A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

Chapter 8 When Women Play: The Relationship between Musical Instruments and Gender Style

8 When Women Play The Relationship between Musical Instruments and Gender Style Having for some time noticed that various accounts of women participating in musical activity did so primarily as singers and dancers, I began to wonder in the mid-1990s why this was the case. Why did so few women play musical instruments, and when they did, why did their activities seem to be so undervalued? In researching this article, I sought literature from both ethnographic and historical sources available in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the pickings were slim—only about 10 percent of the total literature I surveyed mentioned women instrumentalists. Photographs of actual women playing instruments (not artwork depicting women playing, which were plentiful) were even scarcer. Was this actually a true picture, or more evidence for bias in music scholarship and publishing? In this article, I examine four contexts, each with its own gender style, that is, an inherited and practiced set of gendered expectations and behaviors embedded in musical activity, and then survey relevant literature describing women as instrumentalists in those contexts. In doing so, of course, I also dipped back into my desire for a comparative, cross-cultural theory—still an elusive goal. The four contexts are as follows: the court, courtship, ritual practice, and the context of everyday life. These four general contexts proved useful, so I used them again in my part of the entry “Women and Music,” written with Judith Tick and Margaret Ericson for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000). * * * In many societies, musical roles are divided along gender lines: women sing andmenplay.Ofcourse,menalsosing,andwomensometimesplay;yet,unlike men, women who play often do so in contexts of sexual and social marginality. When Women Play 123 This essay surveys the literature on women playing musical instruments in a variety of social and cultural contexts. It then presents some recent anthropologicaltheoriesregardingtheinterrelationbetweensocialstructureandgender stratification that can be useful in understanding these data in the broader perspective of gender relations. I will, for now, regard women’s performance on musical instruments, or lack thereof, as an indicator of the gender style of a given society, for although all performance may be regarded as a locus of power, performance on musical instruments is often bound up with cultural notions of gender and control in ways that vocal performance is not. First, some preliminary remarks concerning gender, musical instruments , and cross-cultural surveys. The term gender is being used here to define a socially constructed category (man and woman) and is distinguished here from sex, the biological category of one’s birth (male and female). Further, although most societies recognize a relative difference between the two sexes and often use these as the primary bases for the division of labor in economic, ritual, and other domains, gender categories are often quite fluid, with so-called masculine or feminine behaviors appearing to a certain degree in both sexes.1 The term gender ideology has been used by Ortner and Whitehead (1981), among others, to denote a conceptual and valuative framework that underlies and structures behaviors for women and men. Ideologies may be codified as religious, moral, or legal justifications for gender relations. Although gender roles are based to a certain degree on biological categories, it is the value given to one gender over the other that promotes a certain gender style, theoretically ranging from relatively equal autonomy and value for both men and women (complementarity) to a lack of equality in both autonomy and value (gender stratification). Musical instruments are defined here simply as material objects for the most part outside the body, or connected to the body, that are used in performances of music, dance, ritual, and ceremony, however culturally defined . Clapping, slapping one’s thighs, snapping fingers, or other rhythmic accompaniment that uses one’s own body as a musical instrument will not be considered here. Concerning cross-cultural studies, it goes without saying that social contexts for performance vary widely across cultures and time, as do the relative distribution and significance of musical instruments and instrumental performance. Asserting generalizations about gender and musical roles is therefore fraught with difficulties. Native perspectives, individual exceptions, and the complexities of everyday life tend to be glossed over or ignored in such generalizations, and they can often veer toward the glib. Yet there is value in the cross-cultural survey, for certain broad patterns emerge from this 124 part ii: 1990...