The construction and representation of the gender identities of singer-songwriters KT Tunstall (UK), Missy Higgins (Australia), and Bic Runga (New Zealand), artists who destabilise typical binary notions of gender in their media output (specifically their music videos), will be analysed in order to argue that female masculinity is a means for singer-songwriters to negotiate a dichotomously gendered mainstream, constructed to appeal to the ‘male gaze’.1 I contend that blurring the lines of ‘cultural differentiation of females from males’2 allows for multidimensional readings that appeal to a queer gaze. The effect of this is arguably a wider mainstream appeal, inclusive of heterosexual and queer female spectators, increasing cultural and economic capital and artistic credibility.
The key issue underpinning the discussion of gender identity in this chapter is the difficulty female musicians in the popular music industry have traditionally had attaining commercial success whilst gaining or maintaining artistic credibility, potentially caused by the heteropatriarchal and sexist hegemonies that have existed in mainstream Western music since its inception. The ‘mainstream cultural industries’3 of rock and pop are closely linked with gender and ‘perceived as masculine or feminine’.4 While rock music has connotations of authenticity, autonomy and seriousness, pop music faces negative bias as a ‘feminized form of mass culture’5 that is superficial, formulaic, and commercialised. Bannister points out that the difficulty women have in gaining artistic credibility exists because ‘female performers are identified with genres viewed as having less cultural capital’6 in contrast to their male peers.
As the notion of gender identity is so critical to this chapter, it will be useful to clarify my usage of the expression before continuing to the case studies. My ideas around gender identity are heavily influenced by the work of Judith Butler, who argues that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the “expressions” that are said to be its results’.7 In other words, gender is a set of acts and rituals that we perform constantly.8 As such, masculinity and femininity as attached to male and female bodies are simply a cultural construct. When discussing the gender identity of a particular artist, I am referring to the set of acts or representations that connote either masculinity or femininity, regardless of sex. Lucy Green provides a helpful summary of indicators of masculinity and femininity in her book Gender, Music and Education (1997). She states, ‘masculinity tends to be defined as active, rational, inventive, experimental, scientific, unified, as a catalyst to culture and an emblem of the controlling powers of mind; femininity tends to be defined as passive, reproductive, caring, emotional, contrary, as part of nature, controlled by the body’.9
Hence, female masculinity is simply a displacement of performances of masculinity from male to female bodies. Judith Halberstam in her influential work Female Masculinity (1998) argues that masculinity exists across both male and female bodies, that masculinity does not need male bodies to exist within, in order to explore queer subject positions that can subvert or displace heteronormative gender identities.10 According to Halberstam, female masculinity is performed in a variety of ways, from the drag king, to the butch dyke through to the subtle performative masculinity of the tomboy.11 She notes that ‘tomboyism tends to be associated with a “natural” desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation’.12 This is appropriate to female singer-songwriters who wish to free themselves from the sexualised representations of femininity that occur in mainstream pop music. It also opens opportunities for greater displays of musicianship that are usually associated with men in popular music, but conflict with signifiers of femininity.
Representations of gender in popular music performance predominantly focus on women’s bodies, either as sexual objects, or the source of their voices.13 This is due in part to the male gaze – a term coined by Laura Mulvey,14 developed from the work of John Berger in the 1970s to describe the way art (particularly the nude) was constructed to offer pleasure to an ideally male spectator. ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’15 Green expounds on this as she argues that in Western culture, ‘display’ is coded as feminine, whereas spectatorship is coded as masculine.16 She posits that singing reaffirms patriarchal definitions of femininity.17
The queer gaze is preferable to the concept of a lesbian gaze or female gaze because it refers to a gaze that is uncertain of its gender and sexuality.18 A female gaze predominantly refers to the way women look at men, or how women look at other woman in view of their desirability towards men, and is thus heterosexual in nature.19 Tamsin Wilton states ‘the lesbian desiring gaze simultaneously of and at a woman contradicts utterly the heterosexual master narrative’,20 which although useful, is not as flexible as a queer gaze because it requires sexual desire. Although a queer gaze may be attributed to a male viewer, it is appropriate to hetero- and homosexual female spectatorship because it acknowledges the complex set of identifications that can take place in order for viewing pleasure or identification to occur when women are both subject and object. For the queer female viewer (primarily lesbian and bisexual women), there are a number of possible spectator positions that can be taken up. Depending on the representation of a popular musician’s gender identity, a ‘queer viewer finds that … desire is mobile here and may take up butch, femme, masculine, or feminine spectator positions’.21
The role of singer-songwriter in the folk or neo-folk tradition provides a vehicle for female (or male, for that matter) musicians to construct less dichotomous gender identities than would be possible in pop and rock genres. Female singer-songwriters can negotiate the male gaze without creating overt sexual feminine gender identities. Jodie Taylor makes a critical point when discussing the folk movement of the 1970s. She states, ‘folk was … less bound to the rigid gender roles ascribed to rock and pop’.22 As such, folk and its successor neo-folk enable women musicians to create queer gender identities that invite a multiplicity of readings and offer various viewing pleasures to a variety of spectators, particularly heterosexual and queer female spectators.
