‘Couture military’ and a queer aesthetic curiosity: music video aesthetics, militarised fashion, and the embodied politics of stardom in Rihanna’s ‘Hard’1 Catherine Baker University of Hull In December 2009, at the end of a year in which Rihanna had been forced into a struggle to control and redefine her public persona after being assaulted by her then partner, the second single from her image-redefining album Rated R appeared with a video proclaiming her resilience and invulnerability, placing her in a succession of haute-couture-styled military- themed outfits in the middle of a fantastic version of a desert war. ‘Hard’, released while fans and journalists were still debating the meanings of the BDSM imagery around Rated R’s lead single ‘Russian Roulette’, asserted Rihanna’s triumphs in the music industry and the luxury they had earned her result with a defiant message to her online haters and the repeated declaration in the chorus ‘I’m so hard’. Its video translated the innuendo of this symbolic appropriation of masculinity into a military setting, showing Rihanna both in command of displaying her own sensuality and in dominant positions over men – inviting the viewer to co-operate in ‘telling stories’ (Shepherd 2013) about gender, race, geopolitics, violence and survival while subverting, reinscribing, exploiting and/or queering the association between ‘hardness’, masculinity and military power. While the video’s entanglements with the gendered and racialised world politics of the Obama presidency’s ‘avant-garde militarism’

In December 2009, at the end of a year in which Rihanna had been forced into a struggle to control and redefine her public persona after being assaulted by her then partner, the second single from her image-redefining album Rated R appeared with a video proclaiming her resilience and invulnerability, placing her in a succession of haute-couture-styled militarythemed outfits in the middle of a fantastic version of a desert war. ‘Hard’, released while fans and journalists were still debating the meanings of the BDSM imagery around Rated R’s lead single ‘Russian Roulette’, asserted Rihanna’s triumphs in the music industry and the luxury they had earned her result with a defiant message to her online haters and the repeated declaration in the chorus ‘I’m so hard’. Its video translated the innuendo of this symbolic appropriation of masculinity into a military setting, showing Rihanna both in command of displaying her own sensuality and in dominant positions over men – inviting the viewer to co-operate in ‘telling stories’ (Shepherd 2013) about gender, race, geopolitics, violence and survival while subverting, reinscribing, exploiting and/or queering the association between ‘hardness’, masculinity and military power. While the video’s entanglements with the gendered and racialised world politics of the Obama presidency’s ‘avant-garde militarism’ (Cannen 2014) now make it a historic artefact, it exposes an affective continuum between militarisation and stardom that can be explored further for other political moments including our own. The insights into music video aesthetics necessary to perceive this continuum at work highlight a relationship between music and visuality which suggests that articulations between senses are important for understanding not just the embodied politics of militarisation but the wider field of aesthetic politics itself. Just as much as the better-researched audiovisual genres of film and serial television, music video is also a site through which viewers and listeners encounter narratives about gender, race, geopolitics, violence and security which form part of their everyday experience of international politics and their everyday entanglements of war. Yet music, as Matt Davies

political economy of gender, militarism and imperialism that entertainers such as Carmen Miranda negotiated in becoming stars (Enloe 2014: 213-18); human rights campaigns mobilising around oppressed musicians such as Pussy Riot (Street 2013;Wiedlack 2016), or being led by musicians as celebrity humanitarians (Repo and Yrjölä 2011); international musical competitions such as Eurovision as platforms for promoting desired versions of national identity (Jones and Suboti 2011) or making international LGBTQ political claims (Baker 2017); and the music of the black diaspora as a site of anti-colonial resistance and knowledge production (Gilroy 1993;Shilliam 2015: 109-30). The sensory and embodied aspects of music are nevertheless still not explored as deeply or as often as their visual equivalents, despite the pronounced turn in international politics research towards theorising aesthetics and emotions.
