If girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” then Katy
Perry and Nicki Minaj take this statement to the extreme, deploying an excess
of sweetness in their visual and aural performances. From cotton candy hair to
bras shooting out whipped cream, these two pop stars deploy more than enough sugary
signifiers and surfaces to send their audiences to the dentist. I will compare
Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj’s use of sweets, paying particular attention to how
candy complicates gender and racial politics. The use of sugary surfaces and
signifiers in both their visual and aural performances blur the boundaries
between edible / non-edible surfaces and bodies, real / artificial, and playful
/ aggressive, ultimately complicating feminine corporeality and sexuality. By
aligning candy with the female body, Perry and Minaj makes manifest, borrowing
from Carol J. Adams, the sexual politics of candy. While Adam’s outlines the
sexual politics of meat, I propose that candy as a signifier works in a similar
way. Candy is an incredibly complex
signifier that lends itself to numerous contradictions that I will explore
throughout this essay. For one, it lures hungry subjects, often children (see this interesting take on the candy shop and sexual exploitation) with its
enticing smell and promise of sweetness, yet too much candy takes a rotten
turn. Furthermore, it connotes both a sort of innocent girlhood, yet is an incredibly
erotic and sexually potent metaphor (think 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”). By
comparing these two female pop stars, I hope to unpack some of these
contradictions and reveal how candy can be at once a problematic and subversive
signifier for the sexed, racialized and gendered female body. Katy Perry’s
“California Gurls” music video as well as the marketing of her Teenage Dreams album and tour reveals
tensions between candy and the female body, specifically the youthful female
body. What does Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” reveal about American cultures
of girlhood? Nicki Minaj uses sugary surfaces in a potentially more subversive
way. Using her videos “The Boys” and “Stupid Hoe”, I will explore how her use
of saccharine makeup, hair, skin, and voice displace any notion of an essential
“skin” that signifies race and gender. Nicki Minaj, in her abrupt movements
between sweet and sour, between cute and aggressive, reveals the power of candy
to lure the gaze of the audience in with its sweet smell only to turn into a
disruptive substance. Ultimately, these two pop and fashion performances reveal
the volatility of candy as a substance, surface, and signifier.
Cotton Candy and Ice
Cream and Gummi Bears, Oh My!: Katy Perry’s “Candyfornia Gurls”
Katy Perry,
in her “California Gurls” music video, brings the children’s boardgame “Candy
Land” to life. I will focus on the complex politics of consumption in the video
as well as the female body that leaks candy. Perry uses candy to such an excess
that one can almost smell the sickly sweetness leaking out of the video. In
fact, for her 2011 California Dreams tour,
Perry’s performance was literally so sweet the audience could smell it (Vena).
Furthermore, the limited edition of her album Teenage Dreams filled music stores with its sweet smell. It is easy
to see how Perry’s use of sugary signifiers, surfaces, smells verges on a
consumption of candy, of the candied body, that causes indigestion rather than
satisfaction.
The video begins with Snoop Dog
reveling in his Candy Kingdom, playing a game of “Candyland”. Snoop Dog’s
presence in this music video is quite unsettling: he is seemingly omnipresent
throughout the video, controlling the candied women in Candyland. Snoop Dog is
a Sugar Daddy, in every sense of the word: he is the “King of Candyland” who
lures Katy Perry and the other “gurls” along the graham cracker path with the
promise of all the candy they can eat. Furthermore, Snoop Dog’s presence as a
spectator invites not only Katy Perry and the gurls to consume, but invites the
viewing audience to glut themselves. However, it is not just candy that Snoop
Dog invites the audience to consume, but the female bodies who resemble candy
as well. So, to sum up this incredibly complex chain of consumption: the
audience consumes the music video in which Snoop Dog consumes/ objectifies Katy
Perry as candy, who consumes actual candy. The frame in which Katy Perry lies
naked on a cotton candy cloud reveals this tension between the audience’s gaze on
the female body and the consumption of candy. Katy Perry attracts the audience’s
gaze, or hunger, drawing them in with her “sun-kissed skin” that looks a lot
like the cotton candy cloud. However, Perry disrupts the audience’s comfortable
consumption by taking a bite of her cotton candy cloud, exposing the audience’s
own consumption of both candy and the female body. There is a way that Perry’s
excessive use and consumption of candy in this video is at once enticing and
repulsive; there is so much candy that it begins to leak, to melt like the
icecream cone at 0:15, to become grotesque.
