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得到了成功和幽默的模仿，从尼克·霍恩比的《高保真》到吉他店“男人说教”的老板，再到电视选秀比赛的冷嘲热讽的评委。以此为出发点，《流行音乐的女性主义认识论》（femm）旨在挑战人们对“了解”音乐的先入为主的理解。事实上，FEPM认真对待音乐学家史蒂夫·瓦克斯曼（Steve Waksman）在2017年的随笔集中提出的一个问题。他问道，“如果我们把一个12岁女孩收集超级男孩（N’sync）的专辑和其他物品视为一种重要的唱片收集形式，”我们或许可以补充一下，这也是一种知识获取形式，会发生什么？通过采用女权主义的存档做法和从音乐品味的民族志中汲取灵感，我们的网络汇集了来自不同学科的学者、公众成员、策展人和音乐行业人员，以前景和分析流行音乐的女性知识文化。我们将为女性创造空间，让她们表达自己与音乐的关系，照亮米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）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，在学术对话中，在媒体上，在我们自己的课堂上，都被沉默了。因此，我们提供的智力是双重的。我们将：突出女性对流行音乐的聆听和参与模式，目前人们对这些知之甚少；我们从认识论上介入，挑战知识的概念，从关于音乐的理性知识（列表，日期，琐事）的概念转移到具体化的知识（舞蹈，叙事，调解）。我们的合作（与普通人博物馆，我们的音乐产业顾问格伦·麦克唐纳，他在在线流媒体服务Spotify，苏塞克斯人文实验室和阿滕伯勒创意艺术中心工作）将确保研究问题是共同创造的，并与学院以外的人相关。该网络将作为研究、发展和教育活动的中心。该网络包括领先的国际学者，但在萨塞克斯大学（University of Sussex）与利兹大学（University of Leeds）合作的媒体、艺术和人文学院（School for Media, Arts and Humanities）拥有强大的英国基地。FEPM将参与一系列活动（包括制作一个编辑集），但我们的主要重点将是三个关键活动：两个社区研讨会，结果是一个弹出式和在线展览，一个研究研讨会和一个国际会议。需要明确的是，FEPM建议以一种战略本质主义的方式使用“女性”和“女权主义者”这两个词，以便为迄今为止被征服的故事发声，并将其作为涵盖跨性别和非二元人格的类别。因此，这个项目并没有提供了解和聆听由生物学决定的流行音乐的方法。相反，我们感兴趣的是知识、关系、互动、事件，这些都被排除在主流话语之外，因为它们缺乏与女性气质相关的“严肃性”。

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.