The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender

Stan Hawkins, Stan Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317042037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry's impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins's introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.

1
Introduction

Sensing gender in popular music

Stan Hawkins

There can be little doubt that the debates surrounding gender differ vastly from yesteryear. This is because research into popular music is constantly evolving. The prime objective of this volume is to make sense of ideas that can further contribute to knowledge on the ways in which gender and music are assimilated within culture. For all intents and purposes the perspectives, methods, and theories offered are transdisciplinary and directed towards scholars, fans, musicians, and performers.

Theorise gender we must, for excavating the lineages of identity in music is vital for understanding agency, affect, and instantiation. The body lumps together a wealth of entities that are contingent upon vastly diverse phenomena. Gender is performative, as Judith Butler has argued, “insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint”.¹ It is likely that not everyone will concur with Butler’s assertion that there is “no subject who is ‘free’ to stand outside these norms or to negotiate them at a distance”.² Hence, the notion of gender as performative warrants re-evaluation, and it is on this basis that many of the perspectives aired in this volume have materialised.

Gender is located in the twists and shapes that construct the subject in music performance. With the reiteration of norms over time, it is their differences and mutations that are as compelling as perplexing to deal with. This Research Companion engages with a vast range of positions on performance, agency, and emerging cultural practices, seeking out the vibrant contexts of musicianship where gender operates as a force of resistance and a carrier of normative identities in musical practice. All the contributors recognise that struggles over equality are as prevalent today as ever before, which prompt an investigation of agency on many levels. Thus, a prime objective is to give thought to the functions of gender in popular music.

The matter of interpretation is immanent in such a volume, disclosed by numerous close readings of texts, performances, and experiences.³ In the main, the critical approaches to subjectivity, style, and performativity attend to the intricate aspects of human agency that are mediated by discourses of sexuality and gender. It is evident in many of the interpretive methods employed that close readings exist as a result of distant readings, a point that Allan F. Moore flags up in his edited volume, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, where the theoretical inclination to larger units “implies another facet, that of a wider view, of being aware of things beyond or outside the immediate focus”.⁴ Broad contextual consideration (and the oscillation between close and distant readings) defined the contributions to Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley in 1997, the first anthology of popular music and gender.⁵ The essays in Sexing the Groove provided a combined account of gender within all styles of popular music, spawning a wealth of studies in years to come.⁶ Since then, discourses have evolved that seek to identify corporeality in new social contexts as well as attitudes towards gender and sexuality. Music’s convergence with other media in the past decades has ignited interest in the articulation of gendered subjectivities. For instance, audiovisual research is engaged with patterns of human expression not only on the part of the performer, but also audiences, spectators, and users. Undoubtedly, the trends in reception and consumption within emerging media landscapes have had far-reaching implications for popular music scholarship.

Gender in popular music has “often been considered to be more ‘social’, and ‘sex’ in turn more natural”, as Keith Negus has argued. One reason for this is that gender is “usually more visible as a series of conventions about dress codes, expected public bodily behaviour, work place organization, manner of speech and so on”.⁷ Importantly, distinguishing between gender and biological sex is as ideological as cultural, “based on a very specific set of values”,⁸ evident in the ways people speak, write, and think about music, as well as perform it. The postulation that “men and women ‘express’ some essential masculine or feminine forms of sexuality”⁹ is by and large recognised as contentious today, though, and has been debated rigorously from a feminist perspective in popular music scholarship.¹⁰ Accordingly, that women are repressed by the patriarchal music industry is rigorously researched within popular music studies.

There can be little doubt that the move towards greater freedom of expression and equality in sexual pleasure in many popular styles since the 1960s has had repercussions for the emerging ideologies and social practices that steer people’s understanding of gender roles.¹¹ From the 1970s onwards, as women’s rights emerged as a powerful catalyst for female empowerment, scholars would challenge fixed notions of femininity and masculinity by exposing not only the conventions, but also the radical and unruly aspects of crowd-pleasing performativity.¹² As well as addressing the impact of biographical details, social relations and cultural identity, the emphasis would fall on how and why gender is inscribed in specific styles and genres.

The discourses that have concentrated on rock music illustrate this well. Not only has it been argued that rock had been relegated to the domain of men and masculinity – its very construction comes from within the culture – but also to sexual orientation.¹³ One of the first studies to assert this was undertaken by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, who explored the aggressive, boastful, and derogatory display of male sexuality in ‘cock rock’.¹⁴ In later years, scholars, such as Robert Walser in his study of heavy metal and masculinities in Running with the Devil, would contest many of the norms and prejudices associated with heavy metal.¹⁵ Extending Frith and McRobbie’s critique, Walser pointed to the performance practices located in heavy metal that stem from the anxieties and hysteria of masculinity, misogyny, and androgyny. Walser’s discursive approach set out to deconstruct masculinity as a performance through music analysis and hermeneutics. Albeit from another angle, Lori Burns, in her book Disruptive Divas and subsequent publications, connected music theory to cultural studies in a bid to consider female rock ‘divas’ – Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Me’Shell Ndegeocello, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, and k.d. lang.¹⁶ The basis of her work was to implement interdisciplinary models for the study of embodied gendered subjectivities in popular music. Another notable scholar, Susan Fast, showed in her book In the Houses of the Holy that women often engage with rock and its artists in ways where sexual attraction is an enabling experience, indeed dispelling the concept of ‘cock rock’ and the simplistic binaries of pop/rock, feminine/masculine, straight/gay, and so on.¹⁷ Fast’s musicological approach addressed the appeal of music and lyrics, including close readings of Led Zeppelin’s music. Implementing an ethnographic and music analytic approach to phallic rock, Fast’s study also helped pave the way forward for a critique of gendered representations and reception in rock music.

