Transposition (Mar 2013)
Boy Bands, Drag Kings, and the Performance of (Queer) Masculinities
Abstract
This article explores the queer potentialities inherent in boy band culture. Boy band culture had its heyday during the mid- and late 1990s when innumerable boy bands were casted in order to successfully conquer the music market. The boy band phenomenon might at first sight seem to have evolved around a very heteronormatively structured pattern of male performers on stage and screaming female fans in front of the stage. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Judith "Jack" Halberstam, and Gayle Wald, this article challenges this notion and argues that boy band culture offers a space for alternative (queer) masculinities. In reference to the Backstreet Boys and Take That as my primary examples of boy bands from the 1990s, I will first identify some characteristic features shared by (almost) all boy bands. Afterwards, my reading of the Backstreet Boys’ music video "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" (1996) will show how these bands perform a specific "boy band masculinity" which heavily relies on markers of gay culture and homoeroticism. The third part of this article deals with affective responses to boy band culture. This part primarily focuses on subcultural re-interpretations and re-significations of boy band masculinity by drag king troupes. Drag kings as performers of "female masculinity" (cf. Halberstam) use strategies of exaggeration and parody to playfully deconstruct notions of binarily gendered identity. In a final step, I will draw attention to the bands’ performance of masculinity in the new millennium: Take That’s music video "Happy Now" (2011) makes us ask whether, meanwhile, boy bands have started to adopt parodic performance styles themselves in order to self-consciously distance themselves from "traditional", heteronormative masculinities on the one hand side, and, maybe even more importantly, from the boy band image itself.
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