Queer Pop QUEER FUTURES Edited by Kathrin Dreckmann, Bettina Papenburg and Jami Weinstein Volume 1 Queer Pop Aesthetic Interventions in Contemporary Culture Edited by Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Freiburg. ISBN [Paperback] 978-3-11-144730-8 ISBN [Hardcover] 978-3-11-079586-8 e-ISBN [PDF] 978-3-11-101343-5 e-ISBN [EPUB] 978-3-11-101415-9 ISSN 2940-2344 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) that is not part of the Open Access publication. These may require obtaining further permission from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942768 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 the author(s), editing © 2024 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. d|u|p düsseldorf university press is an imprint of Walter de Gruyter GmbH Cover image: wacomka – stock.adobe.com [2]. Composing & Artwork: Silvia Sunderer Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com dup.degruyter.com https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dnb.dnb.de http://www.degruyter.com http://www.degruyter.com http://dup.degruyter.com Acknowledgements The editors of the present volume would like to thank their cooperation partners and a number of institutions and individuals who facilitated the international and inter- disciplinary symposium on Queer Pop held at Freiburg University in January 2020, and who enabled the publication of the present volume, which grew out of the sympo- sium. The Center for Popular Culture and Music at Freiburg University hosted and partially funded the event. The Cultural Office of the City of Freiburg, the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg, and the Dean’s Of- fice of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf all pro- vided financial support for the symposium. The Publication Fund of Freiburg University generously supported the open ac- cess publication of the present volume. A big thank you goes to Antonia Lauterborn, Maxi Kisters, Susanna Kothen, Sandra van Opbergen, and Max Höfer for their meticu- lous work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We are especially grateful to Sarah Rüß and Emma Rüter for tirelessly copy-editing all contributions and liaising with the contributing authors. We thank Don MacDonald for his accurate proofread- ing work. Last but not least, Anne Sokoll of De Gruyter / dup deserves special thanks for supporting the idea for the Queer Futures series already in its initial stages, for her continued support, and for seeing this volume through to completion. Without her, the series and the volume would not exist. Berlin and Dusseldorf, February 2024 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-202 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-202 Contents Acknowledgements V Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann Introducing Queer Pop 1 Part I: Queer Aesthetics in Pop Music Kathrin Dreckmann Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato: Eclectic Iconographies of Self-Empowerment in Lil Nas X’s Montero (Call Me By Your Name) 25 Franziska Haug “Work, Work, Work, Work, Work.” On the Aesthetic Production of Gender in and through Pop Music 41 Daniel Baranowski Getting-into. Queerness at Work in Early Pet Shop Boys 51 Part II: Homonationalism and Homonormativity in Television Katharina Wiedlack Russian Bodies We Can Laugh About? Ethnic Drag in Race Conscious Gay US Media 69 Sarah Rüß “We Want the Right Kind of Gay” – Homonormative Representation of Lesbian Characters on Television 89 Creative Interlude Kathrin Dreckmann Artists Talk – A Conversation on Queer Pop 111 Part III: Queer Affect Joanna Staśkiewicz Killing the Pain with Pleasure: On the Queering Effect of the Neo-Burlesque 119 Peter Rehberg Affective Sexualities 137 Part IV: Queer Futures Vera Mader Is She the Girl from the Anti-Video? On FKA twigs’ Chronopolitics 161 Josefine Hetterich Queer Reproduction: AIDS Activist Pasts and Futurity in Pose 177 Notes on Contributors 195 Index 197 VIII Contents Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann Introducing Queer Pop 1 Queer Aesthetics and the Question of Politics Taking as its point of departure the debate between those who argue that queer has no future1 and those who envision the future as the purview of queer,2 this volume considers the potentials and futurities of the concept of “queer” in the field of popular culture. How do musicians, performance artists, film directors, television producers, show masters, and photographers who claim the notion of “queer” contribute to reim- agining possible futures? To offer a variety of answers to this question, the assembled contributions discuss selected case studies from popular music, film, television, maga- zine culture, curating, and performance art. They engage with forms of expression that employ stylistic means such as citation, parody, and remixing, among others. It is our contention that aesthetic considerations play an important role in think- ing about queer futures – be they utopian, dystopian, or otherwise. In the context of media and cultural studies, we understand the aesthetic as the capacity of media envi- ronments and representations to profoundly change and re-orientate our perception. To this end, Queer Pop assembles theoretically advanced research on a range of crea- tive expressions by queer and trans✶ artists that materialize futures and forms of community. Contributions address the aesthetics of sexual and gender identities and engage critically and creatively with persisting hegemonic ways that cultural artifacts are produced and exhibited. They explore how individual artists and artistic and pop- ular cultures translate, appropriate, critique, and redefine the concept of “queer” and the visions of the future it generates. Media studies engage with phenomena from popular culture and scrutinize them critically and affirmatively. In doing so, the field takes up the tradition of critical the- ory and takes inspiration from British cultural studies. The present volume combines stances from British cultural studies with US-American queer theory. It aims at facili- tating a broader diffusion of these perspectives in German-speaking scholarship by connecting Anglo-Saxon theory with discussions in German-speaking academia and cross-linking the latter internationally. Cultural studies direct attention to the representation of subordinate and socially marginalized groups and focuses on the culture of everyday life and popular culture. Scholars working in this field considered and continue to consider how visual repre-  See, for instance, Lee Edelman: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC / London 2004.  See, for instance, José Esteban Muñoz: Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY 2009; Kara Keeling: Queer Times, Black Futures. New York, NY 2019. Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-001 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-001 sentations shape ideas about members of social groups.3 They thus speak to the social sciences, which negotiate the question of “representation” through concepts such as marginalization, cultural participation, equality, and social justice. The present vol- ume follows in this vein and studies how aesthetic and political dimensions relate to one another in queer popular culture, namely to counterbalance those positions in media studies today that deal with “representation” primarily as an aesthetic concept and ignore its political dimension. The contributions assembled here gain decisive theoretical impulses from queer the- ory, a field of study established in literary studies and philosophy in the USA in the 1990s that has been constantly developed ever since. The interdisciplinary orientation of queer studies is evidenced, among other things, by the fact that in its early years, it took literary analyses, statistical studies, and sociological and ethnological observations in everyday and subcultural contexts as starting points for developing theoretical concepts.4 Researching the history of those human beings who suffered exclusion remains a desideratum in the German-speaking world.5 The research approach offered by queer theory, which has undergone rapid development in English-speaking academia over the past thirty years, has hardly been addressed in German discourse until 2010; this approach has been gaining some currency over the past ten years.6 Historians work-  See, for instance, E. Ann Kaplan (ed.): Women in Film Noir [1978]. London 1998; Richard Dyer: Now You See it: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. London / New York, NY 1990; bell hooks: Black Looks. Race and Representation. Boston, MA 1992; Kobena Mercer: Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York, NY 1995; Stuart Hall (ed.): Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London 1997; Richard Dyer: White. London / New York, NY 1997; Kobena Mer- cer: Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary. In: The Masculinity Studies Reader, ed. by Rachel Adams / David Savran. Malden 2002, 188–200.  See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Queer and Now. In: Tendencies. ed. by Michèle Aina Bar- ale / Jonathan Goldberg / Michael Moon. London 1994, 1–8.  See, for instance, Richard Kühl: Der Große Krieg der Triebe. Die deutsche Sexualwissenschaft und der Erste Weltkrieg. Bielefeld 2022. See also Nicholas Maniu: Queere Männlichkeiten. Bilderwelten männlich- männlichen Begehrens und queere Geschlechtlichkeit. Bielefeld 2023, 62–78.  