Diva

Kirsty Fairclough is Professor of Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the co-editor of The Music Documentary (2013), The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury, 2015), The Legacy of Mad Men, Music/Video (2019), Prince and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2020) and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture. She is the Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival.Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His publications include Michael Reeves (2003), Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film (2019), and Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society (2022). He has co-edited: Mark E. Smith and The Fall (2010); Reverberations (Bloomsbury, 2012); Resonances (Bloomsbury, 2013); The Music Documentary (2013); The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury, 2016); Stories We Could Tell (2019); Politics of the Many (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Adult Themes (forthcoming).Nicole Hodges Persley is Professor of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Her books include Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance and Black Matters: Lewis Morrow Plays (2021) and, as co-editor, Breaking it Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority and Hip-Hop in Musical Theater (2021). Shara Rambarran is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK. She is a musicologist for the award-winning Spotify music podcast, Decode, co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences, and is an editor for the Journal on the Art of Record Production. Her publications include Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2021) and (as co-editor) The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (2020).

This book is a work of ideological expansion in which 15 essays about how charismatic female ‘stars’ choose to perform and represent themselves to the public are compiled to produce data intended to encourage the formulation of a truly global, truly intersectional, style of feminism. Because we know the semantically unstable term ‘diva’ can be deployed to either praise or damn any female actor, pop star, comedian, or drag queen who dares to use their Dionysian stagecraft to defy repressive stereotypes of how women are allowed to behave, the four editors of Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop encourage scholars to embrace the word’s semantic drift the better to affirm that for truly gifted performers there is no self-mythologizing body image, social media post, song lyric, or verbal quip so transgressive that it cannot function as effective cultural critique and resistance.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsContributorsIntroduction: ‘Y’All! The Diva and Us’Kirsty Fairclough, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, Benjamin Halligan, University of Wolverhampton, UK, Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas, USA, and Shara Rambarran, University of Brighton, UKSection One: The Rise to Power1. “Proceed with Caution”: Mariah Carey – the Ultimate Diva in Popular Music and Culture?Shara Rambarran, University of Brighton, UK2.Performing Creative Labour: Whitney Houston Metanarratives on MTV, 1985-1988Gwynne George, Independent Scholar, USA3. A Girl of Many Colours: Dolly Parton’s Image Evolution, 1967-2022James Reeves, Independent Scholar, UK4. A Fondness for Shock: The Celebrated Outburst of Grace Jones Mark Duffett, University of Chester, UKSection Two: The Diva and Our Times5. Aaliyah’s Voice and AfterBenjamin Halligan, University of Wolverhampton, UK6. “Suck On My Balls, Bitch!”: #MeToo and Beyoncé – A Paradigm ShiftHannah Strong, Independent Scholar, USA7. Amuro Namie: Japan’s Diva in the Postmodern Era?Dorothy Finan, Independent Scholar, UK8. Reconstructing the American Dream: Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist PerformancesTimmia Hearn DeRoy, Independent Scholar, USA9. “WAP”: Erotic Revolutionary Hip-Hop by Cardi B and Megan Thee StallionShawna Shipley-Gates, Independent Scholar, USA10. Putting the Divas Back in Their Place: Controversy and Backlash at the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime ShowGina Sandí Díaz, California State University, USA11. Simultaneously Black: Drake and Nicki Minaj and the Performance of Hip-Hip Cosmopolitanisms Nicole Hodges Persley, University of Kansas, USASection Three: Diva Cultures12. Curating the DivaHarriet Reed, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK13. A Diva on the Iranian Stage: Ali Akbar Alizad’s Remix of Jean Genet’s The Maids Rana Esfandiary, University of Kansas, USA14. Recasting Diva Culture: Performative Strategies of Fourth Wave Black Feminist Stand-Up ComedyRachel E. Blackburn, Independent Scholar, USA15. Independent Women: The Impact of Pop Divas on Stand-Up ComedyEllie Tomsett, Birmingham City University, UK, and Nathalie Weidhase, University of Surrey, UKIndex