Contemporary pop as a symbolic laboratory
Songs, like literature, are symbolic laboratories. Just as they accompanied the absurd pain of war in the last century (Lily Marlenefor example) and genocides (If this is a man) so even now they can not just be moments of escape. Summer song e Disenchantment they are not just moments of escape, but they reach the gender devices also active in theology, such as the Eve/Mary tension. Only apparently painless
«Do you want me more of a nun or a porn star?» sings Annalisa in Summer songand in a single question reactivates a thousand-year horizon. It’s not just a pop provocation, it’s the contemporary version of a dichotomy rooted in the Christian tradition. On the one hand purity, on the other sensuality. On one side Mary, on the other Eve. In the middle, for centuries, women’s bodies have been called to choose or, worse, to be chosen.
Today, however, something is cracking, something is being rewritten. It is not a minor detail that this very song, together with Disenchantment of Madame – a single that anticipates the album of the same name due out in a few weeks – was released on 13 March. A temporal coincidence that sounds almost symbolic: two parallel releases which, from different perspectives, put the same node at the centre, that of a feminine marked by ancient tensions but reworked in the present.
In fact, recent Italian pop shows an increasingly conscious use of religious symbols, not to destroy them, but to reinhabit them. Annalisa mixes registers: “non-Catholic thought”, “go in peace and so be it”, “hallelujah”. The liturgical language slips into the erotic, the sacred intertwines with the profane. In Disenchantmentan image resurfaces of Eve who no longer carries the burden of guilt, but that of awareness. The loss of innocence is no longer a fall, but a passage. What these artists are doing is not just narrating relationships or corporeality, but intervening on a representation stratified over the centuries.
Half a century of feminist reinterpretations
Eve, long identified as the temptress, has been transformed into an archetype full of guilt. In Beyond God the Father (1973),1 Mary Daly shows how the myth of the Fall operates as a cultural device that ends up associating evil with the feminine, a “cosmic false naming”, a symbolic distortion that transforms a historical construction into an apparently divine truth. Along this line, other scholars have highlighted how this reading does not belong univocally to the biblical text, but to its interpretation.
Judith Plaskow, in the famous The Coming of Lilith (1972), contests the identification between woman, temptation and sin, proposing a rewriting of the origins in a liberating key. So, not to forget the classics, but the topic is also popular in Italy, among recent publications (Eva by Cristina Simonelli, The roots of the world by Adriana Valerio, Torah in the series «The Bible and women», In the beginning by Marinella Perroni and Ursicin Gion Gieli Derungs…) and even imminent, as Daughter of Eveby Simona Segoloni and Letizia Tomassone (Exousia 6, San Paolo 2026, in press).
In this context, even the Eve/Mary polarity appears less and less natural and more and more culturally elaborated. Not two opposing essences, but two figures bent to support a hierarchical vision of the feminine. And it is exactly this rigidity that contemporary pop seems to break down. It’s not a question of choosing between the two poles, but of inhabiting both, without being prisoners of them.
They are not songs
Even outside Italy, this tension emerges forcefully in artists who work directly on religious imagery. For years, Lana Del Rey has been building female characters suspended between sanctity and perdition, between desire and redemption, while Ethel Cain, in the project Preacher’s Daughtercrosses Christianity from the inside, staging a female body marked by guilt, violence and the search for meaning. In both cases, the woman is no longer simply “Eve the temptress”, but the place of a complex experience, which escapes rigid moral categories.
A symbolic laboratory
And then Summer song ceases to be just a hit. That “do you want me more of a nun or a porn star?” it doesn’t really ask for an answer. Rather, it undermines the question itself. The female subject that emerges – between “psychosis”, “paranoia”, desire and bewilderment – is no longer reducible to a dry, one could say binary, choice. It is unstable, contradictory, alive.
In this sense, contemporary pop becomes something more than simple entertainment. A symbolic laboratory. A space in which women can escape inflexible definitions, without necessarily having to destroy what comes from the past, but transforming it. And perhaps this is precisely the most interesting point: there is no longer a forced choice between Maria and Eva.
There is a new space, unstable or rather probable like quantum energy, and therefore finally habitable.
[1] Also available in Italian in 2a edition: Editori Riuniti 2018.