Revealing what music can add to an aesthetic approach to international politics, Roland Bleiker (2005: 179-80) argues, involves going beyond the places 'where references to the political are easy to find' -that is, beyond lyrics, which as text and language are the most accessible elements of meaning within conventional epistemologies for studying world politics, and also beyond political contentions involving musicians as actors. While scholars are being called upon to think beyond the affective meanings of language in world politics by considering other aesthetic and sensory experiences as well (Sylvester 2013;Solomon 2015: 59), and it is testament to how far studies of visuality in global politics have outstripped other senses that Kyle Grayson and Jocelyn Mawdsley (2019: 436) are also urging IR to overcome an 'ocular-centrism' which privileges sight (Grayson and Mawdsley 2019: 436). Bleiker (2005: 179) himself has transcended language and visuality by studying instrumental classical music rather than music with lyrics, asking 'What can we hear that we cannot see?
And what is the political content of this difference?' The methodological challenge of studying popular music, however, is only firstly to recognise the importance of the sonic; it is then to reckon with the way that sound and visuality in popular music have become not just incidentally but also structurally intertwined. Beyond the incidental visuality of music that already exists in audiences' 'witnessing and response' to live performance (Slee 2017: 153), broadcast television's promotion of popular music and music video's emergence as a genre of cultural artefact created an audiovisual aesthetics of popular music which has carried over into, while also being transformed by, the age of digital and social media.
Music video's origin as a genre and product is typically, though simplistically, ascribed to the launch of MTV on North American satellite television in 1981 and in Europe in 1987 (Arnold et al. 2017: 1). Its aesthetics have developed through two main phases, each linked to technological innovations and their surrounding configurations of capital, power and creativity. The first, televisual and analogue, phase of music video aesthetics arose from MTV creating a new promotional platform which required hit singles to have audiovisual accompaniments to be shown. Foundational works on music video aesthetics from the turn of the 1980s-90s divided into cultural critique explaining music video's editing, content and style through theories of postmodernism (Kaplan 1987), and studies of its distinctive ways of producing meaning, including Andrew Goodwin's ground-breaking work theorising stardom and embodiment as well as sound and image into the structural analysis of music video (Goodwin 1992). Since the 1990s, digital editing techniques and computer-generated imagery have permitted music video creators to visualise settings, movements and montages unrestricted by analogue recording and editing constraints, while broadband internet, online streaming platforms such as YouTube, and mobile internet devices have delinked music video from state-regulated broadcast television, editorially mediated playlisting, and proximity to television sets, creating a new 'digital audiovisual aesthetics' (Vernallis 2013: 74; see Richardson, Gorbman and Vernallis (ed.) 2013). While analogue music video functioned largely to advertise recorded tracks (Goodwin 1992: 28), and was usually harder to access and lower in quality than audio recordings, music videos today 'are now clearly primary products in their own right', capable of reaching greater audiences than the audio of the same song (Railton and Wilson 2012: 7). Rather than displaying what we hear and cannot see, music video aesthetics concern what we hear and what we see at once, and their politics are the politics of how these senses converge.
As well as being an audiovisual medium, music video is also fundamentally an embodied one, centred around the meanings of the performer as star. Not all videos feature their stars (some solely contain other dancers or actors), and they need not even depict bodies at all; nevertheless, deciding not to feature a performer in music video is as conscious an aesthetic choice about how their stardom will structure the video as it is to decide how a performer will be embodied in it. Music as a purely sonic phenomenon is, of course, embodied already: it is the result of the body producing sound through the vocal cords, through gestures, and through interaction with other found or manufactured material objects, and audiences hear, see and experience it through the gendered and racialised lenses of their own socially-situated embodied knowledge (McClary 2000): while racialised practices of distinction and categorisation are usually seen as based on visual difference, race can also be heard, producing what Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016: 4) calls 'the sonic color line'. When music becomes an audiovisual artefact, however, it additionally involves the representation of performing bodies through techniques and gazes with prior histories in cinema and television -but also through conventions which are unique to or considered typical of music video, to the extent that they can make other audiovisual artefacts 'look like a music video' or 'look like MTV' when employed elsewhere (Vernallis 2004). Before asking what imaginations of gender, violence and militarisation might have been at work in Rihanna's 'Hard', therefore, we should consider what is distinctive about music video aesthetics and how they might enhance methodologies for understanding visual and digital media in international politics.

