Is the massive backlash against the former child star justified?
It’s a Hollywood cliche, but unfortunately true, that talented children rarely have it easy transitioning their careers into adulthood, much less transitioning to adulthood themselves. The recent string of controversies around Dance Moms-kid-turned-pop-star JoJo Siwa, however, reminds us that rebranding from a child star to a mature one isn’t easy — especially if your “brand” was perhaps never fully understood to begin with.
Since Siwa started promoting her new single “Karma” over a month ago, the backlash from fans and haters alike has been virtually nonstop. Audiences have trashed her for everything from allegedly “stealing” the song itself (she didn’t) to getting too sexual in the music video, which went viral in part due to the outrage over a scene in which she dry-humps another woman. (She did warn us it wouldn’t be kid-friendly.)
All of this outrage is simultaneously more and less complicated than it looks on the surface. On the one hand, Siwa is yet another young star who’s had trouble putting an end to the aura of their childhood cuteness, and who’s being perceived as “trying too hard to shock us” with a rebrand many seem to view as crass and over-sexualized. On the other hand, the controversy seems to suggest that there’s a limit to what kind of public queerness we’re comfortable with — especially regarding queer women.
On top of all this, there’s an arguably separate conversation about the actually offensive things Siwa has allegedly done and said — a series of missteps, bad business decisions, and profound failures to read the proverbial room that can’t be ignored.
Siwa’s promotion of “Karma” has already dealt her plenty of backlash
JoJo Siwa has long been a fixture of competitive reality TV thanks to her striking personality, nimble dancing, and perhaps most famously, her collection of big bright hair bows, made by her mom.
Siwa joined the Dance Moms universe in 2013, when Dance Moms instructor Abby Lee Miller, who ran the show’s focal dance studio, highlighted her as a guest dancer on the spinoff series Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition. She joined the main show in its fourth season the following year, then rode the reality dance show wave through the rest of her adolescence and early adulthood.
Siwa grew her fanbase through YouTube via her XOMG POP! channel. Her hit 2016 single “Boomerang,” released when Siwa was almost 13, currently sits just shy of 1 billion views. The video sees her sporting her trademark bows and fully embracing her ice-cream-colored teen girl bubble-pop era. On the strength of its success, Siwa signed a lucrative deal with Nickelodeon in 2017 to do similar work aimed at Nickelodeon’s target audience of preteens — leading Siwa to helm an “empire” of children’s programming that netted her an estimated $20 million over the years. In 2020, Time named Siwa, at 17, one of its 100 most influential people.
Siwa’s Nickelodeon era plays like an extended Hannah Montana remix of fully kid-themed, ditzy pop. Simultaneously, however, and a little incongruously, she continued her dance show career, using it to help her transition toward more adult mediums: She featured as a singing, dancing T-Rex on the third season of The Masked Singer in 2020. After casually coming out in a tweet in 2021, she competed on Dancing With the Stars in its 30th season, dancing to upbeat queer anthems like “Born This Way” as part of a historic same-sex dance team. The last two seasons of So You Think You Can Dance have seen Siwa joining the show as a somewhat controversial judge.
You might expect that with that much influence and popularity and the ability to leverage her dancing skills into an ongoing career, Siwa would have relatively little problem transitioning out of her Nickelodeon phase. But therein lies the problem: The image she’s trying out now is, depending on who you talk to, either a step too far removed from that earlier spunky kid for many fans to take, or not far enough — just “Disney with cuss words,” as one X user put it.
“Child stars and celebrities embody not only our culture’s ideals of childhood, but also demonstrate how contradictory those ideals actually are,” Djoymi Baker, who researches child stars as a media and cinema studies lecturer for RMIT University in Melbourne, told Vox in an email. “Child celebrities are expected to act as if they are not getting older, and maintain a child-like innocence or face public outrage.” With “Karma,” the outrage at Siwa seemed to peak.
Siwa’s “Karma” music video released on April 5, yet due to the incendiary previews of a fully sexualized Siwa, it was drawing backlash well before its release. The general consensus was that Siwa was trying too hard to perform a hyper-sexualized, raunchy caricature of her own queerness — and the actual video only seemed to confirm that view. Highlights include Siwa’s much-mocked choreography and a sequence in which Siwa makes out with a series of different women, set to lyrics about infidelity and reaping what you sow.
The public’s general distaste for Siwa’s “Karma” persona involved debates about authenticity and whether her style is really “her” — a conversation that soon extended to controversy over the song itself and whether it’s also really “hers.”
Things kicked off when Siwa claimed to invent a subgenre of music that already existed. “I want to start a new genre of music,” she told Billboard on April 5, “called ‘gay pop.’” She then went on to list example songs like Lady Gaga’s “Applause” and her own version of “Karma,” prompting many people to respond by noting both the long history of queer pop artists and the long existence of the music she claimed to want to “start.”
She quickly corrected the statement, telling TMZ less than a week later that she “definitely [was] not the inventor” of the style, but rather wanted to “be a piece in making it bigger than it already is.”
By the time Siwa walked back that unfortunate statement, however, the hostility toward her had already calcified. On April 12, artist Lil Tay slammed Siwa on Twitter, noting that she “didn’t buy the song [her 2023 single “SUCKER 4 GREEN”] or hire a ghostwriter,” implying that Siwa had. It’s true that Siwa didn’t write “Karma,” but rather picked up a new production of an old track. According to Siwa, she was pitched an old song that had been recorded by previous artists, including Miley Cyrus, who never released it.
