University of Southampton Music Department
Academic Year 2016-17
MUSI3021 Research Project
Student number: 26289857
DISSERTATION
CyBjörk: Binary Divides Dismantled in the Work of Björk to Reveal Björk’s Artistic Output as a Third Wave Feminist Gesture
Student Research Project Ethics Checklist 2016/17
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Student name: Bethany Stenning Student ID: 26289857
Supervisor name: Matthew Shlomowitz Discipline: MUSIC
Programme of study: BA MUSIC (with year abroad)
Project title: MUSI3021 RESEARCH PROJECT
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Abstract
Abstract:
CyBjörk seeks to reveal artist Björk as a potential third wave feminist figure by dissecting the relationship between gender binaries within her music. My dissertation firstly addresses contemporary arguments circulating within third wave feminist discourse that suggest that the solution to inequalities derived from patriarchal dualities is to reorganise said dualities into a state of “hybridity”. Secondly I expose embodiment as an important factor for feminists, which acts as the connecting membrane between dualisms. I explore Björk’s multi-media work through a series of specific case studies, with focus on embodiment and how female/male hierarchies manifest in several dualisms, including body/mind, nature/technology, and nature/culture. As indicated in the title, my dissertation establishes Björk as the embodiment of a cyborg – a third wave feminist emblem conceived by donna Haraway. The motivations for the thesis are: to review Björk’s music and how she challenges dualisms typically employed in western culture that third wave feminists seek to dismantle, and further, to reason how her role as an artist who reinforces third wave feminist notions could potentially normalise contemporary feminist ideas associated with dualities.
PART 1
Introduction
In August 31st, 2016 Björk appeared as a live “Avatar” in the press conference for her London MoMa exhibition. Using motion-capture technology, her movements were echoed by a genderless multicoloured cyborg that was displayed on a large screen. In an accompanying statement on her social media, she wrote “technology is enabling women to work outside the already formed hierarchical systems”. This paper will consider Björk’s artistic output with regards to technology and feminism, and, as Björk neatly exemplifies in her statement, the relationship between the two. More specifically, I will focus on how these two issues concern “embodiment” and investigate to what degree Björk’s solo work reflected the rise of third wave feminism which was rising in the early 1990s, the same decade she began her career as a solo artist.
This paper is divided into two parts. The first section briefly introduces Björk and her artistic output that I will be analysing. I then provide an overview of third wave feminism with discussion of the key concepts and debates within the movement followed by an introduction to the concept of embodiment, tying its significance to feminism and Björk with regards to how technology and feminism manifest in many aspects of her creative process. Part two weaves these ideas together to explore in more depth Björk’s output in relation to technology and third wave feminism illustrated by several case studies. I will endeavour to expose how her work challenges the validity of several notable dualisms such as nature/technology.
Throughout the writing of this paper, I have drawn closely on several books, and resonate ideas raised by the respective authors, thus I am much indebted to Nicola Dibben’s Björk, Barbara Arneil’s Politics and Feminism, Charity Marsh and Melissa West’s Chapter The Nature/Technology Binary Opposition Dismantled in the Music of Madonna and Björk, and Eleanor Berry’s chapter CyBjörk: The Representations of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto Within Björk’s Music and Video, from which the title of my dissertation originates.
1.1 – A Brief Overview of Björk
Björk is primarily known as an unconventional pop-star and her “kooky” character. She has pursued a variety of artistic endeavours, including music production, film composition, and acting (most famously playing the lead role in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark). Björk has released nine studio albums as a solo artist together with albums featuring remixes, Jazz standards, and film soundtracks. The two main sources I have focused on for information regarding Björk’s biography is Nicola Dibbens Björk, and Mark Pyltik’s Björk: Wow and Flutter which together offer academic, and practical insights to Björk’s artistic output and early life.
