15 - On women

Summary

Music is gendered. But it has no genitals. At least, if it were to be given a phallus it would have to be constructed as a discourse. And this would be a very messy operation in which music would find its sexual identity complicated by a host of contradictory discourses in the play of sexual politics. This is precisely what happened in the Enlightenment. Under its own critique, the age of reason found its structures of gender destabilised; the inherited distinctions of sexuality were no longer tenable under the searching light of reason. The Enlightenment needed to reconstruct sex difference. But this was an ambivalent process in which music was dragged in as a specimen and was forced to display its newly found genitalia – not that they really existed since such essential signs of sexual identity were only the constructions of a discourse and could easily be reversed. In this fluidity of sexual politics in which women were beginning to assert their rights and redraw their identity, the Enlightenment wanted to solidify the structure and to fix the identity of men and women with its tools of thought. And in this process, instrumental music had a sexuality imposed upon it, at first from the outside as a discourse which it eventually internalised as a new configuration of masculinity. It had a sex-change – but the operation was messy.

At the close of the eighteenth century, instrumental music suffered a crisis of identity: it didn't have a phallus.