninhibited articulations of lesbian sexuality parallel an
intensification of her Chappell persona, beginning with the conventional
femininity adopted in her earlier music videos and growing into exorbitant
costumes that mirror exaggerations of femininity found often in drag. In this
paper, I will examine Chappell Roan’s concomitant development of a campy,
feminine persona and sapphic identity as a deliberate act of queering
femininity to move beyond a binary, heterosexual viewpoint which requires
women to be “pretty” to be successful in the hetero dating scene to a
female-gaze, queer vision of attraction that does not hinge on outdated
male-gaze beauty standards.

When asked about her style inspirations, Chappell responded, “I love
looking pretty and scary, or pretty and tacky — or just not pretty, I love that
too,” in a feather-adorned outfit on The Tonight Show. Chappell Roan’s
selection of a feminine, drag-inspired appearance empowers her to navigate
the liberation of female sexuality and disrupt gender roles through her
conscious use of camp, connecting her musical project to her childhood
admiration of ultra-feminine aesthetics. Across her songs “Casual,” “Red
Wine Supernova,” “Good Luck, Babe!,” and “The Giver,” and concurrent live
performances, Chappell continuously restates her queer identity through a
variety of campy visual aesthetics explored across multiple performances of
the same song, with each iteration adding to an evolving work-concept.
Chappell intentionally disentangles herself from the exacting standards of
mainstream, heterosexual viewpoints through her combination of overstated
feminine appearance with unmistakably queer narratives, defining a space
for her unrestricted expression of lesbian sexuality within the popular music
space. Chappell Roan’s curation of an explicitly sapphic persona provides
insight to the methods by which queer women have created a space for
themselves within the larger popular music landscape.

Rose Bishop, “Snapshots of the Counterculture: Rolling Stone, Rags, 
and the ‘Bay Area School’ of Fashion Photography, 1967–1983”

This proposed paper considers the role of Rolling Stone magazine (est. 1967), and its
short-lived companion devoted to fashion, Rags (1970-1971), in the development and
popularization of street style photography. Unlike the meticulously staged scenarios
found in the pages of conventional fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s
Bazaar, early issues of Rolling Stone and Rags were illustrated with candid snapshots
of self-styled models, who used clothing to express their identification with West Coast
counterculture and its associated music fandoms. These environmental portraits,
produced at nightclubs, music festivals, and record shops, reveal an alternate tradition
of street photography currently absent from our understanding of 1960s and 1970s
documentary practices. I will spotlight the work of Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone’s first
chief photographer (1967-1970) and the founding editor-in-chief of Rags, as well as
Wolman’s successor at Rolling Stone, Annie Leibovitz (1970-1983), to outline the use of
snapshot photography in these two interconnected publications. Such pictures, I argue,
reflect the shifting politics of beauty, authenticity, and personal expression in 1970s
America, and offer new insight into music media’s relationship with fashion reportage.

Katherine Reed, “‘Music is Serious, Fashion is Silly’:
Rock, Style, and Rolling Stone in the 1980s”

For the magazine’s 20 th anniversary in 1987, Rolling Stone planned a special issue with
David Bowie gracing the cover. The theme? “Style.” The extra-long issue included
photos and an interview with Bowie, along with a feature tracking the fashion history of
musical subcultures. This issue sheds light on RS’s 1980s turn toward fashion and the
way the magazine conceptualized its relationship to style in a changing media landscape.
Rolling Stone came to that focus well after rock and its denizens did, and for different
reasons– choosing to center Bowie’s fashion in 1987 is markedly different from doing so
in 1972.

This paper focuses on that anniversary issue to examine the 1980s connection between
music, fashion, and the press, explored by Hebdige and Davis in earlier contexts. To do
so, I begin a decade before that RS issue, examining glam and Bowie’s affinity for
subversive style and the ways periodicals like Creem began capitalizing on it through
their reader contests and “Eleganza” column. Drawing from new interviews, RS’s
fashion features, and internal magazine communications, I then focus on fashion editor
Laurie Schechter’s 1985-1987 tenure at RS as a turning point in that magazine’s fashion
coverage. I show how Schechter created RS’s fashion section and pushed for style
coverage that went beyond a mainstream advertising focus, and why Bowie as
figurehead (with all his fashion history) was important in that push. The 1985-7
coverage shows how musicians, editors, and fashion professionals understood music’s
importance in forging multimedia identities. While other Rolling Stone editors saw
fashion as a commercial opportunity, Schechter’s choices show the deep connection
between star image and fashion. Assessing the internal discussion around her music-
centered choices, I argue that this moment in fashion coverage reveals the changing
symbiotic relationship among fashion, music, gender dynamics and the press in the
1980s.

Kimberly Mack, “Nasty Gal: A Black Critical Response to
Betty Davis’ 1970s Live Performances”

Between 1973 and 1975, funk-rock singer, songwriter, and producer, Betty Davis,
released three albums, Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, and Nasty Gal. While her
output failed to garner commercial success—radio, in particular, rarely played her
songs—her live shows became infamous. Davis’ onstage fashion certainly played a
role—her style was sexy and fabulous whether she was wearing hot pants and thigh
high platform boots or a trench coat with lingerie underneath (Mahon 237 ). But it was
what she did with her body onstage that caused moral panics among the Black middle
class, the White middle class print media, and unprepared (male) audience members.
Her pelvic thrusts and booty shaking was too much for onlookers unaccustomed to such
a joyous and uninhibited expression of Black female sexuality. The uproar was loud
enough for the NAACP to join protests to stop a Black radio station in Detroit from
playing her song, “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up.” (Mahon 231).

Davis played a series of live shows at the popular New York City club, the Bottom Line,
in June 1974 in support of They Say I’m Different and one show at the same venue at
the end of 1975 after the release of Nasty Gal. There’s virtually no extant live footage of
Davis from the 1970s, so what we know about those performances is largely mediated
through the writings of music critics who are overwhelmingly White and male. This
presentation will focus on Vernon Gibbs, a Black male rock critic who wrote positively
about Davis’ live performances in Phonograph Record, Crawdaddy!, and Penthouse in
1974 and 1976, calling out the underlying sexual repression, and latent sexism, in the
reception to her music. Gibbs’ intervention underscores the vital role that Black rock
critics played in articulating a politics of support and allyship for Black rockers who faced
obstacles in the music industry because of their race and, in this case, gender.