For a historically-rooted and forward-thinking perspective located at the intersection between queer theory and expanded cinema, see Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Queeres Post-Cinema. Yael Bar- tana, Su Friedrich, Todd Haynes, Sharon Hayes. Berlin 2017; for a framing of queer cinema as an art form that articulates the precarious, see Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky / Philipp Hanke (eds.): Queeres Kino / Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären. Vienna 2021; for critical reflections in ac- tivism and artistic practices on the affective politics implied by social inequality and power relations, see Käthe von Bose / Ulrike Klöppel / Katrin Köppert / Karin Michalski / Pat Treusch (eds.): I is for Impasse. Affektive Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst. Berlin 2015; for a reconsideration of queer maculinity and sexuality in German fanzine culture, see Peter Rehberg: Hipster Porn. Queere Männlichkeiten und affektive Sexualitäten im Fanzine Butt. Berlin 2018; for a consideration of queer motives in rock and pop music, see Doris Leibetseder: Queere Tracks: Subversive Strategien in der Rock und Popmusik. Bielefeld 2010; for an examination of a variety of examples from different media, see Sebastian Zilles (ed.): Queer(ing) Popular Culture. Special Issue, Navigationen: Zeitschrift für Med- ien- und Kulturwissenschaft 18/1 (2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1920; for a collection of Ger- 2 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1920 ing on queer German history even go so far as to identify a “queer moment”7 in recent years, referring to a watershed in gender and sexuality studies in German-speaking academia and, more specifically, of academic work at the intersection of a German cultural canon and queer topics.8 In contrast to some current German-language publications in the field of queer studies whose merit lies primarily in the translation of English-language key texts into German, Queer Pop distinguishes itself by demonstrating what the transfer of predomi- nantly Anglo-American theory into cultural studies discourse in German-speaking aca- demia can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary forms of aesthetic expression. Furthermore, the volume explores how studying the various present-day forms of artistic self-staging enables one to gauge the current state of queer theorizing. Unlike existing publications on queer cultures in English,9 the assembled contributions do not consider queer pop culture in isolation as an aesthetic issue but discuss the staging of the body as socially significant representations that address, hin- der, and promote social inclusion and cultural diversity. To position this book on Queer Pop as the first in the Queer Futures series means to make an initial attempt at bringing into conversation queer theory and the aes- thetic expressions by queer artists. We are currently witnessing the successful mar- keting of queer, Black, and trans✶ artistic personas, especially in the field of pop music. This development demands including in the discussion liminality and hybrid- ity – not only as concepts that media cultural theory utilizes but also as practices in art and pop culture. In the context of Black art, liminality refers to an aesthetic strat- egy that underscores the cross-linking of the experience of a traumatic past and the imagining of a possibly liberating future. Temporal hybridity is seen as specific to a jazz aesthetic10 that spans music and literature and includes many more art forms. Pointing to the interweaving of liminality with Black posthumanism and Afrofutur- man translations of canonical readings in the field of queer theory and some exemplary applications of the perspectives offered, see Mike Laufenberg / Ben Trott (eds.): Queer Studies. Schlüsseltexte. Frankfurt 2023.  Sébastien Tremblay: Review of The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism. By Jennifer V. Evans. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. German History 41, No. 4 (2023), 632. See also Sébastian Tremblay: A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as Global Symbol of Memory. Berlin 2024.  The scholarship of Adrian Daub and Ervin Malakaj, among others, provide evidence for this obser- vation. See, for instance, Ervin Malakaj: Anders als die Andern. Montréal / Berlin 2023. We thank the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for this insightful hint and the invaluable comments on the individual contributions and the book as a whole.  See, for instance, Thomas Peele (ed.): Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television. Basingstoke 2011; Stan Hawkins: Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality. New York, NY / London 2016.  In his description of a “jazz aesthetic,” Swiss-US-American scholar of African American literature Jürgen E. Grandt emphasizes temporal hybridity. He writes: “the ‘blackness’ of black culture, of both the music and the literature, in fact thrives on hybridity, harnessing the energies inherent in the tension- filled process of cultural product as well as simultaneously affirming the African American (literary) Introducing Queer Pop 3 ism, US-American scholar of literature Kristen Lillvis stresses that “contemporary black artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and theorists record and reconfigure the black subject’s experiences of liminality by blending references to the past and pres- ent with predictions for the future.”11 These ideas and practices resonate, on a positive note, with reflections on tempo- rality in queer theory. In his future-oriented imagination of queerness, Cuban-US- American performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz asserts: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past und used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.12 And US-American critical theorist and film studies scholar Kara Keeling starts her reflection on the intersection of queer theory and critical race studies from “the gen- erative proposition another world is possible, the insistence that such a world al- ready is here now.”13 2 Queering the Concept of “Pop” The English term “queer” exists as a noun, adjective, and verb. Since the late nineteenth century, the noun “queer” has been used as a derogatory term for a male homosexual. In the early 1990s, as queer theory was gaining currency in the United States, the term underwent a critical re-evaluation:14 the research approach celebrated difference in re- gard to the sexual norm and broadened the concept of “queer” to include the inten- tional subversion of social conventions and the conscious and strategic destabilization tradition.” Jürgen E. Grandt: Prelude: So What? In: Kinds of Blue. The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus, OH 2005, xviii.  Kristen Lillvis: Introduction. In: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Athens, GA 2017, 13.  Muñoz: Cruising Utopia, 1.  Keeling: Queer Times, ix [italics in original].  This usage of the term “queer” can be traced back to Teresa de Lauretis’ introduction to a special issue of Differences on “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” and the conference of the same name held at the University of California at Santa Cruz in February 1990. See Teresa de Lauretis: Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities An Introduction. In: Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cul- tural Studies 3/2 (Summer 1991), ed. by Teresa de Lauretis, iii–xviii. Many scholars recognize this text as the founding publication of queer theory, in conjunction with Judith Butler: Critically Queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993), 17–32. 4 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann of classificatory systems,15 thus opening up new spaces for thinking and ways of living “otherwise.” The term queer, however, carries a problematic legacy, since it is mainly associated with white gay male history and thus only partly operative for lesbians, Peo- ple of Color, or trans✶, intersex, and non-binary people.16 This begs the question whether “queer” is still a useful concept. In the academic context, there is some debate on the question whether “queer” primarily signifies sexual orientation and homosexual practices or whether it goes be- yond sexual orientation. Some scholars argue that sex matters and insist that “queer” should not be untied from homosexual identity, same-sex desire, and homosexual practices, and primarily focus on the potentialities for social transformation that iden- tity politics instigate.17 Other scholars working in queer studies use the interdisciplin- ary space that this field opens up to include perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical race theory,18 transgender theory,19 transnational feminism,20 disability  French historian Michel Foucault who, in his History of Sexuality, pinpointed how sexology in- vented the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, also pointed to the historical formation of spe- cific “epistemes” and highlighted the possibility to change them. See Michel Foucault: History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction [French original 1976], trans. by Robert Hurley. New York, NY 1978, 42–44 and Michel Foucault: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [French origi- nal 1966], London / New York, NY 2005, especially “Preface,” xvi–xxvi, and the chapter “Mathesis and ‘Taxinomia,’” 79–85.  For a lesbian critique of the term queer see, for instance, Julia Parnaby: Queer Straits. Trouble and Strife 26 (1993), 14; see also Susan J. Wolfe / Julia Penelope: Sexual Identity / Textual Politics: Lesbian {De/Com}positions. In: Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe / Julia Penelope. Cambridge, MA 1993, 5; for a Queer of Color critique see, for instance, José Esteban Muñoz: Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN 1999; Roderick A. Ferguson: Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis, MN 2004; for an emphasis on intersectionality in queer studies see, for instance, David L. Eng / Jack Hal- berstam / José Esteban Muñoz: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now? Social Text 23/3–4, (Fall–Win- ter 2005), 1, 3, 4; for a trans✶ critique of “queer” and queer studies see, for instance, Susan Stryker: Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10/2 (2004), 212–215, here: 214. Stryker also alludes to the kinship between transgender studies and “disability stud- ies and intersex studies, two other critical enterprises that investigate atypical forms of embodiment and subjectivity that do not readily reduce to heteronormativity, yet that largely fall outside the ana- lytic framework of sexual identity that so dominates queer theory.”  See, for instance, Leo Bersani: Homos. Cambridge, MA 1996; Lauren Berlant / Michael Warner: Sex in Public. In: Publics and Counterpublics, ed. by Lauren Berlant / Michael Warner. New York, NY 2002, 187–208; see also Rehberg: Hipster Porn, 8–11.  See, for instance, Phillip Brian Harper / Anne McClintock / José Esteban Muñoz / Trish Rosen: Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender. An Introduction. Social Text 52/53 (Fall/Winter 1997), 1.  For instance, Jack Halberstam: In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York, NY / London 2005, 1.  For instance, Jasbir K. Puar: Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC / London 2007. Introducing Queer Pop 5 studies, and critical animal studies.21 Taking the concept of “queer” as their point of departure, yet another group of scholars examines all the diverse meanings of further critical terms and puts experimental writing forms to the test.22 Some scholars reach ethical conclusions that are socio-critical in their outlook; others unfold decidedly uto- pian visions. If we are to speak of queer pop, then we also have to problematize the term “pop.” While in the English language “pop” is just shorthand for “the popular,” in German- language discourse the term has certainly led to controversies regarding the different methodological approaches in attempts of defining it. Because most contributions to this volume grow out of German-speaking academia, it is especially productive to gain in- sight into German methodological approaches to the term “pop” and pop culture. This might also facilitate a better understanding of the academic background of the contrib- utors and further elucidate the perspectives this volume and its contributions are writ- ten from. For example, German pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen distinguishes “pop music” from “the popular” and considers “pop” as a system that emerged only after 1955. He writes: I therefore distinguish between pop music, whose history begins in 1955 give or take five years, and the popular and popular culture that existed before pop music and continues to exist. Fi- nally, one can also speak of a more recent pop culture, which is the result of the influence of pop music as a cultural, artistic, and culture-industrial model on other arts and culture-industrial formats.23 Another attempt at a definition which distinguishes between the “mass culture” of old and “popular culture” highlights the development of the first youth subcultures that stimulated a specific pop cultural experience after 1945.24 Above all, the demarcation of  For instance, Mel Y. Chen: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC / London 2012.  