The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture Gender Studies and Music Contributors: Linda Cimardi Edited by: Janet Sturman Book Title: The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture Chapter Title: "Gender Studies and Music" Pub. Date: 2019 Access Date: May 2, 2019 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks, Print ISBN: 9781483317755 Online ISBN: 9781483317731 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483317731.n308 Print pages: 981-984 © 2019 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE © 2019 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference Gender defines the social, cultural, and historical construction of sexual identity. Biological sex differs from gender in that gender is not natural data but a category shaped by cultural context, which varies according to different historical periods. This entry examines the intersection of gender studies and music studies and touches briefly on the underrepresentation of women’s contributions to music. Gender Studies Gender studies developed greatly during the 1970s, influenced by a feminist trend of studies, especially in American academia. The concept of gender often represents the idea of male and female social roles: statuses and positions that women and men embody in society. Based on the binary opposition of male and female identity, social roles imply the construction of the status of individuals in society on the basis of their sex, while the concept of gender further interprets the cultural and symbolic shaping of sexual identity. Gender is not only bound to the dimorphism of two opposite genders but may also encompass a variety of different identities. The concept of gender had an enormous impact on most human and social sciences, where it was assumed first as a new area of study and then as an approach or as an analytical tool to reconsider each subject from a different perspective. Feminist studies elaborated on the concept of gender, with their efforts politically connoted by the commitment to women’s emancipation. This initial bias was reflected in other disciplines, which started to consider gender as a new field of inquiry by focusing on the study of women. Thus, the first result of the application of the concept of gender is represented by literature dealing mainly with women. Origins of Feminist and Music Studies Scholarship In music studies, Sophie Drinker’s 1948 book Music and Women was deemed a pioneering work because it cast light on the place of women in music history, an issue neglected by the musicology of the time. Indeed, it was not until the mid-1970s that the virtual invisibility of women in the literature about music history and world music started to be contested by several scholars, and thus the musical production of the second sex, as the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir defined women, came to the center of new academic works. Women’s music had not been completely ignored previously; some female informants had appeared as important sources of information, especially as singers, in some ethnomusicological works like Cecil Sharp’s song collections. Some ethnographic literature had concentrated on cultural phenomena involving music mainly performed by women, like anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s analysis of funeral mourning in Italy. Although these works acknowledged the role of women as performers, the specific issue of women’s repertoires as distinct from men’s ones was not clearly defined or problematized, but the focus was on music as the expression of a uniform local culture. After the adoption of gender in music studies as a newly defined area of investigation, since the second half of 1970s, several monographs and collections of essays concentrating on women’s repertoires and on women as musicians appeared in ethnomusicology. Works like Claire Farrer’s Women and Folklore and Holly Corner’s Women and Folk Music represent the first attempts to document previously overlooked women’s music. This scholarship, often biographies of women composers or musicians, was usually marked by emancipation concerns and by a critical attitude toward the existing ethnomusicological literature. Disapproval of previous scholarship pointed to the rare consideration of women’s music and observed that this rarity was usually caused by the observer’s point of view, which was usually male. Women’s music was often less evident than men’s (being often performed in private situations) or simply considered less important. By documenting unknown aspects of women’s musicianship and performances, which had not been organically considered before, this scholarship aimed to fill the existing gaps and to finally recognize women’s place in music. According to researcher Ellen Koskoff, this literature is part of what can be considered the output of the first wave—the Page 2 of 5 The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture SAGE © 2019 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference women-centric one—of feminist and music studies scholarship. Since the 1970s, three main waves of music and gender studies have defined specific research interests and approaches. Second Wave The second wave, started in the 1980s, was identified by Koskoff as gender-centric: This scholarship shifted its focus from women to the cultural shaping and representation of genders and considered gender relations in the musical sphere as well. Gender was then intended as a tool to understand how musical production and fruition were organized in society and so it was employed as an alternative perspective to investigate human production. While