Music/Image and the cusp-persona

Abstract

This chapter explores the cultural and economic value of children 'acting' like adults and gaining popularity and fame through the ability. It investigates the way that music in particular has produced perhaps the most frequent pathway for children to 'perform' and produce what could be described as adult-child personas or cusp-personas . The chapter focuses on how child-performers have used music in their transitional phase where they are on the cusp of adulthood in order to transform their public persona from child to adult specifically because of music's capacity to imply a more sexualised and thereby more mature identity. Pop music with its less-threatening sensibility became the formation of popular culture that could be embraced by children's television programmes and their stars in the 1950s and 1960s. The hegemonic scopophilic male gaze of popular culture has also helped position young female stars into objects of inappropriate desire, but nonetheless structured their child performance persona in a more sexualised way.

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