Miley Cyrus

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a vast expansion of media aimed at the pre-adolescent female consumer demographic. Through an analysis of Hannah Montana, and in particular its lead character Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana and star Miley Cyrus, this article argues that tween popular culture uses celebrity as an allegory for growing up female. Drawing upon the concept from within girlhood studies, it demonstrates that the girl ‘becoming’ a woman is paralleled with the girl ‘becoming’ a celebrity. Both are highly invested in formulations of the real and authentic, and Hannah Montana highlights this significance of the notion of staying true to yourself through celebrity, as a way of making sense of the tween’s growing up female. Fitting in with the broader contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal cultural context, Hannah Montana employs the narrative of a perpetual makeover, addressing the tween as a self-surveilling subject who must continually work to retain an ‘authentic’ self as she progresses towards womanhood. Both the onscreen girl and celebrity, Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana, and the franchise’s star, Miley Cyrus, are constructed as simultaneously becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity, and the three personae become more enmeshed as the series nears its end; the franchise draws upon the off-screen persona of Miley Cyrus to further parallel becoming a woman and becoming a celebrity and to emphasise the investment in the real. This article demonstrates that tween popular culture addresses the young, female viewer in terms of her becoming woman by teaching the importance of investing in celebrity, and effectively preparing her for the consumption of adult female films and television programmes.

Miley Cyrus has increasingly occupied debates at the centre of feminist engagements with popular culture. Evoking concerns around young women and ‘sexualisation’, Cyrus emerges as a convergent signifier of sexualised media content and the girl-at-risk. As Cyrus is repeatedly invoked in these debates, she comes to function as the bad object of young femininity. Arguing, however, that Cyrus troubles the sexualisation thesis in the provocations of her creative practice, I suggest that this contested media figure exceeds the frames through which she is read. Thus, I ask: what kinds of insights might be possible if we were to transform the terms on which we approach this figure? Considering a selection of the images and performances that constitute the Cyrus archive, this article proposes a reading of Cyrus as performative provocation. Mobilising an existing sensibility of queer feminist struggle, Cyrus emerges as a disruptive, albeit contradictory, figure. Questions of privilege, limit and possibility emerge in this discussion, as well as what constitutes feminist struggle.

“They're gonna put me in the movies / They're gonna make a big star out of me / We'll make a film about a man who is sad and lonely / And all I gotta do is act naturally”

When Ringo Starr sang these lines he didn't write, he was singing about the (lack of) distance between the star's image and the real person in which us spectators like to believe. We develop our expectations through the mediatized performances marketed by the culture industry. Those mediatized performances (movies, records, music videos...), as Philip Auslander wrote, became the referent of the live ones. The live event becomes the space where we seek to confirm those expectations, our idea of the star. However, the image of the idol is no longer provided only by the industry. Digital technology has maximised the audience's capacity to register its own images of the idol, and a quick look at Youtube shows that filming concerts is now common practice.

Michelle Citron wrote that home movies signify authenticity. When fans film a star live, they are using a tool to strengthen both their authenticities. On the one hand, he's increasing his subcultural capital by producing a proof of their presence in the same space. On the other, he is recording the moment of confirmation of the qualities he gave to the star. This work analyses those videos and their subsequent distribution to explore their meaning regarding the relation between performer, audience and their respective images.

My paper explores the contested and liminal cultural space of tween music by focusing on one of the genres biggest stars, Miley Cyrus. Tween music inhabits a cultural space between traditional notions of childhood and adolescence and is aggressively marketed to a core demographic of girls aged between 6 and 12. Tween has been accused not only of the up-aging of childhood, but also of the down-aging and infantilisation of adulthood. My paper attempts to explain the media's and increasingly, academia's fascination with Cyrus, and the contrasting responses to her onstage performances, recordings and promotional videos. Commentators have noted how her videos and performances either empower young women and girls by redefining the narrow and stereotypical definitions of young female sexuality policed by the media, or, they merely reinforce hetero-patriarchal constructions of gender expectations, thus reinforcing stereotypes and disempowering young women. An analysis of Cyrus' singing voice begins to explain this fascination. As an ex-child star, she is often perceived to be precociously sexualised, 'too sexy too soon'. Children, especially girls, with adult mannerisms have long aroused the interest of the record-buying and cinema-viewing public. The combination of 'grown-up' gestures with childlike attributes, contextualised by socially prescribed constructions of innocence has led to the eroticisation of child stars such as Shirley Temple, Brenda Lee, and Judy Garland. The frequent conflation of Cyrus' on-screen and on-stage personae also contribute to media responses. The paper draws on Kristeva's ideas of intertextuality to explain the largely-binary representations of Cyrus. To the media, Cyrus and other young female tween stars such as Ariana Grande are either angel or devil, innocent or knowing, virginal or slutty. Social constructions of innocence and its protection inform such responses. I present a taxonomy of vocal attributes that contribute to aural perceptions of aging. The mismatch between Cyrus' low voice and her childlike appearance contributes to the perceptions of premature sexualisation and perceived loss of innocence that are central to mainstream media narratives. Her resonant and aurally 'damaged' voice defies expectations of gender, age and perhaps, sexuality. Through textual and contextual analysis of the pitch and timbre of Cyrus' voice, combined with ideas from McClary, I propose that Cyrus is able to transgress a number of sexual personae, from the street wise young teen in Hannah Montana, to the raunchy young adult of her post-transition career. Cyrus' voice, I argue, subverts normative notions of childhood (especially female childhood) where purity of tone signifies innocence, and its absence spells knowingness, lived experience and an encroachment of adulthood into childhood. I draw on Brackett's discussions of how the person, persona and character combine, and how the voice, and the biography of the vocalist become symbiotically linked. A consideration of musical genre suggests that pop, and the obvious auto-tuning of Cyrus' voice on recordings, confines Cyrus to a particular media narrative which contrasts to other child singers such as 14 year olds Ari Up of

