Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages/Midwest I A &
B
Women in Rock, Pop, Jazz and Rap: What you Know to be
Real: Women’s Music, Women’s Reality
Organizer: Patricia
S. Rudden
New
York City Coll. Of
Technology/CUNY
Session A
Staging Motherhood: Liz Phair,
Tori Amos and the Maternal Sublime
All women’s reality would not appear to be equally noteworthy, as the cases of
Liz Phair and Tori Amos
make abundantly clear. While Phair and Amos have received some significant critical
attention since the release of their landmark albums Exile in Guyville (1993) and Little
Earthquakes (1992), the focus of scholars’ interest in their work seems
illustrative of a more general tendency in writing about women in rock. While both artists have consistently set out
to—in the words of one of Phair’s
commentators—“shatter every repression we [women] have, be it musical, sexual
[or] canonical,” a recurring theme in the work of Phair
and Amos since 1998 has received much less attention: both women’s experiences
with motherhood. Perhaps Chrissie Hynde is correct that there’s something not quite “rock ‘n’
roll” about taking the stage in a nursing bra.
Beginning with the 1998 album Whitechocolatespaceegg, however, Phair’s
writing has illustrated the tensions inherent in the reality of women who hope
to “shatter repressions”: asserting sexual agency with a Fender guitar, while
at the same time assuming the role of motherhood. While an earlier generation
of artists has broached the subject of the maternal in rock ‘n’ roll, Phair and Amos have moved beyond the very real joys of
motherhood and into its frequent terrors.
For Phair and Amos, motherhood is sublime, both in echoing that joy
expressed by their predecessors, but also the anxiety induced by a toddler who
sees “Mom” sharing a bed with a man who’s not “Dad” or Amos’s oft-stated desire
to remain an “integrated woman.” While Phair and Amos
have rightly been lauded for their attempts to expand the range of women’s
identity, they are also staging motherhood, and making this still far-too-taboo
subject rock at the same time.
John McCombe
University of Dayton
John.McCombe@notes.udayton.edu
Rage, Women, and Rock: Mapping the Trajectory
of the Female [Rock] Star and her Art of Rage and Performance in Contemporary Music
Alanis Morrisette broke barriers with her seminal 1995 release Jagged
Little Pill. The first single, “You Outta Know”,
perused the often unexplored nuances of female rage in music. Since her
explosive debut, there have been pockets or moments, rather than meaty musical
threads where female artists consistently feel, explore, and perform rage
within their music. What are the circumstances in which these musical moments
of rage are explored? How does place, race, age, and
evolving notions and questions about women and rage play into how female
artists transcribe this into their music. Beyonce’s
“Ring the Alarm”, Kelis’s “Caught Out There”,
Courtney Love (though her explorations of rage can be construed as performative or faux rather than “authentic”), Dixie Chicks
“I’m Not Ready to Make Nice”, Ani DiFranco,
Pink, etc. all have performed rage. Is
rage from the male musician more easily quantified and responded to than the
female star? Is male rage seen as natural and female rage seen as exceptional
or hysterical? The purpose of this presentation is to explore how time, place,
and race have changed the circumstances by which the contours of female rage
are explored performatively and linguistically.
Courtney Young
Independent Scholar
cocacy@gmail.com
A Little Bit Country or a Little Bit Rock ‘n’
Roll: Locating the Performance Style of the Dixie Chicks
What made the Dixie
Chicks country music darlings one minute and anathema the next? This paper examines the performance of
authenticity and musical taste for both country and rock music in relation to
the Dixie Chicks’ March 2003 performance in London on the eve of the war in
Iraq during which lead singer Natalie Maines made her
now infamous statement, “Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the
United States is from Texas.” By saying
this during a performance in London, Maines was
violating the rules of what performance behaviors are appropriate for a country
music artist (which according to Richard A. Peterson include the way one talks
about Texas). Taking into account the intense backlash by the country music
community, I examine the roles of authenticity and appropriate behavior as they
are considered within country music both in the way that the Dixie Chicks
violated that authenticity and in the way that country fans responded. Moreover, by violating that tradition of
authenticity, as it has existed throughout the history of country music, the
Dixie Chicks established themselves as performers that more closely adhere to a
rock sensibility. Upon performing within
the rock tradition of public protest and political commentary, then, the Dixie
Chicks have since taken steps to fully establish themselves as rock artists in
taste and authenticit. Similarly, they have been embraced by rock
fans while being boycotted by country fans.
