Music for Girls: Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sussex
Department Name: Sch of Media, Arts and Humanities
Abstract
In the public imaginary the figure of the popular music expert is nearly always male. So strong is the male expert stereotype that it has been successfully and humorously parodied in popular culture from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity to the "mansplaining" proprietor of the guitar shop to the sneering judge of the television talent contest. Using this as our point of departure, Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music (FEPM) aims to challenge preconceived understandings of what it is to "know" about music. Indeed, FEPM takes seriously a question raised by musicologist Steve Waksman in a 2017 essay collection. He asked, "what happens if we consider a 12-year-old girl's collection of N'Sync albums and other items as a significant form of recording collecting" and, we might add, of knowledge acquisition?
By employing feminist archiving practices and drawing from ethnographies of musical taste, our network brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, members of the public, curators, and music industry personnel to foreground and analyse women's knowledge cultures of popular music. We will be creating space for women to articulate their relationships to music, illuminating what Michel Foucault would call "subjugated knowledges" -- that is, ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been rendered silent in academic conversations, in the media, and in our own experiences in the classroom. Our intellectual offering is therefore twofold. We will: foreground women's listening to and modes of engagement with popular music, which are currently poorly understood; and we intervene epistemologically, challenging the very idea of knowledge, by moving from notions of rational knowledge about music (lists, dates, trivia) into embodied knowledge (dance, narrative, mediation).
Our collaborative work (with the Museum of Ordinary People, our music industry advisor Glenn McDonald, who works for the online streaming service Spotify, the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) will ensure that research questions are co-created and relevant beyond the academy. The network will serve as a locus for activities in research, development, and education. The network includes leading international scholars but has a strong UK base at the School for Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex in collaboration with the University of Leeds. FEPM will engage in a range of activities (including producing an edited collection), but our main focus will be three key events: two community workshops resulting in a pop-up- and online exhibition, a research symposium, and an international conference.
To be clear, FEPM proposes using the words "women" and "feminist" in a way that is strategically essentialist in order to give voice to hitherto subjugated stories, and as categories that encompass trans and non-binary persons. This project does not therefore proffer ways of knowing about and listening to popular music that are biologically determined. Rather, we are interested in knowledge, relationships, interactions, events that have been left out of the dominant discourse for their lack of "serious-ness" as linked to femininity.
By employing feminist archiving practices and drawing from ethnographies of musical taste, our network brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, members of the public, curators, and music industry personnel to foreground and analyse women's knowledge cultures of popular music. We will be creating space for women to articulate their relationships to music, illuminating what Michel Foucault would call "subjugated knowledges" -- that is, ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been rendered silent in academic conversations, in the media, and in our own experiences in the classroom. Our intellectual offering is therefore twofold. We will: foreground women's listening to and modes of engagement with popular music, which are currently poorly understood; and we intervene epistemologically, challenging the very idea of knowledge, by moving from notions of rational knowledge about music (lists, dates, trivia) into embodied knowledge (dance, narrative, mediation).
Our collaborative work (with the Museum of Ordinary People, our music industry advisor Glenn McDonald, who works for the online streaming service Spotify, the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) will ensure that research questions are co-created and relevant beyond the academy. The network will serve as a locus for activities in research, development, and education. The network includes leading international scholars but has a strong UK base at the School for Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex in collaboration with the University of Leeds. FEPM will engage in a range of activities (including producing an edited collection), but our main focus will be three key events: two community workshops resulting in a pop-up- and online exhibition, a research symposium, and an international conference.
