A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

Chapter 10 Unresolved Issues

10 Unresolved Issues In the late 1990s, I began to feel a sense of frustration with mainstream ethnomusicology . Wonderful new monographs and anthologies were appearing, as well as countless articles documenting various gendered musical practices cross-culturally. Why, then, had this literature remained largely on the margins of the field? Why had the obvious (to me) benefits of feminist music scholarship based on fieldwork been so slow to integrate into mainstream discourses? Growing interest in new technologies, diasporas, and globalism , to name just a few shifting paradigms, seemed to lead away not only from feminist theory, but also, as in anthropology, toward a reevaluation of ethnographic fieldwork as a basic method of gathering data. Further, although third-wave feminism, which privileged individuality, was helpful in understanding the real-time flow of gendered musical performances , it also seemed to be fragmenting itself out of political usefulness. And I could barely see a feminist consciousness among the younger generation of students I taught. Their understanding and use of gendered politics seemed to have shifted to such a degree that I no longer recognized it as such. In short, I was getting cranky and began to look at other, larger, underlying issues that could account for these problems. Here is a story describing an incident that occurred in 2002, at the Eastman School of Music where I teach, that gives a sense of my growing unease (perhaps disappointment?) in what I saw then as the younger generation’s lack of interest in current unequal gender relations, coupled with a certain attitude of disdain (perhaps ungratefulness?) for all they had inherited—in short, the usual feelings of a parent toward a recalcitrant child. 146 part iii: 2000–2012 October 2002 It is the new millennium, and I am teaching a course called Music, Gender, and the Body. One day before class, I go to the second-floor reserve area in the library to retrieve some readings . There, the head of Reserves and Recordings has placed an LP record jacket on display for all to see. He is a young man in his thirties and, along with most of the students at the Eastman School, regards much of the older recording technology and marketing as amusing and the stuff of parody. I am beginning to see a change in my relationship with the students I am teaching. Sometimes, when I tell a joke, it goes completely over their heads. They no longer seem to get my references and are so concerned about what I think about them that they are afraid to laugh. Was that a joke? They just look at me oddly while keeping their faces arranged and controlled. I am worried that I can no longer relate to them—our worlds and worldviews are simply too different. I have been noticing such differences for a long time now. My stepdaughter, Rebecca, who is an artist, became rather well known in the early 1990s through her parody oil paintings—beautifully executed portraits of the Pillsbury Doughboy (from the perspective of a number of artistic periods) and of plastic creatures built from Legos and the Barbie Doll franchises. This is Art, I thought? And it was! I just wasn’t understanding it as such. I talked with her about this. She said, “Oh, Ellen, this is just my generation’s way of dealing with irony and cynicism. Your generation [’60s hippies] never did fulfill the dream. This is how we answer you.” Even my own son, an actor, would frequently entertain me with what I thought of as unconscionably sexist and racist humor, poking fun indiscriminately at all groups without any regard to their history or social context. Yes, I would laugh—he was funny! But I was also uncomfortable. “David,” I would say, “you’d better not say this stuff in public—it’s not only hurtful, but you can get into trouble for this out there. And it really is upsetting to me personally—you know, women still get paid only seventy-eight cents to the dollar men get, and most African Americans in Rochester live below the poverty line!” “Oh, Mom,” he would say. “Get real! Everyone does this now, and no one gets upset anymore!” Unresolved Issues 147 It was clear that I no longer “got it,” that I did not relate to this generation’s values or to their idea of humor. Okay, so I show up at...