Since the late 1980s, when her band the Sugarcubes became known internationally, singer-songwriter Bjork, the most famous Icelander since Leif Eriksson, has been met with both praise and criticism, almost always directed at her difference from Westerners, pop musicians, adults, and even humans. Biographer Mark Pytlik recalls the press around her 1993 album Debut: Nearly every new story paraded her otherness, lionized her differences, and positioned her as an outsider operating as a slave to her ever-changing emotional state. (1) This persona was not entirely a figment of non-Icelandic journalists' imaginations: Bjork had circulated select facets of Iceland's nationalist image/tourist imagery to contextualize her innovative blend of punk, pop, avant-garde, and electronic dance music with its themes of nature, sensuality, emotional intensity, and quirky curiosity. However, journalists turned her creative inspirations into essentialist metaphors, describing her emotions as volcanic and her appearance as elfish and including ice among her Viking compositional tools. (2) Against her intentions, Bjork was set up as the ultimate other--nonhuman, childish, hysterical, and someone even men wanted to mother. (3) Bjork is indeed one of the most imaginative and unusual popular musicians of her time, but labeling her as an outsider and her music as fancifully but meaninglessly quirky misses one of her tantalizing projects: Bjork musically defamiliarizes Western cultural archetypes from within. She compels listeners to experience the whimsical performativity or infuriating constructedness of roles and situations that we may take for granted. In a famous early song, she plays a (seemingly child, alien, or animal) who studies behavior, singing, If you ever get close to a human and human behavior ... be ready to get confused (my emphasis). (4) Journalist Alex Ross explains the irony of the song: It was a career-defining move: Bjork positioned herself as a figure outside convention--as a member of another species, even--while using the second person to implicate the listener in the conspiracy. (5) By involving listeners in the critique, she invites her audience to identify with her denaturalizing performances rather than see her artistic persona(e) as other. Understanding this aesthetic helps contextualize her gender performances, which resist normative sexualized feminine stereotypes yet also thoughtfully embody select female archetypes, playing on feminist perspectives ranging from equality to difference and occasionally even essentialism. Femininity and motherhood have proven awkward territory for academic feminism and queer theory, which have focused (for at least the last thirty years) on the social construction and performance of gender and sex, centering on antinormativity. Contemporary theorists typically critique mainstream depictions of motherhood for essentialism, heteronormativity, and biased assumptions that motherhood and particularly pregnancy are central to all women's identities. However, as feminist literary scholar Susan Fraiman argues, queer theories that reject femininity and motherhood outright while prizing masculinity and androgyny as cool and progressive replicate centuries-old sexism. (6) Bjork's alien anthropologist interpretations of femininity and motherhood provide productive working examples of critically navigating these issues personally, artistically, and politically. This article addresses the interconnections between Bjork's explorations of both essentialism and identity performance as she conveyed Icelandic nationalism and then later invoked its icons in metaphors of world unity and peace; (7) simultaneously represented female sensuality and motherly nurturing, thus challenging the Western asexual mother stereotype; and combined these interests in feminist critique of the patriarchal culture of by examining terrorism and the war on terror through frames of motherhood. …