Sexuality in Country Music

Abstract

Abstract: This chapter surveys prior scholarly work on country music’s ostensibly conservative relationship to sexuality. It tracks how sexuality becomes linked to other identity markers in songs by artists such as Gretchen Wilson and k.d. lang, as country functions as not only a distinctly classed but also racialized, gendered, and regionalized genre traditionally associated with white working-class Southerners. It probes whether earlier and recent modes of white masculinity and femininity, might or might not be constituted in relationship to queerness and/or blackness. This overview also suggests new ways to expand the critical terrain by taking up case studies: (1) Tanya Tucker, the now-faded star of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, who gained early notoriety for her sexualized performance style and material; and (2) the recent bro-country sensation (Florida Georgia Line), whose young male artists recycle explicitly (hetero) sexual content through pseudo-hip hop rhythms and rapping.