Authenticity after Cock Rock: Emo and the Problem of Femininity

Authenticity is a fetishized value in music fan cultures, yet its definitions are unstable and contradictory. As Norma Coates established, the discursive construction of authenticity is silently equated with masculinity in music, and it's posited opposites (commercialism, fakeness, unoriginality) with the feminine. This further maps onto a binary between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’, with rock occupying the positive masculine side of the divide, and pop the denigrated feminine. But in the early 2000s, the relative mainstreaming of emotional hardcore (‘emo’) posed a challenge to this divide, critiquing from the inside many of the tropes of masculinist ‘cock rock’. This paper presents part of the research that informed my forthcoming book, Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture to examine how the tropes of authenticity are negotiated in emo culture, in ways that both critique and consolidate Nicholas and Agius’ ‘persistence of masculinism’ in rock music cultures