Conference Agenda

This paper examines how menstruation is represented in pop music, analyzing how artists use lyrics, rhythm, and sonic disruption to challenge dominant cultural narratives about periods. Drawing from critical menstruation studies (Chris Bobel, Sharra Vostral, Lara Freidenfelds) and popular music studies, I argue that songs about menstruation resist reproductive chrono-politics—the regulation of menstrual time within patriarchal, capitalist, and heteronormative frameworks. While menstruation has often been erased or euphemized in Western pop culture, certain artists directly confront the stigma surrounding periods, using music as a medium for menstrual visibility and empowerment.

In mainstream pop, menstruation is rarely acknowledged, reinforcing its cultural invisibility. Yet, some artists have broken this silence. Mary J. Blige’s "PMS" (2001) explicitly addresses the physical and emotional toll of premenstrual syndrome, offering a rare depiction of menstruation as a lived, embodied experience. The song’s slow, melancholic R&B arrangement reflects the exhaustion and frustration Blige expresses in her lyrics, grounding menstrual discourse in the sonic textures of pain and vulnerability. Similarly, Destiny’s Child’s "Bootylicious" (2001) contains an often-overlooked lyric in which Beyoncé references menstrual cravings (“I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly”), linking menstruation to cycles of desire and bodily autonomy within pop’s hyper-feminized aesthetic.

Other pop songs frame menstruation as a site of resistance. Princess Nokia’s "Tomboy" (2017) unapologetically normalizes menstruation within a broader celebration of gender fluidity and body positivity, rapping about bleeding freely without shame. Lily Allen’s "Not Fair" (2009) subtly incorporates menstrual discourse in its critique of male sexual entitlement, addressing the ways in which women’s bodies are often expected to function according to male-centered timelines.

By analyzing pop music’s engagement with menstruation, this paper argues that sonic representations of periods challenge cultural taboos, offering alternative menstrual temporalities beyond reproductive teleology. This study contributes to feminist musicology and critical menstruation studies by highlighting how pop music serves as both a mirror of menstrual stigma and a space for its radical reimagination.

In a TikTok video posted on May 14, 2021, the violinist and social media influencer Anastasiia Mazurok (@mmm_anastasy) responded to a prompt from another influencer that asked, “what’s something that’s not a cult but borderline seems like one?” Mazurok responds, “Classical music.” The video that follows, which received over 5,000 “likes,” details several cult-like aspects of classical music culture: “You’re recruited at a very young age.” “You need to practice your daily rituals for 40 hours a day, and the more you practice, the more devoted you are.” “Your music teacher is always right and can never be challenged or doubted.” “If you are a true classical musician, you are chosen, and you are special.”

Mazurok is not the first artist to identify the slippage between classical music and cultism. In fact, classical music’s cult-like status is the subject of two recent works of literary fiction: R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries (2018) and Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty (2023). Both novels portray conservatory-trained female prodigies who abandon their musical careers only to fall prey to (other) dangerous cults. Kwon’s protagonist Phoebe experiences such devotion to her music that she would “forget I had an I,” displaying a proclivity for self-abandonment that is soon weaponized by the violent leader of the Jijeh religious cult (7). Similarly, conservatory life instills in Huang’s narrator an “obsess[ion] with growth and self-improvement” through which she falls prey to a dangerous “wellness” cult called Holistik (26).

Building on recent work in critical conservatory studies by scholars like Jillian Rogers, Loren Kajikawa, and Sean Robert Powell, I argue that these recent novels—as well as work by social media influencers like Mazurok—expose the potential harms of classical music training. These texts, I propose, invite readers and viewers to interrogate some of classical music’s most cherished conventions: its encouragement of rigorous physical exertion, exacting standards of aesthetic beauty and purity, and ethos of utter devotion.

“I don’t think I sing like a woman. I sing like a girl, and it’s a quality I never want to lose.” This statement by Madonna, from an interview regarding the release of her third album True Blue in 1986, illuminates how the singer and her team centered girlish vocality in her early career. The 1980s was not the first era in which women singers exaggerated the temporality of their bodies through their voices to navigate gendered sociocultural expectations (Warwick 2007, Pecknold 2016). However, in the era of Margaret Thatcher and MTV, pop voices rendered sonorous a configuration of gendered temporality that was particular to the commodifying impulses of neoliberalism. Examining performances of youth by women pop stars in the 1980s thus reveals how time fits into the workings of neoliberal femininity, as well as pop music’s role in constructing neoliberal femininity.

This paper examines the relation between pop voices, neoliberalism, and gendered temporalities through a case study on Madonna’s first three albums (1983-1986). In order to outline how Madonna performed, produced, and sold a brand of sonic girlishness, which I term girl-sound, I analyze her voice and musical style on these albums alongside scholarship on the increasingly corporate and profit-focused practices of pop music record labels in the 1980s (Negus 1992). To illustrate the ways Madonna’s girl-sound was central to her framing and reception as an artist, I consider album reviews as well as interviews with Madonna and her team from this period. Finally, I ask why Madonna’s emphasis on singing “like a girl” resonated with listeners, especially girl listeners, in this period, considering her reception within the context of neoliberalism in the 1980s and its effects on cultural constructions of femininity and time.

Ultimately, I argue that Madonna’s voice in the 1980s articulated a broader shift in social understandings of youth and femininity, pointing to the cultural solidification of consumption as a means of negotiating and performing identity. This paper thus demonstrates that analysis of pop music and its industries can make audible the ways time has been commodified and fetishized in the neoliberal age.