From mcess Sent Tue, Feb 16th 1999, 10:36
From mcess Sent Tue, Feb 16th 1999, 10:36
People on this list are letting themselves make massive
generalizations about gender, and even the people citing anecdotes/personal
experience are tending to use them as support for their massive
generalizations about gender. It's called "essentialism", people, and it's
a drag. Substitute "left-handed" or "Philipino" for "woman" and switch the
music under discussion to "hip hop" or "rock" and you will realize just how
unconvincing ANY of your generalizations really are. Why do you expect
aesthetic pleasure to correspond neatly to social groups? What
paternalistic fantasies about educating the world in the mysteries of IDM
are you indulging in by way of this handwringing about how to welcome women
into your community, and who have you written out of the picture in order
to feel that "your" electronic music scene is originally (heterosexual)
male in the first place? Given the heavy rhetoric of the "unnatural" and
the "inhuman" surrounding electronic sound, shouldn't we supposedly
sophisticated listeners be less eager to nail everything down in terms of
the traditional Male/Female opposition? If you've already transcended the
rhetoric of the natural and human when it comes to the art you make or
appreciate, why can't you leave that rhetoric alone when you're interacting
online/at shows/in everyday life?
Maybe a discussion of how socialization has built up expectations
about the correspondence of gender to sound is in order here. A good place
to start is Richard Leppert's "The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation,
and the History of the Body", an account of how representations of music
have evolved in lockstep with the emergence of the bourgeois family, with
populist, collective and festive music making eclipsed in favor of the
private household model that centers around the "man of the house". Surely
the lone male bedroom knob twiddler, that figure of both identification and
oh-god-it's-not-me anxiety for many an IDMer, is in fact one expression of
this historical trajectory. Whatever, the points to be made are simply
these: Don't assume that you know something about what women as a group
really want, really like, ought to like etc. When you catch yourself
reaching for some time honored truism about gender ("women are soft and
they want to hear soft sounds") just negate it, laugh at its inadequacy,
think past it, and while you're at it, reach for a Laetitia de
Compaigne-Sonami, Kaia Saariajo, Nic Endo, Kelly Hand, Neotropic, Pauline
Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Scissor Girls, Diamanda Galas, Joan La Barbara
(and on and on and on and on) CD . . .
Do I have to mention Walter/Wendy Carlos or Terre Thaemlitz as well? Don't
you people know the deal already?
why won't somebody write the definitive third sex electronic manifesto,
Drew
NP: Pauline Oliveros "Alien Bog" some of the coldest, most inhuman
electronic sound imaginable