Music for Girls: Feminist Epistemologies of Popular Music

在公众的想象中，流行音乐专家的形象几乎总是男性。男性专家的刻板印象是如此强烈，以至于它在流行文化中被成功而幽默地模仿，从尼克·霍恩比的《高保真》到吉他店的“男性说教”老板，再到电视才艺比赛的嘲笑评委。以此为出发点，流行音乐的女性主义认识论（FEPM）旨在挑战对音乐“了解”的先入为主的理解。事实上，FEPM认真对待音乐学家Steve Waksman在2017年的论文集中提出的问题。他问道：“如果我们把一个12岁的女孩收集超级男孩的专辑和其他物品看作是一种重要的录音收集形式，会发生什么？”通过采用女权主义的存档做法，并从音乐品味的民族志绘图，我们的网络汇集了来自一系列学科的学者，公众成员，策展人和音乐产业人员，前景和分析妇女的知识文化的流行音乐。我们将为女性创造空间来表达她们与音乐的关系，阐明米歇尔·福柯所说的“被征服的知识”--也就是说，倾听和了解流行音乐的方式，这些音乐在学术对话中，在媒体中，在我们自己的课堂经验中都是沉默的。因此，我们提供的知识是双重的。我们将：突出妇女对流行音乐的收听和参与方式，目前对流行音乐的了解很少;我们从认识论的角度进行干预，挑战知识的概念，（列表，日期，琐事）转化为具体的知识（舞蹈，叙事，调解）。我们的协作工作（与普通人博物馆，我们的音乐产业顾问格伦麦克唐纳，谁的工作在线流媒体服务Spotify，苏塞克斯人文实验室，和阿滕伯勒创意艺术中心）将确保研究问题是共同创造的，并与学院以外的相关。该网络将成为研究、开发和教育活动的中心。该网络包括领先的国际学者，但在与利兹大学合作的苏塞克斯大学媒体，艺术和人文学院拥有强大的英国基地。FEPM将开展一系列活动（包括制作一个编辑的集合），但我们的主要重点将是三个关键事件：两个社区研讨会，一个弹出式和在线展览，一个研究研讨会，和一个国际会议。要明确的是，FEPM建议使用“妇女”和“女权主义者”的方式，是战略上的本质主义，以便发出声音，迄今为止被征服的故事，以及包括跨性别者和非二元性者的类别。因此，这个项目并没有提供了解和收听流行音乐的方法，这些音乐是由生物学决定的。相反，我们感兴趣的是知识、关系、互动、事件，这些事件由于缺乏与女性气质相关的“严肃性”而被排除在主导话语之外。

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.