Editors' Introduction for NANO Special Issue 16: "This Is What Makes Us Girls": Gender, Genre, and Popular Music

Boys don't cry. God is a woman. I can't talk right now, I'm doing hot girl shit. Popular music has a long history of defining gender for its listeners. Our introduction to NANO Special Issue 16, "This Is What Makes Us Girls," offers a reading of contemporary singer Lana Del Rey as a participant in pop music's obsessive theorization of gender, race, and other intersecting genres of embodied identity. We propose that Del Rey's body of work provokes shared questions about how other artists (and their fans) use the tropes, sounds, and platforms of pop stardom to theorize raced, gendered, and national identity. On the road to introducing this issue's top-billed performers--Melissa Weber, Ebony L. Perro, Patrick Clement James, William Mosley, and David Wills--we map some of Del Rey's innovations and provocations without putting forth a unifying theory of gender or genre within the realm of pop music--a perhaps impossible task. Instead, we hope to encourage readers to ask what the genre of pop music--and the genres within pop music--teach us about race, femininity, and masculinity in our current moment.