Gender

Transcript

• 00:01

  [MUSIC PLAYING]

• 00:26

  It is a very dominated, male dominated area, rock and roll,and blues.I do feel comfortable with these girls.I don't think I would have startedplaying bass if I wasn't here.Boys always do music, it's so common.I don't want to feel insecure, but I do.

• 00:48

  [MUSIC PLAYING]

• 01:11

  This is an alternative for to tryto get more women to play rock and roll music.Those women who are in the business,usually they are singing or perhaps a singer/songwriter.

• 01:32

  But it's not so common that womenas musicians or instrumentalists.Our goal is to try to change that.It's ultimately a Democratic issue and feministis a Democratic issue.

• 01:58

  What I'm trying teach them is how to express themselves.Boys or men are more focused on practicing, training,doing scales, and being fast.I think it's more an expression when women play.

• 02:36

  I really like John Bonham in Led Zeppelin,and I like Jimi Hendrix.[MUSIC PLAYING]

“You're not born a woman. You become one.” Simone de Beauvoir's famous maxim goes to the heart of matters of gender. This concept points toward social construction and hierarchical ordering of the two sexes. Initially conceived as a counterpoint to the biological difference between men and women that is involved in the term sex, gender encompasses everything that distinguishes them historically and culturally, whatever determines that a human being is recognized as a man or a woman. Each society defines what it considers to be in the realm of the masculine and the feminine. It also designates what is involved in the attributions “feminine” and “masculine,” and endows them with an often differential valuation.

In what way does music figure into this reflection? Is music not the performance art the furthest removed from considerations of this kind? Except for uses of the voice—and even here it is good to specify which ones and in what context—and opposed to the theater, for example, music is not based on a distribution of roles that are a priori sexually differentiated. Composing or playing a musical instrument might appear neuter with respect to gender. This is not actually the case. Everything belonging to the area of creation and performance on a public stage involves the person who produces it, just as it does the person who receives it. In universal and artistic terms there is no neuter.

In the English-speaking countries to begin with, gender studies developed after World War II. They encompassed all areas of artistic creation and gave rise to impassioned debates. Between feminist musicology, history of music that holds a place for women, and the sociology of music, which delves into the construction and mutations of feminine and masculine, various ways exist of asking questions about gender in music. For a certain number of scholars, this type of reflection has acquired a certain legitimacy, which, however, remains tenuous. Its relevance is often called into doubt, especially since it involves discipline-specific approaches, which play out differently according to the country, sometimes setting them apart. The various ways of studying music theoretically and/or empirically may prove more or less amenable or, on the contrary, resistant to this type of questioning.

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