Pop Masculinities explores the many ways in which twenty-first century pop artists perform masculinity through their songs, music videos, and public appearances. This offers a point of entry for addressing broader gender issues in contemporary popular culture and society.

Introduction: Like Pinocchio 1. Separating the Men from the Boys: New Masculinities, Pop Music, and the Social Politics of Interpretation 2. Good Boy Gone Bad: Fashioning a Post Boy Band Masculinity 3. A Different Country? Lil Nas X, the Sound of the Internet, and Queering the Cowboy 4. Beyond Bieber Fever 5. Dangerous and (In)Vulnerable: Aestheticizing Violence and Dancing in Sin City 6. From Boy Band to Man Band: Take That, Age(ing), and the Display of Self-Irony Conclusion: Fade-Out Bibliography Index

"Hansen's conclusion is both an homage to masculinity in popular music studies and an invitation for future pop scholars to join him in this ever-expanding field of gender and performance." -- Paxton Haven, The University of Texas at Austin, Journal of Popular Music Studies "Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they may seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us." -- Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities "We often forget that men have gender too. And despite what a patriarchal ideology might frame as a natural structure, boys, no less than girls, struggle to forge their own subjectivities amid the many cultural pressures confronting them. In this dazzling and nuanced study, Kai Arne Hansen analyzes the ways several prominent young male entertainers have publicly negotiated their own coming of age by means of music, lyrics, fashion, and self-presentation. A beautifully written and deeply compelling study." -- Susan McClary, Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University and Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA "Pop music is a unique context in which the meanings of masculinities are being negotiated on an exceptional kind of display. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Hansen provides rich and nuanced analyses that unpack just what it means to argue that enactments of gender sometimes simultaneously shore up and destabilize the very systems of inequality they sometimes seem designed to challenge. Pop Masculinities provides new material for better understanding the flexibility of gender hegemony in a cultural arena that impacts all of us."--Tristan Bridges, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Co-editor of Men and Masculinities and Exploring Masculinities "In Pop Masculinities, Hansen draws together a range of perspectivesDLage, class, race, sexuality, and moreDLto consider the complex manifestations of masculinity in twenty-first century popular music culture with an impressive intersectional nuance. He interweaves close readings of sonic and visual artefacts with a rich cultural-theoretical framework, to offer a timely analysis of the gender politics of commercial music culture." -- Freya Jarman, Reader in Music, University of Liverpool

Kai Arne Hansen is Associate Professor of Music in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He is co-editor of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements (2019, with Nick Braae) and Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins (2020, with Eirik Askerøi and Freya Jarman), and he currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Journal of Musicology. His research spans the topics of popular music and identity, gender and sexuality, contemporary media, audiovisual aesthetics, and children's musical cultures.

Selling point: Presents extended analyses of the creative output and public personae of a diverse selection of well-known pop artists, including Lil Nas X and Justin Bieber Selling point: Directs attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize pop music, culture, and society alike Selling point: Develops and demonstrates a broad interdisciplinary approach for studying the intersectional politics of gender in pop music