Interrogating Authenticity: Understanding East Asian Female Pop Music in the Western Cultural Sphere

This thesis explores the connection between East Asian female pop music artists and inauthenticity in Anglo-Western popular culture. It embarks on a two-step mixed method analysis to provide both breadth and depth to this research project, analyzing songs and music videos through a content analysis and critical discourse analysis. Specifically, it foregrounds the understanding of these artists as inauthentic against a broad tradition of authenticity in Western art and specifically in Western music to understand how these artists are perceived to be inauthentic. Focusing on a contemporary period, it explores how popular music interacts with the Western cultural imagination, interrogating how racial and gender dynamics contribute to understandings of authenticity. Also integral to this study is a consideration of technology and how technological developments have had an impact on understandings of art.