Björk’s artistic output began at the age of 12 in 1977 with the release of Björk. She has since remained invested in music, ranging from classical performances, jazz and punk. During adolescence, Björk was involved in the growing Icelandic Punk scene, creating the band Spit and Snot and joining punk band Tappi Tíkarris in 1981. Dibben suggests that for Björk’s generation, punk “represented a rebellion against conservatism and apathy and what they saw as its musical incarnation in Anglo-American rock” and differed greatly to British punk of the same époque which was more concerned with a repressive social sphere as opposed to Icelandic punk’s complaints about “mundane aspects of everyday life”. A common theme of Björk’s subsequent collaborations, including the band Kukl, and organisation “Bad Taste Ltd.”, was to avoid “materialism, and small town mentality”. The main musical group that was tied to Bad Taste was Sykurmolarnir, anglicized to The Sugarcubes. Björk’s singing style and lyricism in The Sugarcubes is an introductory example of her dual states, encompassing the identity of both child, and woman in her musical identity, exploring erotic, and sometimes unpleasant topics in a childlike manner: the hit song Afmælið, which translates to Birthday in English, concerns “the erotic attraction felt by a five-year-old child towards a fifty-year-old man”.
Björk pursued her solo career with the release of Debut in 1992, an eclectic mix of dance, jazz, and indie influences. She has since released seven more studio albums which consistently reveal musically contrasting content. One can argue that Björk’s nationality has played a vital role in her development as a musician, and as a potential feminist icon. In an interview, Björk states that many Icelandic musicians find themselves playing in a range of bands from classical to metal simultaneously stating that “everything blurs into each other, which I’m sure you can hear in Icelandic music”. This suggests that Björk’s heritage has influenced the amalgamation of genres within her music, a characteristic “very much partial to Iceland”. Pyltik writes “Björk had unwittingly come to represent a sort of political ideal by totally embracing herself without ever trying to justify her subject matter within the framework of the standard feminist ideology”. I will reveal Björk’s nationalistic identity amongst my analysis’ of the examples I have chosen, and suggest how it has played a role in identifying her as a third wave feminist figure.
I am going to be placing particular emphasis on the albums, Homogenic (1997), Vespertine (2001), Medúlla (2004), Biophilia (2011) and Vulnicura (2015) in my discussion on Björk, embodiment and third wave feminism. The albums I have chosen are particularly stimulating when discussing the specific dualisms tied to feminist thought, which I will expand upon in part 1.2
1.2 – An Overview of Third Wave Feminism
Imelda Whelehan, in her book Modern Feminist Thought, describes feminism itself as heterogeneous, but consequently unifies feminist thought by stating the foundations for all feminist stances are based upon women’s commitment to the “reappraisal of the position of women in society” which stems from the belief that women suffer from social injustices due to their sex. Likewise, feminism has been described by Shelley Budgeon as being characterized by its “diversity, fragmentation, and a series of internal contestations”. Third wave feminism is deeply tied to its predecessors and it is therefore important to explore first and second wave feminism, before endeavouring to develop third wave feminism.
The first wave of feminism is marked as commencing in the 1850s and 60s with the incentive to attain women their political rights, such as economic and legal independence, and to oppose the “male monopoly” of education, women’s professional position in society, and the treatment of women’s bodies. Second wave feminism is directly connected to first wave feminism, but instead of seeking an “equality” to men, the second wave uses women’s difference to men to “oppose the ‘legalities’ of a patriarchal world”. Second wave feminism would become associated with the media fix of “bra burning”, which stems from a notable protest in Atlantic City in 1968, involving feminists throwing several symbolic female products into a “freedom” trash can.
Maggie Humm suggests that Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, can mark the beginning of the second wave of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote “On ne nait pas femme, on le devient" (“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) which argues the divorce of sex (the natural body) and gender (cultural applications of gender). Her philosophies were arguably the first (since Plato) to question the duality of private/public and women’s role in the private sphere. De Beauvoir’s significant influence to feminist thought, specifically in fuelling the second wave, was her conclusion that these separate categories (within dualisms) were not “mutually defined in terms of one another” but rather the public/culture categories defined what was private/nature. In this sense, men defined “women”, who de Beauvoir defined as the “other” to men.
