Justify My Love

An analysis of sex and gender in music videos, covering everyone from Beyonce to Madonna, Nine Inch Nails to Mykki Blanco.

In Justify My Love, Ryann Donnelly explores sex and gender in one of the most widely consumed art forms of our age — the music video.

Through an autobiographical reckoning with the author’s life in a band and collaboration with past lovers, and a close analysis of the erotic iconography of music videos, Justify My Love tells the subversive history of this medium, from the inception of MTV in 1981 through to the 2010s.

Covering everything from Lady Gaga and Beyonce to Nine Inch Nails and George Michael, Justify My Love shows how subversion became mainstream, and how marginalized voices shaped some of the biggest music videos of the last thirty years.