Introduction: Gender and Popular Music Knowledge

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Popular Music and Society on gender and popular music knowledge considers feminized ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have occupied the margins of media representations and popular music studies. By way of introduction, we consider classic and recent work on gender and popular music, the traditional confines of popular music knowledge-making, and how centering the knowledge of women and girls broadens our understanding of popular music.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• popular music
• expertise
• knowledge

Introduction

The character of the male popular music expert has over the past half century acquired recogiseable currency as a figure of humorous parody: from the Marty DiBergi-style talking head to the “mansplaining” proprietor of the guitar shop. Even in the 2020 television adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which Zoë Kravitz replaces John Cusack (2000) in the lead role, jokes are made at the expense of the male-coded compulsion to flaunt music trivia: “I’m sorry, he likes to impress people with his musical knowledge,” says the character Cherise in episode two (“Track 2”). This special issue of Popular Music and Society on gender and popular music knowledge aims to illuminate ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been marginalized in media representations and academic conversations alike. Musicologist Steve Waksman asked in a 2017 essay collection, “[W]hat happens if we consider a 12-year-old girl’s collection of N’Sync albums and other items as a significant form of record collecting?” (qtd. in Shuker 38). We extend his prompt: what if, instead of looking at how people who identify as women and girls are sidelined by male-focused popular music sites of knowledge acquisition, we center the experiences of women and girls as key to “knowing” popular music, unpacking the politics of knowledge, and developing an ordinary but powerful “expertise?”

The articles in this special issue explore the intersection of popular music, gender, and knowledge across disciplines, regions, genres, and ways of knowing. In this introduction, we set the stage for their focused investigations by unpacking the idea of popular music knowledge. We consider the historic and ongoing conditions that position women and girls at the margins, the value in questioning what constitutes knowledge, how expertise has been defined, classic efforts to locate the experiences of women and girls, and the benefits to participants of all kinds to be gained when we broaden our understanding of what it means to know popular music.

Women and Girls on the Margins

Public opportunities to gain and demonstrate popular music knowledge have historically excluded women and girls by taking place in male-dominant and sometimes hostile spaces. Examples of this from the twentieth century include the exclusion of women from sites of rock-music knowledge acquisition (Bayton) and the barriers women have faced in the context of production and engineering (Sandstrom). In the popular music scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, women and girls were expected to express their fandom at home rather than in public (Frith). Much of Simon Frith’s discussion of gender is based on his 1972 study of young people, in which he found that girls were less likely to collect records and more likely to buy singles when they do; that participation at music activities like dances was actually work, not leisure, as the goal was to get married; and that girls’ activities often revolved around the home whereas boys were in the streets. On the topic of record collecting specifically, in Matthew Bannister’s 2006 account of indie music, he describes record shops in the 1980s as informal sites of musical education, locales in which knowledge was passed from an elder hippie record collector to local young musicians, all of whom were male. The indie-rock canon in this context “is not a list,” he writes, “but rather a tool of education and a means of distributing cultural capital” (“‘Loaded’” 82). In later decades, some popular music scenes were more inclusive, with occasional scenes (notably Riot Grrrl in the 1990s) established to enable girls and women to participate fully and, indeed, to lead (Gottlieb and Wald). Using Frith and McRobbie’s work as a springboard, Gottlieb and Wald reflected on the problematics of women being involved in rock (256), ultimately addressing Frith’s question of whether women can appropriate rock without becoming one of the boys (261). They proposed that “riot grrrls draw upon their experiences of girlhood to emphasize female difference in concert with female equality” (266).

In more recent years, studies have shown comparatively fewer women on music technology courses in higher education (Born and Devine) and ongoing discrimination in the music workplace (Tolstad; Wolfe, “Rise”). Furthermore, participation in popular music spaces can come with risks. For example, the nightlife economy associated with making and enjoying popular musics remains discouraging (Hill et al.). Women and girls may have permission to explore gigs and other events, but may view locations where they take place as potentially dangerous for travel and attendance. Those who choose to attend gigs confront the same conditions that mar nighttime activities more generally, which can include unwanted sexual attention from men (Fileborn).

