"she's so soft," "she's so solid"
BUTCH-FEMME STYLE IN MUNA’S LESBIAN EROTIC GAZE
I presented the following essay on March 15th at the USC Thornton School of Music for PopCon 2025, an academic conference that focuses on popular music. This year’s theme was “Baby, It’s a Look! Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge.
In the music video for the indie-pop hit “Silk Chiffon,” lesbian band MUNA stages a revised tribute to the 1999 lesbian cult-classic film, But I’m a Cheerleader. In a world where eager lesbians (myself included) obsess over potential queer readings of Taylor Swift music based on the color coding of her videos, it’s refreshing to see a band like MUNA self-consciously attend to the lesbian aesthetic and visual archive. It is, undeniably, an exciting time for lesbian pop music. Alongside artists like Clairo, Arlo Parks, Girl in Red, Cat Burns, and of course Chappell Roan, MUNA raises critical questions for queer art and pop music; of particular interest to me is the question of how lesbians going mainstream represent and celebrate the lesbian body while resisting the fetishizing and dehumanizing effects of the commodified, heteronormative gaze. In this vein, I’m interested in how artists like MUNA maintain aesthetic difference while asserting themselves firmly in the popular sphere.
Comprised of Naiomi McPherson (they/them), Katie Gavin (she/her) and Josette Maskin (she/her), the LA-based band MUNA began working together in 2013 while studying at USC and became widely known in 2017 after a stint opening for Harry Styles. Despite the critical success of their first album, Saves the World (2019), they were dropped by RCA Records in 2021, and were sadly one of the many bands who lost their representation because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2022, they signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records and released their self-titled album MUNA in June 2022. The album’s lead single “Silk Chiffon” featuring Phoebe Bridgers, was a great success—it peaked at 33 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay and 35 on Adult Pop Airplay charts, which announced their bold re-entry into the indie-pop scene. 1
In my time today, I’ll turn to one of the album’s lesser-streamed songs, “Solid,” to consider the band’s intervention into lesbian erotic performativity by crafting a pop love song with a butch lover at the center of the singer’s devoted gaze. Unlike “Silk Chiffon,” “Solid” does not have a music video, so we are left to apprehend their art instead with only one other sensuous orifice: the ear. (In my time today, we’ll do a close-reading of the lyrics and end by looking at their corresponding merchandise). In MUNA’s lyricism, we witness the negotiation of a lesbian pop song that invites the public to look at the butch lesbian as an object of desire, while maintaining her own terms of recognition. MUNA navigates this tension within lesbian pop music by crafting a queer erotic gaze that celebrates lesbian desire while preventing heterosexual derision or fetishization of butch aesthetics and people.
Before I begin, I want to quickly clarify some terms: throughout my presentation I’ll sometimes use the terms “butch,” “masc” or “butch lesbian” interchangeably, but I want to clearly state that these terms are distinct and emerge from specific social historical contexts. “Butch” historically—in the broadest sense—refers to masculine lesbians who wear traditionally male clothing and are often associated with a dominant sexual role.2 In recent years, many queer people from the lesbian community have distanced themselves from the word “butch” in the favor of the term “masc” in large part to carve space for gender variance that butch can sometimes occlude. Being “masc” in this context has relation to transmasculine identities and emerged as a term that seeks to affirm gender non-conforming and genderqueer people. As a scholar, and as a queer lesbian, I position butch and masc in relation to one another to maintain historical and political continuity with lesbian elders, political efforts, and aesthetic and erotic archives. That being said, I look to MUNA’s song “Solid” as a performative, aesthetic, sonic intervention into butch/femme identities that honors the past while projecting a more gender-inclusive understanding of what butch can mean. Put another way, I posit that “Solid,” in the world of the pop song, becomes a kind of queer lesbian gender grounded in aesthetics that disidentifies with butch identity itself to project a more capacious articulation of queer masculine lesbianism. So I see MUNA’s “Solid” as one artistic answer to a very contemporary political question of what do we do with lesbian terms that might feel narrow or outdated while maintaining the political continuity and commitment to community archives.
