Kathrin Dreckmann

Bettina Papenburg

Popular culture encompasses and draws on a rich history of works by musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and performers who question the contours of traditional sexual and gender identities, including but not limited to members of LGBTQIA* communities. When encountered on the stage or screen, for instance, in the guise of drag performances, forms of sexual ambiguity often spark fascination. Yet in everyday life in various socio-cultural contexts, sexual and bodily difference in all its forms is still met with hostility, rendering vulnerable those human beings that deviate from the white, male, straight, able-bodied norm. Queer artists today respond to social stigma in multiple creative ways, for example, by transforming negative affect, fostering a politics of care, and rewriting history. This volume considers how feminist, queer, and trans* musicians, filmmakers, curators, and performance artists contribute to popular culture. It explores the many ways of relating to difference, however this is conceived, that their contributions enable. What affects do their works engender? How do they rouse their audience, and to what ends? How do they fabricate and circulate provocative messages about new forms of gender, race, class, and desire? What other visions do they inspire?

Aesthetic Interventions in Contemporary Culture

Queer Pop

Christofer Jost

Bastian Schramm

From their inception, music videos have served as an important instrument for depicting collective emotional states, cultural affiliations and processes of social change. At the beginning of the 21st century, the utilization of the music video genre changed, with more and more artists using it to address social and political grievances as well as questions of identity. Both the decline of music television as a gatekeeper limiting access and participation as well as the rise of social media have contributed significantly to the growth of the critical and subversive but also utopian potential of music videos. As a result, music videos today offer counter-proposals to heteronormativity, ableism, patriarchalism, racism and other forms of oppression that not only reach a wider audience but also reflect a broader diversity of lifestyles, interests and motivations than was possible during the MTV era. This volume explores transcultural imaginaries in music videos from a variety of angles, providing a broad overview of approaches to negotiating the 'cultural' in the music video genre, both past and present.

Media - Aesthetics - Social Utopia

Music Video and Transcultural Imaginaries

Nachdem das aus dem Musikfernsehen bekannte Musikvideo inzwischen eine fast vierzig Jahre dauernde Geschichte vorweist, ist eine zentrale Frage, ob es immer noch gewinnbringend als Produkt einer "Kulturindustrie" lesbar ist. Dieser Band erprobt einen neuen interpretativen Ansatz, der Musikvideos als Produkte eines hybridisierenden, intermedialen und Genregrenzen überschreitenden Diskurses begreift. Während das Musikvideo eine spezifische audiovisuelle Form darstellt, die im Kontext des Musikfernsehens der 1980er erprobt, raffiniert und kommerzialisiert wurde, liegen seine Wurzeln in den audiovisuellen Experimenten von Avantgarde-Künstler*innen des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts und transportierte damit immer auch ein ästhetisch subversives Moment. Dieses Moment kommt in seiner Fähigkeit zum Ausdruck, sich in bestehende Diskurse einzuklinken, diese zu ästhetisieren und umzudeuten. Das Musikvideo ist zum einen an einer popkulturellen Umdeutung des Alltags beteiligt, zum anderen kommen in ihm häufig wieder Bezüge zu künstlerischen und avantgardistischen Produktionsweisen zum Vorschein, die dadurch popularisiert werden. Diese bisher wenig erforschte Perspektive auf das Musikvideo soll in diesem Band untersucht werden.

Kathrin Dreckmann

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