Christ as Princess of Pop

In Australian music history, Kylie Minogue remains the undisputed Princess of Pop. This and her disco invocation to dance remain organising principles, at least for me. Decades on from first resonating like a soundtrack to my formative teenage years, Kylie’s singing voice still hums of joy, embodied and ecstatic. With Roland Barthes’s singing voice as ‘material of the body’ and Virginia Burrus and Karmen MacKendrick’s ‘life in desire’ as support acts, this chapter proposes that the humanity Kylie conjures can be for us a pointer to the incarnational life of Christ and, as such, a reminder to look beyond absolutes in order to seek and see the Christ, who liberates beyond existing normative categories and structures of order and power. Kylie’s many growth spurts and creative transformations are found to distinguish her as a sequinned, excessive body, being and becoming herself beyond limits, including of time, an apophatic body in and of the image of God. In her consistently ecstatic way, Kylie is thus more than just ‘the gay shorthand for joy’—she is a christic image for the ages who signals something of the liberative Christ Lisa Isherwood describes: ‘the Christ who is beneath our feet, before our eyes, in our hearts, and throbbing between us’.