“Solid” begins in a protective stance, with an opening verse that refuses to allow the listener to apprehend the butch lesbian through codes of normative femininity. We hear lead singer Katie Gavin’s voice tell us firmly: “She is not a screen on which you project/ She is not a scene on your movie set/ She is not a mirror in which you reflect/ Yeah, she is of material substance.” Gavin introduces us to her lover by singing to us in a firm and defensive tone, and rightfully so; she does not allow us to visualize and in that way consume her butch lover through the visual codes of normative femininity which would position her as either a failed woman or man. Gavin’s words warn us only to receive her lover in the ways she desires to be perceived. The sonic lesbian erotic therefore intervenes in visual attempts to make the masculine woman or gender nonconforming person strange, abject or perverse for the ways she exceeds normative femininity. As art critic John Berger articulates in his seminal text, “Ways of Seeing,” the act of looking is itself an act of power where the spectator becomes a “spectator-owner,” who gains a sense of ownership over the object of their gaze because of the ways in which they provide the spectator a sense of pleasure. So to visually apprehend a woman’s body, is to derive pleasure, is to own. Gavin’s voice, however, intervenes in this process because she denies visual access to the butch lesbian body. For Gavin to sing “she is not a screen on which you project” notes the dangers of visuality for lesbians, particularly when representing lesbian erotic desire, which in film and media is overwhelmingly fetishized to suit male consumption. Further, Gavin’s declaration that “she is not a mirror in which you reflect” also notes her difference from the spectator, who is the “you,” presumably a stand-in for the male gaze. These lines communicate that the butch lesbian can neither be assimilated into heterosexual male desire nor be mistaken as a replication of cis-maleness. Gavin’s butch lover therefore exists outside of these modes of recognition.
The meditations on screens, movie sets, and mirrors also highlight the burden of visuality for a butch/ masc person. Lesbian identification is very much tied up with style and the moment of visual apprehension. Butch author and photographer Kerry Manders writes of butch people, “The old adage applies: You know her when you see her.” Visuality is fraught for Gavin’s butch lover because it is her surplus sexuality, or the ways that she exceeds normative femininity, that make her simultaneously ugly to the public and desirable to lesbians like Gavin. Manders adds, “To many people, ‘butch style’ remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters—our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless…we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.” I want to quickly clarify that this quote aims to articulate a negative stereotype of butches as “fat, frumpy disasters,” but I do not interpret Manders’s assertion as actually coupling fatness and ugliness; indeed, in the context of the song’s title, the idea of being “solid” gestures to a resignification of stereotypes about butches that link fatness or “excess” embodiment to being ugly. Being “Solid” in this way celebrates both non-normative sexuality and the material fact of having more body to hold, touch, taste, and love. In the song’s language, MUNA contrasts these surfaces of visuality—screens, scenes, and mirrors—with “material substance,” which builds out the sensuous physicality of Gavin’s butch lover, and is indeed more favorable than these flat surfaces. This both speaks to what it means to be “solid,” as an embodied aesthetic, as well as an identity that rejects dominant, heteronormative modes of assessing those bodies. The pop song importantly offers cultural space to celebrate a kind of femininity that in many ways cannot appear otherwise (like in film and television) because the realm of the visual, and certainly the mainstream visual, frequently assimilates lesbian desire into normative, softer-edged feminine representations because of this imperative for commodification.