Towards the
end of the video, Katy Perry and her California gurl gang face off against
Snoop Dog and his army of Gummi Bears. Perry pulls out two cans of whipped
cream, attaches them to her bra, and fires away: her body is not only leaking,
but projecting, sugar. This image aligns sugary substances with the abject: the
substance that transgresses the boundaries of the body, “attest[ing] the
permeability of the [female] body” (Grosz 193). Candy, as an edible object,
invites licking, sucking, yet is also a potentially transgressive substance: it
is sticky, gooey, oozy, messy. The whipped cream that shoots out of Perry’s breasts is
messy and sticky, and in this way it is a viscous substance. Mary Douglas
states that "[t]he viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid [.
. .] It is unstable, but it does not flow [. . .] Its stickiness is a trap, it
clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it" (Grosz
194). Katy Perry’s candy-leaking body presents a threat to the spectator’s
coherent subjectivity: threatening to disrupt the spectator's stability with stickiness. However, the viscosity of candy works both ways: to ensnare the spectator as well as the surface/ subject who deploys it. Throughout the video, Perry must save one of the gurls who is continuously trapped in various gooey substances: bubblegum, jelly, and the most disturbing of all, a candy wrapper. While these images highlight the intersection between consuming candy, or any food, and objectifying the female body, they also reveal the precarity of candy as a signifier. Katy Perry's use of candy both disrupts and reinforces the objectified female body. She uses it to defeat Snoop Dog, yet finds herself trapped by the sugary surfaces of her own making. Nicki Minaj, like Katy Perry, uses candy as surface, as skin, in an incredibly complex, yet potentially subversive way.
Pink Invasion: Nicki
Minaj’s Deadly Sweetness
Nicki Minaj deploys sugary signifiers to the point that her
cute- candy sweetness threatens to consume the audience – the consumers. Using
Minaj’s music videos “The Boys” and “Stupid Hoe” I will outline, what I propose
be called Nicki Minaj’s Pink feminism that asserts feminine subjectivity and
corporeality as volatile and dangerous. I
will begin by looking at Nicki Minaj as a feminist camp figure, who manipulates
surfaces of the body using candy, both on the level of clothing and skin, in an
attempt to displace any natural notions of gender and race: she trades in depth
for sugary surfaces and artificial flavorings. Furthermore, I will explore how Minaj’s
use of candy is inextricable to her manipulation of cuteness that rapidly
morphs into aggressiveness. What happens when Nicki Minaj’s candied surfaces
turn sour?
“The Boys” begins with an onslaught of pink substances and
surfaces: pink is literally flooding the video, taking over. Minaj uses the
colour pink to accentuate the sugary surfaces of both her skin and hair,
drawing attention to the artificiality of her skin. Pink feminism embraces
artifice and excess, much like the Camp sensibility. Susan Sontag states that
Camp is “the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (275). Camp
reveals the performativity of race and gender in its exaggerated mannerisms,
gestures, and for Nicki Minaj, facial expressions. Minaj’s use of sugary
surfaces play into her manipulation of camp: her facial expressions are both
exaggerated and, with the combination of her bubblegum pink lips and Barbie-
looking skin, sugary. I propose that Minaj uses Camp much like the modernist
artist, Josephine Baker (see below). Both female performers juxtapose female
sexuality with a wacky humour, resisting objectification by offsetting the
viewer’s gaze with an unexpected facial expression, such as Minaj’s face at
1:58 in “The Boys”. Anne Cheng, in her analysis of Baker’s use of skin and
surface in her performance of gender and race, proposes that Baker’s black skin
entices viewers with its shimmer and smoothness. The audience, in their ability
to place her, to get under her skin and see the “true” Josephine Baker, are
given surface upon surface. Much like Baker, Minaj uses her skin as “a costume,
a prop” (Cheng 60), to resist gender and racial categories.
