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Abstract

Georges Bizet’s Carmen has been restaged countless times since its premiere in 1875, in settings ranging from its original staging to Broadway musicals to a “hip hopera.” The opera’s revolutionary and boundary-breaking nature has made it a popular vehicle through which musicians have critiqued myriad social issues in historically divergent contexts. Thanks to innumerable reinterpretations, Carmen has been studied and examined through many lenses, most influentially in Susan McClary’s feminist reading of the work (McClary 2002). However, scholars rarely consider the complexity of gender in modern reinterpretations of the opera such as MTV’s 2001 reimagining, Carmen: A Hip Hopera starring Beyoncé Knowles. The film has been written off as a piece of “Millennial lore,” a nostalgia-inducing title that does not seriously critique gender binaries in popular culture. Inspired by Anne Fausto-Sterling’s rejection of hegemonic gender norms espoused in The Five Sexes (1993) and The Five Sexes, Revisited (2001), in this paper I offer a gender critical interpretation of Carmen: A Hip Hopera through an analysis of Carmen’s gen(d)re-bending (fluid movement across genres, from rap to R&B and classical). I argue that the screenwriter’s goal in bridging the gap between “high art” and popular culture inadvertently but effectively questions gender binaries by overtly calling attention to contemporary gender norms. In doing so, I suggest that this work is an enlightening expression of popular culture that can potentially call for a more inclusive understanding of gender and sexual identity in our present moment.

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