The following titles present feminist critical approaches to the study of music, including classical and popular music by male and female composers and performers, as well as reception history and social studies of music. To find more titles like these, try searching the SUBJECT term "Feminism and music" in the library catalog.
Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music by 
Music, Gender, Education by
This book focuses on the role of education in relation to music and gender. Invoking a concept of musical patriarchy and a theory of the social construction musical meanings, Lucy Green shows how women's musical practices and gendered musical meanings have been reproduced, hand in hand, through history. Covering a wide range of music, including classical, jazz and popular styles, Dr Green uses ethnographic methods to convey the everyday interactions and experiences of girls, boys, and their teachers. She views the contemporary school music classroom as a microcosm of the wider society, and reveals the participation of music education in the continued production and reproduction of gendered musical practices and meanings.
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music by
Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model. With acuity and candor, longtime feminist activist Hayes elucidates why this music scene matters. Veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer, and cultural historian Linda Tillery provides a foreword.
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality by
A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism, this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance art. When it was originally published in 1991, Feminine Endings was immediately controversial for its unprecedented intermingling of cultural criticism and musical studies, an approach that came to be called the "new musicology." Through case studies of works ranging from the canonical - operas by Monteverdi and Bizet - to the contemporary - the performance art of Diamanda Galas and popular songs by Madonna - Susan McClary focuses on the ways music produces images of gender, desire, pleasure, and the body, and explores the gender-based metaphors that circulate in discourse about music. This classic work features a new introduction that discusses the critical reception the book received and the debates it has inspired
Opera: Or, the Undoing of Women by
This was the first work to have applied a systematised feminist theory to opera. It concentrates on the stories & text of opera, that perhaps have more relevence today in a growing literature than it had when it was the sacrilegious pioneering work.
A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender by
One of the pioneers of gender studies in music, Ellen Koskoff edited the foundational text Women and Music in Cross Cultural Perspective, and her career evolved in tandem with the emergence and development of the field. In this intellectual memoir, Koskoff describes her journey through the maze of social history and scholarship related to her work examining the intersection of music and gender. Koskoff collects new, revised, and hard-to-find published material from mid-1970s through 2010 to trace the evolution of ethnomusicological thinking about women, gender, and music, offering a perspective of how questions emerged and changed in those years, as well as Koskoff's reassessment of the early years and development of the field. Her goal: a personal map of the different paths to understanding she took over the decades, and how each inspired, informed, and clarified her scholarship. For example, Koskoff shows how a preference for face-to-face interactions with living people served her best in her research, and how her now-classic work within Brooklyn's Hasidic community inflamed her feminist consciousness while leading her into ethnomusicological studies. An uncommon merging of retrospective and rumination, A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender offers a witty and disarmingly frank tour through the formative decades of the field and will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, scholars of the history and development of feminist thought, and those engaged in fieldwork. Includes a foreword by Suzanne Cusick framing Koskoff's career and an extensive bibliography provided by the author.
Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music by
Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegeocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship.
Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music by 
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