the first wave of scholarship was influenced by feminism and women’s studies, the second one drew fecund inspiration from history and from social sciences, where alternative systems of gender in other historical times and in cross-cultural perspective started to be analyzed. In anthropology, the issue of the cultural shaping of individuals according to their sex had found an early but important space in Margaret Mead’s work. Her main study Sex and Temperament, describing the cultural construction of biological sex as temperament, was the first analysis of the role and character of men and women in some close societies: Juxtaposing their very different conceptions, she made a case that the biological data of sex did not determine the psychological and emotional nature of persons. In this way, Mead challenged the classical ideas of Western society that biological sex affected the root of an individual’s personality and that only two universal opposite and complementary sexualities existed: Male and female related to men and women. Mead is therefore considered a precursor of later feminist and gender studies, but she also helped foster anthropological analysis of the way society constructs individuals—both male and female—on the basis of their sex through processes of enculturation, social norms, ritual ceremonies, cultural conceptions, and habits. In this line of scholarship, a fundamental study is Woman, Culture, and Society edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, which in the 1970s opened the way for an organic analysis of gender in anthropology. Music plays a part in gender anthropology, and there is a strong association of some repertoires to specific genders. As a way to structure society, gender came to be understood also as the main element through which relations of power are elaborated, strengthened, and imposed. An essay by the historian Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” provoked intense debate in the late 1980s and influenced many disciplines because of its theoretical contribution. This essay dealt with a redefinition of gender as an analytic tool. On one side, gender became a means to interpret the social representation of biological differences, which are culturally articulated as multiple symbols, normative concepts, political institutions, and subjective identity. On the other side, gender was presented as the field in which power is molded and legitimized and thus becomes the model underlying every relation marked by power inequality. The gender-centric wave of music studies tackles the connection of music to the sociocultural construction of gender, as well as to intergender relations and to power. Ellen Koskoff’s Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective and Music, Gender, and Culture are renowned works representing this trend of studies. These books, comprising several case studies featuring context-specific analysis, not only describe and compare men’s and women’s repertoires but also dedicate special attention to document the multiple ways in which gender is implicated in the cultural shaping of music. The main research lines of 1980s scholarship about music and gender were synthesized by Ellen Koskoff. She gave particular significance to the analysis of the socially embedded beliefs and ideas regarding gender and to the way they impact music and the relationships among genders expressed through musical activities. Koskoff’s approach grounds and supports the analysis of musical behavior in anthropology, which includes not only music production and performance but also any action in relation to music. This conception of musical behavior takes particular relevance when considered from a gendered perspective. Although the spectrum of the subjects considered by this trend of studies is wide, some elements and themes are recurring. These elements include weddings, as the main ceremonies where gender identities are constructed through musical Page 3 of 5 The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture SAGE © 2019 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference behaviors; death and lamentation, as one of the fields of almost exclusive women’s musical domain; gender roles in the innovation and preservation of musical traditions; gender segmentation of repertoires; access to musical practices; and the gendering of instruments and vocal practices. American ethnochoreologist Judith L. Hanna addressed several issues concerning gender and dance in her work Dance, Sex and Gender. Presenting cases of various world dances and of Western ballet, Hanna discussed several relevant points: the representation of gender roles through dance movement, the role played by this art in marking and codifying gender identities in life-cycle ceremonies, the central theme of sexuality and its complex blending to gendered representation, and dance as a place where redefinition of gender, and thus the display of alternative gender identities, is possible. Third Wave A third wave of gender studies identified by Koskoff’s periodization starts in the 1990s and comprises scholarship that crosses other disciplines including semiotics, gay, lesbian, and queer studies; cultural and performance studies; and psychoanalysis and area studies. These disciplines are represented in musical studies by several collections of essays, which demonstrate that when analyzing contemporary phenomena, musicology, popular music studies, and ethnomusicology usually intersect and borrow research approaches from each other. Musicology and Difference, edited by Ruth A. Solie, is a landmark study in this third wave of scholarship, in which the focus