Music video aesthetics and international politics
Studies of music video aesthetics, combined with existing approaches to making sense of popular cultural artefacts (more and more of which are audiovisual) in international politics, emphasise aspects of audiovisual meaning typically underappreciated in analyses of linear fictional narratives on screen. The obstacles to perceiving music video as a kind of cultural artefact capable of being 'constitutive' (Grayson, Davies and Philpott 2009: 157) of people's affective relations towards world politics likely stem not just from residual perceptions that songs' most 'real' forms are their audio recordings, or the lingering effects of critics' dismissals of music video as postmodern, but also from the fact that music video depends far less than film or television on narrative -the concept around which methods for interpreting popular culture in world politics have chiefly been organised (see Shepherd 2013). Narrative, in the sense of a plot with a protagonist, obstacles and change, is not a structural prerequisite of music video and often is absent altogether; even if the digital video era with relaxed content restrictions, new post-production tools (using the same technology that provides backdrops and special effects for films and video games, so that music videos' action can increasingly unfold in the same digitally-generated settings as these (Jenkins 2006: 104)) and more capacity for pre/post-song film sequences might (and do) enable 'novel forms of narrative' in music video (Vernallis 2013: 27), the form itself has not been rebuilt around narrative in such a way.
Viewers do, nevertheless, make meaning out of music video through narrative -both the narrative they try to construct through organising videos' montages of images and sound/image convergences into an interpretive web (Adriaans 2016: 22), and narratives about the public personas of their stars. These 'metanarratives', Goodwin (1992: 103) argued using Richard Dyer's theory of star 'texts' (see Dyer 1998), are composed of audiences' knowledge about stars' past performances, publicity and public representations of their private life.
While music video's convergence of music and image distinguishes it both from narrative audiovisual formats and from still visual images, the importance of star metanarratives in music video aesthetics distinguishes them from other forms of short video with musical soundtracks as well. Explicitly discerning star metanarratives in audiovisual artefacts which harness the politics of stardom or celebrity to any degree should thus be among our methodological tools for observing world politics at work through media and popular culture.
Moreover, music video is also renowned for making the aesthetics of embodiment an essential element of meaning, raising complex questions about what viewers hear and see which can also be posed of other audiovisual forms. Most music videos put bodies in the metaphorical, and sometimes literal, spotlight, as featured performers, supporting dancers, actors, and/or crowds at actual or simulated live performances; the choice to make a music video without bodies is equally possible using audiovisual technology but creates a statement about that video's relation to the form. The pleasures of watching music video depend on spectatorial gazes which are simultaneously gendered and racialised (Railton and Watson 2012), and as Sunil Manghani (2017: 32) observes, 'the editing of the gendered body […] has arguably become the most prevalent and recognizable characteristic of the pop video aesthetic'. Alongside (or rather, contributing to and informed by) star meta-narratives themselves, the style and dress of the performer(s) and the '[m]ovement, dance, and embodied action' (Slee 2017: 147) shown on screen are equally constitutive elements of meaning within music video as lyrics, spatial setting, instrumentation or sound. As 'points of identification' (Goodwin 1992: 117) for the viewer, stars provide a particularly powerful affective hinge between the viewer and the (geo)political narratives and imaginations that a video contains.
Studying audiovisual popular music thus helps to highlight the importance of embodiment, performance and spectatorship, as well as sound, to studies of 'visual global politics' (Bleiker (ed.) 2018), digital media (Shepherd and Hamilton (ed.) 2016), and popular culture and world politics (Grayson, Davies and Philpott 2009). These fields' methodological paradigms for making political sense of audiovisual popular culture were largely developed through analysing cinema and serial television, and more recently also video games. Applying Annick Wibben's 'narrative approach' to feminist security studies (see Wibben 2011) to popular television drama, Laura Shepherd (2013: 12) was thus able to demonstrate that the 'ideas and ideals about gender and violence' embedded made these entertainment shows 'profoundly political'. Nevertheless, although her methodology did offer the potential for studying 'the embodied performance of narrative identity' (Shepherd 2013: 9) through factors such as body language and non-linguistic visual tropes as well as spoken words, in practice most popular culture and world politics studies of television still emphasise plot and dialogue, that is, what can most easily be contained in text. The interactivity of video games, where players must physically manipulate devices in order to advance and co-produce the aesthetic experience on screen (see Jarvis and Robinson, in press), has challenged scholars to reconfigure their methodologies around the aesthetic practices that set this genre apart.