For second wave feminists, the chief site of struggle was the female body, as illustrated by early demonstrations. The notion of “difference” that saturates second wave feminist thought, “begins with the celebration of the female body” which third wave feminism expands on by using “embodiment” as a fundamental feature for analysis. Third wave feminism is a term that developed in the early 1990s which is noted for opening several debates between second and third wave feminist thought, and between third wave feminist and post-feminist thought, where post feminism is an anti-feminist stance that believes feminism has already been accomplished. Despite the clean correlation between the first and second waves of feminism, third wave feminism is a more radical development on its predecessors. Arneil defines the third wave in Politics and Feminism as a “new body of thought, distinct from second wave feminism, which is characterised by notions of identity, difference, contradictions, and embodiment”. Third wave feminism places greater priority on individual subjectivities and experience, as opposed to the second wave’s group identity which third wave feminists have argued to identify women with “a collective position of victimhood”.
Third wave feminist thought has posed “a fundamental challenge to western dualisms” in its attempt to reconstruct dualisms present in contemporary culture. The dualities inherent in Western culture developed from Ancient Greek politics that ordered authority and laws of human reason to exercise control over natural chaos, and anarchy. This duality transformed into the distinction between body/mind, and thus the Cartesian distinction between subject and object. When discussing such dualities, it is critical to understand that the boundaries are constructed to imply that if one side of the dualism collapses, “the other is either meaningless or utterly changed”. Reiterated, dualism “results from a certain kind of denied dependency on a subordinated other”.
Unlike second wave feminism, which attempted to shift men and women’s roles around within the binary dualities of nature/culture, and private/public, third wave feminists consider that “the way the categories themselves have been constructed is flawed”. Third wave feminism seeks to acknowledge the complexity of society, favouring multiplicity over polarised groups: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explains “difference has replaced equality as the central concern of feminist theory”. Contemporary feminists have taken a new perspective on these dualisms, embracing diversity between women and seeking to become the very boundaries between seemingly exclusive binaries. An argument that third wave feminism points to is the idea that contemporary western dualities therefore do not leave space for equality, and must be reconstructed in order to achieve equality across men and women.
In my argument, I consider how technology in the late 20th and 21st Centuries has transformed the female/male dualities that third wave feminism oppose, and can be argued to resonate third wave feminist philosophies by acting as a tie between opposing dualities. Donna Haraway suggests in her political fictional, The Cyborg Manifesto, that the image of a cyborg is an appropriate emblem for third wave feminist thought for it is a hybrid between organism and machine. Essentially, the cyborg “straddles” both the subject, and the “other” in its “deliberate attempt to overcome the disconnection between nature and culture, or biology and technology. In many feminist texts, such as Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, this “straddling” or renegotiating borders becomes known as “hybridity”.
Haraway’s cyborg has been an attractive reference for many academics writing within women’s studies, including feminism. Barbara Brook suggests this is because the cyborg “blurs the boundaries between the organic and inorganic” but also can potentially remain resembling a woman. Significantly, the cyborg in Haraway’s manifesto is “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism” and is thus potentially viewable as politically revolutionary in de-stabilizing conventional western discourse such as materiality, and nature/culture dualisms. On the other hand, the cyborg could be argued to suppress women (as opposed to being a figure of liberation) under the idea that in order to bypass the binary dualisms in western culture, a woman must become a man through her use of technology in order to succeed with the same capacities as men. This is a significantly fertile area for discussion within third wave feminist discourse that I will explore in depth regarding Björk’s artistic output in Part Two.
1.3 – An Introduction to Embodiment Theory within feminist discourse
In Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland writes of the body as the membrane between sensory experience, and communication by “extending itself prosthetically through gesture into the world”. Sarah Boak offers another perspective on this by implying that the voice (in particular, the sung voice) is a concept that conjoins the materialism and idealism of the “self”/body. “Embodiment”, as opposed to “the body”, has recently been a term favoured by academics. Weiss and Haber identify this as a change in perception from a non-gendered body that “plays a role in perception, cognition, action and nature” to “a way of living or inhabiting the world through one’s acculturated body”. This concept of “doing”, “becoming” or “dramatizing” one’s identity through embodiment is explored in depth in the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir, Grosz, and Butler who have all developed a feminist discourse around embodiment.
De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex expands upon Merleau-Ponty’s position in his book Phénoménologie de la perception in which he writes that existence does not have any casual qualities and that only through existence (thus, experience) can facts “manifest”. De Beauvoir states that the presence of a body is a condition “without which the very fact of existence would be impossible”. To de Beauvoir, to be present implies there must exist a body which is both “a material thing in the world and a point of view towards this world”. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex expands on the causal relationship between the body and the self, which has acted as a starting point for contemporary feminists. Succeeding this, feminists have fought to show the body as the site for change, using the body as a canvas to reveal the inequality of the sexes.