Female singer-songwriters have a certain flexibility to perform different roles – this is suggested in the very title of the role. The singer-songwriter performs two roles – both singer (reaffirming femininity) and songwriter (linked to authorship and thus connoting masculinity), thus destabilising heteronormative gender binaries. This enables a queer gaze, arguably widening appeal, and increasing artistic credibility and cultural capital. The following case studies will examine how each artist destabilises heteronormative binary gender identities in their media output, primarily their music videos, and how this enables a queer gaze and increases artistic credibility.
It is important to note that the videos in which these singer-songwriters play with gender identities and female masculinity seem to be targeted to audiences outside of the United States. There are a few possible reasons for this, the most logical relating to the harshness of the American mainstream popular music market, which is ‘a hostile environment for lesbian and bisexual women, with marketability requiring certain compromises at the political level’,23 namely, their gender identity. It is possible Missy Higgins and Bic Runga have attempted to negotiate this struggle by feminising their gender identity in order to appeal to the male gaze in the US versions of their videos, supposedly in an attempt to break into the mainstream market. However at the very least, the different versions of each song, or duality within the videos (as in the case of KT Tunstall) allow us to uncover ways female singer-songwriters can displace or play with gender identity in their media output.
KT Tunstall
For Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, whose debut album Eye to the Telescope (2005) was an international success,24 gender identity is a site of conflict. Tunstall has garnered a large lesbian following arguably due to her tomboy, ergo masculine gender identity that invites the queer gaze.25 Her music videos for ‘Suddenly I See’26 from Eye to the Telescope and ‘(Still a) Weirdo’27 from her 2010 album Tiger Suit show two versions of Tunstall – an authentic, strong-minded, tomboy version, and a constructed feminine or muted and suppressed version. The lyrical themes of both videos suggest an internal struggle between how Tunstall perceives herself (a weirdo), and how the world expects her to be represented. These videos emphasise Tunstall’s apparent struggle with herself and mask, as Lucy Green points out: ‘the mask has the effect of splitting the displayer in two. From the point of view of the onlooker, the displayer takes on a double form, as both ‘other’ and ‘mask’; from the point of view of the displayer, the self is doubled into ‘self’ and ‘mask’’.28
KT Tunstall demonstrates this struggle, and in doing so, the flexibility accorded to female singer-songwriters in a number of ways. Firstly, she is represented as both an authentic self and a constructed mask. In ‘Suddenly I See’, the establishing shots of Tunstall lit in blue, performing in a live set up with an electric arch-top guitar in an industrial warehouse establishes a tomboy gender identity as Tunstall’s true and authentic self. Tunstall’s performance on electric guitar is significant, because as Green notes, ‘women singers … who make use of technology as part of the inherent meanings of their music … threaten in some ways to break out of definitions of femininity, by challenging women’s alienation from technology’.29 This representation of Tunstall is juxtaposed with a sexualised, red-lit doppelgänger who enters about a third of the way through the video. This juxtaposition establishes the second Tunstall as the mask – a realisation of patriarchal expectations of femininity. She is sexualised, not playing an instrument, and the camera focuses on her body more than her face. This establishes her as an inferior musician, as according to Green, ‘the more she goes in for displaying her body, the less likely it is that she is a “good” musician’.30 However, this video, rather than confirming patriarchal definitions of femininity, destabilises or queers them.
