Hunter, Shay2025-09-192025-09-192025-08-262025-08-262025-09-19http://hdl.handle.net/1993/39398This thesis examines the expectations of women in the pop music industry, which emphasizes beauty and sex appeal over talent or musical content, and discusses how two contrasting pop artists, Janelle Monáe and Billie Eilish, confront those expectations. Relying on Judith Butler’s theory of gender as a set of constantly replicated performances and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectional feminism, I analyze how Monáe and Eilish perform gender through their personas, fashion, music videos, lyrics, and musical content, how these performances challenge the dominant culture’s views of race, gender, mental illness, and sexuality, and how they help to expand the roles available to women in the pop music industry. Janelle Monáe challenges the perception of pop music as surface level entertainment through her grand sci-fi concept albums, android personas, and use of genre as a tool to unify pop audiences of differing backgrounds. Her tuxedo “uniform” throughout the first part of her career, alongside the open sexuality of her persona in 2018’s Dirty Computer and 2023’s The Age of Pleasure, presents a diverse and fluctuating model for female pop performers and is especially important for Black performers and audiences, who are often presented with fewer options than white performers and audiences. The dark themes and imagery of Billie Eilish’s music, paired with her candid demeanor and uncomfortably honest lyrics portray the anxieties of youth in the 21st century. Her tomboyish fashion sense has become a core aspect of her persona and has been received by fans and critics as a symbol against the pop music industry’s obsession with young female bodies and their sexuality. Eilish’s involvement in every aspect of the writing process, from lyrics and composition to music production and recording techniques, has the potential to strengthen women’s place as creators, authors, and engineers in the music industry – roles that women have historically struggled to be taken seriously in.engJanelle MonaeBillie Eilishpop musicgenderfemininitymasculinitygenrepersonaperformance