It began on March 11th, 2024 with a robot-narrated “warning” posted on JoJo Siwa’s TikTok account: “The following content is not made for children and may be disturbing or offensive to some viewers. May contain sexual themes, violence, strong language, traumatic scenarios and flashing lights. Viewer discretion is advised.” It was time for JoJo Siwa to grow up, to become an adult, to undergo a public metamorphosis that would accurately reflect the woman buried within the glittery girl who’d made her famous.

JoJo Siwa was going to sing about girls and dating and gay chaos and bad decisions, and she would do so in a flesh-toned bodysuit, or while suggestively biting her lip or grabbing her crotch in a frenetic dance, or while topping a dancer on a sandy soundstage christened “Karma Island.” And JoJo Siwa was going to do this with complete confidence, bless her heart, and even before the full single and video actually dropped last night, it was hard to find a social media user who had not already been exposed to its hook.

While her rebrand was unlikely to be flawless, it was made increasingly clear that it would be, at the very least, something.

JoJo Siwa in the music video for “Karma”

Siwa’s not the first young celebrity to clumsily attempt to cross this particular bridge — from cherubic child star to a grown-up who experiences sexual desire — but she may be the first out lesbian pop star to do so, as few others have hit that precise combination of being both incredibly famous and incredibly out at such a young age. (Siwa will turn 21 in May.) Far fewer have the financial resources Siwa does to fund her own album production and music video. The “uncharted territory” of it all is compelling to me as a scholar of lesbian pop culture — what does this journey look like when uninformed by and unconcerned with the male gaze? Is there any lesbophobia lurking beneath her negative reception from the mainstream? Would they think more highly of her if she was surrounded by shirtless men rather than two girls at one time? And is the cringe coming from within the community at all informed by internalized homophobia, or does JoJo Siwa’s entire deal exist on another plane altogether that many simply cannot abide for completely unrelated reasons?

On the Viall Files podcast this week, Siwa said she expected the video to shock people and turn heads — that was part of the goal, really. But she wanted more than just that. “I definitely want to be taken seriously,” she explained, and then added: “But I kind of realize that no matter what I do, no one’s gonna take it seriously.”

(Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)

In the days and weeks following March 11th, JoJo continued to hype the single and its accompanying video, and reactions ranged from, “I’m gonna lie, this song slaps” to “this song always fails to put me in a good mood!” to “This song helped me through life. I was in labor for 15 hours. I was in excruciating pain. Thankfully this song was playing and the baby crawled out of me to turn off my phone. Thank you.”

There were parodies and there was commentary and there was JoJo herself. She began sharing clips from rehearsals in which her costume evoked memories of Ziggy Stardust and/or Jem and the Holograms. Moments tumbled forward on her timeline at a precedented pace: JoJo Siwa crying in her Lamborghini, JoJo Siwa listening to her own song in her Lamborghini, JoJo Siwa getting really unfortunate tattoos. She rhinestoned her head and ears while telling us that it’s been so gratifying to hear people compare her transformation to Miley’s “Bangerz” moment, to note that she’s becoming an adult and “an artist.” She leaned over to the camera, Hey-Mamas style, in acid-washed rhinestone-encrusted jeans and 75 silver chains, lip syncing “I was a bad girl, I did some bad things.” She ranked the lyrics to the few clips yet released from her own song while wearing a baseball cap seemingly designed to replicate the experience of entering a room through a beaded curtain. She did her dance.

“For as much shit as people are giving JoJo Siwa, I am so thoroughly entertained,” TikToker Jake Shane posted on Tuesday. “I can’t even begin to describe it. Every red carpet interview. Every TikTok. Every snippet. Like — I can’t look away! I can’t look away! The dance! The fucking dance? The dance.”

JoJo Siwa commented on Shane’s TikTok: “don’t look away 👀❤️‍🔥.”

Most people don’t announce that they are entering their Adult Era, they simply do it and wait for the world to notice. Saying it can’t make it so. One yearns for Siwa to consider showing, not telling, as she boldly stares at the camera, dressed for glam rock yet singing synth-pop, and literally says she is a bad girl.

To return to the gendered gaze of it all, ultimately JoJo Siwa usually seems unconcerned with any gaze at all besides her own, which’s one of a few reasons why her evolution faces a formidable challenge. Siwa herself exists in a unique, self-created bubble. She’s been homeschooled her entire life (aside from a very brief third grade stint in public school), the majority of her projects have been self-focused, and she seems usually surrounded by people much older or much younger than her, many of whom work with her, for her, or adjacent to her. She grew up in the cutthroat world of competitive dance and has been subjected to critique and bullying and hatred from adults and strangers since she was nine years old, thus weakening her ability to sort through the noise for valid feedback. She’s not particularly tapped in to the zeitgeist, and perhaps never has been.

