Gender Studies and Music: Three Waves of Scholarship in Ethnomusicology
Gender Studies and Music
Defining Gender in Cultural Context
Gender refers to the social, cultural, and historical construction of sexual identity. Unlike biological sex, gender is not a natural given but a category shaped by cultural context, varying significantly across different historical periods. This entry examines how gender studies intersect with music research and touches on the historical underrepresentation of women's contributions to music.
The Emergence of Gender Studies
Gender studies expanded considerably during the 1970s, fueled by feminist scholarship, particularly within American academia. The concept often denotes the social roles of male and female — the statuses and positions that women and men occupy in society. These roles, based on a binary opposition of male and female identity, involve constructing individual status according to sex, while gender further interprets the cultural and symbolic shaping of sexual identity. Gender extends beyond the dimorphism of two opposite categories and may encompass a variety of different identities.
The concept of gender profoundly affected most human and social sciences. It was first adopted as a new area of study, then as an approach or analytical tool for re-evaluating each subject from a different perspective. Feminist studies elaborated on gender, with their efforts carrying political connotations tied to the struggle for women's emancipation. This initial bias influenced other disciplines, which began considering gender as a new field of inquiry by focusing on the study of women. As a result, literature dealing mainly with women represented the first outcome of applying the concept of gender.
Origins of Feminist and Music Studies Scholarship
In music studies, Sophie Drinker's 1948 book Music and Women is considered a pioneering work because it illuminated the place of women in music history — an issue neglected by the musicology of the time. It was not until the mid-1970s that several scholars began to contest the near invisibility of women in literature about music history and world music. The musical production of the "second sex" — as French feminist Simone de Beauvoir defined women — then came to the center of new academic works.
Women's music had not been entirely ignored previously. Some female informants appeared as important sources, especially as singers, in early ethnomusicological works like Cecil Sharp's song collections. Certain ethnographic literature focused on cultural phenomena involving music performed mainly by women, such as anthropologist Ernesto De Martino's analysis of funeral mourning in Italy. Although these works acknowledged women's roles as performers, the specific issue of women's repertoires as distinct from men's was not clearly defined or problematized. Instead, the focus remained on music as the expression of a uniform local culture.
After gender was adopted in music studies as a newly defined area of investigation in the late 1970s, several monographs and essay collections concentrating on women's repertoires and women as musicians appeared in ethnomusicology. Works like Claire Farrer's Women and Folklore and Holly Corner's Women and Folk Music represent early attempts to document previously overlooked women's music.
This scholarship — often biographies of women composers or musicians — was marked by emancipation concerns and a critical attitude toward existing ethnomusicological literature. Critics pointed to the rare consideration of women's music, observing that this rarity typically stemmed from the observer's perspective, which was usually male. Women's music was often less evident than men's — performed in private situations — or was simply considered less important. By documenting unknown aspects of women's musicianship and performances that had not been organically considered before, this scholarship aimed to fill gaps and recognize women's place in music. According to researcher Ellen Koskoff, this literature belongs to the first wave — the women-centric one — of feminist and music studies scholarship.
Three Waves of Music and Gender Studies
Since the 1970s, three main waves of music and gender studies have defined specific research interests and approaches.
The First Wave: Women-Centric
The first wave, as described above, centered on women, their contributions, and their previously ignored musical practices.
The Second Wave: Gender-Centric
The second wave began in the 1980s. Koskoff identified it as gender-centric: this scholarship shifted its focus from women to the cultural shaping and representation of genders, considering gender relations in the musical sphere. Gender was now intended as a tool for understanding how musical production and fruition were organized in society, employed as an alternative perspective for investigating human production.
While the first wave was influenced by feminism and women's studies, the second drew inspiration from history and the social sciences, where alternative systems of gender in other historical times and cross-cultural perspectives began to be analyzed.
In anthropology, the cultural shaping of individuals according to sex had found early but important space in Margaret Mead's work. Her study Sex and Temperament, describing the cultural construction of biological sex as "temperament," analyzed the role and character of men and women in certain isolated societies. Juxtaposing their very different conceptions, Mead argued that biological sex did not determine the psychological and emotional nature of individuals. She challenged classical Western ideas that biological sex affected the root of personality and that only two universal, opposite, and complementary sexualities existed: male and female. Mead is considered a precursor to later feminist and gender studies; she also fostered anthropological analysis of how society constructs individuals — both male and female — on the basis of sex through enculturation, social norms, rituals, cultural conceptions, and habits.