For an example in experimental collective writing that queers the ideology promoted by the Sili- con Valley, see Caroline Bassett / Sara Kember / Kate O’Riordan: Feminist Futures: A Conditional Paeon for the Anything-Digital. In: id.: Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures. London 2020, 1–22.  Diedrich Diedrichsen: Über Pop-Musik. Cologne 2014, xii [Own translation, B.P.].  In regard to the emergence of popular culture, English cultural and media historian Jon Savage points to the invention of the teenager through the invention of an independent consumption- oriented life stage between childhood and adulthood. This took place precisely after the Second World War, and it was only from that point on that this idea, starting in the USA, spread throughout the countries of the Western hemisphere. The socially relevant notion of the teenager as the bearer of a specific concept of culture applicable to this life stage only – namely youth culture – emerged. Al- though certain reform movements since the twentieth century accentuated and even glorified youth (one might think for example of the Wandervogel, of certain instrumentalizations in the National So- cialist terror system and in the USSR), the societal width and consumerist entrenchment of youth cul- ture is a laborious “invention” of the 1940s and 1950s. 6 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann youth as a sociologically addressable group and its attachment to musical concepts gave rise to the first subcultures starting in the late 1950s up to punk in 1977 in England.25 Punk opened up new possibilities for self-definition by following a postmodern vein, the dismemberment of the world and recomposition of its individual parts. Al- though punk caused a rivalry between the fragmentation of the status quo and a new aesthetic that interconnected media to create new gendered codes, it was nevertheless shaped by a history of white, mostly heterosexual youth. Artists such as David Bowie and Brian Ferry can be credited with questioning and subverting gender relations and role clichés. Both these artists as well as others played an instrumental role in shaping the iconography of the punk movement.26 In this context, the performances of Grace Jones between 1978 and 1986 deserve special attention. She expanded the un- derstanding of performance art, for example, and hinted at a connection between postcolonialism and postmodernism. German scholar of literature Thomas Hecken traces the various concepts of pop historically. In Hecken’s view, especially the concept of the “culture industry,” coined by the German philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, developed a great impact. The two representatives of the first generation of the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the concept in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, which they wrote in 1944 while in exile. The book became one of the most widely-quoted texts of critical theory and played a decisive role in developing the concept of “pop.” In the canonical formulation of their position in the chapter on culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the impact of an industrial form of cultural produc- tion. It is not an exaggeration to declare this chapter to be one of the most influential works of mass media analysis and cultural theory, at least in Europe. The very con- cept of the culture industry makes it clear at which point Horkheimer and Adorno And it is only in this constellation that a traditional mass culture, to which categories such as gen- eration and age were largely extraneous, and which even tended to target older consumers, became pop culture in the modern sense. The catalyst of this process was the invention of another cultural strategy, namely pop music as a specific system in the 1950s. It is precisely at this point in the 1950s that the contours finally form which became the starting point for all further pop cultural differentia- tions. Pop culture refers to the mass-media reception of entertaining contents and their complex con- catenation and transfer into a form of life. Pop as a form of life means offering a set of possibilities for cultural reflection and related patterns for action. Since the 1950s, having an affinity to pop culture means not only having certain musical preferences but also wearing certain clothes, advocating cer- tain attitudes and world views, driving certain vehicles, and practicing certain ways of life. See Jon Savage: Teenage. The Creation of Youth Culture. New York, NY / London 2007. In his reflections on the concept of “queer time,” Jack Halberstam proposes that the “queer tempo- ralities” which subcultural lifestyles open up challenge such a division into lifespans. Taking queer time as the starting point, he suggests “that we rethink the adult/youth binary in relation to an ‘episte- mology of youth’ that disrupts conventional accounts of youth culture, adulthood, and maturity.” Hal- berstam: In a Queer Time and Place, 2.  Dick Hebdige: Hiding in the Light. On Images and Things. London 1988.  See Simon Reynolds / Joy Press: The Sex Revolts. Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll. Cambridge 1995. Introducing Queer Pop 7 start. From their perspective, the universe of late capitalist popular culture essentially consists of the mass media of film, television, radio, and the press and appears as a single large industrially and profit-oriented context of use. The products of the culture industry, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, cheat people out of their happiness by presenting them with false ideals and opportunities for distraction in order to keep them from realizing their true situation. The perfidy of the culture industry – according to the authors – lies in the fact that it transfers the already problematic modes of production of capitalist society to cultural products of all kinds, including products of high culture, thus creating a conformist cosmos, or, as the authors put it, “the reproduction of sameness,”27 which does not allow for intellectual and aesthetic variety. Starting from a traditional Marxist theory of manipulation of the masses by the entertainment industry, Horkheimer and Adorno go even further, and Adorno then also pointedly elaborates on this in his later work, for example, on television. According to Adorno, the diabolical thing about the forms of the modern entertain- ment industry is precisely that they make an implicit pact with the unconscious of the recipient. To put it simply, the lowest instincts of the viewer are tapped into in order to create an intellectual training for an anesthetized existence in late capitalism. Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. [. . .] The culture industry end- lessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. [. . .] Fun is a medical bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheat- ing happiness.28 The point of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument is that the tendency for cultural decay characteristic of the culture industry is infectious and also corrodes parts of high culture. This implies that the culture industry promoted stereotypical images of characters in regard to race, class, and gender. A continuity of the same bound the gatekeepers of yore to decisions that conveyed a commercial and thus simplistic and self-perpetuating image in regard to race, class, and gender. Thus, the culture industry in particular also significantly contributed to the fact that the history of female, as some scholars have argued,29 and queer pop artists has hardly been addressed. Already in the early 1980s, British cultural theorist Angela McRobbie pointed out the lack of visibility of female bands and fans. She was able to identify very early and very clearly gaps in the historiography of pop.30 McRobbie,  Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In: id.: Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA 2002, 106.  Horkheimer / Adorno: The Culture Industry, 109–112.  See Christa Brüstle: Popfrauen der Gegenwart. Körper – Stimme – Image. Vermarktungsstrategien zwischen Selbstinszenierung und Fremdbestimmung. Bielefeld 2015.  See Angela McRobbie / Jenny Garber: Girls and Subcultures. In: Resistance through Rituals. Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. by Stuart Hall / Tony Jefferson. London 1976, 209–222. 8 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann English media theorists and sociologist Dick Hebdige,31 British journalist Vivien Gold- man,32 Diedrich Diedrichsen,33 as well as English music journalist Simon Reynolds and US-American music journalist Joy Press34 all highlighted that pop is a genuinely heterosexual cis-male cultural field. An alternative history of pop, the authors argue, could be written as a history of female bands and musicians. In doing so, they perpet- uate the binary understanding of male versus female. Hence, lesbian, bisexual, and trans✶ musicians have been left out of the evolved structures of the culture industry, women’s historiography, and also the “Fringe of the Fringe.”35 This begs a number of questions: How can pop historiography counter a perpetuation of the clear-cut dis- tinction between male and female? How does the concept of queer promote a critical and creative rewriting of the history of pop culture? Should genres be rethought?36 3 A Queer Historiography As such cursory consideration of pop historiography shows, the various academic and journalistic discussions on the notion of “pop” employ a binary and non-inclusive ap- proach. In other words, the discussion surrounding the concept of pop perpetuates the politics of exclusion prevalent in mainstream culture. To intervene in this discus- sion from a decidedly queer and intersectional perspective, we propose the com- pound term of “queer pop.” In doing so, our aim is twofold: Firstly, we seek to critically interrogate the problematic academic legacy of pop cultural historiography by pointing to its omissions that become apparent through an intersectional lens.37  Dick Hebdige: Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London 1979.  See Vivien Goldman: Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot. Austin 2019.  