Music Can Be Seen as Related to Gender.
Explain how music can be seen as related to gender.
For many years discussions of sexuality were informed by a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The sex of a person was judged to be ‘biologically determined’ and their gender to be ‘culturally and socially constructed’ (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1988: 103). Gender roles are frequently based around the ideas that women are expected to be more passive and emotional and men more assertive and rational. “The first type of essentialism that can be found in this area [music and gender] is the idea that men and women ‘express’ some essential masculine or feminine forms of sexuality. The second type is that this in turn can be found manifested in the content of particular cultural products and practices.” (Negus, p.124). Jeffery Weeks argued that biology merely provides ‘a set of potentialities that are transformed and given meaning in social relationships’ (1986: 25). One of the reasons why gender has perhaps often been considered to be more ‘social’, and ‘sex’ in turn more natural, is that gender is usually more visible as a series of conventions about dress codes, expected public bodily behaviour, manner of speech and so on. Sex, however, is closely connected to ‘sexuality’, which has often been informed by beliefs that this should be a more ‘private’ affair. The distinction between sex and gender is therefore both ideological and misleading. Here I follow the approach of Weeks, who has argued that gender is the ‘social condition of being male or female, and sexuality, the cultural way of living out our bodily pleasures and desires’ (1986: 45).
Is ‘rock’ itself an inherently masculine genre? One of the earliest attempts to start theorising the relationship between rock music and sexuality can be found in an essay written by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie (1978), in which they argued that rock operated as a form of sexual expression and as a form of sexual control. Frith and McRobbie declared that, in terms
For many years discussions of sexuality were informed by a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The sex of a person was judged to be ‘biologically determined’ and their gender to be ‘culturally and socially constructed’ (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1988: 103). Gender roles are frequently based around the ideas that women are expected to be more passive and emotional and men more assertive and rational. “The first type of essentialism that can be found in this area [music and gender] is the idea that men and women ‘express’ some essential masculine or feminine forms of sexuality. The second type is that this in turn can be found manifested in the content of particular cultural products and practices.” (Negus, p.124). Jeffery Weeks argued that biology merely provides ‘a set of potentialities that are transformed and given meaning in social relationships’ (1986: 25). One of the reasons why gender has perhaps often been considered to be more ‘social’, and ‘sex’ in turn more natural, is that gender is usually more visible as a series of conventions about dress codes, expected public bodily behaviour, manner of speech and so on. Sex, however, is closely connected to ‘sexuality’, which has often been informed by beliefs that this should be a more ‘private’ affair. The distinction between sex and gender is therefore both ideological and misleading. Here I follow the approach of Weeks, who has argued that gender is the ‘social condition of being male or female, and sexuality, the cultural way of living out our bodily pleasures and desires’ (1986: 45).
Is ‘rock’ itself an inherently masculine genre? One of the earliest attempts to start theorising the relationship between rock music and sexuality can be found in an essay written by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie (1978), in which they argued that rock operated as a form of sexual expression and as a form of sexual control. Frith and McRobbie declared that, in terms
Bibliography: * Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of performance and imagination. London: Sage, 1998 * Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction By Keith Negus * Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, 1978: Taking popular music seriously. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007 * Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music * Gottlieb and Wald, Alternative Femininities: body, age and identity. London, 1994 * Julie Burchill, 1994, quoted in Raphael, p.xi * Paul Lester, ‘Beauty or Beast’, Melody Maker, 1992, quoted in LaFrance, p.100 * O’Brien, p.164 * Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, Routledge, London 1990 * John Gill, Queer Noises: male and female homosexuality in twentieth-century music, 1995 * Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: music, gender and sexuality, University of Minnesota, 2002 * Adolf Bernhand Marx, Theory and Practice of musical composition, New York, 1860 * James Hepokoski, ‘The Musical Times’, Vol. 135, No.1818, 1994