Introduction

Demonstrating that gender representations in popular culture are intertwined with a broad range of cultural, historical, and social discourses that shape both their production and reception, the introduction outlines some of the key concerns related to the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music. It discusses the theoretical and methodological foundations that may underpin an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and interpretive approach to the study of popular music and gender, and places an emphasis on grappling with the multiple affordances elicited by pop artists’ construction of identity across several platforms. It advocates for an inclusive definition of pop music that encompasses the range of musical and cultural impulses that circulate in mainstream popular music culture. It also discusses the selection of material for a study of pop music and masculinity, and considers the benefits and limitations of an artist-centered interpretive approach.

Book Review: Words, Music and Gender (Michelle Gadpaille and Victor Kennedy, eds.)

Words, Music and Gender is a collection of 17 contributions by scholars hailing from a variety of academic backgrounds, enabling the volume to cover an impressive array of ways in which gender, words and music intersect and intertwine.

Gender

This chapter introduces musicological and philosophical treatments of gender, and their relation to broader critiques of ideology. After introducing the ways that different musicological traditions have examined gender in relation to music, it clarifies the political quality of different philosophical approaches to the question of gender in music. It closes by offering a reconsideration of the role of the musical canon, and its central figure Beethoven, in shaping understandings of music and gender.

From Parnassus to Bayreuth: Staging a Music which is Not One

The final chapter brings together all three thinkers and demonstrates the way in which they all – albeit in different ways – inherit and deploy aspects of a Romantic and idealist conception of music. It considers their writings on Wagner in order to ascertain more clearly how their different positions play out over a shared question: to what extent is Wagner’s music fascist or anti-Semitic? Rather than seek to solve this problem, the chapter argues that their positions on this question relate to their a priori understanding of the relationship between music and philosophy, their broader political-philosophical commitments, and their characterization of what is ‘essentially’ musical. The chapter also draws on Irigaray’s work in order to show how both Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe reinstate a gendered foundationalism (specifically the musical maternal-feminine which logically and chronologically precedes the symbolic, language, and culture) that is so at odds with their broader projects; by contrast, though Badiou never identifies music ‘itself’ with the feminine, the way in which he constructs ‘truth’ nonetheless rehabilitates a certain feminine exceptionalism alongside a pervasive misogyny in his work. The concluding analytic argues for multiply intersecting planes of mediation and a non-reductive approach to both music and gender that refuses to attribute a single essence to either.

What does gender have to do with music, anyway? mapping the relation between music and gender

‘What does gender have to do with music?’, is in this article a question explored in order to 1) give an overview of important themes and areas in feminist interdisciplinary research on music and gender from the past decades, and to 2) theoretically advance what is specific about music’s relation to gender, and discuss how music and gender research can be furthered today. To achieve these two aims, the author describes and discusses different approaches to investigating the relation between music and gender; cultural critique of music itself, consumption/production research, studies of genre and social settings as well as studies of media technology. The author, with her portrayal of the field as a back-drop, wants to revitalize a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of music and gender research. Arguing that this is an interdisciplinary field with its own theoretical contribution that can be furthered by advancing the discussions of music’s particularity and music research’s relation to intersectional gender theory.