kylie Breaks the tension with queer sublime

Kylie Minogue has long been celebrated for her high-budget performances, cool confidence, and stunning (and ageless!) aesthetic. But for many in the LGBTQ+ community, her aesthetic offers something deeper than just pop spectacle. It speaks to identity, connection and joy.

Philosophers have long pondered as to why certain experiences move us so deeply. The concept of the sublime; that overwhelming mix of awe, admiration, and emotional intensity, has been used to describe everything from vast landscapes to powerful music. More recently, theorists like Lyotard and Musser have argued that the sublime also helps explain our responses to art, identity, and queerness. As such, the sublime isn’t just about beauty, it is about personal transformation.

Kylie Minogue, whether she emerges from a seashell as Aphrodite or glides down through laser beams to break the “Tension”, continues to evoke a sublime effect on her audiences. Her 2011 “Aphrodite – Les Folies” tour, with over a million moving parts wasn’t just a concert. It was a divine, immersive experience. Despite a simpler aesthetic, her most recent Tension Tour continues to enthral, maximising use of immersive stage design, offering the audience a chance to join the disco diva, for one night only, in a nightclub of her own making. Her performances then, transport audiences into a different realm; her realm, where the audience are asked to “Come into My World”. Aesthetic in this sense, communicates a feeling of emotional and spiritual transcendence, where, for a moment, we know what it’s like to be Kylie.

Kylie get’s intimate with the audience.

For gay fans especially, this aesthetic represents the diva as sublime: a figure who offers glamour and fantasy, but also safety, power and joy. In a world that often marginalises queer people, Kylie’s aesthetic becomes more than style, it becomes ritualistic. Musser suggests that, divas don’t just perform, but they help us understand something about queerness itself. As such, Kylie’s aesthetic, isn't just superficial fluff. That would do it an injustice. Instead, it is inherently symbolic, inviting not just admiration, but devotion as way of reclaiming personal joy, asserting group identity, and finding community within the collective.

So, from disco to devotion, Kylie’s aethetic reminds us that beauty; when it’s bold, camp, and almost accidentally unapologetic, can be a powerful source of joy, connection and healing.