See Diedrich Diederichsen: And then they move, and then they move – 20 Jahre später [preface to the new edition]. In: id.: Sexbeat. 2nd edition. Cologne 2002, i–xxxiv.  See Reynolds / Press: The Sex Revolts.  See Kathrin Dreckmann / Elfi Vomberg / Linnea Semmerlin (eds.): Fringe of the Fringe. Queering Punk History. Berlin 2023.  See Jack Halberstam: Trans✶ Feminism and Punk Performance. In: Fringe of the Fringe. Queering Punk Media History, ed. by Kathrin Dreckmann / Elfi Vomberg / Linnea Semmerling. Berlin 2023, 35–45.  Here, we take inspiration from US-American film historian Laura Horak’s archival study on cross- dressing women in US-American films from 1908 until 1934. Horak’s study intervenes in film historiog- raphy by showing that the well-known examples of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katherine Hepburn had a host of predecessors pertinent to establishing imaginations about lesbian identity. Considering representations of gender and sexuality in regard to class and race, Horak makes it clear that gender-bending performances abound in American cinema before the Hays Code was established. See Laura Horak: Girls will be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908– 1934. New Brunswick, NJ / London 2016. Introducing Queer Pop 9 Secondly, we want to draw attention to the contributions of LGBTQI✶ artists to popu- lar culture and appraise such contributions by bringing them into conversation with approaches from the academic fields of queer studies, transnational feminism, and critical race studies. To this end, we distinguish between queered pop and genuine queer pop. The cat- egory of “queer” as a positive term of self-identification has only become established in academia and everyday language during the past 20 to 30 years. Thus, if one wants to look historically at practices of queering in pop music, one must be aware that the term “queer” may seem anachronistic in regards to contexts that predate the 1990s. While gay and lesbian artists have in parts shaped pop discourse phenomenologically since its beginnings, their influence has largely gone unnoticed and the queer under- tones and subtexts of their contributions have received little critical acclaim.38 Public discussion and academic discourse tended to reduce artists who would go by the term “queer” today to their subcultural status, while the artists themselves cultivated a dis- tinct coding culture. Today, music videos like Queen’s I Want to Break Free from 1984 can certainly be read as queer statements. However, the codes the band utilized in the video were not so clearly noticeable in the 1980s. Consider also the cover to the album The Man Who Sold the World, released by David Bowie in 1970. The cover, de- signed for the UK market, features Bowie wearing a dress by fashion designer Michael Fish. The album was not available in the US. Examples abound that prove the hetero- normative view of the time. In her 1964 essay Notes on ‘Camp,’ which queer theorists often quote,39 Susan Son- tag refers to the specific culture of homosexuals as a forerunner of the camp aesthetic. Sontag describes the concept of “camp” in 58 theses40 and underscores how exaggera- tion works especially with regard to the unsettling of gender roles. Highlighting the intertextuality between high and low and emphasizing the pop cultural, Sontag points out how eclectic concepts circulating between lowbrow and highbrow culture often fol- low a logic of citation.41 The process of reinterpretation and denaturalization of texts coming from a heterosexual culture perceived as dominant was of interest to queer the- orists and artists alike. Sontag’s essay even gained some currency in pop culture. David Bowie, for instance, heavily annotated his personal copy of the essay, as exemplified by the respective exhibit in the traveling exhibition David Bowie Is.42  See, for instance, the artists’ talk in the present volume.  See, for instance, Jack Babuscio (ed.): Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Edin- burgh 1999.  Susan Sontag: Notes on “Camp.” The Partisan Review (Fall 1964), 515–530. See also: Dolores McEl- roy: Camp. In: Gender: Laughter, ed. by Bettina Papenburg. Farmington Hills, MI 2017, 293–310.  Sontag: Camp, 515–530.  “David Bowie Is,” touring exhibition curated by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh of the Victo- ria and Albert Museum, London. See also: Victoria Broackes / Geoffrey Marsh: David Bowie Is. London 2013. 10 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann The culture industry has only been classifying music by queer artists as such for the last few years. In the previous decades, one-dimensional, patriarchally organized mainstream culture provided clear role models and propagated clear-cut categories. Only a few connoisseurs knew provocative albums like those by bands such as The Slits. Singer-songwriters such as Maxine Feldman had little audience. In the 1990s, at long last, K.D. Lang and Melissa Etheridge committed openly to a mainstream lesbian culture. However, a small number of performances by artists whom the cultural indus- try promoted present an exception. Those artists employed distinct codes intelligible to only a small portion of the audience. Bowie, for instance, invented the androgynous concept of “outer-space” – which refers to space travel and to a space outside of the normative social order – and the related narratives revolving around figures such as Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, and Aladdin Sane. Bands such as Queen and artists such as Prince and Grace Jones likewise provided codes that were intelligible for a homosexual subculture. The phenomenon of “queering” artists to enhance their promotional value, however, occurs only recently. Consider, for instance, the biopic of Freddy Mercury in 2018.43 Artists such as Lil Nas X, Janelle Monáe, Arca, and Mykki Bianco who openly identify as queer have only hit the stage and achieved public success in the last five years. 4 Mainstreaming “Queer” The performance of marginalized identities, which in the 1980s still came to pass in cultural niches, increasingly spread into the cultural mainstream over the past thirty years, as demonstrated by the commercial success of artists such as Lady Gaga and Janelle Monáe. Until the 1990s, gay musicians (such as Freddy Mercury, David Bowie, and Prince) who became commercially successful and received public recognition did not, for the better part of their careers, openly identify as gay. They used specific codes that the gay community would understand. Their public acceptance and commercial success, however, depended on not labelling their work and themselves as gay. The situation today is a quite different one. Openly identifying as queer, bisexual, trans✶, or pansexual has become a selling point. Such self-identification allows artists to not only present themselves as “cool” and “with it” but also to reach a broader au- dience and extend their community of fans. In regard to some artists, one could de- value such self-fashioning as inauthentic – the public response online and in various social media channels points in this direction – and argue that it simply serves the purpose of commercialization. On the other hand, however, the public performance of highly visible artists who embody an LGBTQI✶ persona enhances visibility of the  Bohemian Rhapsody. Directed by Bryan Singer. 20th Century Fox / Regency Enterprises / GK Films / Queen Films, USA/UK 2018. The film presented Freddy Mercury’s homosexuality as problematic. Introducing Queer Pop 11 community and facilitates acceptance of individuals who have experienced discrimi- nation or would experience it under different cultural circumstances. The censorship occurring in social media notwithstanding, a new culture of debate via social media opens up new possibilities for exploring sexual identity, which not only curtails the influence of gatekeepers such as labels and television channels – who, for a very long time decided whom to include and whom to leave out – but sometimes also pushes theory to its limits. Pop culture today includes and references an extensive history, quoting from a var- ied repertoire of works by sexually ambiguous musicians, film-makers, authors, photog- raphers and performers, including – but not limited to –members of different LGBTQI✶ communities. This applies to the creative expressions by artists who worked or are still working at the margins of their respective fields as well as to those whose work was critically acclaimed or received public recognition. Artists who identify as queer draw inspiration from filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, Todd Haynes, and Jennie Livingston, for instance, as well as writers such as Pat Califia and Octavia E. Butler, photographers such as Claude Cahun, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Cath- erine Opie, and performers such as Ron Athey, to name but a few. Bowie’s work re- mains a continued reference for queer performances,44 as does the work of Prince, Freddy Mercury, and Grace Jones.45 Many musicians, particularly very successful ones, have been engaging with LGBTQI✶ issues in recent years and positioning themselves in a queer pop culture dis- course. For example, Black US musician, singer, and performance artist Janelle Monáe construed a pop cultural persona that explicitly plays with gender roles. In the short film Many Moons which promoted her album Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) in 2007, for instance, the artist wears a bow tie and appears as both dandy and diva. Monáe exemplifies a queer pop concept. In her stage shows and music videos, she cites, en- acts, and shines a critical light on the gender-specific policies of the various music genres.46 Monáe also addresses issues of race. In Metropolis, she develops a narra- tive – which unfolds across a number of studio albums – in which Black subjects, who have been attributed the status of objects for centuries, live as androids in an imagi- nary future. In this form of embodiment, they continue to experience oppression and continue to struggle for liberation. In Dirty Computer, a 50-minute narrative film – or “emotion picture,” as she her- self terms it – from 2018 that showcases her album of the same name, borrows from and breaks down aesthetics from previous eras, focusing above all on the media aes- thetics of David Bowie. The shape and design of the “vulva pants” that Monáe wears  See Kathrin Dreckmann: Notes on Pop. Campy Popästhetiken in Musikvideos. In: Musikvideo re- loaded: Über historische und aktuelle Bewegtbildästhetiken zwischen Pop, Kommerz und Kunst, ed. by Kathrin Dreckmann. Berlin / Boston 2021, 141–157.  See Diederichsen: Sexbeat, xix.  See Halberstam: Trans✶ Feminism and Punk Performance, 35–45. 