The body has always been factored by feminists, but throughout the 1990s the subject of the body was gathering more interest in various disciplines, particularly within third wave feminist discourse. The increase of academia surrounding the body has not been based on empirical studies, but of “philosophical or textual studies concerned with developing the concept of corporeality”, a new development within feminist studies. Contemporary feminist writers, such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz, focus on corporeality and explore how lived bodies within culture lead to formed conceptions of gender and sexuality. Butler and Grosz’s analysis is centred around how the material body is performative and reflects the “cultural zeitgeist” leading to the conclusion that if sex and gender were performative, then they were not permanent and could be reoriented.
Grosz argues that one’s sexed identity is the exact overlap of the corporeal body, and the “circulating discourses” such as the current network of cultural doctrines at the moment in question. Grosz uses the Möbius Strip to demonstrate her idea that “bodies and minds are not two distinct substances” but an entwined inversion where one can become the other. In Butler’s work throughout the 1990s and early 2000s she holds the opinion that the sexed and gendered identities people possess are the product of “normalizing practices” which male and female bodies come to learn as an “ideal” under the influence of society.
Performers are fertile catalysts for debating gender as a performance. Media figures Boy George, and Annie Lennox have been described as “gender benders” because of their “gender-fucking” – a term coined to remove the notion of “woman” and “man” from heterosexual naturalizing narratives. Mary Gergen suggests that Madonna’s postmodern “queerness” is possibly the most vivid example of exposing the construction of gender by modifying her bodily appearance with regards to clothing, singing style, and demeanour. A key example is her song, and video “Express Yourself” in which she imitates Michael Jackson’s “already androgynous…interpretation of phallic masculinity”.
Kathy Davis writes that “the female body becomes a metaphor for the corporeal pole of [the mind/body] dualism” in which the female body is regarded as the submissive “other” to male superiority. Third wave feminist discourse suggests that it is necessary to create a coalition between dualistic binaries, and normalise individual identities and their subjective identities as opposed to generalisations. Thus, performers who attempt to “bridge” the binaries, such as Madonna and Björk, can be thought of embodying these notions.
Third wave feminism is, as explored in part 1.2, heavily formed on phenomenological ideologies and the body’s role as a locus between dualisms indicates that embodiment is a suitable area to apply to third wave feminism. Furthermore, as the relationship between technology and embodiment is a key focus of this paper, later we will consider questions such as: Is the female body liberated by the possibility of technologically mediated bodies? Is technology a form of female oppression, in a society where technology is deemed “masculine”? And, how can the cyborg act as an image that changes philosophies of modern western society? If the body is formed through corporeal acts, creating a technologically mediated body would alter how gender would be conditioned to be, if the body would be gendered at all. Consequently, embodiment of technology can challenge social constructions of gender, and thus disrupt the female/male binaries that third wave feminists wish to dismantle. In part 2, I will be applying these ideas to Björk’s musical and artistic output.
PART 2
Introduction
In part 1, I analysed how western political thought has been dictated by some key dualities, including body/mind and private/public. These dualities remain hierarchically associated with femininity and masculinity, where habitually the duality is in favour of patriarchy. Furthermore, I explained how third wave feminism seeks to disassemble such female/male dualities. In part 2, I will be discussing Björk’s work through a series of key examples, concentrating on how she embodies third wave feminist stances in her work and becomes a potential third wave feminist figure without explicitly identifying with feminism. Particular emphasis will be placed on Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, using her political fictional cyborg as a key third wave feminist notion to apply to Björk. The cyborg opposes bodily connotations of “meat”, and the “other” to a disembodied mind, instead indicating that we must re-define the body within the new technological evolution, consequently putting “‘the guts’ back into the machine”. Björk as a performer is a glowing example of a musician whose use of technology can be analysed to “straddle” several binaries within her music, and potentially re-define our relationships with such binaries, particularly through using embodiment as the medium.