Such formal, informal, and recurrent architectures of exclusion arguably lead to the normalization of a particular mode of popular music knowledge. People who are able to participate collectively decide what knowledge matters, and a segment of those people enter into gatekeeping positions that enable them to re-affirm the dominance of certain types of knowledge over others. Gatekeepers in a position to canonize musics and to demonstrate what kinds of knowledge matter—including journalists, music magazine editors, and record shop and musical instrument shop employees—have historically been drawn from similar demographic pools dominated by white masculinity. There are, of course, notable exceptions, which we’ll come on to, but the demand that outsiders prove themselves through shared taste and knowledge ensures that the pipeline tends to stay the same. As Bannister has suggested, “Canon-related practices such as archivalism are not simply cataloging of the past—they are political and selective. Foucault views them as discursive practices which shape the way we ‘know’” (“‘Loaded’” 78).

This special issue isn’t, therefore, an ordinary “women in music” project. Rather, in response to the reification of certain types of knowing, we offer more of a focus on music-consumption practices and tastes, and begin to consider them as types of feminized knowledge. Indeed, it is not accidental that music genres and activities associated with women and girls are excluded from understandings of serious popular music knowledge and real expertise. That has not stopped scholars from locating women and girls where they are and challenging their dismissal as less important to knowing popular music. We pick up, therefore, where Elijah Wald left off in his keynote at the Society for Ethnomusicology in Indianapolis, 2013, where he stressed,

the importance of doing work that addresses the musical tastes of girls and young women. That is different from studying female performers in male-dominated styles, which to a great extent continues to prop up the status of boy styles over girl styles—I’m glad there are women performing rock, jazz, and rap, but we really need more work to be done on styles that are dominated by women and girls—most of which, not at all coincidentally, tend to be disrespected by serious critics and scholars.

We argue that hierarchies that privilege genres and concepts associated with male artists and male fans, and that value depersonalized “objective” accounts of popular music (what Bannister calls “abstract systems of statistics” [“‘Loaded’” 90]), have developed and become entrenched. The language used by gatekeepers to communicate popular music’s value, like authenticity and creative genius, is coded as male (Klein); accounts of popular music’s history play down or erase contributions made by women (Gaunt, Games; Tucker); and music scenes are actively “produced as male through the everyday activities that comprise” them (Cohen 17). While some grassroots feminist music scenes have challenged the tendency for women to be measured by “‘boy’ notions of excellence and expertise” (Reynolds and Press 328), entrenched expectations are hard to shake. Punk amateurism invited women to participate while also leaving early women-led post-punk groups open to criticism about their lack of skills and supposed reliance on being women (Haddon, “Not Playing”). In recent years, accounts that place women’s contributions as central to popular music history have sought to disrupt the usual narrative (see Feldman-Barrett): time will tell whether stubborn mythologies can accommodate them. In short, popular music knowledge is constructed, but also difficult to demolish.

What is Knowledge and Expertise?

In addition to the historic and ongoing limitations regarding women’s and girls’ access to and participation in popular music knowledge-making, the notion of expertise figures as male both in and outside of popular music discourse. Keir Keightley has argued, for example, that “women aren’t driven to forms of ‘conspicuous seriousness’ in the ways men are, in part because the very idea of seriousness has historically been gendered as masculine for a long time in Western culture” (qtd. in Shuker 38). Will Straw suggested that “the lines” excluding women from full participation in popular music “emerge when the music is over, and the boys in the band go back to discussing their record collections.” This is emblematic of the dynamics of expertise within popular music culture. This isn’t to say that women don’t collect records: Vicki Bogle’s research shows otherwise, as does more recent work by Sophia Maalsen and Jessica McLean, who note the masculinist discourse that surrounds recording collecting with an emphasis on status, control, seriousness, and competition, even if record collecting’s unconscious is, in fact, “feminine” insofar as it is consumerist and in counterpoint with “public ideals of masculinity as self-sufficient, instinctual power” (Bannister, White Noise 130). However, when knowledge or expertise is communicated and shared in the form of the accumulation of artifacts, as a representation of cultural and economic capital—what Roy Shuker suggests when he refers to record collections as a “competitive display demonstrating knowledge” (36)—women are minority participants. The intersection of class and gender is important here too; the requirement that knowledge is demonstrated via an extensive vinyl collection excludes those who don’t have access to records, space, or turntables owing to financial restrictions, precarity, or an itinerant life.

When women do hold expert roles in the music industries, they likely will face discrimination (Leonard) and skepticism about their true motives, often assumed to be sexual or romantic relations with musicians (Cline; Reynolds and Press). The message that women do not belong is endemic in professional music spaces, from recording studios (Banks; Wolfe, Women; Tolstad) to music shops (Sargent). In her work on women entrepreneurs and intellectuals who have built careers around the Beatles, Christina Feldman-Barrett notes, “‘the expert’ and the notion of ‘expertise’ are still, in many arenas and contexts, viewed in masculinist terms” (140).