To be clear, FEPM proposes using the words "women" and "feminist" in a way that is strategically essentialist in order to give voice to hitherto subjugated stories, and as categories that encompass trans and non-binary persons. This project does not therefore proffer ways of knowing about and listening to popular music that are biologically determined. Rather, we are interested in knowledge, relationships, interactions, events that have been left out of the dominant discourse for their lack of "serious-ness" as linked to femininity.
| Title | Music for Girls Exhibition |
| Description | We staged a temporary exhibition in collaboration with the Sussex Humanities Lab in October 2022. This was a collaborative process with the Museum of Ordinary People and members of the community workshop groups. The event exhibited women's music memorabilia and personal stories of their lives through music. It was well attended and included participatory activities. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | The event was extremely popular and we have received several invitations/requests to re-stage this particular event in a bigger venue. Visitors commented on the need for more events that focus on women's lives through music. |
| Description | Here are the original key objects from our grant (which is due to finish in July 2023): (1) To gather personal stories from women in the musical communities of East Sussex that foreground their diverse knowledges and experiences of popular music. Such stories will become the basis of new data available for academic analysis and display in the form of a pop-up- and online exhibition. We have succeeded in delivering on this objective. The pop-up and online exhibitions were both built and staged with attendance/engagement from members of the general public. We are now in the process of gathering and organising new data based on these events and the community exhibitions. (2) To bring together academics, music industry personnel, and curators to workshop modes of engagement with popular music that are linked to femininity but are yet to receive sustained and detailed attention in scholarly discourse. We successfully did this via our Leeds symposium, our workshops, and our exhibitions. The next steps are to organise the data collected, host an international conference (June 2023), and formerly articulate our findings in the publication of a special-issue journal. (3) To promote a more inclusive understanding of the cultural significance and uses of popular music by decentring masculinist assumptions about music knowledge. This objective is pending and will come to fruition once the project has come to an end and the findings are published. |
| Exploitation Route | We are looking at organising a post-doc position to build a formal archive based on the project, its many materials, and data. This can be used by future researchers in additions to the findings we will publish in our special-issue journal. There is also the potential to run similar projects and events in collaboration with different museums and arts organisations both nationally and internationally. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Since this project involved direct engagement and collaboration with members of the public, we have observed impact at the level of (1) changes in knowledge and understanding, (2) the emergence of a new micro-community, (3) changes in levels of creativity and well-being, and (4) an explicit desire amongst members of the public to see similar events (or indeed the same event) in the future. The women involved in the project discussed the ways in which music can be used a portal to co-explore identity and diversity - a way to get to know people from different backgrounds. They also benefited from the "safe-space" of a women-only, trans-inclusive event but were similarly curious about running the same project with different genders. The community participants expressed a desire to stay in touch with each other, therefore forging a new micro-community. Some said that being part of this project had reignited their own personal creative projects. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | University of Leeds |
| Organisation | University of Leeds |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Expertise in music history, in feminist music history, in project vision, project management, and main organising responsibilities. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Co-I institution on this project is the University of Leeds. To this project they have brought expertise in feminist media studies, mentoring, and organisational support. |
| Impact | Outputs include: the symposium at the University of Leeds (May 2022) and the Music for Girls Exhibition (October 2022). Disciplines involved: feminist media practice, music history, archiving, community archives, and collaborative history. |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Community Workshops |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We held two community workshops with women from the local East Sussex area. The total number of women involved was approximately 15. The women varied in age and demographic, from teenage to age 72. We worked together to explore women's music tastes and music histories, and developed plans for a community-led exhibition in collaboration with curators from the Museum of Ordinary People and a technician in the Sussex Humanities Lab. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Music for Girls Exhibition |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We held a pop-up exhibition in the Sussex Humanities Lab in collaboration with the Museum of Ordinary People and women from the local East Sussex community. The exhibition displayed the participants music-related memorabilia as well as stories of their musical lives. The exhibition was free, open to the public, and interactive. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Music for Girls Symposium |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | Our first event for this Networking Grant was a virtual symposium hosted by the project's partner institution the University of Leeds. Four academics spoke to the ideas behind the project followed by general discussion. Approximately 40 people attended via Zoom. Some (but not all) were network members. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Virtual Exhibition |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | To accompany the pop-up exhibition October 2022, the Museum of Ordinary People also built a temporary virtual exhibition. This included images of the women's memorabilia in addition to their stories and tracks that were meaningful to them. The virtual version of the exhibition ran from October 2022 to December 2022. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |