Introduction to the Divine Affliction Blog Series
Divine Affliction: Perception Through A Feminine Lens Part 1
Divine Affliction: Perception Through a Feminine Lens Blog Series presents an expansive view behind the music production of album Divine Affliction. The album is an expression of the feminine aesthetics in music. A sonic portrayal of the duality of divinity and affliction, a journey through the female experience. The album is a shorter album consisting of seven songs and would be defined as experimental electronica with raw, introspective, brooding, emotive music. This album presents an aural representation of the female processes and application to music production. The musical compositions are inspired by my own experience of the intersectionality of gender and music production along with the preliminary research uncovered in the following four theoretical blogs.
Following these preliminary blogs, several further blogs will be published in the series. These dissect my creative process with visceral accounts on the sonic storytelling of the music, narrating my music-making processes, by highlighting how I implement the song concepts into the musical composition, audio processing, and lyrics. The blogs will also host theoretic discussions and introspective reflections on the intersections of gender and music production. Along with observations on the feminine aesthetic of my music and production approaches, as a female music producer. Experience her story of music production through a feminine lens, a feminine perception of music production, educating womxn how to make music and embrace the realm of music production.
Affliction: “Something that makes you suffer” (Cambridge, N.d).
Divine: “Extremely good or pleasing” (Cambridge, N.d).
These two terms, divine and affliction describe my experience with the intersectionality of gender and music production. Divine is how I feel when I’m writing music and in my creative realm. Divinity is the state of things that are believed to come from God or a creator (Wikipedia. N.d.). I attribute being a creator to being a music producer, and through creating this project I am establishing my feminine subjectivity within my creative practice, reaching my true state of divinity. French feminist author, Irigaray believes “as long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal of her own. She lacks an ideal that would be her goal or path in becoming” (Irigaray, 1984, p. 63). (Adams & Duncan, Ed Clark, 2003, p. 197–198). By creating my own image of the divine through the sonic notions in the music I will establish my feminine subjectivity. Producing the album Divine Affliction is my goal and ideal of becoming. Throughout this project, the term divine is attributed to the feminine aesthetics of music production. These feminine aesthetics include; feminine performativity in music production, feminine modalities of music production, and feminist DIY cultural production. I feel afflictions with my femininity and the masculine culture of music production. Throughout this project, the term affliction defines the representation of women in music production, and the barriers to accessing the field this produces, along with the alterity issues this brings for women.
Conceptual Frameworks: The Background Story of Divine Affliction
I, a female producer, am at the intersection of gender and music production, the intersection of divinity and affliction. Music has been a constant in my life. From the age of five, I would memorise the weekly top 20 countdowns, learning the trends of the industry and what I liked in the musical expressions. I wanted to be a performer or rock star, though my real interest was in the studio and music production. My father would feed my interest in music technology and production, bringing home old or broken electronics from his workplace, an electronics and record store. I struck gold when he brought home a dynamic microphone, now at the age of five, I could record the song lyrics that I had composed. By the age of ten, I produced a lyrical and musical composition for my neighbor’s little sister’s birthday, presented on a cassette tape. During high school, I started making my own conceptual compilation mixtapes for friends. At this age I thought my future was set; I was off to Abbey Road Studio to learn from Sir George Martin, due to my father's influence with The Beatles. My dreams came crashing down during adolescence when I gained comprehension of the social constructs of being a female and the barriers this bore to becoming a professional music producer, with my guidance counselor insisting that I would make a great studio receptionist…this is a man’s world.
Suppression of females is central to the field of women and social studies explained by Abigail J Stewart and David G Winter, “as the interlocking complex of lower status and limited opportunities for women as compared with men, in the spheres of law, education, the economy, and social power” (Stewart & Winter, 1977). The well-established fact is that female suppression exists, is widespread and pervasive over many cultures and throughout much of human history. Rachel Gibbs and Claire Martin explain that sexual liberation has won many battles with the suppression of women, such as rights to abortion and divorce. Though with the modernisation of relationships and sexuality, sexual liberation has not ended the oppression of women. New socio/sexual expectations label “women as being sexual objects, with sexual violence including rape, being seen as a joke” (Gibbs & Martin, 2013). This oppression and suppression of females ripples through to music production and the music studio. In an NPR interview, female producer Grimes (Claire Boucher), explained how making songs with others is an experience bound by gender. Women, historically are the vocalists, while men take care of the beats. Despite her experience in production, Boucher said she wasn’t allowed to touch a computer in studio song-writing environments. “I came in with experience as a producer and I wasn’t allowed to produce, so how could any woman who didn’t have experience as a producer ever learn how to produce?” Boucher told NPR. “There are stereotypes of, women do certain jobs in music and men do certain jobs, the way the studio works, it’s not easy to escape that” (Boboltz quotes Boucher, 2016). These gendered stereotypes lead to identity issues for female producers, as they are seen as the altered form to the norm. For some female producers like myself, the altered form is even more prevalent, due to motherhood.