For this special issue and the project from which it emerged (the AHRC-funded Music for Girls network¹), the question of knowledge and who “owns” it has been spurred on by three key areas: a Foucauldian impulse not only to interrogate what constitutes knowledge but also to see what happens when we focus on alternate knowledge-making practices, anti-colonial approaches to teaching in higher education, and several ideas from popular music scholarship over previous decades that deserve to be revisited. Both of us were drawn separately to Michel Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things. It refers to a passage from Borges which outlines types of animals described in a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia”: the taxonomy, which ranges from those “belonging to the Emperor” and “fabulous,” to those “that from a long way off look like flies” amuses with its seemingly random collection of categories, but also provokes with its truth that knowledge is shaped by culture, politics, and power. The implication lays the groundwork for Foucault’s study of the production of knowledge, how ways of thinking determine what can be understood as true. It is a perspective that inspires us to interrogate what is taken for granted as popular music knowledge.

Decolonial (or anti-colonial) approaches to teaching and curriculum development encourage educators to decenter what we think of as “knowledge” (usually associated, in the case of popular music studies, with the canon of Western art music or the so-called Anglo-American axis of popular music) as a way to foster a more equitable learning environment and to build new knowledge cultures together. To understand what constitutes popular music “knowledge,” we can look at multiple interlocking forms, which might include knowledge of the history of popular music from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, knowledge about musical details or music theory (e.g. harmony, melody, rhythm, etc.), or detailed knowledge about record labels, individual musicians, genres, songs, albums, gear, and techniques for performing and composing. As Katherine McKittrick has recently suggested, sharing how we know can be an important way of acknowledging the power associated with knowledge and access thereto (17). She asks, “What if we read outside ourselves not for ourselves but to actively unknow ourselves, to unhinge, and thus come to know each other, intellectually, inside and outside the academy, as collaborators of collective and generous and capacious stories?” (16).

Finally, in addition to considering the politics and culture of what constitutes knowledge, as well as questioning the normativity or universality of knowledge cultures, we’ve been encouraged and intrigued by interventions from scholars working across a range of popular and non-popular music genres, who have trailed different ways in which we might cleave new discourses and new ways of knowing. This began for us with Will Straw’s 1997 article about the male association with record collecting and the amassing of trivia (what in the UK we might called “pub trivia” knowledge) and how that points us to gender as a determining influence on what is understood as knowledge and on what knowledge is required to claim expertise, a point to which we return below.

These three different aspects of scholarly endeavor produce a constellation from which we can begin to question the structure of knowledge, what counts as knowledge, and what kinds of barriers prohibit access to it. To be clear, this special issue isn’t a polemic against expertise; rather, we’re providing a frame and a context in which alternative, feminized kinds of expertise can be explored, and we’re highlighting the gendered and raced dimensions of the notion of expertise. This is neither a gender essentialist nor biologically deterministic project. We’re centering women’s knowledge cultures primarily as a way to expand discourse and approaches.

Retrieving the Experiences of Women and Girls

From the early days of popular music studies, some intrepid researchers set their focus on the experiences of women and girls, and the ways that emerging cultures of knowledge and expertise worked to exclude them. Research that focused on their exclusion attended instead to where women and girls did find themselves: often celebrating pop in their bedrooms. Angela McRobbie, in trying to make sense of the “invisibility” of girls in the study of subcultures in the 1970s, drew our attention to feminized practices of engagement with music as a “complement” to male modes: being in the bedroom, daydreaming, fantasy, and using consumption to make sense of their emergent identities offer examples of what Kyra Gaunt has more recently referred to as “bedroom musical play” (Gaunt, “How Black Girls”). Sarah Louise Baker expands on earlier work about bedroom culture by Frith and McRobbie through ethnographic study, including audio and visual documentation by girls, in order to take seriously the musical practices of adolescents, exploring how the space of bedrooms allows for the exploration of alternative possibilities. “The musical play of nine-year-olds Kate and Rosa in their bedrooms demonstrates ways in which popular music can provide a pathway to their understanding of ‘self’ in wider cultural contexts” (76). The girls used music to personalize their spaces and engage in “serious play.”

