Bows and Rhinestones: how JoJo Siwa's look explains her behaviour
i.e There's research on JoJo's fashion as fan object and identity performance?
If you are a reality TV fan, British, or lesbian (or all of the above), you have likely been following the drama that is JoJo Siwa on Big Brother (UK). I myself have been watching every single update on this messy situation in real time. Thank you @madsesh on Tiktok for this very accurate depiction of me this past week:
Now, even if you are none of the above and have no idea who Kath and Chris and JoJo are, trust me you’re going to want to stay til the end, because this situation is a fascinating one, with insights into fandom culture, identity negotiation, and child stardom.
So, let me fill you in quickly on the plot. For those who know the context already, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs. For 12 year old girls in English-speaking countries, JoJo is an icon. She got her start at the age of 9 when she was on a reality TV dance show, and then got her big break at the age of 11 on the hit show Dance Moms. Since then, JoJo’s career has been relentless: she’s been on other reality shows like The Masked Singer and Dancing with the Stars, she’s launched her own merchandise business, she has her own feature film, she’s released music and gone on tour, and has done countless partnerships with big name brands.
While her target audience has thus far been primarily, if not only, young girls, she recently undertook somewhat of a rebrand. In 2021 she came out as lesbian, and in 2024 she began releasing a series of adult-pop music accompanied with high-production music videos. These videos have garnered millions of views, with the most famous being Karma, which features queer imagery, and currently has 52 million views on Youtube. She also has given some pretty controversial interviews about her releases, including her most infamous line, in which she dubbed herself “the inventor of gay pop”…which of course resulted in deserved backlash from the queer community, and particularly queer folks of colour, whose histories in relation to queer song were seemingly erased with this comment.
Since coming out, JoJo has been in several high-profile relationships, and has been known for being…well…messy, as the lyrics of Karma would suggest. It is then not particularly surprising that she is currently embroiled in some relationship-related drama. Only a few days ago, she finished filming the reality show Big Brother (UK), a rather wild show in which contestants live together in a house that can be monitored by the public 24/7, with contestants being systematically voted off by viewers. Before going on the show and while on the show, JoJo was in a relationship with Kath Ebbs, a content creator and actor; however, during her time in the Big Brother house, she developed what many viewers thought was a romantic relationship with co-star Chris Hughes.
Of course, the online discourse on this has been rapid and fierce, with some viewers arguing that criticizing JoJo for her very touchy-feely relationship with Chris is queerphobic, as this erases the possibility of queer people engaging in a diversity of types of relationships, including close platonic ones. There is also an argument that such criticism does not allow for the possibility that she could perhaps be discovering that she has a more fluid sexual identity (which did indeed turn out to be the case). Others though have said that it’s lesbianphobic to assume that Jojo would be forming a relationship with Chris, as this seems to negate her self-proclaimed identity as a lesbian person (though towards the end of the show she said that she now identifies as queer rather than lesbian). And then many people have just been upset that, in their opinion, she crossed typical boundaries within exclusive monogamous relationships through her relationship with Chris. All of this discourse was also in the context of an incident which occurred early on in filming, when co-star Mickey Rourke verbally assaulted JoJo with homophobic and sexually threatening language - we won’t get into this here, but I encourage you to read the full story.
Following the end of filming, JoJo has expressed in several interviews that she feels as if she discovered more about herself in the Big Brother house, and desires to make changes in her life…which she seems to have done rather quickly, as she broke off her relationship with her partner Kath at the Big Brother after party. This dramatic end to their relationship in combination with her current press tour alongside Chris has caused quite the stir…and as a pop culture enthusiast and particularly a queer pop culture enthusiast, I have been fascinated by this whole situation, and by JoJo as a figure.
So, as I do, I asked myself whether there’s academic research on JoJo Siwa?
Well, much to my surprise, there apparently is. And more, it reveals insights into the current situation in super interesting ways. This research comes to us by:
Fiona Andreallo (2020), who published “Displaying and negotiating identity through the hair bow: A case study of child celebrity JoJo Siwa and her social media fans” in the journal of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture (Vol 7, Nom 1). https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00005_1
Not surprisingly given the journal in which this is published, Andreallo’s commentary on JoJo is related to her fashion…which is also one of the many polarizing aspects of JoJo’s life that has been both criticized and praised. So what does JoJo’s fashion reveal? Let’s get into to.
Up until recently, JoJo was never spotted without her signature ‘JoJo Bow.’ The JoJo Bow was both branding, personal clothing item, and merchandise, all simultaneously.
In 2019, JoJo released a series of JoJo Bows for purchase, in collaboration with the brand Claire’s. In an effort to mimic JoJo’s look, these bows quickly became THE item for young girls to have, and for a couple of years they could be seen on most young girls (up to age 12) in the US, UK, and Australia. Andreallo describes the bow as a ‘fan object’, a term emerging from fandom studies, which refers to an item that not only holds a particular meaning for a celebrity—whether expressed explicitly or not—but also for the fan. This object shapes the “attitudes, behaviours, and life narratives” (p. 55) of the fan, and ultimately their identity. That’s not all however: as Andreallo explains, the fan object also exists simultaneously in relationship to the individual wearer, and to the community of wearers. In the case of the JoJo bow, the individual attributed meaning to the bow—for example, that it made them feel like a princess—while also the community associated either a congruent of different meaning with the bow as well.