A fundamental study in this scholarly line is Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, which in the 1970s opened the way for organic analysis of gender in anthropology. Music plays a role in gender anthropology, and a strong association exists between some repertoires and specific genders. Gender came to be understood as the main element through which power relations are elaborated, strengthened, and imposed. An essay by historian Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," provoked intense debate in the late 1980s and influenced many disciplines. Scott redefined gender as an analytic tool: on one side, gender interprets the social representation of biological differences, culturally articulated as multiple symbols, normative concepts, political institutions, and subjective identity. On the other side, gender is presented as the field in which power is molded and legitimized, becoming the model underlying every relation marked by power inequality.
The gender-centric wave of music studies examines the connection between music and the sociocultural construction of gender, as well as intergender relations and power. Ellen Koskoff's Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective and Music, Gender, and Culture are renowned works representing this trend. These books, comprising case studies with context-specific analysis, describe and compare men's and women's repertoires while also documenting the multiple ways gender is implicated in the cultural shaping of music. Koskoff synthesized the main research lines of 1980s scholarship, giving particular significance to analyzing socially embedded beliefs about gender and their impact on music and intergender relationships expressed through musical activities.
Koskoff's approach grounds and supports the analysis of musical behavior in anthropology, encompassing not only music production and performance but any action in relation to music. This conception of musical behavior takes particular relevance from a gendered perspective. Although the subjects considered by this trend are wide, some themes are recurring: weddings as ceremonies where gender identities are constructed through musical behaviors; death and lamentation as fields of nearly exclusive women's musical domain; gender roles in innovation and preservation of musical traditions; gender segmentation of repertoires; access to musical practices; and the gendering of instruments and vocal practices. American ethnochoreologist Judith L. Hanna addressed several issues concerning gender and dance in her work Dance, Sex and Gender. Presenting cases of various world dances and Western ballet, Hanna discussed the representation of gender roles through dance movement, the role of dance in marking and codifying gender identities in life-cycle ceremonies, the central theme of sexuality and its blending with gendered representation, and dance as a space where redefinition of gender — and thus display of alternative gender identities — is possible.
The Third Wave
According to Koskoff's periodization, a third wave started in the 1990s. This scholarship crosses other disciplines including semiotics, gay, lesbian, and queer studies; cultural and performance studies; and psychoanalysis and area studies. These disciplines appear in musical studies through several essay collections, demonstrating that when analyzing contemporary phenomena, musicology, popular music studies, and ethnomusicology usually intersect and borrow approaches from each other.
Musicology and Difference, edited by Ruth A. Solie, is a landmark study of the third wave. The focus here is the varied articulation of social and cultural diversity in music — not limited to the bipolar gendering of men and women but unfolded to the multiple possibilities of gender identity. The essays consider cases from Western art music, popular music, and ethnomusicology, employing analysis approaches from linguistics and semiotics to new perspectives generated by cultural studies.
Third wave gender and music scholarship is broad, examining multiple aspects of gender as a learned phenomenon, as in researcher Judith Butler's theorization of performed gender and researcher Teresa de Laurentis's concept of represented gender. Another important postmodern reference is anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner's work, which combined "constructionist" and "subject-centered" theoretical frameworks with the theory of practice to elaborate a complex but effective theory of gender and other minority and subaltern cultural phenomena. The idea of "making gender" strongly examines processes imposed by society, individuals, and active practice.
Additional Notable Works in Gender and Musicology
These and other influences appear in significant collected works about music and gender. Audible Traces: Gender, Identity and Music, edited by Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamesslay, investigates the interconnection between gender and identity in musical performers, composers, listeners, and scholars. Another outstanding book is Music and Gender, edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond, which acknowledges the major trends of the three waves and discusses the researcher's own perspectives on the themes. Music and Gender: New Perspectives From the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini, broaches the issues of gender focusing on a circumscribed but ample geographical area, juxtaposing case studies that suggest disparate gender frameworks. The project of connecting area studies with music anthropology calls for a more dynamic and complex understanding of genderedness in various cultures and historical periods of the Mediterranean. Finally, Queering the Pitch, though not directly dealing with ethnomusicology, deepened a gender-oriented perspective by opening the new field of gay musicology.
The scholarship about music and gender has increasingly appeared in dedicated journals, scattered articles, and monographic issues dealing with specific aspects. For example, the Ethnomusicology Forum issue "Sounds of Power" examines the main directions taken by gender studies in relation to musical instruments. Veronica Doubleday's theoretical introduction provides a valuable guide to investigating this particular aspect of gender and music.
Future Directions
Today, gender has become an indispensable perspective for research in the humanities and social sciences. Although a specific research area has been configured as gender studies, most scholars use the concept of gender across different contexts of inquiry and apply it to various subjects. New contributions continue to enrich the definition and understanding of gender and its use as an analytic tool. What appears clearer is that the concept of gender is as interdisciplinary as it is indispensable, requiring from the ethnomusicologist a more flexible theoretical background to face new areas of inquiry.