Subsequent studies have focused on musical genres associated with women and girls, and on redeeming their related activities as meaningful and political. Barbara Ehrenreich et al.’s “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun” reexamined the behavior of teenage girls in response to the Beatles, moving beyond the simple judgment of mass hysteria to a theory of sexual revolt. At the time, she suggests, teenage girls were denied public sexual expression of any kind, and that the Beatles were responded to as sexual objects was revolutionary in and of itself (90). Ehrenreich et al. argue that Beatlemania could be viewed as a kind of radical protest. Lisa Amanda Palmer proffers lovers’ rock as its own kind of resistance movement, even though its register was different from the male-associated and more obviously countercultural genre roots reggae. Such work has been invaluable in documenting the popular music experiences of women and girls. By highlighting the alternative spaces occupied by and experiences of women and girls, this research helps us to identify alternative knowledge-making practices outside the purview of traditional notions of canon, expertise, and the “right” ways to engage with popular music.

As important as it is to look to often-neglected spaces of popular music culture, a reconsideration of what knowledge means in the context of popular music also requires different ways of thinking about and looking at popular music experiences. Rather than positioning women’s and girls’ music knowledge practices as alternative to a male-associated benchmark, or focusing on the countercultural potential of women’s fandom, this special issue aims to center femme-associated knowledge practices in such a way as to intervene at the level of close reading and historiography, to re-think the established order of things. We take inspiration, for example, from the way Tucker moves the periodization of swing from the 1930s to the 1940s by switching focus from male big band players to women.

Different ways of thinking about and looking at popular music experiences can, for instance, include a focus on bodily experiences of popular music culture. Suzanne Cusick’s “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music,” is an example of a different approach to analyzing gendered modes of engagement: Cusick invites us to “lie on our backs” and to think of music as the exchange and circulation of physical pleasure. Gaunt also reclaims bodily experience as knowledge in her reminder that Double Dutch was a core element in early hip-hop culture, and that re-positioning it in historical accounts can improve the visibility of women in rap and hip hop (see Games). An observation in a paper by Charles, where she suggests that “women know what to do” when Wookie’s remix of Sia’s “Little Man” comes on in the club, points to a knowledge displayed by dance. Likewise, Christabel Stirling has examined the gendered practices of exclusion and embodied displays of “knowledge” in contemporary London EDM scenes. In line with these established and more recent approaches, there is latent and emergent potential to further explore the musicking body as a knowledge-generating and knowledge-storing entity.

Other examples of different ways of thinking about and looking at popular music focus on lesser-heard perspectives and lenses, or notions associated with feminine experiences, or less obvious depots of data. For instance, Francesca Royster offers a queer utopian reading of music by Brittany Howard, using autobiography and memoir to analyze Howard’s songs. The notion of “care” has been used in recent feminist jazz studies and elsewhere, particularly in the context of behind-the-scenes work, by writers such as Mimi Haddon (“Matrices”) and Lisa Barg. Tara Rodgers’s revelatory work on the young women of the 1950s who wrote to the RCA synthesizer company to learn more about its technology suggests untapped archives that can expand our knowledge of women’s popular music cultures. Likewise, Straw’s more recent work (“Distance and Connection”) illuminates how we might look to cinematic depictions of phonograph records and jukeboxes to eke out an alternative genealogy of women’s relationship to records. In the films of the 1940s that he analyses, “women occupy professional roles that involve the selection and playing of phonograph records,” and they’re “privy to the secrets” of the record-playing technology that often “remains obscure to the films’ main characters.”

Bringing these matters to the present, we can use the notion of feminized knowledge-making practices to respond to urgent questions. For example, how does one cultivate knowledge of popular music in the context of digital poverty or poverty in general? If male-coded subcultural capital manifests in the accumulation of “stuff,” how does this fit with current debates about capitalism in relation to planetary boundaries and climate change, when one’s stuff—as a material manifestation of knowledge—can be literally rubbish, as Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s essay collection illuminates?

Lastly, we can expand our conception of popular music knowledge by looking at different ways of telling the story of popular music, including through personal fan-based accounts. Classic popular music histories, often written by male music journalists or academics, tend to reveal little about the position of the author in the narrative, presenting instead seemingly “objective” accounts of scenes and genres. Some women (and occasionally men) journalists and academics have either consciously or unknowingly taken up the feminist approach to reflexivity and positionality in their retellings, acknowledging their own positions as fans and the way their positions shape their acquisition and understanding of popular music knowledge. Gina Arnold’s Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, for example, looks at the mainstream success of alternative music through her own personal experiences within the scene, alongside interviews with musicians. Her location within the narrative captures the powerful emotions that influenced views and choices of participants in alternative rock. Lavinia Greenlaw’s memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls, excavates her childhood and adolescent experiences to explore how music features centrally and distinctively in the formation of identity for girls. More recently, Jude Rogers’s The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives traced the meaning of music through memoir intertwined with theories and evidence for the role of music in memory and emotion. Although not pitched as a gendered approach, there is something feminized about the exploration of tracks through key events, relationships, and identities. Rogers includes information about the tracks themselves, but it’s almost incidental to the stories being told, which are about how we relate to songs, not the songs on their own, as is typical of music journalism.

