The desire for the heel: Male fetishism and pop-fan culture around Prince

High heels represent femininity, seduction – a binary gender system, in which the wearer longs for the recognition of the gazer. Once connoted as signifiers of power, high heels have been transformed in a gendered fashion accessory designed for women. The singer and songwriter Prince has continuously worn them for almost four decades. His anti-normative dressing and gender expression techniques evoked an audience, which consist of a majority of fans who define themselves as heterosexual and male. The starting point for my research was the hypothesis that the artist’s non-normativity led to an anti-normative desire angle: a heterosexual male fan desiring his heterosexual male fan-object by fetishizing the artist’s high heels.