(De)constructing a White Male Space: Gender, Race-Ethnicity, and Rock Music in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: 441 - Regular Session. Taste and Cultural Reception in Popular Culture

Abstract

Music genres are constitutive of social boundaries, which often reflect ethno-racial groups and gender roles or are structured along ethno-racial lines and/or gender roles. By zooming-in on rock music as a case study – which is historically constructed as predominantly white and male, this article investigates how audiences construct or deconstruct the symbolically male and white rock music culture. Moreover, this paper addresses how the culturally inscribed ethno-racial and gender boundaries of American rock music are transported to and renegotiated in another socio-cultural context – Rotterdam, a distinctly multicultural harbor city in the Netherlands. Making use of the innovative subjectivity-based visual Q-methodology and post-sorting interviews, the analysis reveals how Dutch rock music audiences – varying across ethno-racial and gender dimensions – have distinctly different understandings of rock music authenticity. First, female and non-white musicians are routinely marked as oppositional to the unmarked white, male norm. Second, female and/or non-white artists are both seen as tokens and role-models, revealing how difference can function as a double-edged sword. Third, discourses of color/gender-blindness and color/gender-consciousness are regularly employed to discuss gender and ethno-racial inequality in the Dutch rock music scene.

Authors

• Julian Schaap, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Pauwke Berkers, Erasmus University Rotterdam