Introduction to ‘Gender and Sexuality’ special issue

Extract

Academic work on popular music has had a difficult and intermittent relationship with work on gender and sexuality. Bursts of intense debate have been followed by years of scholarly silence, and questions that were raised in the early days of rock writing remain unresolved today. Is rock a male form? And if so, is this achieved through the gender of the performers? of audiences? through the sexuality of the performance, or the discourse of the songs? Is rock's ‘serious’ status guaranteed by its binary definition as the opposite of ‘pop’, seen as ‘for the girls’? And if a rock/pop divide now seems absurdly outdated, do we not see its gender divisions reconstituted within the new forms? On the other hand, what happens to these divisions when boys, too, decide they ‘just want to have fun’? And why have musicians been so much happier ‘flirting’ with gay identities than coming out as gay?