Sam O’Connell
Northwestern
University
sjoconne@gmail.com
Not Ready to Make Nice: The Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way and the Real
Prior to Dixie Chicks lead singer
Natalie Maines’s infamous 2003 anti-Bush comment
(“Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from
Texas”), the Dixie Chicks were not considered a particularly political
band. Further, the lyrics to most of their
songs were not terribly personal—many of them, such as “Goodbye, Earl” and
“Tortured, Tangled Hearts” told fictional stories from a third-person point of
view. Both the political and personal
nature of their band changed after what the Chicks refer to as “the incident,”
however; not only did the Chicks join the Vote for Change tour in support of
John Kerry, but their subsequent album was decidedly more personal. Tracks on Taking
the Long Way such as “Not Ready to Make Nice” and “The Long Way Around”
directly reference the incident, while “So Hard” and “Silent House” reference
Emily Robison and Martie Maguire’s struggles with
infertility and Maines’s grandmother’s Alzheimer’s
disease, respectively. Moreover, Taking the Long Way was the first album
in which the Chicks coauthored every song; as Robison notes in Shut Up and Sing,
the documentary chronicling the incident, after everything that had happened,
anything not written by them would seem “false.” This paper discusses how the Chicks’
(unintentional) move into the political realm prompted them to write an album
that was at once more political and more personal than previous efforts.
Molly Brost
Bowling Green State
University
mjbrost@bgnet.bgsu.edu
Session B
“Testimony” in Context: Women’s Music and
Romantic Poetry
What is the relationship between the personal experience and the
political statement in women’s music? I claim that the context for addressing
this question goes back beyond the feminist call that the personal is political
to the 19th century lyric poem. I discuss the link between romantic
poetry and the folk music of early 20th century in the United States
and Great Britain and then demonstrate how the individual valorized in
romanticism takes form as the individual voice of lesbian women’s music. A
detailed analysis will follow, using Ferron’s song
“Testimony” as an example.
Susan Booker Morris
Ferris Sate
University
bluemonk7772000@yahoo.com
“When You Walked
into the Room You Had Everybody’s Eyes on You”: RuPaul
and the Disciplining Politics of “Gender”
When RuPaul burst on the American pop culture
scene in the early 1990s, confusion abounded.
This confusion stemmed from a palpable anxiety insofar as what to “do”
with a six foot tall drag queen resplendent in stiletto heels, a red dress and
blonde wig. Did “Ru”
follow in the arguably safe footsteps of other gender/genre benders e.g.
Sylvester and Prince, or was she drawing on the occasionally militant Afrocentric and queer movements of the early 1990s? How could one think about her without
simultaneously invoking scopophilia, exoticization, and fetishization? These kinds of questions are relevant to an
analysis of RuPaul’s subjectivity and reception. In drawing on these questions as well as
Jennie Livingston’s “Paris is Burning,” I choose not
to deconstruct RuPaul as a cultural anomaly. Instead, I call into question the constructs
of gender that aim(ed) to define and categorize
(read: contain) RuPaul. In examining how RuPaul
creates/created a spectacle out of those who longed to contain her in a rigid
gendered framework, I also underscore how issues of class awareness, racial
pride, and ancestral affiliation operate in RuPaul’s
oeuvre and construction, making RuPaul the fabulous,
fierce – and, yes, real – creation
she remains.
Chris Bell
Nottingham Trent
University
“Time To Design a
Woman”: Laura Nyro’s Rhetoric of the Real
One project of Laura
Nyro’s body of work, from the late 1960s to her last
album in 1993, is to discover the meaning of the word “woman,” and her method for
discovering this meaning is to watch herself unfold
and see what emerges. She does this by
establishing personae in her work whom she describes
in the third person, observing aspects of herself and of others she knows from
a pose of external objectivity, like an anthropologist in the field. This approach rests in a supreme confidence
in her own identity, whatever it turns out to be, and a reluctance to allow
imposition of socially determined constructs of what being a woman means. One of her earliest songs proclaims “All I
ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me,” a
determination to see herself develop, grow and come to the end of life without
artificial interference. On those
relatively rare occasions when Nyro talks about what
is “real” in life, she often means something romantic or reproductive, and she
uses this as a standard against which to measure a relationship’s failure, and
her rejection of it. We see this in the
1978 version of “Man in the moon” and the revised version, which appeared on her
most overtly feminist work, Mother’s Spiritual (1984). Her discovery of a woman’s reality involves
both self-observation and a carefully maintained power to make her own
decisions.
Patricia S. Rudden
New York City
College of Technology/CUNY
patriciarudden@gmail.com