In some ways this has made her an unprecedented force as an out lesbian celerity — she has the privilege, the opportunity and the nerve to take some pretty big risks. She is resolutely unapologetic about who she is, and who she is is very gay.

But more crucially — known worldwide for her buoyant hair bows, Rainbow Brite aesthetic and raspy, hyperbolic, effusive endorsement of everything as “the best thing ever” or “the best day of her life,” Siwa’s specific brand is deeply tied to over-the-top childish iconography. Hannah Montana was a child because that’s how old Miley Cyrus was. But JoJo Siwa wasn’t simply the age at which one is a child — Siwa, even as a teenager, lived in a Lisa Frankish candy palace, surrounded by glitter and rainbows and unicorns, courting a fanbase of actual children who bought over 80 million of her signature hair bows. Her out-of-touchness may’ve been an asset for an adult creating children’s content without self-consciousness, but it’s harder, now, for this.

She’s occasionally overcome this association to be seen as a hot and cool adult, but only incidentally — most memorably, the clip posted by ESPNW after the 2021 MLB All-Star game, which inspired TikTok comments like “she’s so fine right there” and “I feel like she realizes how hot she is.”

Photo by Tom Cooper/Getty Images

But in general, JoJo’s brand is only not embarrassing because it was so successful. Transitioning that same attitude into her rebranded adulthood is going to be rocky unless it, too, is successful, and on April 3rd, Wikipedia was already confidently declaring, “On April 5, 2024, she released her official debut single “Karma” which received mixed reviews from the public.”

Mixed reviews won’t necessarily impede economic success or popularity, though. Last week, Siwa shared an article from Forbes announcing that her song was charting on Billboard despite being unreleased. Indeed, it had ranked on the TikTok Billboard Top 50, which measures the platform’s most popular tracks “based on creations, video views and user engagement.” As of 9:30 AM on Saturday, April 6th, the video has already racked up 7.1 million views and easily tops YouTube’s trending charts.

She knows how to get people talking. What I mean is — on some level, JoJo Siwa knows exactly what she’s doing.

Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Kershaw’s Challenge

Siwa perhaps is torn between the marketing antics that got her this far and the behavior that could actually move her to a new level — on The Viall Files, Nick begged her to remove the legendary decals of her face from her car (JoJo’s “Jojomobile” is plastered in cutouts of her face) and she refused, citing it as an effective marketing tool, while also acknowledging it posed a great risk to her personal safety. But what kind of sense does that make? JoJo is famous enough to not rely on her personal vehicle to serve as free ad space for her overall brand within Los Angeles metropolitan area. Perhaps the most revelatory admission about the car is her explaining that it was a gift from her parents, who thought it would help promote her tour. The wrap was a “full surprise” that has since become “a standard.” But to whomst? And why?

“People are afraid of things they don’t know,” Siwa told E! News of the reaction to her ‘transformation.’ “Things can be scary for people. New things can be very, very scary.”

Jon Kopaloff / Stringer

“Karma” isn’t a bad song. It’s catchy and fun and danceable. The music video is high camp, which’s ultimately is the language of our people.

TikTok musician Eternity posted a cover of “Karma” that JoJo Siwa duetted, and Brooke Butler did her own version, captioned with “what karma would sound like if jojo siwa drank whiskey and drove a truck.” In their hands, the song has real momentum and a kind of soul and self-consciousness missing from Siwa’s performance. They sing with honesty and despair. When Eternity and Brooke sing “Karma,” they’re not trying to be cool. They’re trying to be honest. The end result is that they do, in fact, look cool. It might take a few minutes away from cameras and her parents for JoJo to figure out what honesty looks like on her.

Throughout all of this, there have been moments when you can see a person who is truly straining behind the mask she created for herself to create a space for something authentic to grow. JoJo Siwa, like most 20-year-old girls and most newly out lesbians, wants to be hot and wants to be cool. Like most entertainers, she wants to be seen as an artist, and wants people to take her seriously. She wants to dress like G-Flip, she wants to talk about being a top on a podcast, she wants to seem dangerous and complicated, she wants to make music videos like Lady Gaga and wear outfits like Elton John but in the end she’s still profoundly unformed. Ultimately, that may be the only truly relatable and grounded thing about JoJo Siwa — how clearly she is yearning to be something she has yet to become. It is that unformed, baby dyke, desperately trying piece of ourselves that we recognize in her, and in that moment of identification, it’s hardly surprising that so many want just as desperately to look away.

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