By JON PARELES


For divas and would-be divas, a voice and a batch of potential hit songs aren't enough. Sure, a diva has to beguile radio programmers in order to reach listeners. But she also has to project a larger-than-life persona, using her songs to link personal history to grand female archetypes, then hoping she has picked an archetype the public will endorse.

With their new albums, Christina Aguilera, Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopez and Shania Twain, five women who flank Mariah Carey in the late-2002 diva derby, are as busy posturing as they are singing. They're bearing up under the pressures of celebrity, finding the right balance between romance and self-respect, deciding when to be a lover and when to be a fighter. And through it all, they promise to "keep it real" with all the artifice at their command.

WHITNEY HOUSTON Ms. Houston, the best singer of the bunch, juggles roles carefully on "Just Whitney . . ." (Arista), with four love songs, two kiss-off songs (one hedged), three self-esteem numbers and her one songwriting credit, an anti-tabloid complaint called "Whatchulookinat" that grumbles that enemies "try to dirty up Whitney's name." "My Love" celebrates 10 years of tabloid-turbulent marriage in a duet with her husband, Bobby Brown, as they both show off their soul technique while she proclaims she's no golddigger and he admits she's not like other girls. Ms. Houston's voice sails and spirals through breathy ballads, staccato constructions and big-build anthems; she's strategic and improvisatory at the same time. She easily commands her backup choirs, and she seems to especially savor the defiant pronouncements in songs like "Unashamed" and "Tell Me No." Even when she's seething, she's graceful.

TONI BRAXTON Ms. Braxton plunges into more detailed romantic strife on "More Than a Woman" (Arista). The album is split between complaints and love songs, most of them written by Ms. Braxton with various collaborators, and the complaints have a bitter specificity. In a husky voice that borders on a sob, she flings accusations like "Didn't I keep your kids when you were out smokin' and drinkin'?" In "Lies, Lies, Lies," which works up to power-chorded choruses, she sneers at her man's attempt to explain one more late night. The album isn't humorless; she shares "Give It Back," a demand for alimony, with raps by the Big Tymers, whose Mannie Fresh insists, "Call your lawyer back, baby, I was just playin'." But by the end of the album, she's back to masochism, offering her man anything he wants, from "lingerie and toys and things" to love "even when my heart's in pain." Unfortunately, she also subordinates her voice to too many indifferent tunes, wafting her vocals into the groove instead of seizing a melody.

JENNIFER LOPEZ Love is more blissful for Ms. Lopez on "This Is Me . . . Then" (Epic); the album includes "Dear Ben," a ballad for her fiance, Ben Affleck, which promises, "There's no way I'd leave you/ It's just not a reality." When she's not extolling her man, she reruns the message of her 2001 hit "I'm Real," insisting that she's "still Jenny from the block." Many of the songs rely on borrowed hooks from 1970's and 1980's pop-soul hits like the Stylistics' "You Are Everything" or Mtume's "Juicy Fruit." It's a more low-key album than the flamboyantly produced "J. Lo" from 2001. But exposing her thin voice, which often takes on the buzz of computerized retuning, is a losing tactic, particularly in songs so filled with cliches.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA Ms. Aguilera has a huge voice, and "Stripped" (RCA/BMG) is this 21-year-old singer's fervid attempt to grow up fast. She ricochets from breathy ballads to pithy rhythm-and-blues to quasi-gospel to rock, collaborating on most of the songwriting. She also keeps flipping her image from vamp to victim to tough gal. "All these years you violated me," she sings. "It's overkill, now I'm ready to fight." Determined to shed her teenypop past, she flaunts her sexuality and aggression in self-explanatory songs like "Can't Hold Us Down," "Dirty," "Get Mine, Get Yours" and "Fighter." Perhaps it's no wonder she sounds overwrought in nearly every song, although she briefly quiets down for "I'm O.K.," a song about watching her father beating her mother. "Stripped" is a blast of excess that risks alienating Ms. Aguilera's old fans without luring new ones, and it's bursting with misguided energy.

SHANIA TWAIN Adult calculation rings through Ms. Twain's "Up!" (Mercury). It's a double album with the same 19 vocal tracks topping two kinds of arrangements. With the aim of fitting into more radio formats, one is garnished with country fiddle and pedal steel guitar for her original fans, the other with rock guitars and keyboards. The pop mixes are generally more fun, randomly alluding to U2, Abba, Bryan Adams, Queen, Bonnie Raitt and Supertramp, for starters. (Two free tracks on www.shaniatwain.com work in some quasi-Indian violin.) Yet the sheer volume of material reveals the perky monotony of Ms. Twain's voice.

While Ms. Twain has few of the hip-hop or rhythm-and-blues roots of the other women here, she and her songwriting partner (and husband), Robert John (Mutt) Lange, are also looking for a marketable balance of self-assertion and flirtation. They wind up with what might be called feminism lite. Ms. Twain itemizes women's achievements and decries the pressure on women to look perfect; she mocks materialism in "Ka-Ching!," and she sings about being a single mother at 15. But she also keeps reassuring her man that she wants him forever, that his kiss transports her and that "I'm Not in the Mood (to Say No)!" Chipper but never threatening or even angry, Ms. Twain tells her man he can choose the television channel and sleep with his socks on, but "In My Car (I'll Be the Driver)": an everyday compromise that goes for practicality instead of grand passion.