Filming female desire: queering the gaze of pop music videos

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the queer gaze within pop music videos. It contends that the contemporary US musician Hayley Kiyoko can be seen as a queer music video auteur who has transformed what the ‘gaze’ can mean in mainstream pop music through directing her own videos. The paper asserts that through her performance within and, arguably even more significantly, via her direction of videos, Kiyoko has produced a new and complex portrayal of how female sexual desire is represented even when, on the surface, it may not necessarily appear to disrupt normativity. Reaction videos made by Kiyoko’s fans have also queered the gaze whereby the ‘watcher’ becomes the ‘watched’. The paper concludes that online spaces and digital technologies are radically reshaping understandings of queer sexuality in music videos.

KEYWORDS:

• Music videos
• gaze theory
• queer
• lesbian
• sexuality
• Hayley Kiyoko

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful for the useful comments provided by Rosie Harsant, Kevin Milburn, and Nick Stevenson. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful guidance. Any errors, of course remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Cordelia Freeman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. Her research is broadly concerned with gender and sexuality and this has been predominantly through the biopolitical control of women’s bodies through reproductive healthcare restrictions in Latin America.