A growing literature on digital media in international politics has meanwhile called attention to various types of short-form video as significant artefacts in the 'mediatized everyday' (Åhäll 2016: 162) of international politics. These include military (Newman 2013) and extremist (Leander 2017) recruitment videos, arms manufacturers' promotional videos (Åhäll 2015), tribute videos to fallen soldiers (Knudsen and Stage 2013), soldiers' own frontline video production (Andén-Papadopoulos 2009) and musical parodies (Shafer 2016), viral clips documenting news events (Saugmann Andersen 2017), and ISIS videos of execution and beheading, around which there is already an established literature (Friis 2015;Patruss 2016;Chouliaraki and Kissas 2018). Mette Crone (2014: 294), for instance, acknowledges ISIS videos as not simply visual texts but also 'aesthetic assemblages', that is, 'technologies that juxtapose linguistics, sound, images and matter' just as is the case for music video. The prevalence of studies on these topics hints at what International Relations most readily recognises as political, that is, armed conflict, violence, terrorism and unrest. Yet online video platforms and social media, technologies which have made 'video […] central to security politics' (Saugmann Andersen 2017: 355) place these in the same digital spaces as entertainment artefacts like music video: within a few minutes, users can be equally likely to see, watch or interact with any of them on an algorithmically generated social media feed.
Understanding that the distinctive meaning-making feature of music video is its mode of producing metanarratives through the performing bodies of stars simultaneously links them into world politics through studies of embodied performance and celebrity. Critical studies of celebrity humanitarianism have deconstructed the visual spectacles stars create through stars' off-stage performances of aid, especially the coloniality inherent to the trope of the benevolent white visitor to Africa (Repo and Yrjölä 2011;Müller 2018). The affective politics of celebrity and stardom amplify spectators' identification with political narratives. M Evren Eken (2019: 223), discussing actors' methods for creating the semblance of emotional and physical authenticity in war films, argues that the emotions they communicate facilitate the audience 'affectively embod [ying] and empathis [ing] with' the hegemonic geopolitical narratives that war films dramatise, in a more 'visceral engagement' than the narrative's bare bones would produce. Katarina Birkedal (2019: 188), similarly, explores how embodied and fashioned performances can charge 'everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses' in superhero/supervillain cosplay, whose characters have first been personified by stars and who come from storyworlds that revolve around geopolitical narratives of security, violence and war. Fashion itself -an essential component of embodied performance in music video -has also been written into international politics by Cynthia Enloe's feminist questioning of military uniforms and camouflage fashion (Enloe 2000) and more recent studies of phenomena such as the embodied performances of female political leaders and gendered religious struggles over dress (Behnke (ed.) 2017). While music video aesthetics could deepen insights into as many domains of international politics as a selection of videos seems to depict, what stands out at once from 'Hard' is its 'military chic' styling and its setting in a fantastic version of a US desert military base: particularly important for making sense of it, therefore, are perspectives on the embodied aesthetic politics of militarisation.
Music video and the embodied aesthetic politics of militarisation Militarisation, as defined by Enloe (2000: 3), denotes the processes through which 'an individual or society […] comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to be not only valuable but also normal'. Perceiving it requires turning a critical 'feminist curiosity' (Enloe 2016: 152) towards the taken-for-granted, including the 'fascination with militarized products' that advertising and consumer industries largely treat as unproblematic and natural (Enloe 2000: 2). Unquestioned, such fascination feeds the political economy of desire that fuels what Anna Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling (2009: 46-7) termed the 'neoliberal imperium' of coloniality and hypermasculinity. It is through the everyday, including people's encounters with popular culture, that much of this normalisation of military power and its racialised gender order as a solution to insecurity occurs, creating the 'everyday geopolitics' (Basham 2016: 884) of militarisation. These everyday politics are also an aesthetic politics, in which visual practices -including fashion -inform 'how people see themselves, others and war' (Shepherd 2018: 213).