Com roupas e um visual diferente do que se esperava diante da narrativa traçada por sua
carreira até então, a cantora Miley Cyrus trilhou um caminho próprio na indústria
musical através de sua imagem. De ídolo infanto-juvenil, destaque da Disney, a ícone
influente e porta-voz de uma geração, ela empregou elementos, como o exagero, o
grotesco e o kitsch, em sua construção artística, que são analisados neste artigo.

This textual and photographic essay documents obsessive pre-teen Miley Cyrus fans, drawing our attention to questions about media and celebrity culture, femininity and beauty image, economic class and consumption, and race, gender, and sexuality.

This paper looks at how mainstream media representations of young female popstars, Lorde and Miley Cyrus, present a class discourse wherein Lorde is framed as ‘good’ and bourgeois and Miley operates as ‘bad’ and working class.
Since the ascent of both popstars’ careers in 2013, mainstream media has regularly pitted Lorde – a self-proclaimed feminist – against Miley, who is framed as a ‘trashy’, talentless, teen.
Using Bourdieu’s ideas around taste, class and modalities of cultural capital I propose that the discussion around the two women’s worth in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feminism masks the constitution of a class-based hierarchy.
For all the hyping of Lorde’s apparent critique of capitalist consumer culture, we see the same old class positions rehearsed. Lorde is indie – original and authentic. Miley and her ilk are not. Middle classness remains the status quo.

This paper unpacks the intersection between class, race and gender through a discussion of Miley Cyrus. Using Bourdieu’s work on distinction I position Cyrus as working class due to her lack of ‘good taste’. However, I propose that key to the much-blogged and tweeted panic regarding her promotion of Bangerz (2013) is a problematic elision between African-American ‘ratchet’ identity and ‘working class-ness’. The unsaid in the outrage from (mostly white) media commentators after Cyrus’s twerking at the 2013 VMAs is that the pop star’s performance of a dance apparently coded ‘African American’ demonstrates her lack of ‘class’. I suggest that this demonstrates a broader issue where African-American identity – particularly youth identity – is framed negatively by mainstream media. The ongoing spectacle of Brand Miley works as a flashpoint where this is visibilised.

The arena concert requires a particular type of liveness of performance in order to transcend impersonal mass entertainment. Liveness here looks to authenticity and happenstance, privileges personal communications and seeks to live in the moment, and in this way the live performance then meets and matches or even surpasses the virtual life of the artist or group. The concert must be both mass spectacle and an individual and singular experience for those witnessing and participating in it. Without these latter essential attributes, which can be read as the auratic and authentic replacing the virtual, the arena concert falls short of ontological expectations of live music.

In recent years the mise-en-scène of the arena concert has become calibrated to female artists with, seemingly, a concomitant feminisation of the event. In this, the space is often given over to intimacy, empathy, and presented as an insight into the life, and even philosophy, of the performer. This chapter discusses this feminine turn with respect to early intimations of this era (Debbie Gibson and Tiffany) and contemporary manifestations (recent arena tours from Kylie Minogue, Alicia Keys, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Peter Gabriel and Girls Aloud), and considers Miley Cyrus’s use of arena technology to ensure that those present for her Bangerz concerts jointly created, and shared in, intimacy. Questions of liveness and intimacy are considered in respect to sexualised performance, affect, Benjamin’s notion of the auratic, Renaissance images of the infant Christ’s genitals, and in terms of music festivals as germinating alternative lifestyles in the 1970s.