12 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann in her music video Pynk recall the Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit worn by David Bowie back in 1973. At the same time, she expresses femininity and self-empowerment: Pynk can be seen as surmounting a male-dominated world.47 Monáe communicates her message as a highly successful Black and openly pansexual musician who identifies as a feminist. Playing with gender roles and gender identity, however, does not count as a brand- new phenomenon in mainstream pop culture. At the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles in September 2011, performance artist, singer, and actress Lady Gaga appeared in men’s clothing as the macho Jo Calderone, the boyfriend of prize winner Lady Gaga. In her drag performance, Lady Gaga remained true to her signature outlandishness.48 The gender and sexual orientation of the artist have been hotly debated ever since she shot to fame in 2008. This debate sparks questions about artists who talk, sing, and per- form in public within the framework of gender, race, class, and erotic desire: How does their self-positioning affect their utterances? What drives the public discussion that aims to pin down the biological and social gender of a person, a labeling that the term “queer” decidedly rejects? How can changing perceptions through empowering repre- sentations of members of marginalized groups, as art can do, provide impulses for in- terventions in the field of the social? 5 Structure of this Volume and Contributions This volume brings together contributions from emerging and renowned scholars from mostly German-speaking academia who employ concepts from queer theory such as homonormativity, homonationalism, erotohistoriography, and queer tempo- rality in fields including media aesthetics, critical theory, cultural studies, and literary studies. They analyze a variety of case studies that we gather under the rubric of what we call “queer pop.” With this volume, we launch the English-language series on Queer Futures. The contributions assembled here take up the social and political re- sponsibility of cultural studies and examine the aesthetic strategies that artists who occupy marginalized subject positions and whose history has not yet been compre- hensively documented and researched have employed in their self-fashioning over the last forty years. The essays collected in this volume examine how queer artists intervene in a mainstream cultural discourse and explore how they use aesthetic means to promote social justice and inclusion. The contributions are loosely orga- nized around four thematic foci: firstly, “Queer Aesthetics in Pop Music”; secondly,  Kathrin Dreckmann: “PYNK” beyond forests and thighs: Manifestations of Social Utopia in Current Music Video. In: Music Video and Transculturality: Manifestations of Social Utopia?, ed. by Kathrin Dreckmann / Christofer Jost. Münster 2024.  Jack Halberstam: Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, MA 2012, 4. Introducing Queer Pop 13 “Homonationalism and Homonormativity in Television”; thirdly, “Queer Affect”; and fourthly, “Queer Futures.” The “Creative Interlude,” situated between the third and fourth parts, includes reflections of practicing feminist and queer artists on their posi- tioning in the male-dominated arena of pop culture and on the question of how the public discussion of queer topics has changed during the past 30 years. Part I – Queer Aesthetics in Pop Music As we have shown above, academic and public discourse on pop culture as well as pop historiography reproduce the normalizing distinction between men’s history and women’s history. A queer history of pop is still to be written. The contributions assem- bled in this part attempt at such a critical rewriting. They do so, for instance, by as- sessing and reevaluating selected works by commercially successful pop artists in regard to the queer motives they allude to or openly present. Kathrin Dreckmann pro- motes such a queer historiography by tracing the history of the visual motives and tropes evoked in the music video Montero (Call Me By Your Name) from 2021 by US- American rapper and queer Black icon Lil Nas X back to the discussion on same-sex desire going on in ancient Greek philosophy. Highlighting the politics of citation at work in current pop music, Dreckmann not only shows how Lil Nas X references ho- moerotic desire and non-binary ideas of gender that had already circulated in Plato’s Symposium. She also tracks postcolonial practices of empowerment in Montero by pointing to how the artist appropriates feudal accoutrement used at European courts in the eighteenth century, such as the wig, in an ironic pose of self-fashioning. In re- gard to colonial and neocolonial practices of cultural appropriation, Dreckmann ar- gues, this seizure comes into view as an empowering gesture of asserting hybrid identity at the intersection of race and sexuality. Franziska Haug’s contribution dwells on the topic of the music video and lingers with the subject of the commercially successful non-white pop artist. Haug analyzes how selected music videos by artists such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Madonna, but also Britney Spears, collude in the mainstream manufacturing of gender identity and erotic desire. She assesses how such artists in their lyrics and performances reflex- ively address such production of gender and desire. Reconsidering the question of the relation between aesthetics and politics, Haug unravels the aesthetic strategies that the music video employs to shape – and possibly change – normative ideas about gen- der. To this end, Haug combines materialist and social constructivist approaches and includes perspectives from monist philosophy and psychoanalysis. While artists such as Lil Nas X, Beyoncé, Madonna, and Rihanna address issues of gender identity and erotic desire head-on, these topics play a more subdued role in the oeuvre of the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys. In his close reading of selected songs, albums, cover artwork, and music videos by the Pet Shop Boys, dating from 1984 to 1990, Daniel Baranowski discerns queer topics and unfolds queer moments that func- 14 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann tion, as he argues, borrowing a term from French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as an “eccentric center” that is an unobtrusive yet significant starting point allowing for a slow unwrapping of the key motif of the oeuvre by directing attention to its margins. Part II – Homonationalism and Homonormativity in Television The contributions assembled in the second part shift the subject focus from pop music to television. Both contributors of this part firmly anchor their analyses in queer theory, taking up some of the problems and concepts that scholars in this field are currently debating and reconsider them in light of selected case studies. Katharina M. Wiedlack investigates how the embodiment of the white Russian drag persona Katya by Irish-American comedian Brian McCook in the US-American reality televi- sion show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present) supports a homonationalist program. The term “homonationalism,”49 coined by queer theorist and postcolonial critic Jasbir Puar, refers to a collusion of nationalist and sexual rights discourses that strategically enlists lesbian and gay politics into an orientalist and racist agenda. Taking the per- sona of Katya as her example, Wiedlack stresses how a show such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, which deliberately promotes liberal pro-gay discourse, concomitantly asserts Western hegemony by exploiting the stereotype of the racialized Other. Sarah Rüß considers how the US-American television series The L Word (2004– 2009) and The Fosters (2013–2018) endorse ideas and practices of homonormativity. The term “homonormativity,”50 propagated, among others, by US-American historian Lisa Duggan, refers to a politics of enrolling lesbians and gay men into a heteronormative, consumption-oriented, capitalist lifestyle that conforms to a nationalist agenda. Rüß considers how television series such as The L Word and The Fosters, while enhancing the visibility of lesbians by presenting a variety of lesbian characters to a wider audi- ence, advance a repressive and exclusionary politics of shame. Such politics devalues lifestyles that deviate from the homonormative ideal. To this end, Rüß reads selected scenes from both series through the lens of affect theory. Part III – Queer Affect Since the formation of queer theory in the early 1990s, “affect” has emerged as a cru- cial concept. Shame, stigma, embarrassment, and pain as consequences of the experi- ence of social exclusion, devaluation, and misrecognition, as well as the trauma  Puar: Terrorist Assemblages, 336–339.  Lisa Duggan: The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism. In: Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. by Russ Castronovo / Dana D. Nelson / Donald E. Pease. New York, NY 2002, 175–177. Introducing Queer Pop 15 ensuing from this experience have all been focal points for queer theorizing.51 In the noughties, politically progressive queer theorists disengaged from the affect trajectory promoting a move from shame to pride, in response to conservative activists pushing the renaming of Christopher Street Liberation Day to Gay Pride. Instead, scholars in- sisted on dwelling on affects such as shame and anger and suggested investigating the capability of negative affect for instigating social change.52 By foregrounding the transformative capacities of negative affect, scholarship in queer studies resonates with a feminist tradition of taking negative individual affective experience as a start- ing point for political activism that denounces social ills and formulates political demands.53 Many studies that combine queer theory and affect theory take up Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s work on shame as a heuristic pedagogical tool.54 In regard to Sedgwick and Frank, London-based feminist philosopher Clare Hemmings, for in- stance, emphasizes the fact that “[s]hame itself [. . .] has a resonance well beyond its homophobic generation, enabling queer subjects both to identify the bodily resonances  See, for instance, Heather Love: Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cam- bridge, MA 2007, 3.  See David M. Halperin / Valerie Traub: Beyond Gay Pride. In: Gay Shame, ed. by David M. Halperin / Valerie Traub Chicago, IL / London 2009, 3–4; see also Clare Hemmings: Invoking Affect. Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies 19/5 (2005), 549. The Gay Shame conference, held at the Univer- sity of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2003, gave a decisive impulse. US historian of sexuality David M. Halperin and US literary and women’s studies scholar Valerie Traub state in the introduction to the edited volume that followed from the conference: “Gay pride has never been able to separate itself en- tirely from shame, or to transcend shame. Gay pride does not even make sense without some reference to the shame of being gay, and its very successes (to say nothing of its failures) testify to the intensity of its ongoing struggle with shame.” They conclude: “Perhaps, then, the time has come to consider some alternate strategies for the promotion of queer sociality.” Halperin / Traub: Beyond Gay Pride, 3–4. Gay pride labeled the gathering of bodies of people who have been shamed. It enabled an identity politics that were and still are the politics of gay pride. The questions the Michigan conferences sought to ad- dress were: Can there be a politics after gay pride? What gets lost through the affirmation of pride in- stead of shame? Negative affect – for instance, disgust – that the bodies of gays, and perhaps, to a lesser extent, lesbians, elicit in those who shame them can become a starting point for reflection about affec- tive responses circulating in the culture of the majority, and, by extension, can prompt participants in this culture to reflect about stereotypes and prejudices.  See for instance, Audre Lorde: Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger. In: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Freedom, CA 1984; Ann Cvetkovich: An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC / London 2003; Sara Ahmed: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York, NY 2004; Sara Ahmed: The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC 2010; Barbara Tomlinson: Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Fem- inist. Philadelphia, PN 2010; Ann Cvetkovich: Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC 2012.  See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick / Adam Frank: Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. In: Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC 1995, 1–28; see also Eve Kosofsky Sedg- wick: Touching Feeling. Durham, NC 2003. 16 Bettina Papenburg and Kathrin Dreckmann of a heterosexual status quo and to create community through empathy and shared ex- perience.”55 However, as Hemmings aptly points out, questions of intersectional posi- tioning need to be addressed here. For whom does bodily knowledge open up new possibility for connecting? Hemmings rightfully foregrounds “that only for certain sub- jects can affect be thought of as attaching in an open way; others are so over-associated with affect that they themselves are the object of affective transfer”56 – for instance, the prostitute or the Black person. Joanna Staśkiewicz’s contribution investigates how queer forms of neo-burlesque stage performance in Warsaw and New Orleans employ humor and laughter as strate- gies for transforming individual and collective pain ensuing from the experience of social exclusion into an experience of community and belonging. Considering 2018 neo-burlesque performances by New Orleans-based artists Dick Jones Burly and Lefty Lucy as well as Warsaw-based artists Lola Noir and Gąsiu, Staśkiewicz argues that queer performance art offers a space outside of the normative temporal order. It tem- porarily frees the performers and the audience from the pressure that a capitalist and heteronormative lifestyle exerts. Staśkiewicz employs the concept of “erotohistoriog- raphy,”57 as coined by US-American scholar of literature Elizabeth Freeman and which refers to a corporeal rewriting of history, to argue that queer performance art allows for a glimpse of a utopian world in which trauma may be processed and from which a collective politics may ensue. Peter Rehberg proposes what he calls “affective sexuality” as a form for gay men to relate to one another sexually that significantly differs from performance-oriented gay male sexuality as it is represented, circulated, and perpetuated in mainstream vi- sual gay pornography. Rehberg discerns this specific form of gay male sexuality in the photographic staging of the male nude in the English-language Dutch gay and queer fanzine Butt (2001–present). Situating Butt in the discourse on post-pornography and taking his cue from Michel Foucault and Lauren Berlant, Rehberg critically reevalu- ates the evasion of the topic of sexuality in current queer affect theory and insists on tethering the debate in this field to sexuality. Part IV – Queer Futures The subjects considered in Staśkiewicz’s and Rehberg’s contributions – queer perfor- mance art and post-pornographic queer magazine culture – already provide a glimpse at what queer futures may look and feel like and what pleasurable and enriching forms of community they may enable. The contributions collected in the final part of  Hemmings: Invoking Affect, 549–550.  Hemmings: Invoking Affect, 561.  Elizabeth Freeman: Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography. Social Text 23/3–4 (2005), 59. Introducing Queer Pop 17 this volume further elaborate on forward-looking aesthetic strategies that explore how they can rework and transform the experience of discrimination and social ex- clusion so that new forms of relating to one another and to a variety of different sub- ject positions may materialize. Vera Mader’s contribution traces a Black feminist chronopolitics in three music videos of 2013, 2014, and 2022 by British pop artist FKA twigs. Combining stances from Black feminism with concepts from Afrofuturism and ideas from a strand of German media theory inspired by cybernetics, Mader argues that the aesthetic staging of a time out of joint in FKA twigs’ music videos challenges a linear conception of time that was and still is at the bedrock of ideas on Western supremacy. To complicate such a linear understanding of time by emphasizing gaps, intervals, and including ret- rograde and sideways moves implies, as Mader suggests, an interrogation of historical and present power relations responsible for oppression and marginalization. In such practice, which deliberately addresses the ambivalence of media technology, a more just and inclusive future shimmers through. Josephine Hetterich, in the final contribution to this volume, dwells on the con- cept of queer temporality and connects it to the practice of queer reproduction. Het- terich asks how a focus on queer reproductive labor brings into view different conceptions of the future. To answer this question, the author examines how the Net- flix series Pose (2018–2021), which pays homage to the Black and Latinx queer and trans✶ ballroom culture in Harlem of the 1980s and 1990s, revisits audiovisual materi- als relevant to queer and trans✶ historiography. In doing so, Hetterich identifies three forms of queer reproduction in Pose: a narrative focus on the topic of care, the writ- ing of a queer and trans✶ history, and a publicizing of such history. The engagement with the past that Pose offers, the author concludes, can be read as a future-oriented strategy of resistance. The past that queer media practices address has been and still is subject to orders of knowledge that largely remain unconscious. We can only rework and overcome such epistemes if we render them conscious. And it is here that the present volume aspires to contribute to the ongoing discussion, namely by assembling contributions that bring into view past and present forms of articulation of queer identity and queer desire, thus offering a foretaste of a queer future. Bibliography Ahmed, Sara: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York, NY 2004. Ahmed, Sara: The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC 2010. 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Introducing Queer Pop 21 http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1920 Part I: Queer Aesthetics in Pop Music Kathrin Dreckmann Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato: Eclectic Iconographies of Self-Empowerment in Lil Nas X’s Montero (Call Me By Your Name) Abstract: In recent years, mega-stars such as Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, and Sevdeliza have successfully integrated critical academic discourse into the conceptions of their current music video productions. In a way, queer Black superstar Lil Nas X is continu- ing that tradition. He creates an eclectic, hybrid image between Christian iconogra- phy, Greek mythology, and Platonism and has empowered himself in this scenery as a Black queer devil. In doing so, he recapitulates the 2000-year-old exegesis of Plato’s Symposium, questioning representational logics of the European cultural history of queer people. This paper traces the connections of media representations of queer- ness in Christian iconography, Greek mythology, and self-empowerment thematized in the music video Montero (Call Me By Your Name). Keywords: Lil Nas X, music video, queer pop, Montero, queer representation, queer, Black empowerment, queer iconography, media art With his debut studio album Montero (Call Me By Your Name) and the music video of the same title (both 2021), queer Black artist Lil Nas X presented a production in which he links Christian iconographies with those of the ancient Greeks, negotiating positions from the Bible and ancient philosophy on the “third” gender.1 In the music video he quotes the story of creation as well as Plato’s Aristophanic treatise on the third gender from The Symposium (385 and 378 BC). The video can thus be read as an audiovisual representation that mediates between the appropriation of a European canon, the adoption of Christian and ancient iconography, and the exegesis of Platonic male-male relationships. Artistic conceptions dedicated to the appropriation of the European canon from a Black perspective have recently been very successful. There seems to be a tendency in current music productions of adopting a European configuration of the gaze to not only make it visible but also expose it as male, colonial, or patriarchal. These productions thus expose the fact that visual regimes become established under specific historical and cultural circumstances.2 Lil Nas X takes this as a starting point for reversing centuries-old visual regimes; in doing so, he follows a political program.  R. E. Allen: The Dialogues of Plato. Volume II. The Symposium. New Haven, CT 1991, 130. See also: Markus Hirschfeld: Berlin’s Third Sex, trans. by James J. Conway, 2017.  Kathrin Dreckmann: Black Queen and King: Iconographies of Self-empowerment, Canon, and Pop in the Current Music Video. In: More Than Illustrated Music: Aesthetics of Hybrid Media between Pop, Art and Video, ed. by Kathrin Dreckmann / Elfi Vomberg. London 2023, 125–144. Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-002 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111013435-002 Logics of visibility as well as strategies of enactment become apparent and trans- form themselves into poignant political visual agendas. How can one describe aes- thetic concepts such as these? How are traditional iconographies reconfigured and reflected between the present and the past? In an interview with TIME magazine he states that “he wanted to deploy this type of iconography and symbolism to draw a connection between ancient and modern- day persecution.”3 He is concerned with taking queerness seriously as a concept that has been around since antiquity. However, perspectives that either label queerness as a heterosexual esoteric fantasy or socially marginalize it through pathologization should be taken into account.4 Roland Betancourt, art professor at the University of California and author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages says in an interview with TIME Magazine: “[the video] says that institu-  Andrew R. Chow: Historians Decode the Religious Symbolism and Queer Iconography of Lil Nas X’s “Montero” Video. Time (March 2021). https://time.com/5951024/lil-nas-x-montero-video-symbolism-ex plained/ (last accessed 03 July 2022).  Luc Brisson: Sexual ambivalence: androgyny and hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Ber- keley / Los Angeles / London 2002, xiii. In Sexual Ambivalence, Brisson consolidates and develops his earlier explorations of sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean. He describes Sexual Ambivalence as a “working aid to the study for all those interested in the question of dual sexuality, whether in the domains of psychoanalysis, gay or gender studies, the history of medicine or zoology, the history of ideas, or even the history of art.” Especially in chapter two (Dual Sexuality and Homosexuality), Brisson considers another type of si- multaneous dual sexuality in humans, displayed by persons with the physical attributes of one sex and gender characteristics of the other, specifically: passive male homosexuals who assumed women’s costume, behavior, and submissive sexual role, along with females who acted out aggressive male per- sonas in their relationships with (passive) female partners. Brisson touches briefly on several related issues that have received much recent scrutiny. Current scholarship on the ancient Greek and Roman perceptions of homosexuality and heterosexuality indicates that they were not the same as our own Western ones. The polarized categories of homosexual and heterosexual themselves are relatively modern. In chapter three (Archetypes), Brisson turns to divine paradigms and precedents for simulta- neous dual sexuality, considering mythological prototypes, entities not viewed as monsters but as es- sential contributors to the generation of the universe, gods, and mortals. He begins with Aristophanes’ myth of Eros and the androgynes in the Symposium, considers possible links with Orphic traditions, and then examines related phenomena in Gnosticism, the Chaldean Oracles, and the Hermetic Corpus. Brisson’s full, interpretive discussion provides useful background for an analysis of Aristophanes’ vi- sion in the Symposium. The Orphic cosmography, with its double-sexed progenitor Phanes, called by a variety of other names, has been considered a parallel for Aristophanes’ globe-shaped ur-humans. The connection of Aristophanes’ fable with the Orphic tradition of a bisexual proto-being is problem- atic. Dover has suggested that the Symposium may have influenced later versions of the Orphic mate- rial and that Aristophanes’ androgynes were the inspiration for the subsequent Orphic fragment in which Phanes’ genitals are described as projecting from the rear of his body. 26 Kathrin Dreckmann https://time.com/5951024/lil-nas-x-montero-video-symbolism-explained/ https://time.com/5951024/lil-nas-x-montero-video-symbolism-explained/ tionalization of homophobia is a learned thing – and that there are other origin myths available to us that are not rooted in those ideas.”5 This thesis implies that the representation of homosexual love in European cul- tural philosophy is in need of a new reading. To seriously consider this would also mean that in the video Montero, the exegesis is brought into a connection with feudal self-dramatization in the style of European monarchies as a strategy of empower- ment. This bears the question: Does a music video, which primarily serves the pur- pose of marketing a product, possess the capacity to question the canon of significant philosophical history on a mass-cultural level? First, the themes of the music video and its dramaturgy will be deliberated in the following. Subsequently, the thematic spectra hybridized in the music video will be elaborated on and discussed. In the conclusion, the results on the relevance of de- constructivist music video analysis will be discussed. 1 Plato’s Symposium and Christian Iconography The music videos scenic opening shows a sky – a sun surrounded by pink clouds. The camera descends from the shots of the sky to another world (00:11); the viewer catches a short glimpse of the remains of ancient-looking columns, broken Greek sculptures (Fig. 1) (00:10), a death mask (00:12), while a snake slithers along an under- world architecture. From the mountain of the gods (“monte”) down into the apparent underworld, which at the same time is not clearly defined, for implied here is a Garden of Eden in the marble ruins of ancient Greece. Right from the start, hierarchies of propositional logic between Christian and ancient iconography are addressed. Inevitably the recipi- ent thinks of Platonic shadow people from the cave allegory formulated in the Poli- teia.6 This context is already called upon in the lyrics: You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend I’m not fazed, only here to sin If Eve ain’t in your garden, you know that you can The figure of Eve, introduced in the text, is perceived as a guardian – only when she is not present does “you” know that he can sin. The boy who lives in the dark does not  Andrew R. Chow: Historians Decode the Religious Symbolism and Queer Iconography of Lil Nas X’s “Montero” Video. See also: Roland Betancourt: Byzantine Intersectionality Sexuality, Gender & Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton / Oxford 2020, 121–143.  Plato: Republic. In: id: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Huntington Cairns / Edith Hamilton, trans. by Lane Cooper. Princeton, NJ 1961, 747. Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato 27 live in the light, he does not show himself and is not visible. Since this scene, which contains Plato’s verses from the Symposium, focuses on brightness and darkness, the philosophically trained eye inevitably makes an association with recognizing vision, an ontological category of inner knowing established in Plato.7 For Plato, seeing is not a sensory-physiological process, it is epistemological. With the implied image and gaze aesthetics in the video, the recipient gains the impression that the detachment from Eve in the story of creation here also means the detachment from the heteronor- matively determined male-female relationship associated with Eve. Romantic talking? You don’t even have to try You’re cute enough to fuck with me tonight Looking at the table all I see is weed and white Baby, you living the life, but nigga, you ain’t livin’ right Cocaine and drinking with your friends You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend I’m not fazed, only here to sin If Eve ain’t in your garden, you know that you can Apparently, the protagonist of the song is living in the shadows, intoxicated and going down the wrong path – unenlightened. As in Plato’s verses from the Symposium that are directed toward brightness and darkness, the philosophically trained eye inevita- Fig. 1: Ruins of ancient Greek statues and buildings. Screenshot: Lil Nas X: “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” (Official Video). Directed by Tanu Muino and Lil Nas X (26 March 2021).  Plato: Republic, 747. 28 Kathrin Dreckmann bly makes the association with cognitive seeing, an ontological category of inner cog- nition established by Plato. For Plato, seeing is not a sensory-physiological process, it is both ontological and epistemological. If the lyrics seem simple and uncomplex at first, they merge through the diver- gence of image and text into a reformulation of the history of Plato’s Forms (“Ideas”). Referring back to the cave allegory, Plato’s maieutic questioning makes possible the achievement of a state of “the good” by overcoming the darkness and the shadows. The video’s narrative goes even further, hybridizing Christian and Greek imagery with Roman architecture. The shadow existence and the fall of man are formulated with a view to Roman pictorial logics as historicized gestures turned to stone in the video: In the background while the serpent is hypnotizing him, the broken hand of a ruined marble colossus is plainly visible. This may be based on the famous colossal hand of Constantine I, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire, that is on display in the Musei Capitolini in Rome. This hand, of course, falls at the intersection of the Christian and the classical, thereby further emphasizing both themes, which are important throughout the video. The fact that the hand is broken and lying on the ground also emphasizes the idea of the fall of man.8 2 Plato’s Spherical Creatures or: When the Bodies Were Separated by Angry Zeus As mentioned above, the video’s citation of Plato’s Symposium is noteworthy. It poses the first exegetical riddles to the recipients. Inserted in ancient Greek: ἐπειδὴ οὖν ἡ φύσις δίχα ἐτμήθη, ποθοῦν ἕκαστον τὸ ἥμισυ9 (Fig. 2) (“Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in longing for its fellow would come to it again”10). This passage from Greek mythology, which Plato has the comic poet Aristophanes narrate in his dialogue Symposium, explains the Platonic perspective on the origin of erotic desire. According to Plato, Aristophanes explains his perspective on Eros, the god of love, in an extensively formulated monologue at a banquet.11 He then formu- lates it with regard to the origin of man and desire, explaining that there were origi- nally three sexes,12:  Spencer McDaniel: Here’s the meaning of the Symbolism in Lil Nas X’s Controversial New Music Video. Tales of times forgotten (07 April 2021). https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/04/07/heres-the- meaning-of-the-symbolism-in-lil-nas-xs-controversial-new-music-video/ (last accessed 09 June 2023).  Gregory R. Crane: Plato Symposium 190a. Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0173%3Atext%3DSym.%3Asection%3D190a (last ac- cessed 09 June 2023).  Gregory R. Crane: Plato Symposium 191a. In: Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hop per/text?doc=Plat.+Sym.+191a&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174 (last accessed 09 June 2023).  Allen: The Dialogues of Plato, 130–134.  (190 St3 A) Allen: The Dialogues of Plato, 130. Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato 29 https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/04/07/heres-the-meaning-of-the-symbolism-in-lil-nas-xs-controversial-new-music-video/ https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/04/07/heres-the-meaning-of-the-symbolism-in-lil-nas-xs-controversial-new-music-video/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0173%3Atext=Sym.%3Asection=190a http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0173%3Atext=Sym.%3Asection=190a http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Sym.+191a&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Sym.