The moment of visual apprehension is also risky for butch and gender nonconforming people. Historically, as scholar Lillian Faderman writes in her study of 20th century lesbian culture, the hyper-visibility of butch people made them more vulnerable to violence. Faderman writes, “Many of them were certainly courageous in their insistence on presenting themselves in ways that felt authentic, but their bravery made them victims. Heterosexuals, particularly working-class young men who were still unsure of their own sexuality, could stand neither the idea of a woman usurping male privilege in comfortable dress and autonomy of movement nor the idea of a sexuality that excluded them” (Faderman 184). Faderman demonstrates that the proud presentation of butch aesthetics are risky in the public sphere because there is a way in which rejection of gender norms of feminine availability is always perceived as a rejection of social order and as a provocation. But for Gavin and MUNA to sing lovingly in a way that celebrates the potential desire and connection that public identities enable reclaims the ways that lesbian aesthetics are only about lesbian pleasure, and not about anyone else. In this sense, the sonic medium of pop music allows lesbian artists to subvert the ongoing burden of visuality for butch and masc people while maintaining the necessity of the visual for lesbian erotic identification.
When we arrive at the chorus, we hear the first assertion of the butch lover as “solid.” The entire chorus is fairly economical—the singer repeats the same few words, “she’s so, so so solid (she’s so solid, my baby, she’s so solid).” The chorus in many ways reflects the utilitarianism of butch aesthetics—butch style is generally intentional yet restrained. And while the notion of “solid,” as well as the idea of “material substance,” does not explicitly name butch identity, the language taps into the working-class lesbian erotic archive of symbols that activate butch and femme identities. Gavin herself has stated, “I think it’s really important for queer people to be our own archivists,” and I read “Solid” as a critical contribution to queer lesbian affective archives. The hypervisibility of butch style is indeed tied to working-class realities. Faderman and other lesbian historians describe that butch and femme genders originated in the 1940s and 50s within working-class communities, in two key ways: first, because working-class lesbians often lacked the economic means to live independently, they had to gather in public spaces, namely queer bars, in order to explore their sexuality and enact their desires. Second, butch/ femme styles of dress became important in these spaces not only to dress in the way they felt most comfortable (which was often heavily regulated in both work and home spaces), but also to communicate sexual and gender roles which in many ways were modeled after working-class male and female relationships. As Faderman notes, butch/femme aesthetics were in its “heyday” in the 1950s, when the so-called “parent-culture” also exaggerated gender roles. So the idea of being “solid” captures the historical conditions of exaggerated working-class masculinity which is associated with virility, physical fitness, and even traditional notions of dependability. To be solid is also to be sure, steadfast, and strong. Gavin further affirms this in the following verse, when she sings of her lover, “You can tell she made herself all by herself,” which evokes a kind of bootstraps masculinity.
At the same time, Gavin’s performative longing for a lover who is “solid” disidentifies with these gender essentialist notions of masculinity. Disidentification, a term coined by performance artist José Esteban Muñoz, refers to the “survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Muñoz 4). By proudly claiming her lover as “my baby,” Gavin expresses her desire for her butch lover’s queer embodiment of masculinity and affirms the ways in which both Gavin and her lover desire “solidity,” rather than heterosexual replications of masculinity.
I want to linger for a moment on the ways that Gavin’s voice and desire makes femme lesbian identity visible in the world of the song. Over and over in the chorus, Gavin sings, “she’s so solid, my baby, she’s so solid,” —so there’s a repeated lingering that builds out a sense of longing--where her repeated prideful longing for her lover reveals her own lesbian identity. In Chicana scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s writing on the Mexican butch icon Chavela Vargas, Yarbro-Bejarano takes up Valerie Traub’s notion of “erotic identification,” which refers to a sense of oneself as erotic subject or object. Yarbro-Bejarano writes that she forms an “erotic identification” with Vargas that affirms and authorizes her own particular embodiment of queer femininity. In desiring Vargas, a lesbian spectator becomes enlivened to her own identity and in this way also occupies a queer femininity outside of the prescribed confines of being a wife and mother. I view Gavin’s vocalized attachment to her butch lover as an affirmation both of the ways that her lover wants to be desired, as well as the ways that the singer feels an awareness of her own lesbianism. Gavin alerts us to the ways that identification, as Munoz writes, “shuffles back and forth” between the individual and the other. While queer identity is self-immanent, it is also true, as the song attests, that spectator-listenership, and indeed the tingly reception of the style of others, animates queerness. Queerness is of course a lived, enacted orientation.
