Music for Girls: Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music

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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 and humorously 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, Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music (FEPM) aims to challenge preconceived understandings of what it is to "know" about music. Indeed, FEPM takes seriously a question raised by musicologist Steve Waksman in a 2017 essay collection. He asked, "what happens if we consider a 12-year-old girl's collection of N'Sync albums and other items as a significant form of recording collecting" and, we might add, of knowledge acquisition?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 will be creating space for women to articulate their relationships to music, illuminating what Michel Foucault would call "subjugated knowledges" -- that is, 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 will: foreground women's listening to and modes of engagement with popular music, which are currently poorly understood; and we 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).Our collaborative work (with the Museum of Ordinary People, our music industry advisor Glenn McDonald, who works for the online streaming service Spotify, the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) will ensure that research questions are co-created and relevant beyond the academy. The network will serve as a locus for activities in research, development, and education. The network includes leading international scholars but has a strong UK base at the School for Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex in collaboration with the University of Leeds. FEPM will engage in a range of activities (including producing an edited collection), but our main focus will be three key events: two community workshops resulting in a pop-up- and online exhibition, a research symposium, and an international conference.To be clear, FEPM proposes using the words "women" and "feminist" 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. This 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 "serious-ness" as linked to femininity.