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Femme Disturbance - Live/d Theory

Micha Cárdenas, Author

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Network Agency




That the performance of Ke$ha arises out of a network of competing desires and norms in the form of the artist, producer, and co-authors, will serve as a useful basis for understanding the form of agency demonstrated by Ke$ha, an agency that is never absolute, not necessarily original, and always in negotiation with networks of norms of various scales.










Ke$ha’s music can be heard through a listening framework described as conversational by Saba Mahmood, that does not seek to impose a judgment of being resistant or not. Mahmood states “agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms”. Although Mahmood makes this claim based on the actual lives of women participants in the Mosque Movement in Egypt, I use her intervention to consider the mediated performances of Ke$ha and the ways that people may respond to these representations. I see Mahmood’s work as an intervention into feminist thought as well as the frameworks within which such thought operates. Mahmood’s assertion that agency exists within norms is particularly interesting to me because much of my motivation for this article comes from my own experiences inhabiting norms in different ways as a transgender woman, as a mixed race queer femme and as a self-declared slut.

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