Although the doppelgänger Tunstall is represented primarily as in competition to the first Tunstall (emphasising the self vs. mask), Tunstall interacts with the doppelgänger by singing with her, either in call and response, or chorus. This demonstrates Tunstall’s representation as both self and mask – further queering gender binaries through the connotations linked to how both Tunstalls are represented. Additionally, both Tunstalls stand opposite each other, reminiscent of a mirror. Tunstall thus reveals her position as both subject and object of her own gaze. As such, she is able to play with her mask because ‘display is not so much a single act by a displayer as a relationship, an exchange which is mutually constructed by both displayer and onlooker’31 and as an onlooker to her own display, ‘since … s/he participates in the active construction of the mask, so s/he can “play with the mask” conceptually’.32
Representations of Tunstall in the music video for ‘(Still a) Weirdo’33 reaffirm her tomboy gender identity. In the lyric of the song, Tunstall describes herself as ‘eloquent’, but ‘never quite elegant’, and the video reflects this struggle. It employs the use of a masculine geography – a local pub, as the setting. Tunstall is seen in isolation either a bare rustic room or by an empty pool table, or walking empty streets. The video is saturated with natural light contrasted with the dark interior of the bar. She is presented finger-picking an acoustic guitar, wearing ripped jeans, a t-shirt and stereotypical ‘dyke boots’. At one stage in the video, Tunstall is seen at the bar, drinking a beer (a masculine coded drink), when she sees herself as the bar tender in a mirror. This doppelgänger Tunstall is represented as suppressed, as the viewer only snatches glimpses of her at the bar, or passing the original Tunstall in a car driven by an aggressive-looking man. Her face is constantly in the shadows. Whereas the original Tunstall is represented as autonomous, free to roam the streets and visit pubs, the ‘suppressed’ Tunstall is always confined to a particular space.
As mentioned earlier, Green argues that in the West, display is coded as feminine, whereas the position of spectator is masculine.34 What effect does this have when the object is both displayer and spectator as in the case of ‘(Still a) Weirdo’? Tunstall is the displayer (ergo feminine) in that she is the object of the video. However, there are a number of devices used to destabilise typical femininity and construct a masculine gender identity. Primarily, that she is the spectator of her doppelgänger – this is the only interaction she has in the video: she is otherwise represented as an outsider and loner.
Through being the displayer and the spectator simultaneously, Tunstall is coded as both masculine and feminine at the same time. Thus, gender binaries are destabilised, and lines are blurred between her masculinity and femininity. This enables the queer gaze because, through gazing at her doppelgänger, Tunstall invites a gaze directed at her doppelgänger from the perspective of a female (here read queer gaze, as the gaze is both of and at a woman). This reveals an apparent suppression and passivity of her doppelgänger who is placed within the confines of patriarchal definitions of feminine gender identity, juxtaposed with Tunstall’s masculinity, which provides a sort of freedom. This enables a mode of identification for the queer viewer due to the freedom afforded Tunstall’s tomboy persona, in contrast with the suppressed, passive, thus feminine, Tunstall. However, this freedom that Tunstall enjoys in the video comes at a cost – she is portrayed as a social outsider, a weirdo, who does not interact with any other characters in the video, walking along the street by herself, drinking by herself, and playing her music in isolation. Again, this provides a site for queer identification as it aligns with narratives of homosexuality in the Western heteropatriarchal world. Up until very recently, homosexuals have been viewed as outsiders – always in a heterosexually permeated society, but never quite part of it.
