ABSTRACT
A popular YouTube genre has emerged in which US military personnel restage music videos by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé (“Telephone”), Carly Rae Jepsen (“Call Me Maybe”), Ke$ha (“Blah Blah Blah”), Taylor Swift (“Shake it Off”), and others. These remix parodies, which originate in the combat theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan, are disseminated to millions of online viewers around the world, and the representational mode of cuteness they employ speaks to a number of social and political concerns. This chapter examines the global dynamics of US masculinity as exemplified by these videos: while these remixes seem to amplify anxieties associated with the precarity of twenty-first-century soldiering, they may also serve a potentially strategic purpose. Their often comic gender and sexual provocations resonate with official propaganda that justifies the US War on Terror through a starkly drawn dualism pitting a secular, enlightened, and egalitarian West against a patriarchal Islam whose oppressed women are in desperate need of rescue. The videos display a distinctive historical, geographical, and aesthetic trajectory. There are two generations of work: the earliest videos emerged around 2005 and tend to be located in Iraq rather than Afghanistan, which coincides with the logistics of the two wars in those countries, as the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq began at the end of 2007.