2.1 – Disembodied Technologies: Female transcendence from a material body in There’s More to Life Than This and Miniaturization and Sexuality in Vespertine
In this chapter, I will discuss how Björk’s music challenges the idea of bodily transcendence through her use of technology, and that this can be interpreted as a third wave feminist gesture. I will introduce the concept of dualism to a greater degree, before discussing how Björk is “disembodied” through her use of technology within the song There’s More to Life Than This. I will then explore how the album Vespertine challenges embodiment through the use of miniaturized beats, and discuss how some of the lyrics connote female bodily experience. This chapter will be drawing heavily from Jennifer Iverson’s Mechanized Bodies: Technology and Supplements in Bjork's Electronica.
Female transcendence from a material body in There’s More to Life Than This:
The song There’s More to Life Than This, from the album Debut (1993) begins with café noises before electronic music interjects and we appear to have entered a club. The location varies throughout the song as Björk takes the listener through a series of locations including a café and a beach. Iverson asserts that Björk’s multi-layered tracks in There’s More to Life Than This suggests “both a strong sense of space and a sense of embodiment”. Iverson explains that “musical sound has a direct relation to the body in acoustic music” within implied gestures of playing the instrument. Electronic sounds, however, do not possess such qualities. Although for the most part, electronic sounds are created by a person, gesture is less closely tied to one’s movement when playing electronic instruments, and electronic instruments are regarded as “task-orientated” with no emotional qualities tied to them. Binaries exist inscribing the acoustic as natural, and the electronic as the “other”, due to the unnaturalness, and the lack of a body to assign to the sound.
In There’s More to Life Than This, Björk creates a fictional body by melding together acoustic sounds and electronic sounds and simultaneously embodies a natural body through employing the “disembodiment” of electronica. Through fiction, Björk exemplifies the merging of contrasting binaries that third wave feminism opposes. Third wave feminism resists the hard binaries associated with Cartesian duality, primarily female/male binaries. Additionally, most dualisms can be tied to femininity and masculinity, including body/mind, nature/technology and pop/rock where the former of the pair is marked as feminine, and the latter as masculine. Although Cartesian Duality has been argued to be deeply flawed in contemporary philosophy (such as the dismantling of Descartes’ premises in The Mind-Body Problem by D.M Armstrong, and Ryle’s Ghost in the Machine), the dualism of body/mind with regards to female and male subjects is still worth discussing in more depth.
The material body is often associated with women’s maternal or sexual bodies, and the male body is less valued aesthetically and valued with high regard for skill and intelligence, or “transcendence” from the material world. Nicola Green writes:
The association of dominant terms in technology relations – masculine, transcendence and technology – alongside the historical construction of masculine spaces tends to reinforce virtual reality as an enterprise of consumption in which a material body is simultaneously suppressed/erased in a masculinized transcendence.
Although Green is referring to digital identities, the same framework can be applied to Björk’s use of electronica in There’s More to Life Than This. Björk enters “masculine space” via her use of technology to create a fictional world. However, Green suggests that women who enter virtual reality become “erased”, as opposed to empowered, which is a counterargument I will develop in part 2.3.
Björk’s sound design in There’s More to Life Than This simulates a lived body different to our own. This fictional body is not viewed as natural, however, “since it is supplemented by technological mediations”. Iverson discusses Björk’s electronica as “sounding out the prosthetic”, through electronically produced sounds that enhance organic sounds such as Björk’s typically untouched voice. Contemporary perceptions remain that prosthesis completes a lacking body. By thinking of electronic sounds as prosthesis implies that Björk’s voice is lacking something and needs to be corrected by technological means. However, Iverson concludes that Björk’s music transcends the binary logic of prosthesis: “by positing a body that is so technologically mediated it might be heard as a cyborg” and suggesting that the body is a malleable concept as opposed to being supplemented.
This is similarly exemplified in Janelle Monae’s 2010 album The Arch Android, by embodying a “messianic cyborg” who goes by the name of “Cindi Mayweather”. Monae disrupts the expectations for her “primitive blackness” in mediating between the two forces of nature and technology, leading to a blend of “humanity with virtual fantasy”. Both Monae and Björk demonstrate technologically mediated bodies through fiction. In There’s More to Life Than This, the technology that could be interpreted as “supplement” is in fact as much part of the body as the natural body, despite being a part of a fictional world. This reflects Haraway’s third wave feminist idea of the cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”, suggesting Björk’s fictional sonic-appearance in There’s More to Life than This to be simultaneously a component of social reality. It is this “hybridity” which distinguishes Björk’s art to be potentially a third wave feminist gesture as opposed to a female material body defined by technology (masculinity).