Although it’s a completely pedestrian thing for artists to release previously unreleased or little-known tracks, most of those artists hadn’t recently claimed to be inventing something new, and the backlash that settled on Siwa was ferocious. As part of the virality of the outrage, fans discovered singer Brit Smith’s 2012 version of “Karma” and boosted its sales, pushing the artist to a surprise No. 1 spot on Billboard’s electronic digital chart, all while Siwa’s version failed to even reach the Hot 100. Lil Tay’s “SUCKER” also got a boost, passing a milestone of 5 million Spotify streams amid all the noise over Siwa.
That doesn’t mean the reception to “Karma” has been fully negative, however: Siwa’s version did open across multiple ranking charts, and she played to a crowd of over 50,000 at the Miami Beach Pride Festival on April 14, performing “Karma” for enthusiastic fans and reportedly breaking audience records.
Still, the sheer level of the public’s anger toward Siwa suggests that something deeper is happening. It might stem from the career growing pains of a young adult making young adult mistakes, but part of it seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding of Siwa herself.
Siwa’s “rebrand” arguably isn’t that much different from her original brand
During her time on Dance Moms, Siwa was portrayed as colorful, loud, opinionated, “obnoxious, [and] sometimes rude.” Siwa channeled that energy into her performances, which usually reflected an edgy personality and powerful, athletic dancing. The bows she always wore, followed by her Nickelodeon era, may have given audiences the false impression of Siwa as forever innocent, stuck in arrested development as a preteen. Writing for Vogue in 2021, Emma Specter argued Siwa had “built a brand off of the kind of glittery, bow-festooned femininity that is typically reserved for straight women” — a brand that her coming-out, especially at the young age of just 17, worked to subvert.
But in fact, there’s really not much difference between one of Siwa’s early dance routines and her current much-touted “rebrand.” It’s not a stretch, for example, to see the girl who performed a tongue-wagging “Electricity” trotting out a KISS homage for an awards show. Abby Lee Miller herself recognized Siwa’s underlying consistency when she reacted to “Karma” on TikTok. “Everyone’s making such a big deal about the rebrand,” she noted. “I think it’s JoJo with paint on her face and a fabulous costume. It’s always been JoJo.”
On the other hand, the backlash to this aesthetic has resurfaced some not-so-good things Siwa has actually done. Though Siwa is only 20, the list of her controversies and allegedly offensive behavior would be notable for a star at any age — everything from marketing a makeup line that was recalled for containing asbestos, to allegedly helping create an abusive work environment for members of her failed pop group XOMG POP!, to defending and continuing to be friends with disgraced YouTuber Colleen Ballinger after Ballinger allegedly engaged her underaged fans in inappropriate sexual exchanges.
Though some of these claims and allegations aren’t necessarily Siwa’s fault, many seem completely avoidable — like the time a white child dancer was asked to don brown monkey makeup for her 2020 music video “Nonstop.” Responding to backlash over the alleged blackface, Siwa doubled down rather than apologizing. That’s more or less her MO for these situations — forging ahead rather than wasting time asking for forgiveness.
And while there’s a huge difference between an adult putting a kid in blackface and a 17-year-old Siwa doing it, she’s old enough to know better, and this sort of behavior has caused Siwa’s notoriety to surpass her fame.
Still, none of these controversies were what caused such deep public outrage in the days since “Karma” was released, and it’s hard not to think that this negative response ultimately boils down to a mismatch of expectations between Siwa’s extended public audience and the core queer audience to whom she’s performing.
It’s hard not to compare Siwa’s fairly tame performance of queer sexuality in “Karma” to Lil Nas X’s wildly successful “Montero” music video. Both were the entries of established pop stars into a queer space, claiming their recently announced sexualities through raunchy, glittery, erotic performances. “Montero” saw Lil Nas X riding a stripper pole and giving the literal devil a lap dance before crowning himself the king of hell. By comparison, “Karma” is milder and murkier: Siwa uses the muddled metaphor of a sea monster emerging from the ocean to illustrate the anxieties of a girl who can’t choose between any of the beautiful women in her orbit.
Admittedly, “Montero” is a lot more fun, full of far more creative and inventive artistry; yet it’s hard not to wonder if the vast difference between the public’s glee and delight in “Montero” and its disdain and derision for Siwa’s “Karma” is ultimately about a misogynistic refusal to let female pop stars grow up — at least without forcing them into rigid parameters of what that adulthood looks like.
“The child star brand of innocence has historically been quite specific,” Baker said. “It is predominantly white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and ostensibly asexual, with an expectation that growing up will be both heteronormative and yet as non-sexual as possible, particularly for women. This pattern has been seen again and again, with female child stars such as Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.”
Baker pointed out that the Siwa backlash closely mirrors the backlash her teen pop predecessor Miley Cyrus received a decade ago, at the same age of 20, after twerking with Robin Thicke in 2013 — a move for which Cyrus recently confessed she “carried some guilt and shame.”
“I was creating attention for myself because I was dividing myself from a character I had played,” Cyrus told British Vogue last year. “Anyone, when you’re 20 or 21, you have more to prove. ‘I’m not my parents.’ ‘I am who I am.’”
Baker noted that Siwa has called Cyrus her “number one idol” for making the transition to an adult brand. A good deal of the criticism Cyrus faced in 2013 focused on the racially insensitive cultural appropriation of her twerking. Yet Baker also observed that both women’s queerness, and their performance of that queerness against their earlier sanitized child-star images, may have amplified the backlash they received. “That Cyrus is pansexual and Siwa is lesbian means they do not fit into the restrictive ideals of childhood, the child star, or growing up that still dominate,” she said.
After all, apart from Siwa claiming her sexuality, just about everything else about her aesthetic is the same — she’s still colorful, opinionated, and backed by innumerable sparkly outfits. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “Karma” has provoked such conversations about authenticity. Love her or hate her, the JoJo we have now was arguably the JoJo we had all along.