Minaj gives the audience no ‘real’
Nicki, but rather moves between playful and aggressive, sweet and sour. In “The
Boys”, Minaj’s pink playfulness becomes excessive resulting in a mass murder,
not only by fire, but by sweetness. This scene is reminiscent of Lady Gaga and
Beyonce’s mass murder by honey in “Telephone”. Minaj’s voice, leading up to
this mass murder, rapidly moves between her two alter-egos: Barbie whose voice
is sugary and sweet, and Roman Zolanski, her gay male twin sister whose voice
is aggressive. Minaj, in the abrupt aural movements between playful and aggressive
reveals the sheer power of her pink feminism; to entice the listeners with her
bubblegum sound only to repulse them with aggression. Her voice, in a similar
way to Katy Perry’s candy leaking body, is out of control. Similarly, her body
and skin cannot be placed and thus disrupt racial and gender binaries. She is literally
candy-coated, however her skin does not hide an essential chocolate centre, but
she is “skin all the way in” (Jack Miles in Cavanagh 70). Furthermore, her skin does not reveal invite the audience to place her into a racial category; she is not black or white, she is simply sugar. Minaj’s “The Boys” outlines
the power of pink feminism that uses candy, Camp, and skin as surface to
overstimulate the audience with pink. As Nicki Minaj states, in “Monster”, “pink
wig thick ass give em whiplash”; Minaj shows how pink, candy, and cuteness can
be toxic. In “Stupid Hoe”, Minaj assaults the viewers with an onslaught of
visual and aural sweetness juxtaposed with aggression.
As Robin James points out, this video is incredibly complex
in both its visual, gender, and racial politics and as a result, purposely resists
classification. I will not so much focus on Minaj’s potentially problematic
gender politics here, for as James states, this video is at once misogynist and
feminist and to label it as one or the other reduces the song to a coherent
meaning. Instead, I am interested in how Minaj uses candy as part of her
subversive cuteness. Minaj introduces the doll-like persona around 2:35 of “Stupid
Hoe”. Her big eyes, small stature, and her child-like voice are all signifiers
of cuteness. Sianne N’gai, in her exploration of cuteness as an aesthetic
category, notes that a cute object is malleable, consumable and states that “the
ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility” (820).
Candy, then, becomes a powerful signifier for cuteness
as it highlights the consumability of the cute object. In fact, Minaj holds a
lollipop as part of her cute act. However, Minaj’s cute appearance fails to
conform to one of N’gai’s markers of cuteness; instead of a small mouth or lack
of mouth, like Hello Kitty for example, Minaj’s mouth becomes bigger and bigger
as her voice escalates from cuteness to aggression. She turns the objectified cute
object that is consumed to the cute object that threatens to consume the
viewer; it literally looks like Minaj is eating the viewer. Furthermore, the
juxtaposition of Minaj’s cute and sugary appearance with her aggressive chant
of “you a stupid hoe” is unsettling. Like in “The Boys”, Minaj uses cuteness to
displace the viewer and their attempts to place her into a stable gender and
racial category. Minaj’s visual and aural performance in “Stupid Hoe” is
overwhelming in more ways than one. She responds to the audience’s gluttonous
appetite for the objectified female body with an excess of sweetness and
cuteness resulting in a reversal of the subject and object relations of the gaze. Ultimately,
Minaj uses cuteness, Camp, and candy to overwhelm the viewer’s attempt to pin
her down: any attempt to get past her sugary surface results in either more
sweetness or an unexpected turn to aggression.
Therefore,
both Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj complicate female subjectivity and corporeality
through their use of candied surfaces in their visual and aural performances. Candy embodies many transgressions; it blurs the boundaries between cuteness and aggression and breaches the limits of solid and liquid, resulting in a threatening viscous substance. All three of these videos explore sweetness in different ways,
however all use candy in a potentially disruptive way. Whether
it be through breasts that shoot out whipped cream, a mass murder by pink
sweetness, or an overwhelming cuteness that morphs into a hostile threat, these
female pop performers reveal the power of sweetness. They work from inside the
pop culture industry, using the very signifier that is used to objectify the
young female body, and reveal the subversiveness of this signifier. They demand
to be consumed, luring the gaze with their candied skin and surfaces, only to
turn their excessive sweetness into a substance that rots the consumer from the
inside out. Minaj, in particular, draws the viewer in with the promise of her
sugary skin, only to overwhelm them with layers upon layers of skin, surfaces,
signifiers, threatening the coherence of the consumer, of the subject. These two pop stars refuse to be anything but surface and artifice; they are layer upon layer of sugar-coated skins and surfaces.
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