Post-Feminism’s “New Sexual Contract” and Electronic Dance Music’s Queered Femme Voices

Abstract

Angela McRobbie argues that post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” grants otherwise privileged white women the things traditionally denied women as a class, namely, economic success and self-ownership of their bodies as sexual property (McRobbie 2004). Because voice is commonly used as a metaphor for self-possessed agency, this article considers three ways white women and femme musicians across EDMC use vocal and authorial voices to reimagine post-feminist practices of self-ownership and property-in-person. Brooklyn band bottoms, Berlin techno collective Decon/Recon and Australian-American pop star Sia, all use voice to craft femininities that deviate from post-feminist gender norms and its “new sexual contract”: bottoms perform femininity as self-dispossession, Decon/Recon’s anonymous collective authorship centers women and femmes while de-centering private property, and Sia disconnects her voice from her person so that her performances of sonic resilience ( James 2015) don’t labor upon her body and turn it into private property.