Miniaturization in Vespertine:
Vespertine reflects a different technological approach resulting from contextually modern digital sampling techniques and the rise of a micro-sound movement which was especially significant in reconsidering and subverting the distinction between natural and synthetic sound within electronic music. Dibben characterizes the micro-beats in Vespertine as “invisible” and therefore disembodied.
The music on Vespertine explores micro-beats through themes of intimacy, shyness and invisibility from the public sphere. Nevertheless, Björk comments Vespertine was an album that wanted to make technology visible amidst “playing with translucency…transparency, [and] soft boundaries”. Björk comments in an interview:
…it’s sort of conquering the fact that most people think that technology is cold because it has no mystery, and it’s very calculated…so when you take technology and use the areas where it breaks, where it’s faulty, you’re entering a mystery zone where you can’t control it. It’s reacting more like an animal or a person to you, and you have to react with it.
Glitches, system crashes, clipping, distortion, and quantization noise were seen as an “aesthetics of failure” in Cascone’s critique on The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies In Contemporary Computer Music. In Cascone’s critique, “failure” is explored as a prominent aesthetic in many late 20th century arts “reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital told to be only as perfect, precise and efficient as the humans who build them”. Björk’s use of micro-beats on Vespertine challenges technology as a rational source by challenging their faultlessness and embracing “the unpredictabilites of technology”.
Female Embodied Sexual Experience in Vespertine:
Lyrically, the content within Vespertine is often explicitly intimate and the album is an example of embodied female bodily (sexual) experience. For example, the lyrics on Cocoon clearly express a sexual relationship: “Who would have known that a boy like him/would have entered me lightly restoring my blisses”. Björk sings in whispers and shivers that gives the impression of female excitement. The peak of the track is Björk’s heavy breaths indicative of an orgasm which Boak argues Björk to have become an “embodied voice”. The album explicitly depicts heterosexuality which would not typically be compatible with the image of the Haraway’s post-gendered cyborg. However, succeeding the climax of the song, Cocoon enters “queer space” where masculine and feminine imagery of genitals are all combined in “a plurality of excessive ecstasy and pleasure”. Instead, Cocoon is simply sharing Björk’s private sexual satisfaction with her listeners. Another key example is the song entitled Sun in My Mouth. Björk’s lyrics are written with mystical imagery as a reference to masturbation:
…I shall enter/ Fingers/ Of smooth mastery// With chasteness/ Of Sea-girls/ Will I complete the mystery/ Of my flesh/ Will I/ Complete/ The mystery…
Björk has invited us to publically share her private, intimate “cocoon” in Vespertine, which contradicts the norms associated with private/public binaries. Toop questions in an interview:
There are songs on Vespertine that seem intensely private… Isn't it a contradiction, this public exposure of sheltered places and times?
Björk explains her history in punk bands lead her to create this album as, “a paradise that you can escape to”. Toop’s comment in assigning the term “contradiction” to Vespertine supports the idea that Björk is a third wave feminist image, as third wave feminism is characterized by “contradictions, and embodiment” in the unification of opposing binaries as attempt to redefine relationships in dualisms. One could therefore argue this album to be a feminist gesture of female sexual liberation, by use of technology, and miniaturization, to meld the private/public binaries.
Vespertine embraces technologies faults as if it were indeed, an animal in its own right. In doing so, Björk brings technology to her own private environment and places human-like faults into typically hyper-rational machines. Embedded in Cascone’s theory on “The Aesthetics of Failure”, Björk seemingly displays the feminist criticism of science and technology in which “feminists argue, [science] is rooted in [a] masculine notion of domination over the natural world”. Furthermore, Björk combines the transcendence typically associated with dis-embodiment with femininity, particularly within Vespertine’s use of miniaturization, glitch, and embodied female bodily experience made explicit in the lyrics which can all be recognized as a reflection of third wave feminisms focus on corporeal embodiment.