While we value the personal accounts of musicians and other professionals in the music industries, there is an expectation that authoritative accounts are told from a non-emotional distance. Personal accounts of fans can be enjoyed but are not measured against the same “authoritative” yardstick as “objective” tellings, even though both are undoubtedly shaped by the authors’ personal experiences with popular music. As the above outlined work has suggested, the approach to inclusion of women and girls in popular music studies and music journalism has progressed and expanded over time. Some authors have acknowledged the masculinist approach to knowledge in popular music, often with a view to recovering histories of women in music and drawing on fan studies to encourage a more inclusive approach to analyzing popular music activities. Rather than locating women and girls within conventional popular music contexts, some authors have sought to locate knowledge in the traditions of women and girls.

Where We Are and Where We Are Going

Despite important work that challenges traditional and gendered constraints, ideas of expertise and knowledge in popular music cultures (and popular music studies) have often continued to rely on certain assumptions and stereotypes involving extensive record collections, writing original songs, and genres to take seriously. It is difficult to break from a masculinist version of knowledge and expertise that is both deeply embedded in gatekeeping structures and reproduced in media representations. We hope that this special issue, which brings the concepts of knowledge and expertise to the forefront of popular music studies, offers a significant step toward a broader conception of popular music knowledge. Instead of viewing women’s and girls’ activities as operating outside the spheres of popular music knowledge and expertise, we take a serious look at how women and girls experience and express popular music knowledge and expertise. Rather than extrapolate specific sociological “findings” (e.g. women from a certain background like a certain thing), we focus on the banalities of popular music culture in a Foucauldian attempt to uncover the “forgotten trivialities” or “subjugated knowledges”—a kind of micro historiography rather than a maximalist, big data-type approach. In doing so, we endeavor to avoid an essentialist assumption that women’s engagement is fundamentally different to men’s but instead make a more subtle intervention, by asking whether, in centering women’s experiences, we can develop a new language and a new knowledge structure that values the rich range of experiences that make popular music central to identity, community, and meaning.

In keeping with the theme of the special issue—to look beyond more obvious and entrenched types of popular music knowledge—we specifically sought out a wide range of subjects in terms of genre, region, participants, and approach. We take an expanded view of what constitutes “popular music” by including work on folk music and jazz in addition to articles on more obviously pop-associated genres such as mainstream pop, U.K. garage, and sound system culture. While participants in the scenes are largely female-identifying, the experiences of racial and sexual minorities are considered both within and as separate accounts of gender and popular music knowledge. How women’s and girls’ experiences are shaped by popular music culture while also shaping popular music culture is traced across cases in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, China, Denmark, and pan-regional online space. Contributions include articles that center the personal and professional experiences of authors, weaving accounts that draw on participation, feminine or less formal styles of writing, reflective practice, and feminist positionality. Mirroring the special issue’s attention to alternative ways of knowing, these pieces demonstrate how personal, emotional, and subjective accounts can strengthen academic knowledge.

The special issue addresses three key areas linked to gendered knowledge. First, it explores institutional and organizational conditions that shape opportunities and experiences for women. Secondly, it highlights gaps in historical narratives, recovering the roles of women who have played, listened to, and danced to popular music. Finally, it points to platforms that give space and visibility to feminine-associated modes of expression. In what follows, we outline the main focus of each of the articles and consider some possibilities for future paradigms of thought.

In “The Institutionalization of Inequality: Female Vocalists’ Struggles in the Chinese Jazz Scene,” Jiang Yuhan considers the exclusion of (mostly women) jazz vocalists in China: highly valued formal jazz programs are not available for vocal training and, as a consequence, jazz vocalists are dismissed as unprofessional by their instrumentalist colleagues. Through institutional structures, vocalists are discriminated against as vocalists and as women. Even spaces and structures specifically established for women and girls are subject to assumptions about what women and girls want and need when it comes to popular music knowledge. Sarah Dougher explores “The Closing of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland” by tracing stories that defined the camp in terms of organization, money, city, music, and girls. Her telling helps to preserve the memory of the camp’s twenty-two-year run, and points to reasons why its closure is a loss. Kristine Ringsager and Katrine Wallevik look at how grassroots collectivity can provide a counter-infrastructure to an industry rife with gender inequality and inequity for minoritized groups. In “Other ways of Knowing: From Disorientation to Feminist Collective Capacity,” they examine how the Music Movement in Denmark grew from an alternative networking space for women in the music industries to a powerful and award-winning organization for promoting equity.

Women’s contributions to popular music knowledge have often been downplayed or neglected in historical accounts of scenes and musical activities. Contributions to this special issue seek to redress the balance, highlighting the significance of women’s involvement. In “Out on the Floor: Exploring the London Lesbian Club Scene of the 1980s and 1990s,” Katherine Griffiths recovers memories of lesbian club nights, which helped shape the larger dance culture in London while also providing a space for lesbians to connect and build community. Like Dougher, Griffiths uses personal reflection and personalized storytelling, a technique that centers the subject, rather than striving for an “objective” account. Monique Charles also sets her focus on London-based scenes: in “Make It Funky for Me: Black British Women’s Exploration of Britishness, Womanhood, and Artistry through 2000s Music,” she explores the successes and challenges for Black British women artists in the genres of U.K. garage and U.K. funky. The achievements of women in U.K. garage, in particular, demonstrate how women participants shaped the sound of the scene, and were supported by their male collaborators.

Up north in Manchester, the Manchester Digital Music Archive has sought to give visibility and voice to the women who contributed to music scenes that made waves around the world but that can look largely male from an outsider perspective. Susan O’Shea and Alison Surtees challenge the gender imbalance of popular music heritage in “Re-membering Music Worlds: Exhibiting the Rebel Women of Manchester’s Suffragette City.” Moving beyond the UK, in “Segue-me à Capela: Inclusion and Resilience Strategies in Traditional Portuguese Music,” Luísa Fernanda Ochoa Márquez considers a group of women who perform traditional polyphonic singing to draw attention to and question the traditional subordination of women in Portuguese folk music. The group’s approach celebrates contributions from women polyphonic singers of the past through the perspective of the present.

If women and girls have often struggled to be taken seriously as participants in the production of popular music knowledge, their dominance across trivialized forms of knowledge production have found new visibility in recent years. In “Sad Girls on TikTok: Musical and Multimodal Participatory Practices as Affective Negotiations of Ordinary Feelings and Knowledges in Online Music Cultures,” Veronika Muchitsch examines how TikTok encourages participatory practices that normalize displays of emotion and provides a space for feminized ways of knowing music. “Screaming, Crying, Writing Up: Literary Music Journalism Books as a Legitimization of Contemporary Fangirl Practices” documents the recent publication of “fangirl” books about popular music and offers another example of how feminized ways of knowing popular music can be valued. Jenessa Williams argues that the form and content of such books challenges preconceptions about musical authority, who has it, and how it is expressed. Humor, too, figures significantly in Williams’s article. While she doesn’t say so explicitly, her writing might encourage us to consider humor as knowledge, e.g. the notions of a “knowing look,” “IYKYK²,” or what Lucy Robinson refers to as “the sisterhood of the eyeroll” (2019). So eccentric are some of Williams’s examples that they could indeed be considered as knowledge-producing in the form of a kind of avant-garde arts practice.

The intention of this special issue is, therefore, to open space to reconsider gender and popular music knowledge. The included articles both continue and extend a conversation begun by our popular music studies and musicology forebears, drawing attention to progress made, but also inviting us to develop new ways of conceptualizing popular music knowledge.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant [AH/W00349X/1].

Notes on contributors

Mimi Haddon

Mimi Haddon is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on issues of genre and identity across different kinds of popular music. She is the author of What is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 (Michigan University Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in the journals Popular Music, Twentieth-Century Music, Women and Music, and the Journal of British Cinema and Television.

Bethany Klein

Bethany Klein is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the author of Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2020) and As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (Ashgate, 2009), and co-author of Understanding Copyright: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (Sage, 2015).

Notes

1. AHRC Music for Girls uses “women” and “girls” 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, and those who identify with the terms. The 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 “seriousness” as linked to femininity. “Music for Girls” is, therefore, a tongue-in-cheek project title to capture historic dismissals of femme-associated types of music.

2. “IYKYK” stands for “If you know, you know,” which refers to the idea of sharing an inside joke or certain types of unspoken knowledge.