+191a&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174 In the first place, there were three sexes among men, not two as now, male and female, but a third sex in addition, being both of them in common, whose name still remains though the thing itself has vanished; for one sex was then derived in common from both male and female, androg- ynous both in form and name, though the name is now applied only in reproach.13 In the exegesis of this passage, inserted by Lil Nas X, there are different positions which essentially have to do with the translation history of this text. Lil Nas X conveys a one- sided perspective in the video, as if the quote from antiquity were already about queer love as it is understood today.14 However, the quote he stages has a complex exegetical history which is not commonly known. Against the background of this history, one can understand the video as a reference to an interpretive construct of “queer” since antiq- uity, formulated in terms of the history of science. The history of translation already gives a good indication of the complexities of interpretation and reception. Thus, in 1920, when Sigmund Freud did not deduce desire from the “pleasure principle,” he followed a different translation than that of Rudolf Kaßner in 1921.15 In his interpretation, however, Freud definitely sees heteronormative unions between the halves separated by Zeus. Fig. 2: A tree with ancient Greek enscription. Screenshot: Lil Nas X: “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” (Official Video). Directed by Tanu Muino and Lil Nas X (26 March 2021).  Allen: The Dialogues of Plato, 130.  This scholarly term only came into fashion at the beginning of the 1990s.  Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Group Psychology and Other Works [1920–1921]. In: id.: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. by James Strachey. New York, NY 1962, 57–58. 30 Kathrin Dreckmann It becomes clear that “Freud considers only one pair out of three, and not the one favored by Aristophanes. Astoundingly, how the fact of same-sex desire, which is sup- posed to be explained by the story, becomes even more surprising in the Freudian version.”16 The interpretation by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld is remarkable. Philosopher Mi- chael Groneberg, who has dealt extensively with the translation history of Plato’s Sympo- sium and reconstructed the passage in its reception history, states of Magnus Hirschfeld that he was the one who did an enormous amount of highly differentiated research, both of empirical and historical nature, pursuing the same project of scientific enlightenment and de-criminalization of homosexuality. He developed a rich taxonomy of the empirical phenomena of sexual differentiation and sexuality, e.g. distinguishing hermaphroditism and androgynism by referring to the primary and secondary sexual features respectively. This distinction is useful and has been retained in the scientific literature. Hirschfeld also uses the term of a third sex, with explicit reference to Plato’s Aristophanes. He identifies the third sex with his “sexuelle Zwischenstufen” that in English would be called “in- tersexes.” He distinguishes four groups among them: hermaphrodites, androgynes, homosexuals, and transvestites. He criticizes the fact that they were formerly mixed in together, but continues to do this himself by subsuming them under one category: the third sex.17 Hirschfeld’s achievement, then, was to sexually differentiate and redefine Aristo- phanic mythology. Aristophanes explains his conception of Eros on the basis of the male spherical men, who become homosexual men after being split by Zeus. More- over, he finds these spherical men to be the most masculine of all due to their purely male form of origin. Aristophanes deals with male homosexuality in particular detail and with apologetic tendency; with this example (of homosexual men) he explains/ demonstrates his understanding of Eros in further detail. He defends boys who devote themselves to men; they would not be shameless but especially manly and brave, which he considers proven by the following: A great proof: actually, it is only men of this sort who, when they grow up, enter on political affairs. When they reach manhood they love boys, and by nature pay no heed to marriage and the getting of children except as compelled to it by custom and law; it suffices them to live out their lives unmarried, with one another. So this sort of becomes wholly a lover of boys or a boy who loves having lovers, ever cleaving to what is akin.18 This is now the point at which Aristophanes – starting from the love of a boy – de- scribes the appearance and nature of Eros in more detail. He describes the shock that  Michael Groneberg: Myth and Science around Gender and Sexuality: Eros and the Three Sexes in Plato’s Symposium. Diogenes 52/4 (2005), 39–49, 45.  Groneberg: Myth and Science around Gender and Sexuality, 44.  Allen: The Dialogues of Plato, 133. Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato 31 seizes a lover when he meets his corresponding half; the philologist of antiquity Regi- nald E. Allen writes: they are then marvelously struck by friendship and kinship and Eros, and scarcely willing to be separated from each other even for a little time. These are the people who pass their whole lives with each other, but who can’t even say what they wish for themselves by being with each other. No one can think it is for the sake of sexual intercourse that the one so eagerly delights in being with the other. Instead, the soul of each clearly wishes for something else it can’t put into words; it divines what it wishes, and obscurely hints at it.19 It is thus quite possible to read the relevant excerpt from the Symposium on the so- called spherical people in a “queer” way. Logics of visibility and strategies of repre- sentation of queer Black people correspond at this point with one of the earliest and elitist philosophies between desire and eros, with strong consequences for the defini- tion of social-sexual role concepts. 3 Wigs, Curls, and Power It is evident that Lil Nas X works intensively on questions of exegesis in the form of a hybrid aesthetic. The deliberate implication and inclusion of sexual and exegetical ambivalence at the beginning of the video sets the tone for further metaphorical and iconographical composition throughout the following scenes. After the Symposium quote fades, a scene follows in which the Lil Nas X can be seen wearing a blue wig (01:16). This is followed by a sequence in which he appears three times as a clone. In the foreground, an alter ego with not-so-highly “toupeed” hair in pink appears, and to his left and right two other versions in blue but with dif- ferent hair lengths (Fig. 4). The protagonist (i.e. Lil Nas X) can be seen bound by chains in the next scene, Greek sculptures behind him; shortly after (01:49), a scene that quotes the myth of Icarus – or a possible reference to Zeus. A little later, Zeus grasps a staff, which turns into a pole on which he glides down into the underworld (Fig. 3). This scene combines elements from the mythological worlds of Icarus and Orpheus. The hairstyle has changed in this scene. Lil Nas X descends into the depths of the glowing lava. (02:19). The campy hairstyle could also be deciphered as an interpretative reference point to the television series Bridgerton (Fig. 5), which premiered on 25 December 2020.20 Lil Nas X’s album had its release one year later. The references to socially constructed  Allen: The Dialogues of Plato, 133. See also: Groneberg: Myth and Science around Gender and Sexu- ality, 41; Robert Eisner: A Case of Poetic Justice: Aristophanes’ Speech in the Symposium. The Classical World 72/7 (1979), 417–419. https://doi.org/10.2307/4349087, 417–418. [Own translation, K.D.].  References to cultural theory are certainly a possibility, as this can also be seen in the work of Janelle Monáe, cf. Kathrin Dreckmann: “PYNK” beyond forests and thighs. In: Music Video and Trans- 32 Kathrin Dreckmann https://doi.org/10.2307/4349087 classifications of race, class, and gender in his video are visually so intense that they could have absorbed the affinity to the Baroque wig. Looking at the canon of Euro- pean art and through royal productions handed down in cultural history, videos like those of the Carters and of Janelle Monáe have developed appropriation as an Afro- diasporic empowerment strategy.21 The fact that Lil Nas X views himself as part of this successful tradition and uses it aesthetically can be seen as a very specific practice of citation and reception from a pop-cultural point of view. In any case, the hairstyle plays a special, royal role here. The fact that Lil Nas X could have drawn on Louis XIV in terms of hairstyle his- tory,22 and as a man carries this wig code to the outside world, points to a cultural- historical interference: British cultural historian Peter Burke quotes George Collas from 1912, referring to Louis XIV’s “glory enterprise” which he views as reminiscent Fig. 3: Lil Nas X pole dancing while wearing tall leather boots. Screenshot: Lil Nas X: Montero (Call Me By Your Name) (Official Video). Directed by Tanu Muino and Lil Nas X (26 March 2021). culturality: Manifestations of Social Utopia?, ed. by Kathrin Dreckmann / Christofer Jost / Bastian Schramm. Münster going to press 2024, 2024, as in Beyoncés work Lemonade cf. Kintra D. Brooks / Ka- meelah L. Martin: Introduction. In: The Lemonade Reader, ed. by Kintra D. Brooks / Kameelah L. Martin, New York, NY 2019, 3. Or in her current Renaissance tour. Cf. Kathrin Dreckmann: “I’m too classy for this world, forever, I’m that girl”. Media hybrids between Pop and Art in Beyoncé’s RENAIS- SANCE. In: Aesthetic Amalgams and Polotical Pursuits. Intertextuality in Music Videos, ed. by Agata Handley et al. London going to press 2024, 2024.  Kathrin Dreckmann: Black Queen and King, 125–144.  Susan Sontag dates the origins of Camp back to Louis XIV. Susan Sontag: Notes on “Camp”, In: Fabio Cleto: Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Edinburgh 1999, 56–57. Queer Curls, Gender Power, and Plato 33 Fig. 4: Three clones of Lil Nas X wearing differently colored wigs. Screenshot: Lil Nas X: “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” (Official Video). Directed by Tanu Muino and Lil Nas X (26 March 2021). Fig. 5: The Character of Queen Charlotte in Netflix’s “Bridgerton”. Screenshot from Bridgerton Episode 5, Season 1 “The Duke and I”. Directed by Sheree Folkson. Shondaland / CVD Productions, UK 2020. 34 Kathrin Dreckmann of “contemporary publicity.”23 The wig played a central role: “integration of the al- longe wig into the exaggerated courtly etiquette that developed at the Versailles court under the Sun King made it the culmination of the refined lifestyle of the Baroque.”24 Louis XIV, in particular, introduced the luxuriant allonge as a state wig.25 By 1665, wigs were so common that Louis XIV approved royal wigmakers for Paris. The king, on whose head thick, curly, exceedingly beautiful hair was sprouting, had, however, refused to wear a wig in his youth. If at all, he initially