This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting
the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady
Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks,
Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others.
Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality,
which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates …

While there are clear issues to this relationship, Queerness acknowledges and emphasizes
how audiences are oriented toward the limitations of the social and political present through
the visual and sonic ecstasies of pop music. 3 A limitation of this work is, perhaps, due to its
use of thematic structuring. A greater attention to the audience's encounter with the pop
music text might yield further reflection on how queer performance is authored not in terms of
a purely expressive or artistic perspective but as a calculated design of capitalist …