Missy Higgins
Singer-songwriter Missy Higgins is an openly bisexual artist, whose catchy tunes and down-to-earth tomboy persona have made her an Australian super-star.35 The original music video for ‘Where I Stood’36 from her 2007 album On a Clear Night is exemplary in its emphasis of Missy Higgins’ tomboy gender identity. The lyrical content of the song is ambiguous in regards to the gender of the object, which creates an opportunity for a queer reading. The break-up narrative is addressed to an ambiguous ‘you’ but there are hints that the object could be female. There are two lines in particular that invite this reading. The first line in the second verse; ‘I thought love was black and white, that it was wrong or it was right’, offers the possibility of an internal struggle between a supposed heterosexual right and white and homosexual wrong and black, which to the queer listener may suggest that Higgins was taken off guard by homosexual desire, forcing her to reassess traditional views on romantic relationships. Indeed there is a strong theme of discovery throughout the song, with the first two lines of the chorus containing themes of internal conflict and then addressing her former lover saying ‘you taught me how to trust myself’. These themes are typical of a coming-out narrative – a journey of self-discovery. The hook line of the song ‘cos she will love you more than I could, she who dares to stand where I stood’ emphasises this gender ambiguity, as the woman who dares to stand where Higgins stood could either be homo- or heterosexual.37
The original version of Higgins’ ‘Where I Stood’ music video places her firmly within a masculine geography and away from the feminine domestic interior. The video is set in an urban subway, in a photo booth, and on city streets. The colour palette of the video consists of masculine-coded colours, mainly blues and greys and faded greens. The film is edited with a dark filter, emphasising the darker colours. Overall, the effect is a gritty urban look, typically used in male rock videos that destabilises Higgins’ gender identity. This can be juxtaposed with the domestic interior that the US version of ‘Where I Stood’38 is set in. Higgins plays the piano in a studio apartment filled with seemingly natural light, emphasising nature and domesticity, two of the signifiers that, according to Green, reaffirm femininity. She states, ‘first, the woman singer continues to appear masked and enclosed in her body; secondly, this helps to affirm her closeness to nature and her alienation from technology; thirdly, public singing calls into question her sexual life; fourthly, she is contrarily counterposed as an image of maternal perfection in the domestic setting’.39 Through affirming her femininity by a connection to nature and a domestic setting in the US version, Higgins promotes a heterosexual viewing and invites a male gaze. However, through destabilising these indicators of femininity in the original version of the video, Higgins creates a tomboy gender identity and opens up opportunities for queer readings of both the lyric and video.
Additionally, Higgins’ drab costume in the original video, consisting of a woolly beanie and a big coat and scarf with her greasy hair, downplays her sexuality and emphasise her tomboyish carelessness. Higgins is also represented as a solitary figure throughout the video, firstly through her isolation in the photo booth, and then by her walking towards the camera in the opposite direction to the extras, who are always walking away from the camera. This invites a queer reading of the video and the lyric as it constructs a loner narrative tied to Higgins’ queer gender identity. In contrast, through the US version, she is shown wearing a short pink dress, playing piano and painting boxes which she eventually arranges into a makeshift projection surface that plays images of polaroid photographs superimposed with lyrics from the song. There are multiple shots of Higgins’ face, but the camera focus is soft, ergo, feminine. There are lingering shots of her hands, legs and body as she sings. Although the image of Higgins is not highly sexualised, there is a noticeable difference in the construction of her gender identity between the two videos. The US version invites the male gaze by emphasising Higgins’ femininity through its use of colour, costume, lighting and camera techniques. There are not many opportunities for queer subversive readings as there are little or no indications of female masculinity, and the narrative of the video does not support queer narratives, in fact, it has little to do with the lyrical narrative.
The same can be said about the two different versions of Higgins music videos for ‘Steer’, also from On a Clear Night. The US version’s representations of Higgins are feminine, but not highly sexualised.40 She is shown in a passive role, lying under an autumn tree, standing on a mountain, silhouetted against a bright moon, occasionally playing an acoustic guitar. There is no particular narrative permeating this video – its sole purpose seems to be to present Higgins in a variety of natural settings, emphasising her femininity. Shots of Higgins’ face have a soft focus, which in combination with the natural yellow lighting serves to construct a feminine gender identity. The many shots of Higgins’ body invite ‘thoughts about sex and sexuality rather than intellect and character’.41 While this video serves the male gaze, it detracts from Higgins’ authenticity and artistic credibility as a songwriter leaving her in a murky no-man’s-land, away from the highly sexualised, yet commercially viable representations of women in pop, but without anything to compensate for its lack.
The Australian version of ‘Steer’42 offers more options for queer readings. The video has a strong narrative – aligning with the lyrical themes of autonomy and ‘taking control of the wheel’. Somewhat literal in its interpretation, Higgins is portrayed as a car-crash test driver by day, driving cars at speed into walls. It shows Higgins stuck in her routine, with little activity outside of her work. Towards the end of the video, Higgins appears to realise she doesn’t have to keep hitting a brick wall and escapes into the Australian outback. The video primarily, again, has an urban setting, switching between an industrial warehouse where Higgins works, and a high-rise rooftop. The colour palette of the video consists of mainly greys and blues, as with the Australian version of ‘Where I Stood’, emphasising Higgins’ masculine gender identity.