Critical military studies' turn towards exploring the affective politics of popular militarism (see Rech and Williams 2016) provides further ground for explaining how embodied performance, a constitutive element of so much popular music and music video, can have political significance by intimately linking the individual spectator to imaginations of war, security and the international. Linda Åhäll's work, in particular, paves the way to do so: using the metaphor of dance, Åhäll argues that feminists' curiosity about 'how bodies matter politically' has offered them 'a different way into "the political"', that is, starting with 'stories, experiences and representations of peoples/individuals/bodies rather than states or political elites' (Åhäll 2016: 158). The 'dance' of militarisation, as an often-unconscious ideological practice communicating ideas about security and politics as common sense, is the 'gendered logic' of socially and culturally preparing society for war, a process that occurs 'through the mediatized everyday' (Åhäll 2016: 162). Åhäll (2019a: 149)  In certain cases, music video has even operated as a vehicle for 'militainment' (Stahl 2010), a term which -like James Der Derian's reference to the 'military-industrial-mediaentertainment network' (Der Derian 2009) -conveys the networks of capital, ideology, technology, representation and power in which the defence and entertainment industries are mutually implicated (Hozic 1999). Popular music's place within these structures is itself underappreciated, at least in IR, though popular music studies and ethnomusicology have done more to problematize popular music's entanglements with militarism in settings such as the USA and elsewhere after 9/11 (Ritter and Daughtry (ed.)  imagined as targets and threats? Which people and bodies ought (not) to be exercising military power, and how should they be trained and disciplined to do it, within which gender regimes? And how are these ideas about bodies mapped on to geopolitical imaginations of the globe? Even more than in other media, the answers to these questions in music video lie in the embodied performance of the star.
Music video's conventions for establishing action is taking place in a military setting are often intertextually derivative of film, sometimes drawing cinematic tropes such as the shouting drill instructor face-to-face with a recruit (famous from films such as Full Metal Jacket (Swofford 2018)) directly into the visual text. They also adopt visual practices of fashion photography (see Tynan 2013: 78-9), abstracting the military base into the same kind of fantasised chronotope as other stock music video locations, such as the club, the spaceship or the beach (Vernallis 2004: 75). Such ideal-type spaces can work to position songs and stars within specific musical genres, with 'different modes of address […] available to different constituencies' along gendered and racialized lines (Vernallis 2004: 73). Music video as a technology of militarisation also differs from film in that music video cinematography and spectacle emphasises the performing body more than the featured character: the aesthetics of Top Gun (1986) are a vehicle for the viewer to follow how Maverick becomes a fighter pilot and gets the girl, and the spectacular rupture that Demi Moore enacted in her public persona by training her body into a hard athletic shape and shaving her head to star in GI Jane (1997) was similarly an instrument for narrating the story of Jordan O'Neill's acceptance as a female SEAL (Tasker 2011: 243-7). Music video, even though it can take the form of short films telling stories, does not depend on overtly emplotted narrative at all. The movement, discipline, dress and styling of the body in music video, as well as the recreation of physical space, all help to code a setting's theme as 'military' but also ask to be interpreted through viewers' meta-narrative about the star.
Music video is thus embedded in processes of militarisation primarily on an aesthetic level that operates beneath narrative: it condenses its representation into assemblages of sound, setting, movement and style in a context which, as part of the popular music industry, is inherently charged with producing affects of desire, identification or both. As a technology of fascination, fantasy and desire, or what Goodwin (1992: 74) called a 'technocracy of sensuousness', music video condenses the militarising potential of narrative audiovisual narrative artefacts on to an aesthetic and stylistic fulcrum. Amid the 'increasingly explicit visualisation' of warfare (Chouliaraki (2013a: 315)  directly served what was then a USMC recruitment priority, persuading more women to enlist in a service that famously cultivated an elite warrior masculinity (see Zeeland 1996) so that the USMC could deploy more Female Engagement Teams on counter-insurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan (see Dyvik 2014). During the video's narrative, Perry's character leaves her cheating boyfriend, spots a recruitment ad for the Marines in a neighbourhood store, physically prepares herself to enlist in the store's bathroom (by cutting her hair, bandaging her breasts and putting on a hoodie -actions that a trans or genderqueer gaze might well see as risky rather than empowering in a women's bathroom), and progresses through basic training with a multi-racial group of fellow female Marines. Such a 'generically familiar montage of transformation' (Tasker 2011: 67) through military basic training lasts for only a few minutes as a trope in narrative feature film but can, in music video, become the logic of the video's entire text.
