This Pitch was picked up for Pop Matters:

Oh My God, You Fucked Kenny: Kenny Chesney, Unruly Bodies, and Celebrity.

Pitch: Kenny Chesney, one of a few male country superstars, provides an ambiguous and coded sexual message. His work has an obsessive, preening, masculinity apparently above any current sexuality. The texts where he talks about having sex, all occur in a Middle American place not connected to actual bodies but some Arcadian construction of space and time.

The gay rumors, the short lived marriage to a major Hollywood figure, the lack of sexuality in his work, the exotic Caribbean constantly found in his work, and his frat boy homo-socialism all tie into something destabilizing about his sexual personae.

Every major male country performer has more of an audience/performer sexual frisson then Chesney, but he keeps trying to create this artificially. He functions as a slippery sexual signifier. The binaries we use to talk about people (audience/performer, gay/straight, butch/femme, top/bottom) all fall down around Kenny.

Talking about this instability is a way to approach a postmodern sexuality, deconstructed, free floating, away from certain geographies, and explicit identity politics.

I will finish a draft in the next couple of days, its only 1200 wds, but im trying not to back burner meritt.