The occupation in which Higgins is depicted is a gendered one. Typically most occupations dealing with mechanics and cars are coded as masculine. This connection destabilises Higgins’ gender identity as it connects her with technology.43 It is also interesting to note that Higgins is the only female character in the video. There are two male doctors, and two male technicians dressed in the same blue overalls that Higgins is dressed in, but it is she who performing the active role of driving the car. This suggests that, not only is Higgins one of the boys (the matching blue overalls suggests this), she is actually at the top of the boys’ game, being the driver instead of a passive observer.
The most obvious, yet crucial point here is that, when taken as a body of work, the two different versions for each of Higgins’ videos destabilise her gender identity. This flexibility aligns with the role of the singer-songwriter, which is can be seen as both a masculine and feminine role. The US versions for each song seem to construct a more feminine gender identity for Higgins, but it becomes obvious that this is only a part of Higgins’ mask of display when compared to the original videos for each song, which demonstrate her ability to play with this mask by constructing a masculine gender identity. I am suggesting that, like Tunstall, Higgins indicates an awareness of different representations and their effect, and her female masculinity offers the queer spectator multiple sites for identification.
Bic Runga
Bic Runga is an iconic New Zealand singer-songwriter who became securely ensconced in the Kiwi rock canon early on in her career through representing herself as a working, touring musician who is one of the boys.44 She has maintained a mostly feminine gender identity, with only subtle indications of female masculinity, however I posit that this has been instrumental to her success in the New Zealand popular music industry.45 In the New Zealand version of her music video ‘Get Some Sleep’,46 Runga is represented in an active and stereotypically masculine role as a travelling DJ. The narrative centres on her operating a mobile radio station out of an old Bedford van that is travelling around the New Zealand countryside to remote towns. In addition to this, snippets of old 8mm handheld footage supposedly shot by Runga whilst travelling in the van add connotations of authenticity attached to documentary modes of signification. More traditional devices that invite the male gaze, such as the soft focus on Runga’s face when she is shown operating the DJ equipment, have toned down these masculine aspects of Runga’s representation. However, Runga’s mastery over electronic equipment (the sound desk and 8mm camera), as well as her isolation in the DJ booth is essentially disruptive to the male gaze and elicits identification from queer viewers because it places her firmly within a discourse of female masculinity.
A comparison of this video with the international version of ‘Get Some Sleep’47 will reveal the full effect of the masculine aspects of Runga’s gender identity. This version shows Runga in a heteronormative passive role – being driven around in the back of a car, and rolling around on a bed. She gazes into the camera alluringly, inviting the male gaze. There are many body shots of Runga, with shots lingering on her legs and at one point, flirtatious movements of her hand whilst she is talking on the phone, inciting connotations of her feminine sexuality, appealing to the male gaze. At one stage, she is shown deciding which outfit to wear out. A series of shots show her trying on different outfits- mainly different variations of jeans and a shirt – a decidedly tomboy outfit – before settling on a little black dress – the epitome of feminine sexuality.
There are two important devices used to destabilise Runga’s gender identity in the videos for this song. Firstly, although she is coded as feminine through her position as the object of the video, in the original video, she refuses to engage the spectator by avoiding eye contact with the camera, whereas in the international version, she actively invites masculine spectatorship by gazing seductively into the camera throughout the video. Secondly, the narrative of the lyric unveils Runga’s life as a working musician, and this reveals her awareness of the mask of display when she sings ‘putting on my daytime eyes, a good enough disguise until I get some sleep’. As with Tunstall and Higgins, this awareness is emphasised by the fact that there are two different videos for the same song, hence two different representations of Runga, indicating her willingness to play with her mask, destabilising her gender identity.
Conclusion
A queer gaze finds many opportunities for identification and desire within these videos, whether through a potentially queer video narrative, as in the case of ‘(Still a) Weirdo’ and ‘Steer’, lyric narrative (‘Where I Stood’), or the destabilising of typical feminine gender identities throughout these case studies. The heterosexual female viewer may either identify with the artist’s representations of strong-mindedness and independence often associated with masculinity, or temporarily desire the facets of masculinity as portrayed by them. This chapter has attempted to add to discourses on women in popular music by defining a role – the singer-songwriter in the folk tradition – that enables female musicians to construct masculine gender identities, destabilising heteropatriarchal gender binaries and appealing to a queer gaze.
