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.
