Project Description:
Women musicians face tremendous obstacles in the music industry, including unequal pay, sexist media representation, and physical and emotional violence. Yet women musicians are also at the forefront of activism to make popular music safe and accessible. In this project, students will conduct research examining women musicians’ activism against gender inequality in the American popular music industry from the 1960s to the present. Specifically, we’ll focus our research on musicians’ approaches to fighting sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, unjust conservatorships, and restrictive beauty standards and fitness regimes. Over eight weeks, SRS scholars will work in collaboration with myself and each other to build a literature review contextualizing the 21st century #MeToo movement within women musicians’ historical struggles for bodily autonomy. Students will engage in a variety of interdisciplinary research methods central to Popular Music Studies, Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, including analyzing the first-person accounts in musicians’ memoirs, collecting qualitative data from documentaries, examining court cases and legal policies, and evaluating the effectiveness of musicians’ activism by surveying YouTube comments, blogs, and other forms of audience and fan criticism.
Prerequisites
Student researchers must have completed at least one course in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Completion of WGSS 120: Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies preferred.
Special Comments
While I would prefer to meet weekly with students in Lexington throughout the course of the 8-week project, I am amenable to working with students that need to research virtually for either part or all of the 8-week period.
Project Information
Estimated Start Date: 6/9/2024
Estimated End Date: 8/2/2024
Maximum number of students sought: 3
Contact Information: Prof. Kate Grover (kgrover@wlu.edu)