Doing Diversity or Keeping Homogeneity: Masculinity and Whiteness in Rock Music Classification

• In Event: 2183 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Politics of Whiteness

Abstract

Whiteness and maleness remain largely unmarked in Western societies, resulting in persistent cultural and social inequalities. Whereas much scholarly work has addressed the blackness of hip-hop or the femininity of pop music, the implicit whiteness and maleness of many cultural products is rarely empirically excavated. When individuals classify culture, they employ collectively shared sociocultural configurations to assess what a practice or product ‘is’ and whether it is ‘any good’. Yet, we know little about how people activate available configurations and whether the resulting classifications are somehow patterned into distinct classification styles that relate to aspects such as gender or race-ethnicity. Combining insights from cultural and cognitive sociology, this paper explores how individuals choose, weigh and combine classifications at their disposal within rock music – a genre which symbolic whiteness and masculinity have remained largely unmarked. Using visual Q methodology and interviews with Dutch and American respondents (N=27), we find four distinct classification styles in rock music: 'doing diversity yourself', 'keeping homogeneity', 'protecting the masculine' and 'learning to rock'. Whereas the first classification style explicitly addresses issues of gender and race-ethnicity in relation to canonization and commercialization, respondents drawing on the other styles remain largely color-blind, while sometimes being attentive to gender. Our analysis demonstrates that gender and race-ethnicity matter in the classification of rock music – even (or particularly) when the salience of race-ethnicity and/or gender is discursively rejected.

Authors

• Julian Schaap, Erasmus University

• Pauwke Berkers, Erasmus University