From Janis Joplin to P.J. Harvey, Women and Popular Music explores the changing role of women musicians and the ways in which their songs resonate in popular culture.

The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical (...) reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. (shrink)

Complete analysis of gender in rock music.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and Internet postings, this article analyzes gender in a local Goth scene. These Goths use the confines of the subcultural scene, where they are relatively safe from outsider view, and the scene’s celebration of sexuality as resources to resist mainstream notions of passive femininity. This article probes the struggles of women in this Goth scene to examine the broader possibilities and limitations of strategies of active feminine sexuality in gaining gender egalitarianism. I argue that although (...) these women do transform sexual expectations and experiences, their gains are hampered by an overly narrow vision of gender egalitarianism that both obfuscates the broader landscape of gender inequality and blurs the reproduction of an ideological system in which romance trumps sex. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production, (...) yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies. (shrink)