By 2018, pop music has undergone a noticeable process of political resurgence. Spearheaded by Beyoncé’s notorious 2014 VMA performance that included the word FEMINIST written in capital letters on a large-scale screen, pop music has recently developed its own, almost obligatory, brand of feminism. Simultaneously, the requirement for artists to exhibit social consciousness has also become prominent with regards to politics of race and, in particular, cultural appropriation, and artists in the US have been expected to distance themselves from the misogynistic, queer- and trans-phobic as well as racist politics of the Trump administration. Vividly illustrated in these interrelated developments, pop stars have been increasingly required to raise their voices politically.
In the context of these broad developments, I will examine the politics of musical voices in contemporary pop music. Vocal performances in postmillennial pop music entangle multiple material-semiotic (Haraway 1988) spheres: corporeal techniques meet technologies of production, sounds are juxtaposed with words and images in videos and live performances, and their aesthetics are commonly intricate webs of reference to particular styles, eras, or artists. With these characteristics, voices in pop music intensify what have been theorized as the central paradoxes of voice: its insistently transgressive entanglement of bodies and subjects and its irreducibility to either of these spheres. It is in these intensifications that I locate their possible capacity for creating alternative embodied selves.
In this paper, I will consider recent vocal performances by female pop artists through a working concept of vocal figurations. Building on Donna Haraway’s feminist figurations, the concept seeks to examine voices in pop music as situated and performative processes in the field of tensions between pop-feminist and socially conscious proclamations and the resurgence of misogynistic, queer- and trans-phobic as well as racist public discourse and politics. By retracing the ways in which particular voices are muted, disciplined, manipulated or amplified, I will explore both their situatedness in our contemporary historical moment as well as their performative potentials of creating possible alternative visions for the future.

Veronika Muchitsch is a third-year PhD candidate in Musicology at Uppsala University, Sweden. In her dissertation project, she examines female voices in popular music with a particular interest in their intersectional politics and performative potentials. She has presented her work at “Un/Sounding Gender”, Symposium at Humboldt-University of Berlin (2018) and “Mixing Pop and Politics. Subversion, Resistance and Reconciliation”, IASPM-ANZ Conference at Massey University Wellington, New Zealand (2017), among others. Her article „Neoliberal Sounds? The Politics of Beyoncé’s Voice on ‘Run the World (Girls)'“ was published in Pop Scriptum, Vol. 12 (2016, Humboldt-University of Berlin) and recently awarded with the Harald-Kaufmann Price for outstanding publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the category Junior Researchers (University for Music and Performance Arts in Graz, Austria).

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