In the bridge, Gavin sings: “She’s making a plan, she’s taking it higher/ She’s using her hands, she’s pulling the levers/ She’s dotting her Is, she’s checking the levels/ She’s using her mind, she’s doing it better.” The bridge conveys an erotic sensibility that captures what it means to be desirably butch through the eyes of her lover — she sees her butch lover as someone who is decisive, imaginative, meticulous, precise, accomplished, and successful. Too, the language speaks to the history of butch women in male-dominated working-class fields like factories. But the final phrase, with the simple statement, “She’s using her mind, she’s doing it better,” cheekily implies a few meanings, in one sense she could mean that her “baby” is always improving upon her own work, or she could be rejecting the notion that butch women are “failed men.” To assert that “she’s doing it better” implies that these aspects of eroticized masculinity are in fact performed “better” through the mind and hands of a butch because butch and masc people are not attempting to mimic cis-maleness, but to craft something different out of similar materials.
Gavin’s words also reflect an erotic encounter between a femme bottom and butch top, where the femme partner desires a top who knows how to dot her I’s and check her levels, so to speak. Allusions to using her hands conjures the moment of erotic lesbian encounter and speaks to an idea of butch-femme relationality that Chicana lesbian author Cherríe Moraga discusses she feels when making love as a butch top. Moraga shares the experience of the look on her lover’s face, writing, “When I looked up at her face […] I could feel and see how every pore in her body was entrusting me to handle her, to take care of her sexual desire. This look on her face is like nothing else. It fills me up. She entrusts me to determine where she’ll go sexually. And I honestly feel a power inside me strong enough to heal the deepest wound” (75). Gavin and MUNA capture this kind of butch-femme relationality by focusing on the ways that a butch can use both her “mind” and “hands,” and if she is allowed to be represented completely through a lesbian gaze. If we begin the song by circumventing the ways that visual mediums reinscribe lesbian bodies as subject to the male gaze, we end the song understanding that specific, relational embodiment enables the cultivation of lesbian satisfaction on their own terms.
I want to close by turning to the merchandise that accompanies the song. Here we have a black tank top with the uppercase, bolded script “SOLID” over a rendering of a barbell. Now, I don’t lift, but I know three stacked weights is a lot. A quick Internet search revealed it’s likely about 300 lbs. This delicious image allows desiring viewers to imagine the lifting of other, similarly weighty things…Under the barbell bench press are the words “Powerlifting Gym” with a faux trademark label with a small, circled “M.” The “M” acts as MUNA’s knowing wink—this gym does not exist in brick-and-mortar, but in the sonic codes of their performative erotics, steeped as they are in queer lesbian aesthetic archives. This shirt demonstrates MUNA’s cheeky queer sensibility—they make their music the way they make their jokes, for an audience on the inside of something—and by selling this shirt to fans (though it’s sadly always sold out) they invite others to take pleasure in celebrating the work of being seen and being seen as mouth-wateringly, audaciously, solid.
References
Berger, John. Ways of seeing. Penguin uK, 2008.
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers : A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. Columbia University Press, 2011. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=953912&site=ehost-live&scope=site&authtype=ip,shib&custid=dartcol&group=main.
Manders, Kerry. “The Renegades.” The New York Times, 13 Apr. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/butch-stud-lesbian.html.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Amber Hollibaugh. “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With [1981].” Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, Duke, 2000, pp. 62–84.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Performing Disidentifications.” Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 1–34.
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Crossing the Border with Chabela Vargas: A Chicana Femme’s Tribute.” Lola Press, no. 13, Oct. 2000, p. 48.
The essay was originally going to consider femme style depicted in “Silk Chiffon” through the refrain from the chorus, “she’s so soft like silk chiffon,” but I honestly just wanted to talk about butches being hot. Oh well!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that to many people who identify as butch, “butch” also is the way they identify their gender, similar to people who identify as genderqueer or non-binary.