Understandably, a degree of sensitivity is necessary when devising theories and methods for gender research.¹⁸ Because music furnishes us with a mix of ideals that often break down and contest reactionary social norms, it incites the senses in all of us quite differently. For sure, the theatrics of gender on display in countless musical styles can be risqué, ribald, and provocative. Yet, subversive performances are often tolerated by mainstream, conservative audiences (even when disrupting social class and political orders). In the name of entertainment, controversial acts can feel at a safe distance from our everyday lives even despite the perpetual monitoring of music in the public arena, with cautionary warnings by government, political, and religious bodies under the rubric: ‘protection for the public good’. Moral outrage aside, there are, admittedly, negative aspects to gendered representations in popular music that symbolise violence, pain, extremism, discrimination, racism, and the darker sides of life. Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan have scrutinised the anecdotes used to “consolidate the positive value of music” in terms of being “moving and inspiring” in identity formation, which can indeed be “one-dimensional perspectives on deeply paradoxical” phenomena.¹⁹ As their study demonstrates, popular music is built on power relations and inflections of suppression in all sorts of guises. The opening decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed this through the momentous alterations in the mediation of subjectivities via social media. Being tweeted, snapshot, or webcammed has drastically altered perceptions of gendered identity. It is within this context that many of the narratives and methods in this volume are cultivated as we zoom in on the role of gender, race, class, nationhood, and sexuality in the shaping of political agendas through musical performance. Throughout, a rich array of issues is framed by central questions such as:

• How do artists convey, stage, and contest gender in their music?
• What sets of politics are activated by genderplay in music, and how?
• Why does gender shift according to age and generation, and how is the desire for pleasure articulated from one group of people to the next?
• What are the relationships between gender and other forms of identification, such as class, race, age, (dis)ability, political engagement, religious belief, and ideology?
• If the singing voice assumes a gendered persona, what are the characteristics that define and shape notions of authenticity?
• In what ways can popular musicology contribute to the interpretive process of understanding the performance persona?
• How do optical technologies discipline the musicalised body and totalise the gaze, and what does this imply?
• Under what musical conditions is gender a formative feature of desire, and how do we interpret the primacy of the gendered body as an object of desire?

It is well worth stressing that music research is conjoined to linguistic conventions that refer to and even subvert identifications of gender. Rules in language, grammar, terminology, tropes, and meta-narratives are integral to gender research, and this calls for some reflection on the etymology of gender. Designating ‘kind’, ‘sort’, or ‘type’, gender emanates from the Middle French (1340–1611) and Anglo-Norman (1066–1204) gendre.²⁰ Grammatically employed to designate masculinity and femininity in the first instance,²¹ gender has gradually shifted its usage within social and psychiatry studies²² to its inclusion in feminist discourse from the mid-1970s onwards. By the end of the twentieth century, the term was widespread in the social sciences and humanities, designating a vast research area that distinguished itself on the basis of a feminist discourse. Subsequently, with the emergence of popular music studies in the 1980s, feminist theory converged on the study of social, cultural, and gendered subjectivities through music production and expression.²³

For the purpose of this anthology, visiting the term ‘popular music’ is equally important. A number of books have attempted this with some degree of consensus.²⁴ In Understanding Popular Music Culture, for example, Roy Shuker claims that “a purely musical definition is insufficient, since a central characteristic of popular music is a socio-economic one: its production for a mass, predominantly youth, market”.²⁵ More precisely, Shuker regards the employment of ‘music’ in popular music studies as “a shorthand for the diverse range of popular music genres produced in commodity form” primarily geared towards an Anglo-American market. Whether recorded, mediated, or documented, popular music needs to be historicised: we tend to ask of the recording when was it performed, recorded, and mixed, and, moreover, by who and for whom?

A common assertion in popular music research is that musical styles connote gender. Yet, styles and idioms abound with frictions and anomalies. Derek Scott, in considering “the implication of older arguments about some forms of rock”, has observed that “this music and its performance can also be analysed as a configuration of signs that connote machismo”.²⁶ Indication of this is found in musical styles produced by female, transgender, and queer artists, where structures of identity have to be measured against social groups and communities, individuals, regions and nations, and cultures. In turn, this begs a range of questions relating to context, time, and...