A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

Chapter 4 Shifting Realities

4 Shifting Realities The six chapters in this part mark a change in my thinking and writing, from a predominantly comparative and theoretical approach to more of a focus on culture-specific gendered musical systems. As I grappled with postmodernism’s multivocality and positioning, I began to experience a deep ambivalence: on the one hand, I was attracted to postmodernism’s deeply compassionate focus and valorization of individual difference and multiple intersections of position; on the other, I wondered, if individual difference were to be privileged, where was room for sameness? Could one successfully and gracefully move back and forth between comparative and individual lenses and still say something meaningful? This ambivalence often emerged in unlikely places. Here is a story of an unusual event that highlights some of the difficulty I was experiencing at the time in holding two (or more) simultaneous perspectives. June 23, 1993 I am involved in a weeklong College Music Society Summer Seminar focusing on feminism and music, organized by Ruth Solie and Jane Bowers, hosted by Catherine Pickar, and held on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C.1 I am there to represent the feminist perspective in ethnomusicology. Thus, unlike other participants dealing with Western art musics (and, roughly, a three-hundred-year time period), I have a dual task—I must be a spokesperson not only for all of ethnomusicology , but also for all “other” women (outside the West) and for all 60 part ii: 1990–2000 historical periods. Needless to say, this is daunting, but I am glad that historical musicologists are finally recognizing that there is more to women and music than what happens in the salons and concert halls of the European or American upper middle class. We are all done for the day, schmoozing in the basement of the dorm where we are staying. Someone has just turned on the television. We watch the news. “It’s June 23,” the announcer intones. “Today, a woman, Lorena Bobbitt, motivated by years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, cut off her husband’s penis, while he lay sleeping. She got into her car with the severed penis and drove off with it, throwing it out of the window of the car into an abandoned field” (reconstructed from memory).2 What?!DidIhearthatcorrectly?Awomancutoff herhusband’s penis? And threw it out of a car window? We sit there, stunned. A wave of shock, tempered with a muted ambivalence, passes over the group. Is this a bad thing—or a good thing? We look at each other, measuring our own internal reactions against the others.’ I see different faces expressing a wide range of emotions—horror, empathy, shock, amusement, vindictiveness, compassion. Suddenly, a guttural, almost animal, sound begins. We all begin to laugh, deep belly laughs, loud guffaws, out-of-control hiccups! We can’t stop! Tears fall from our eyes. I grab my stomach , wracked by laugh cramps, thinking I will surely throw up. Someone claps; another screams. We sit there, simultaneously horrified and bemused, each feeling the entwined and inchoate sensations of vengeance and empathy. “That must have hurt,” someone says. More gales of laughter. It was a moment when all of us, having experienced some measure of sexual harassment, abuse, discrimination, or privilege , unexpectedly came together, our differences melting. We laughed until we were weak, not knowing what else to do in this powerfully ambivalent moment. * * * Feminism in the 1990s: Into the Third Wave By the late 1980s and into the ’90s, many felt that major problems with unbalanced gender relations had been largely solved by the efforts of first- and second-wave feminists. Women were entering the workplace in higher numbers , and some were being elected to public office; rape, domestic abuse, and Shifting Realities 61 workplace harassment were being taken more seriously in the courts and in the mainstream media; and a host of laws came into place, creating greater opportunities and a more equitable social structure for women.3 Men, too, were beginning to understand how gender norms had also constrained or privileged them, and many became more involved with their children, with housework, with caretaking, and with other areas of life previously labeled women’s work. Within the academy, some men began to deconstruct their own systems of masculinity; they came to be called “men in feminism” or, sometimes, “femmenists” (Jardine and Smith 1987). Third-wave feminism grew out of the critiques...