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And exactly what meanings wearers attached to the JoJo bow is the central question which Andreallo answers in the article. She does so through a critical analysis of fan interactions and comments on JoJo’s official Facebook page, Instagram account, and Youtube channel, and in news media reports (all data was collected in 2017). Through this exercise, she identifies three meanings behind the bows, which I have here renamed. Let’s get into it.
Mother-daughters ONLY
Unsurprisingly, the bows were deeply tied to gender, with almost every single follower of JoJo’s being a young girl. More interesting though is that the bows did not simply denote gender as relates to the wearer, but also in relation to their mothers. Almost all of the comments on videos were by the mothers of children, who were running fan accounts on their children’s behalf. If anything, Andreallo argues, the JoJo Bow was just as much about asserting femininity as it was about asserting the presence of a kind of idealistic mother-daughter bond which—in this worldview—only female bodies could experience. The bow therefore offered mother-fans an opportunity to project the feminine character of their child, and also suggest the validity of their own feminine role of ‘mother’ through indicating a deep bond with their child.
I would also add that while Andreallo did not address race in this section, given JoJo’s target demographic and the children featured on the show Dance Moms, where she got her start, it would seem that the bow also indicated a racial character as well: not only a mother-daughter relationship, but a White mother-daughter relationship in specific.
Perfect little angel
The bow is also often associated with innocence and sweetness (think Minnie Mouse for example). This is particularly the case for JoJo. Dance Moms received significant criticism ai its height for the ways in which the young female dancers were sexualized in their performances, and in response some child contestants started wearing bows outside of the dance space as a way of signalling a kind of virginal, childlike nature, in order to counteract this criticism. Similarly, many followers of JoJo’s and their mothers commented on posts that they liked the playful, childlike nature of the bows, and particularly for mothers, the bows seemed to offer a way of ‘keeping their children young’ and by extension within a mother-daughter bond.
We Can Do It
Interestingly, the bow simultaneously can hold the opposite meaning to that of innocence. In fact, it is because of the virginal and childlike symbolism behind the bow that historically it has been used to subvert this messaging, and to express empowerment. For example, in the iconic ‘We Can Do It’ wartime poster of the 1940s, the bow is depicted not for decoration or adornment but as a functional piece of headwear, indicating a readiness and ability to serve under difficult circumstances.
In another example provided by Andreallo, we can also point to the 1980s era of Madonna, when she often wore bows in an equally subversive manner. Madonna, who was of course known for subverting all kinds of symbols through sexualizing, like with the cross and wedding dress, also did so with the bow, as in the image of Madonna in 1985 below.
The JoJo bow existed both simultaneously a way of performing gender, motherly relationships and innocence, AND as a piece for empowerment. As Andreallo put it, “the enormous, bright and perhaps even garish bow in the context of everyday situations signifies at once the female body performing femininity, but with confidence, and requiring resilience” (p. 66).
The JoJo bow then can be seen as a vehicle through which JoJo herself, the wearers of the bow (young girls), and the purchasers of the bow (their mothers), negotiated their own identities. They all simultaneously used the bow to perform a personal identification—which could range from signalling popularity to princess-hood—and a community identification of female gender, mother-daughter bonding, innocence, and empowerment.
So, what does the JoJo bow of 2017 have to do with JoJo Siwa of 2025?
Since Andreallo published this article in 2020, JoJo has in fact stopped wearing the JoJo bow, and while the JoJo bow can still be found in some stores, it is no longer being manufactured and has lost much of it’s popularity. According to JoJo herself, she stopped wearing the JoJo bow the day of her 18th birthday. In the first episode of her no-longer active podcast, JoJo Siwa Now, she said,
“I am now 20 years old. I have not stuck a hair bow in my hair for two years now. Nothing against the hair bow, I just haven’t worn it…I still love JoJo bows. I love what JoJo bows mean. I love what they stand for. I love my past of wearing them every day. I still sometimes stick little bows in.”
At the simplest level, shedding the bow offered JoJo a way of signalling that she is ageing; that she is no longer the same age as her 12 year old fans, but rather a fully fledged adult. There is a deeper meaning here however. For JoJo, as for many celebrities, it can be hard to determine where their own person begins and their brand ends. And that is especially the case for JoJo, who is for all intents and purposes HERSELF her own brand. And given her start on a show which featured the mother-daughter relationship and the feminine heavily, the shedding of the bow can be interpreted not only as an effort to distance herself from her fans in terms of age, but also to distance herself from the confines of the feminine and from her own mother. And her current exploration of not only her sexuality but also her gender (she said in an interview on Big Brother that she feels neither like a woman nor a man) AS WELL AS her expression of a strong desire to stay in the UK post filming rather than returning to the US with her mother is evidence of this. In letting go of the bow, JoJo seems to have signalled a desire to explore her own identity apart from her community of fans.
AND YET…
Even as she has shed the bow, her style still remains extremely extravagant and in-your-face. She seems to have replaced the bow with another signature style: the heavy use of rhinestones, and in particular the rhinestone face bar, which she wore as recently as at the Big Brother finale.