Witches, Bitches & Fluids: Girl Bands Performing Ugliness as Resistance

Abstract

First, what do I mean by ugliness? I view it as an intentional deviation from "nice, gentle, pretty" ways of looking, talking, behaving, and visualizing. Contemporary girl bands deploy "ugliness" as a resistant practice that challenges cultural representations of "pretty" femininity. Specifically, I consider the following as sites of "ugliness" in girl-band performance: album cover art, image, voice, sound, language, lyrics, stage antics, sexuality, and the body. Ugliness as a resistant strategy in rock is not a novelty. Its most noteworthy (past) moment came in the 1970s with punk rock. The punk aesthetic, em-