Intersection of gender and popular music knowledge explored in new journal issue co-edited by Faculty Professor
A Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures has co-edited a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society which explores the intersection of gender and knowledge of pop music
A Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures has co-edited a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society which explores the intersection of gender and knowledge of popular music across a range of disciplines, regions, and genres.
From the “mansplaining” proprietor of the record shop to the male talking heads that overpopulate TV music documentaries, the character of the male popular music expert is well-established and all-too often dominant in conversations about popular music.
In response, the special issue of Popular Music and Society, edited by Bethany Klein (Professor of Media and Communication in the School of Media and Communication) and Dr Mimi Haddon (Senior Lecturer in the School of Music, the University of Sussex), aims to illuminate feminised ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been marginalised in media representations and academic conversations alike.
Articles explore a wide range of subjects, from the experiences of female jazz vocalists in China and the London Lesbian club scene of the 1980s and 1990s, to the practices of “Sad Girls” on TikTok and the increasing attention to fangirl accounts in popular books.
We consider the historic and ongoing conditions that position women and girls at the margins, the value in questioning what constitutes knowledge, how expertise has been defined, classic efforts to locate the experiences of women and girls, and the benefits to participants of all kinds to be gained when we broaden our understanding of what it means to know popular music.
Popular Music and Society, Volume 47, Issue 2 (2024) is available to read online for free.
Between 2022 and 2023, Dr Mimi Haddon and Professor Bethany Klein led Music for Girls, an AHRC Networking project that aimed to experiment with and explore alternative ways of ‘knowing’ about music and alternative ways of articulating knowledge about music, focusing especially on the experiences of women and girls.
In September 2022, the network co-curated an exhibition highlighting the personal music stories and experiences of a range of participants. In June 2023, the network brought together scholars for a two-day conference in Brighton, and the Popular Music and Society special issue features work first presented there.
