2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Lauren Onkey

Lauren Onkey is the Vice President of Education and Public Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Formerly she was an associate professor of English at Ball State University where she taught postcolonial literature and cultural studies. Her book, Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers is forthcoming from Routledge in 2009.Panel(s):
Spectacular Diva Excess
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 10:45 - 12:30

Moderator:
Constrained Pleasure
Sunday, April 19, 2009, 9:00 - 10:30Abstract:

""Get it While You Can": Excess Janis Joplin"
My paper will explore the multifarious excesses of the body of Janis Joplin and map how those excesses have been celebrated, exploited, and elided in rock journalism and rock history. Like many of her counterculture peers, Janis was famously excessive—her sexual, sartorial, and narcotic appetites are legendary. As a woman who performed with physical abandon and masculine aggressiveness, she exceeded the supposed boundaries of female rock performers of her time. But she did so in part through racial mimicry, imitating African-American blues singers to the point of parody. Rock and feminist  celebration of Joplin's excesses in the 1970s and 1980s as virtually the only important and influential female rock performer (as opposed to songwriter) often worked to elide the history and significance of African-American female performers, and the complexities of her sexuality. Joplin's excesses are polymorphous and contradictory—they simultaneously break and reinforce gender and racial stereotypes—but their unquestioned celebration ironically renders them as safe and contained. Forty years after the release of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, her album most steeped in soul music, what has the body of Janis Joplin come to mean? How might we tell her story so that her excess continues to exceed our understanding of rock and roll history?