Queens, Bitches, and Whores

While David Bowie’s persistent challenges to gender norms and conventional masculinity are well acknowledged, less attention is given to the presentation of women characters in his songs. Amidst an abundance of feminine figures and queerly gendered language, there is a thread through Bowie’s catalog of loosely resonant songs that present the lives of unnamed women in sympathetic and interiorized detail, often conflating these women’s experiences with Bowie’s own performing (performed) self. This article posits a fundamental interpenetration between Bowie’s unnamed feminine figures and his own authorial presence, established through sonic and lyrical self-citation and feminine-coded musical aesthetics, and further articulated through transgressive negotiations of racial and national categories. The article then turns to Bowie’s idiosyncratic use of the gendered slurs “bitch” and “whore,” examining these tropes through close readings of characterization and narrative structures in Bowie’s lyrics and 2015 Lazarus musical. “I’ll be a rock’n’rolling bitch for you,” Ziggy sings in 1972, a stance reiterated and embodied in various performative moves across Bowie’s work. By self-identifying as a bitch in ways that exploit the term’s multiple, contradictory meanings, Bowie develops a performative strategy that blurs subject/object boundaries. Bowie’s “whore” trope counters this, reifying patriarchal power dynamics and raising the stakes of performing gendered difference. These feminine-coded figures and terms operate on and through each other in Bowie’s work, simultaneously demonstrating the violence of gendered “authenticity” and affirming the queer potential of capacious illegibility. Reading this interplay in Bowie’s work can open more pluralistic models of gender and identity in popular music studies.