ABSTRACT
Gender is located in the twists and shapes that construct the subject in music performance. Music's convergence with other media in the past decades of twentieth century has ignited interest in the articulation of gendered subjectivities. As the contributions in this anthology attest to, gendered performance is integral to understanding celebrity culture in all its curious guises. In the main, the critical approaches to subjectivity, style and performativity attend to the intricate aspects of human agency that are mediated by discourses of sexuality and gender. Identifying gender and sexual constraints signals hope for a more egalitarian world, where themes of resistance underpin the necessary gender-baiting strategies of activists. The postulation that "men and women 'express' some essential masculine or feminine forms of sexuality" is by and large recognised as contentious, though, and has been debated rigorously from a feminist perspective in popular music scholarship. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
