Representations of women in music: what difference does difference make?

Abstract

This article focuses on the interaction between feminist debates and music. It explores the way in which two musical texts, representing different musical genres and different racial and social contexts, confront issues of gender and sexuality by redefining instances of gender stereotyping. The argument is put forward that music may offer poignant insights into feminine subjectivity, reflecting the challenge and transformation of gender-related boundaries. It is argued that the musical text, in all its richness and ambiguity, is often a contested site of constructing meaning, and deserves close and critical scrutiny.
The two musical texts discussed in this paper bring to the fore a circular relationship between ideology and representation in which each can create and reinforce the other. This means that musical texts have the potential to ‘speak back’, and to work against the grain of the power relations they unmask.
Taking this position as a point of departure in a more general discussion of female resistance in recent forms of African popular music, difference is read as a source of power, which can function in musically nuanced ways as a form of public struggle against male domination – even though this may not always be obvious on first hearing. The paper culminates with a consideration of a long-standing trope in both European and African culture in which music is understood to be ‘a woman’.