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POP CONFERENCE 2025

Baby, It’s a Look!
Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge

March 13 - 15, 2025

Los Angeles, California

Presented by USC Thornton School of Music

With the  International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded


Over three exciting days of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and special events, the 23rd annual Pop Conference will explore the deep and complex relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” draws its inspiration from a 2017 Leikeli47 lyric and marks the first joint gathering of PopCon and IASPM-US since 2012.

Fashion and music are inextricably linked, from Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Cab Calloway’s zoot suits, Billie Holiday’s signature gardenia, to The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts. Today, the connection between pop music and fashion remains stronger than ever. Visualizers thrive on streaming platforms; fashion runways in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg deploy pop music to bring designers’ visions to life; and musicians themselves blaze new trails designing streetwear collections and serving as creative directors for major fashion houses. 

But style has always been much more than just commerce or escapism—it has long been a space for critique, refusal, defiance, and radical expression. At its most powerful, style challenges norms, blurs boundaries, and pushes artistic and cultural frontiers, moving us right to the edge. 

This year’s conference returns to USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles just months after January 2025’s catastrophic Eaton and Palisades wildfires, and during a time of profound global upheaval and turmoil. The 2025 “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge” conference presents a remix, an opportunity to reconsider how fashion and music shape the world we live in, reflecting our realities, struggles, and aspirations while leading us toward the very edge of what feels possible.

Open to the public and free admission with conference registration on Eventbrite. Some events may require separate registration.
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Sapphic Pop (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall
Lesbian pop music, despite rare instances of becoming fashionable and achieving chart viability,
has been construed as otherwise niche and embalmed in past eras like the 1970s and 1990s. As
we’ve entered deeper into this millennium, the lesbian/queer woman presence in pop been
revivified through the expansive sexual and aesthetic imaginary of “sapphism,” a fluid and
purportedly trans-inclusive term that signals the explicitly gay, as well as the more implicitly
“queer coded.” Women pop artists, whether they’ve made a point of being out or not, have
inspired an au courant interest in sapphic pop culture comprised of both performers (like
Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, MUNA, Janelle Monae, Girl in Red, Adrianne Lenker, and others),
and a robust fan culture who draw upon the historical archives and intimate reading practices
of lesbian cultures and queer theory—including the resurgence of actual Sapphic poetry and
aesthetics.

This roundtable explores the explosion of sapphic pop over the last decade, while revisiting
some of the historical and aesthetic touchstones of sapphism. Among the topics we plan to
cover include certain controversies about“Gaylorism,” queer baiting, and queer coding more
broadly. We will also parse between flourishing, open and out expressions of sapphic sexuality,
and the loud insinuations or expressions of “allyship” that set themselves ever-so-slightly apart.
Moderators
avatar for Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson

Chair, Gender & Sexuality Studies; Professor, English and American Studies & Ethnicity, USC
Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (November 2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (one of Pitchfork’s best music books of 2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she was awarded Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Trish Bendix

Trish Bendix

Managing Editor at AfterEllen.com, MTV Networks
Trish Bendix is a GLAAD-nominated and NLGJA-award winning writer based in LA and a regular contributor to the New York Times. Her work has been published in Time, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Spin, and Elle, among many others. The former editor-in-chief of AfterEllen and Managing... Read More →
SK

Summer Kim Lee

Summer Kim Lee specializes in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist theory, queer theory, performance studies, and Asian American art, literature, and culture. She is completing her first monograph, currently titled, Spoiled: Hostile Forms and the Matter of Asian American Aggression... Read More →
AM

Alice Motion

Director, University of Sydney
Alice Motion is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School at the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney where they lead the Science Communication, Outreach, Participation and Education (SCOPE) research group. The overarching theme of Alice’s research and practice is to connect... Read More →
MS

Mairead Sullivan

Loyola Marymount University
Mairead Sullivan is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Sullivan is the author of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer. Sullivan’s work sits at the nexus of feminist and queer cultural s... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA
  Roundtable

Attendees (18)


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