is the varied articulation of social and cultural diversity in music, not limited to the bipolar gendering of men and women but unfolded to the multiple possibilities of gender identity. The essays gathered in this book consider cases from Western art music as well as from popular music and ethnomusicology. The essays exploit several analysis approaches, from linguistic and semiotic ones to new perspectives generated by cultural studies. Third wave music and gender scholarship is indeed broad and examines multiple aspects of gender as a learned phenomenon, as in researcher Judith Butler’s theorization of performed gender and researcher Teresa de Laurentis’s concept of represented gender. Another important postmodern reference is anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner’s work, which combined constructionist and subjectcentered theoretical frameworks with the theory of practice to elaborate a complex, though effective, theory of gender and of other minority and subaltern cultural phenomena. The idea of making gender strongly examines the consideration of processes imposed by society, individuals, and active practice. Additional Notable Works in Gender and Musicology These and other influences which are not possible to document here are present in some of the more significant collected works about music and gender, like Audible Traces: Gender, Identity and Music edited by Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamesslay, which investigates the interconnection between gender and identity in the context of musical performers, composers, listeners, and scholars. Another outstanding book is Music and Gender edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond, which acknowledges the major trends of the three waves of gender and music studies and discusses the researcher’s and author’s personal perspectives and opinions on the themes. Music and gender are leading once again in the title of Tullia Magrini’s work Music and Gender: New Perspectives From the Mediterranean, which broaches the issues of gender focusing on a circumscribed though ample geographical area and juxtaposes different case studies, which suggest disparate gender assets. The project of connecting area studies with music anthropology calls for a more dynamic and complex understanding of degrees of genderedness in the various cultures and historical periods of the Mediterranean. Finally, it is worth remembering a groundbreaking work, Queering the Pitch, which, though not directly dealing with ethnomusicology, deepened a gender-oriented perspective by opening up the new field of gay musicology. The scholarship about music and gender has increasingly passed through dedicated journals, scattered articles, and monographic issues, usually dealing with a specific aspect of music and gender studies: for examPage 4 of 5 The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture SAGE © 2019 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Reference ple, the issue of Ethnomusicology Forum “Sounds of Power” examines and exemplifies the main directions taken by gender studies in relation to musical instruments. Veronica Doubleday’s theoretical introduction is a precious guide to the investigation into this particular aspect of gender and music. Future Directions Today, gender has become an indispensable perspective for research in humanities and social sciences. Although a specific area of research has been configured as gender studies, most scholars use the concept of gender in different contexts of inquiry and apply it to various subjects. New contributions continue to enrich the definition and thus the possibilities of understanding gender and to use it as an analytic tool: What appears more and more clear is that the concept of gender is as indispensable as it is interdisciplinary, thus requiring from the ethnomusicologist a more flexible theoretical background to face new areas of inquiry. See also Body and Embodiment; Identity, Music and; Musical Instruments, an Overview; Sexuality, Social Sciences, and Music; Weddings; Women and Music Website International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Music and Gender. http://www.ictmusic.org/group/ music-and-gender Linda Cimardi http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483317731.n308 10.4135/9781483317731.n308 Further Readings Brett, P., Wood, E., & Thomas, G. C. (Eds.). (1994). Queering the pitch. The new gay and lesbian musicology. New York, NY: Routledge. Doubleday, V. (2008). Sounds of power: An overview of musical instruments and gender. Ethnomusicology Forum, 17(1). Hanna, J. L. (1988). Dance, sex and gender: Signs of identity, dominance, defiance, and desire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Koskoff, E. (Ed.). (1987). Women and music in cross-cultural perspective. New York, NY: Greenwood. Magrini, T. (Ed.). (2003). Music and gender: New perspectives from the Mediterranean. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marcia, H., & Ziegler, S. (Eds.). (1990). Music, gender, and culture. Wilhelmshaven, Germany: Noetzel. Moisala, P., & Diamond, B. (Eds.). (2000). Music and gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ortner, S. B. (1997). Making gender: The politics and erotics of culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5) 1053–1075. Solie, R. A. (Ed.). (1993). Musicology and difference: Gender and sexuality in musical scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zimbalist, R. M., & Lamphere, L. (Eds.). (1974). Woman, culture, and society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Page 5 of 5 The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture