Music for Girls
Art work by Meg Sweeney (Music for Girls Collaborator)
Music for Girls is an AHRC Networking Project led by Dr Mimi Haddon in collaboration with Professor Bethany Klein at the University of Leeds. The project began in February 2022 and runs until July 2023. Its focus is the extent to which popular music experiences of women and girls reveal an “expertise” that goes beyond stereotypes of male critics and collectors. In the public imaginary the figure of the popular music expert is nearly always male. So strong is the male expert stereotype that it has been successfully parodied in popular culture from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity to the "mansplaining" proprietor of the guitar shop to the sneering judge of the television talent contest. Using this as our point of departure, Music for Girls aims to challenge preconceived understandings of what it is to “know” about popular music.
We take seriously a question raised by musicologist Steve Waksman in a 2017 essay collection: “what 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”? By employing feminist archiving practices and drawing from ethnographies of musical taste, our network brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, members of the public, curators, and music industry personnel to foreground and analyse women’s knowledge cultures of popular music. We create space for women to articulate their relationships to music, illuminating what Michel Foucault would call “subjugated knowledges”— ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been rendered silent in academic conversations, in the media, and in our own experiences in the classroom. Our intellectual offering is therefore twofold. We foreground women’s listening to and modes of engagement with popular music, which are currently poorly understood; and intervene epistemologically, challenging the very idea of knowledge by moving from notions of “rational” knowledge about music (lists, dates, trivia) into embodied knowledge (dance, narrative, mediation).
The project has so far included a range of events, beginning with a one-day symposium at the University of Leeds in May 2022 with guest talks from David Hesmondhalgh, Lisa Amanda Palmer, Lucy Robinson, and Richard Elliott. In summer 2022 we hosted two workshops with members of the local community in order to gather material and collaborate on a community-focused exhibition, which was staged in collaboration with the SHL, curator and artist Lucy Malone, and writer and designer Rosa Abbott in October 2022. This year, in 2023, we’ll be at the Brighton Festival with local musician I Am Fya. We’ll also be hosting our biggest event yet, an international conference in collaboration with ACCA with keynote presentations by Angela McRobbie and Kyra Gaunt, and a performance by our Gazelle Twin Scholarship winner, Nina Kohout. Our main academic output will be a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society, edited by Mimi Haddon and Bethany Klein.
Music for Girls Conference
Part of the AHRC Networking Project Music for Girls
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts | 19-20 June 2023
DAY ONE | 19th June
9am Coffee & Welcome | ACCA BAR
All presentations will take place in the Jane Attenborough Studio
9:30 - 10:45am Panel 1: Bodies & Presentation
Chair: Arabella Stanger
Jennifer Carlberg (Independent Researcher), “Britney Spears, America’s Most Famous Singing Virgin”
Katherine Griffiths (Royal Holloway University of London), “Out on the Floor: Exploring the London Lesbian Club Scene of the 1980s and 1990s”
Lucia Affaticati (University of Sussex), “Materialising the Posthuman: Towards a Sociological Reading of Electronic Music’s Queer Bodies”
Ann Werner (Uppsala University), “The Girl in #MeToo. Affective Subjectivity and Political Change”
10:45 – 11 Break
11:15 - 12:30 Panel 2: Generations
Chair: Pam Thurschwell
Emma Longmuir (Newcastle University), “‘Mothers, Daughters and their Daughters too…’: Rethinking Female Ageing and Motherhood in Annie Lennox’s Lockdown Videos”
Nora Leidinger (University of Groningen), “From Voiceless to Powerful: Renegotiating Girlhood in Bedroom Pop”
Evie Wright (Newcastle University), “Musical Heirlooms: The Works of Carole King and Taylor Swift as Timeless Across Generations and Life Phases”
Richard Elliott (Newcastle University), “‘The Space you Give Others’: Maternal Technologies, matriarch Architectures and Narratives of Nurture in Björk’s Fossora”
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 “The (Phallic) Girls of Pop: Notes on The Evasion of Equality”
Short talk followed by Q&A (Zoom from Berlin)
Angela McRobbie is Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths University of London. Her most recent books are Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries 2016, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience 2020 and (with Dan Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli) Fashion as Creative Economy 2022.
14:15 Break
14:30 – 15:45 Panel 3: Voice
Chair: Emily Baker
Lindsay Friday (Independent Researcher), ‘“Bad Bitch Energy”: Reading the “Bad Bitch Anthems” through Fourth-Wave Popular Feminism”
Cristina Pérez-Ordóñez et al. (University of Malaga), “From Social Media to the Stage: the Role of Visual Storytelling in Creating Identity of the Indie Diva. The Case of Florence and the Machine” (Zoom Spain)
Monique Charles (Chapman University), “Make It Funky for Me: Black British Women’s Exploration of Britishness, Womanhood and Artistry through 2000s Music” (Zoom US)
Pamela Thurschwell (University of Sussex), “Hot Girl Omniscience: What Taylor Swift Knows”
15:45 Break
16:00 – 17:15 Panel 4: Community
Chair: Bethany Klein
Sarah Dougher (Portland State University), “The Closing of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland”
Katrine Wallevik and Kristine Ringsager (University of Copenhagen), “Other Ways of Knowing: Sounding Affective Solidarity and Critical Infrastructuring in the Danish Music Industry”
Beatriz Yaunner (Aveiro University), “Brazilian and Portuguese Womens’ Musical Collectives”
DAY TWO | 20th June
9am Coffee
9:30-10:45am Panel 1: Memory & History
Chair: Margaretta Jolly
Paula Guerra and Deniz Ilbi (University of Porto), “Living in the Shadows. A gender approach to Jazz Historiographies in Portugal and Turkey” (Portugal Zoom)
Susan O’Shea (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Alison Surtees (Manchester Digital Music Archive), “Re-membering Music Worlds: Exhibiting the Rebel Women of Manchester’s Suffragette City”
Luísa Fernanda Ochoa Marquez (University of Aveiro), “Segue-me à Capela: Inclusion and Resilience Strategies in the Universe of Traditional Portuguese Music”
John Vandevert (Uppsala University), “Where Are They? The Untold Stories of the Women of Russian Rap” (Zoom US)
10:45-11 Break
11-12:15 Panel 2: Fans and Critics
Chair: Lucy Robinson
Freya Langley (Griffith University), “Fangirls to the Front” (Zoom Australia)
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex), ‘“Bright as Boots Checkout Lasses on a Saturday Night Razzle,” or Ordinariness as Expertise”
Jennessa Williams (University of Leeds), “Digital Fangirls, Now In Print; Popular Music Books & Legitimisations of Contemporary Female (Journo)Fan Practices”
Frances Morgan (University of Lincoln), “Writing What we Know: Music Journalism and/as Feminist Autoethnography”
12:15-13:30 Lunch
13:30-14:45 Panel 3: Exclusion
Chair: Mimi Haddon
Jade Jiang (University of Edinburgh), “The Institutionalisation of Inequality: Female Vocalists’ Struggles in the Chinese Jazz Scene”
Baljit Kaur (University of Sussex), “It’s a Man’s World’: Young Women, Rap and Violence in East London.”
Cande Sanchez-Olmos (University of Alicante and Goldsmiths, University of London), “Gender inequality at the Spanish’s Charts top 50: Frequency, Success and Meaning of Female Artists (2010 to 2020)”
Ann Savage (Butler University) and Trudi Peterson (Monmouth College), “The Elucivity of Racial Diversity at Women-Centered Music Festivals” (Zoom US)
14:45 Break
15:00-16:15 Panel 4: Emotion/Affect
Chair: Sara Jane Bailes (tbc)
Veronika Muchitsch (Södertörn University), “Sad Girls on TikTok: Musical and Affective Ways of Knowing in Online Music Cultures”
Cláudia B. Ramos (University of Aveiro), “Through the Voice of Sara Yasmine: As Case Study on a Young Female Musician of a Non-Rock Genre in Portugal”
Alex Coles (University of Huddersfield), “Fusing Jazz with Hip-Hop: Moor Mother” (Zoom)
16:15 Break
16:30 Keynote Presentation: Kyra Gaunt
“Everybody but the Black Girl Profits”
Did you know YouTube began as a dating site? And the demise suffered from doxxing the 2003 Janet Jackson Superbowl video kickstarted the platform? When we search and discover music on YouTube or TikTok (formerly Musical.ly app)—the top destinations for kids under the age of thirteen—we rarely think our clicks, likes, and shares are grooming the online sexual enticement of 3-year-old to 14-year-old Black girls whose hips make rap hits go viral. Kyra Gaunt’s talk exposes the wickedly complex system that masks how music orchestrates structural violence against girls under the guise of a free musical Internet. Everybody but the Black girl profits.
Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. has been a cutting-edge scholar in the field of embodied ethnomusicology for more than two decades. Her first book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize from The Society of Ethnomusicology. The book and Kyra's earlier publications contributed to the emergence of black girlhood studies and hip-hop feminism. Her current research, featured in the 2022 TED Talk “How Black Girls Can Reclaim Their Voice in Music”, is a primer to her 2nd book, PLAYED: How Music and Tech Orchestrate Violence Against Black Girls on YouTube (SUNY Press).
17:30 Performance by winner of the 2022 Sussex Gazelle Twin Scholarship for Women in Music and Music Technology, Nina Kohout, with drinks in ACCA bar.