Intertextually, 'Part Of Me' remediated the fulfilment narrative of 1980s US militainment cinema such as Top Gun or An Officer and a Gentleman (a protagonist who is downtrodden in civilian life fulfils their potential through successfully passing through military training) to women viewers who could pleasurably identify with the recruit-protagonist. This pleasure was especially available to white women, given the whiteness structuring Perry's star image, but extended more conditionally to women of colour through the multi-racial (legible as supposedly 'post-racial') composition of the group of Marines. The spectacle of the female protagonist achieving empowerment and repairing her past through military training as selfrealisation is further accentuated through the contrast between Perry's embodiment of this character and her established image as a star. While not as radical a bodily transformation as Demi Moore's during GI Jane (1997) -Perry's military haircut is still an unremarkable civilian length, and what she is cutting is not even her own hair -it nevertheless echoes the spectacle of a glamorous female star embodying military masculinity and the production of the character as a 'masculinized subject' whose supposedly naturally feminine reproductive or sexualised qualities must be removed in order to fit into this masculine institution (Åhäll 2019b: 300). The performance gained authenticity through Perry's own star meta-narrative for viewers who knew that she had broken up with her own husband the previous year.
Taking 'Part Of Me' as an example of how to study the visual gender politics of popular culture (though limiting the analysis to lyrics and to action on screen), Linda Åhäll ( Rihanna turns to the camera through her shoulder-spikes as Jeezy begins to rap 'If I wasn't doing this, you know where I'd be'). A deeper but inescapable layer of masculine hardness behind the video, however, is the aesthetics of US-led desert war.
These aesthetics are mobilised in the video in both directly apparent and subtler ways. The Humvees and a water-truck with US Air Force (USAF) markings used as background props, or the Arabic graffiti painted on the side of the house (the Qur'anic verse in honour of the dead, 'We belong to God, and to Him we shall return' (Aidi 2011: 37)), are immediately apparent visual referents; the black and green tones of the parade-ground sequence, in contrast, are an echo but not a replication of the night-vision lenses effects which have filmed nocturnal battlefield action in Iraq. A further type of allusion to the aesthetics of warfare in Iraq is achieved through the use of sound to reinforce the significance of a visual shot, making the meaning of that moment inextricably audiovisual in the way that an appreciation of music video aesthetics enables us to perceive: such is the case for instance when the song's deep, ominous bassline begins at 0.11 and is synchronised with the first armoury shot in which Rihanna's rifle appears. All these elements of meaning would be missed if one only approached music video through lyrics or even how the characters in the video tell a storyand so would another element of music video aesthetics which is essential for understanding 'Hard', the meta-narrative of Rihanna as a star.
Several methods could be used for researching this meta-narrative, including one important set of methods this paper does not attempt: analysing fans' and critics' reactions at the time and/or conducting fresh audience research to reveal what different interpretations viewers might have formed from these ingredients. The circuit of meaning-making within cultural texts is, of course, not complete without considering viewers' own subjectivities and the multiplicity of possible meanings that then result -the very spectatorial experiences that make 'the geopolitical […] emotionally personal' (Eken 2019: 212). Nevertheless, this paper suggests (engaging in its own acts of meaning-making as it does so) that an additional way to understand audiovisual artefacts which rely on star meta-narratives for meaning is to explore the prior incidents, texts and cultural forms that may have informed their production. These relate firstly to Rihanna's own biography and then to the performance of what could be termed 'female military masculinity' that this video entails.
