Rockin' out of the box: gender maneuvering in alternative hard rock

232 Pages·2002·0.55 MB·English

by  Mimi Schippers

PREFACE i
Rockin’ out of the Box
ii PREFACE
PREFACE iii
ROCKIN’ OUT
OF THE BOX
Gender Maneuvering in
Alternative Hard Rock
M I M I S C H I P P E R S
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
iv PREFACE
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Schippers, Mimi, 1964–
Rockin’ out of the box : gender maneuvering in alternative hard rock /
Mimi Schippers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8135–3074–1 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 0–8135–3075-X
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Rock music—Social aspects. 2. Rock music—Sex differences. I. Title.
ML3918.R63 S35 2002
306.4’84–dc21
2001048791
British Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the British
Library.
Copyright © 2002 by Mimi Schippers
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University
Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8099. The only exception
to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Manufactured in the United States of America
PREFACE v
For Marnie
vi PREFACE
PREFACE vii
Contents
PREFACE IX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV
1 GENDER AND ROCK MUSIC: SO WHAT’S NEW? 1
2 THE GENDER ORDER OF MAINSTREAM ROCK CULTURE 18
3 THIS IS ALTERNATIVE HARD ROCK: ROCK CULTURE AS
GENDER MANEUVERING 40
4 GENDER MANEUVERING IN FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION 74
5 THE BODY IN ALTERNATIVE HARD ROCK 102
6 SEXUALITY AND GENDER MANEUVERING 128
7 FEMINIST POLITICS 154
NOTES 191
INDEX 205
vii
vviiiiii CPRONEFTAECNETS
PREFACE ix
Preface
This is, first and foremost, a book about gender. My main goal for
the research reported here was to explore how people use every-
day interactions and activities to push, pull, challenge, and fortify
the rules for gender and sexuality. In order to do this, from late
1992 to the spring of 1995 I conducted an ethnographic study of
a rock music subculture. As I will discuss later in detail, the rock
music subculture is of particular interest to me because it consists
of a group of both women and men who seem to be using what I
have identified as a feminist or antisexist sensibility in their ap-
proach to rock and roll. This is of interest for two reasons. First,
this subculture consists of men as well as women who seem to be
explicitly challenging the sexism of mainstream rock in their per-
formances and interviews. Since I am interested in better under-
standing how all people negotiate gender within face-to-face
interaction, I thought it likely that I’d find some men who were
approaching rock from an antisexist perspective. Unlike previous
research on gender in everyday life, this subculture provided a
golden opportunity to see antisexist women and men in everyday
interactions and, importantly, how others responded to them. The
second reason I chose this subculture was that hard rock has al-
ways been a largely male dominant cultural form. I thought this
ix