ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the feminist outcry over the song “Blurred Lines” (BL), performed by Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell Williams. Using BL as a case study, I engage the epistemic claims and erotic stakes of “call-out culture” and assertions that the song exemplifies “rape culture” (RC). The analysis reveals the song has synesthetic seductive effects that operate on kinetic, affective, and discursive levels. I begin by exploring the condemnation of BL as an instance of, in Sedgwick’s lingo, a “paranoid” reading, where words that could mean violation of consent, must mean violation of consent. Drawing on Foucault, I then demonstrate how the paranoid response to the song is implicated in an incitement to rapey discourse, and thus may be parasitically caught up in the taboo eroticism of rape talk. Finally, I consider another site of erotic pleasure evidenced in the cognitive dissonance reported by many critics of the song. While the purported message of the BL lyrics is bad, the music – they confess – is good; it makes people want to groove. The song itself is not just reciting a ‘rapey’ scenario; it is performative of rapey: a musical seduction of the body that one’s political will must ward off. I conclude by positing that we need to create spaces for exploring the possibility of ambivalence in sexual desire – the very “blurred lines” that anti-RC critics have so vehemently disavowed.
