‘Beyond the dance floor’? Gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music

Stirling, C. (2016) ‘Beyond the dance floor’? Gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music. Contemporary Music Review, 35 (1) pp. 130-149. ISSN 0749-4467 (print) 1477-2256 (online)

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [2004]. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with making changes.

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