Woke Queen: Feminist Theory in Jessie J’s Lyrics

Taylor Swift. Katy Perry. Selena Gomez. The all-seeing, all-knowing internet has spoken, and deemed these pop stars problematic. Is there anyone left standing? How will we ever continue our idol worship now?

Enter Jessie J, our new woke queen. We may have been unaware of Jessie J’s shining wokeness when she first warbled her way into the pop scene circa 2010, but a look into her early lyrics reveals that she’s been in conversation with OG woke baes Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin all along.

Take Jessie J’s debut single, “Do It Like a Dude.” In addition to being a hot bop, the song is an incisive statement on the performative nature of gender. According to aforementioned woke queen Judith Butler, we do not have fixed or inherent gender identities. Rather, gender is “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”! When Jessie J sings, “I can do it like a brother, do it like a dude / Grab my crotch, wear my hat low like you,” she is demonstrating her ability to perform masculinity, thus destabilizing the false dichotomy between women and men and highlighting the arbitrariness of gender. Jessie J seems to tell us that as gender is constituted through repeated stylized acts, it can be subverted, broken, and transformed simply by adopting an alternative set of repeated acts. Yes, Jessie, slay!

But Jessie J is too much of a woke queen to stop there! “Do It Like a Dude” also offers commentary on the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that is so essential to woke bae Gayle Rubin’s hallmark essay “The Traffic in Women.” We see Jessie alluding to Lacan and Rubin in the line “My B-I-T-C-H is on my dick, like this.” In Lacanianism, the phallus is not the physical penis, but the set of symbolic functions commonly associated with male genitalia: most prominently, the ability to possess and dominate women. According to Rubin, the only way for the feminist movement to succeed is to “resolve the Oedipal crisis of culture” brought on by the patrilineal inheritance of the phallus. When Jessie J sings about her “dick,” she is calling for a restructuring of phallic inheritance in service of women’s liberation. Does it get more woke than that?

Wow, is Jessie J a socially aware badass or what? Get ready to buy her fourth studio album “R.O.S.E.,” which is dropping this year! Sure, Gayle Rubin would say that capitalism exploits women, but surely there’s an exception for woke queens.

—Staff Writer Angela F. Hui can be reached at angela.hui@thecrimson.com.