Introduction

Following a rich tradition of popular music scholarship, the chapters in this collection are bound together by contributors’ beliefs that making and consuming popular music are political activities in the sense that both regularly encourage individuals to imagine and enact a better, more just world. Specifically, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can productively contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. In the Introduction, we situate the politics of queer and feminist popular music and scholarship within the generative theoretical frame of critical hope as it has recently been taken up by a number of feminist and queer writers.