Hardness and the continuum of violence: the meta-narrative of Rated R The stardom of Rihanna, a worldwide celebrity since she released her debut album in 2004 aged sixteen, exemplifies Goodwin's argument that the 'meta-narratives' (Goodwin 1992: 98) musicians build up over time through their performances, styling, albums (which often symbolise new chapters in a star's diachronic celebrity persona) and publicity appearances are themselves elements of meaning in music video aesthetics, even as they advance the meta-narrative themselves. Rihanna's persona had already advanced past her initial image as an attractive young Bajan girl (see Russell 2012) through the songs, videos and publicity surrounding her 2007 album Good Girl Gone Bad, taking over 'the image of the stereotypically hypersexual black female as über-"bad girl"' in a narrative of sexual and artistic maturity (James 2008: 404). Rated R (named after the most adult age classification in US cinema, as well as Rihanna's initial) joined violence to sex through an aesthetics of BDSM power-play, revenge fantasy and, in 'Hard', militarisation.
The recording of Rated R, named after US cinema's most adult age classification as well participating in killing at all ranges from close quarters to piloting drones, and women's very capacity to kill was being debated within and around the armed forces as the military began to revisit the combat exclusion, the question of how far representations of military women in music video invite viewers to imagine their stars' characters as women capable of exercising violence and killing was and is directly political. The invitation is much stronger in Rihanna's case than Perry's, and reinforced intertextually when 'Hard' is heard and seen alongside other tracks from Rated R; retrospectively, it has been reinforced retrospectively through later videos such as 'Man Down' and 'BBHMM' continuing to associate her persona with survivorship and violent revenge. Since stars' creation of 'character identities' (Slee 2017: 153) in music video provides viewers with points of identification as well as objects of desire (Goodwin 1992: 103), among the identifications that 'Hard' invites viewers to make from their own socially situated subject positions is an identification with a (Caribbean) woman taking on to and into her body iconic masculine-coded signifiers of (largely US) military power.
In evoking a woman taking hardness and masculinity into her body to battle back from assault by a man, 'Hard' in fact performs a strikingly similar discursive move to the plot of, and Demi Moore's embodied performance in, GI Jane. Moore's Jordan O'Neill, after being beaten and threatened with rape by her unit's instructor during a Survival, Evasion, Resist and Escape exercise, fights back at him and defies his warning that her presence would put the men at risk by shouting 'Suck my dick' (Youngs, Lisle and Zalewski 1999); Rihanna declares, repeatedly, 'I'm so hard'. If the audio already makes this move, the video does so even more emphatically, harnessing the military's aesthetics as an institution that has been made to conventionally symbolise masculinity in order to exemplify what it means to be 'hard' -fusing the body made hard through training and resilience (see Jeffords 1994) and the hardness of having a phallus and becoming aroused.
The imagination of hardening the body through militarising it expresses, as Jesse Crane-Seeber (2016: 42) notes, a 'complicated psycho-sexual dynamics' that infuse militarisation with emotions of 'power, desire, pleasure and agency' within the military as well as representations of that process outside it. In these two audiovisual texts both Moore and Rihanna, to different extents and distinct but overlapping purposes, are 'performing' military masculinities in Judith Butler's sense of expressing bodily signifiers that typically code bodies as masculine (see Butler 1990). Simultaneously, these are performances of what the queer theorist Jack Halberstam (1998: 1)  Rihanna's performance of female military masculinities in 'Hard', unlike Moore's or indeed Perry's, also however operates through aesthetics of fetish, camp and drag. As Valerie Steele (1996: 180) notes, fetish culture and style has long understood that military uniforms owe their 'erotic connotations' to the 'sexual excitement' associated with violence and dominance/submission, the capacity for boots and weapons to become 'phallic signifiers', and the attention dress uniforms draw to the line and shape of the male body (see Crane-Seeber 2016: 47). Steele (1996: 174) argues that men's choices of clothing associated with 'ultra-masculine roles', including military archetypes, in fetish play serve 'as a kind of armor against the world that protects the wearer's inner self, while projecting an image of aggressive masculinity'; indeed, as Halberstam (1998) and C Jacob Hale (1997)  'Hard' as mediated through Rihanna's stardom thus uncomfortably combines its narrative about her own persona with reinscribing the US military, its troops and its desert operations as 'hard'. As such, it exemplifies the limitations of queer projects of reading 'separating masculinity from men' (Halberstam 1998: 50) as liberatory. Yet, Amy Stone and Eve Shapiro (2017: 254) argue through research on drag kinging and leather subcultures in the USA, identifications with masculinities may be 'radically transgressive' for individuals on an affective level and still 'simultaneously re-create gendered systems of inequality' in structural terms. This entanglement of 'empowerment and reinscription' (Stone and Shapiro 2017: 254) is exemplified in 'Hard', and the gendered system of inequality it reinscribes is the logic of militarisation itself.
The larger constellation of meaning around 'Hard', mediated through Rihanna's star metanarrative and the composite persona of all the songs, images and videos that constituted Rated R, arguably undercuts that logic somewhat more, since the position she embodies in the 'continuum of violence' (Cockburn 2004) is not that of white masculine power. A less sustained, casual engagement with the video would be more likely to suggest that the sexualised association between hardness, masculinity and the military is 'what it means'. For Rihanna and her persona, 'Hard' might perform a 'disidentification' in José Esteban Muñoz's sense of reading one's self and narrative 'in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to "connect" with' oneself (Muñoz 1999: 12); but how the viewer affectively perceives it, what aspects of it they might (dis)identify with and how they might do so depends on their own positionality and attachments, such as how they relate to Rihanna as a star or how far they question the gender order and security agenda of US militarism. Appreciating the synchronisations, the embodied performances and the star meta-narratives of music video are all necessary to perceive these politics at work.

Conclusion
Since 2009, 'Hard' has become not just a (complex) story about gendered, racialised and sexualised 'figurations' (Leigh and Weber 2019) of security, geopolitics, violence and militarisation, but also a historical text, one that was imagining the projection of US power under Obama rather than under Trump. This was a moment when black musicians in the USA were reflecting on what it meant for their country to have its first black president -indeed Jeezy had already paralleled Obama's historic access to the White House and his own upward mobility as a hustler and gangsta in a track he released with Nas during Obama's campaign (Nielson 2009) -and when Obama himself was establishing a 'post-hip-hop' presidential masculinity which ostensibly demilitarised the presidency compared to George W Bush yet masked the further institutionalisation of the US-led War on Terror across the globe, a phenomenon Emma Cannen (2014) (1986) and personified by Michelle Rodriguez, in whose stardom the chapter is much more interested -indicative of how much more attention film receives compared to popular music in international politics, even though (and more so than ever in the digital era) these genres' aesthetics and affective economies are intertwined. Applying the key themes of music video aesthetics to help make feminist and queer sense of media and popular culture in international politics thus enriches the methodological toolkit for making sense of international politics itself, by demonstrating how the 'mediatized everyday' (Åhäll 2016: 162) is not just a sensory phenomenon but a multisensory one -that is, how meaning is able to emerge from the juxtaposition and synchronisation of what is offered to the different senses at once. A widely remediated intertextual vocabulary for alluding to and referencing the military, established through the transnational imaginative continuum of mimetic and fictional representations of war, has furnished music video with ready resources for attaching symbolic resonances of war and the military as an episode in their stars' meta-narratives, yet the dynamics of militarisation in 'Hard' were not identical to those in 'Part Of Me' even if both were underpinned by the gendered security politics of the Obama presidency. A decade later, the contexts for viewing and understanding them are significantly and troublingly different, for those whose socially and geopolitically situated circumstances allowed them to experience the turn of the 2000s and 2010s as years of progress and peace. The emotions of contrasting the present and recent past indeed lend an extra dimension of temporality to the spectatorial experience, at least for viewers to whom they are apparent or meaningful. Yet the realisation that 'Hard' and other videos of its era are now historic texts hints that historicity itself is an underappreciated element of meaningmaking in audiovisual aesthetics -yet a deeply political one that deserves to be further theorised and researched, showing how spectators are positioned not just in space but also in time.