Music production and technology have been perpetually considered male domains, with females under-represented in the field of music production. Evidence of this can be identified with the vast majority of the gatekeeper roles in the music industry, a predominantly male dominion, deciding who gets the job, who gets the award and who makes the money. This shows confirmation of the male privilege and dominance within the political dynamic of the music industry. Ange McCormack in Triple J’s Hack reports, “If you’re working as a songwriter, an artist manager, an indie label manager or on the board of a peak music body, you’re more likely to be a man than a woman” (McCormack, 2018). The representation of females in this space has created a lack of accessing music production for females. This has led to a situation where there is a massive under-representation of females producing and creating music, and the few that are there perpetuate tokenisation. Natasha Patel comments, “In the field of music production and engineering, fewer than 5% of all professional producers and engineers are women” (Patel, 2015). How do I represent myself as a music producer when the current industry model is male? Evidence of this is in the vast media representations of a music producer. These industry-specific components have forged the circumstances for the gender inequalities within the music industry, leading to a masculine dominated voice in music production as an omnipresent feature. Music’s lack of diversity marginalizes over half of the Global population, let alone indigenous and other minorities, painting our culture as predominantly white and male, based on the musical artifacts. This blog series sets out to improve the media representations of female producers by representing a female producer within this environment. A female producing her music and her perspective of music production. Which presents a socio-political statement to the culture of music production, providing a source of access to music production, produced by females for females.
Tara Rogers and her text Pink Noises has had a massive influence on this project. Rodgers explains technology and music production have been considered male domains, deeply rooted in gender stereotyping; she aims to re-write this history of electronic music production with a feminist intervention (Rodgers, 2010, p. 2). This feminist intervention is what Divine Affliction bestows; activist art as critical pedagogy. Sally Macarthur promotes a movement in both feminist politics and feminist aesthetics of music. By simultaneously breaking down the barriers of access, and deconstructing the politics and social practices operating in music to marginalize female composers and producers, including females gaining recognition for their works with proper aesthetic analysis (Macarthur, 2002, p. 9). With this project, I argue that women's music is different than men’s but of equal value musically and technically. With the words of Macarthur, “Moreover, it becomes obvious that I want to demonstrate its difference in order to celebrate its worth. On the other hand, it is apparent that I am painfully aware of the deficiencies involved in such an argument” (Macarthur, 2002, p. 3). These deficiencies are formed from the outdated patriarchal assumptions that can be impacted through positive media representations and reconstruction of music production discourse with a feminine vernacular based on inclusivity. Sara Mills states, “Feminist work has been active in bringing about change in representational practices through critique, through teaching and through developing new models of writing practice” (Mills, 1995, p. 158). These constitute the aim of this blog series, to critique the afflictions with a feminine perception, through a feminine lens and provide a source of access to music production for females. In this project, I have aimed to be a representation of my gender in this space so other females see a reflection of themselves in this culture. This is a chance to show females in another light; our creativity and technical skills are culturally aware and intellectually sound.
In order to clarify my use of the terms feminist and feminine, I adopt Grosz’s definitions of these as referred to by Macarthur: “According to Grosz the four criteria for a feminine text are the sex of the author; the content of the text; the sex of the reader; and the style of the text” (Macarthur, 2002, p. 149–150). Grosz explains that “Feminine texts are those written from the perspective of a feminine experience or composed in a style culturally represented as feminine, while feminist texts self-consciously challenge the methods, objects, goals, or principles of mainstream patriarchal canons” (Macarthur, 2002, p. 149–150), due to the majority of discourse composed by men. Helene Cixous defines the term feminine in the binary system of cultural representation:
“Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated with coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity. Philosophical discourse both orders and reproduces all thought. One notices that it is marked by an absolute constant, precisely this opposition activity/passivity. Moreover, woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy” (Cixous, 1997, p. 149).
Many have the perspective that when you focus on gender it separates the female producer, trivializing their practice. I am making female producers the object of my study, invoking Magdalena Olszanowski’s assertion as follows:
“As a separate tradition is not isolationist; rather, it is a strategy in recovering them, in making them an object of discourse. Separation is a means of offering women visibility that they would not otherwise possess and enabling discussions that could not otherwise proceed” (Olszanowski, 2011, p. 10).
Conclusion
By creating discourse in music production from a feminine voice we start to deconstruct the gendered dominance in the music production industry, influencing social transformation and political change. Therefore not solely reflecting an aesthetic sensibility, but also the embodied articulation of how change can happen.
In the following Blog, I will be examining the afflicting intersections females encounter with music production, these include; representation of women in music production, and the barriers to accessing the field this produces, along with the alterity issues this brings for women. This provides a theoretical discussion on the afflicting intersections of gender and music production, leading to a comprehensive understanding of the concepts behind album Divine Affliction and this blog series. Stay Tuned!
Read the following Blog: https://medium.com/orthentix/the-afflicting-intersections-of-gender-and-music-production-a0917a41944c
Reference List:
Adams, Teresa & Duncan, Andrea. (2003.). The feminine case: Jung, aesthetics and creative process. Karnac Books Ltd, London: UK. ISBN: 978 1855752849.
Boboltz, Sara. (May 3, 2016). Huffington post: There are so few women in music production, no one bothers to count [Article]. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/women-producers-statistics_us_57113cebe4b0060ccda345be
Cambridge Dictionary. (N.d) Affliction: Definition [Website]. Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/affliction
Cambridge Dictionary. (N.d) Divine: Definition [Website]. Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/divine
Cixous, Helene (1997) ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’. In Schrift, A. D. ed. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity [Chapter]. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0–415–91098–6.
Gibbs, Rachel., &, Martin, Claire. (September 9, 2013). Women’s oppression: where it comes from and how to fight it [Article]. Retrieved from https://www.marxist.com/struggle-against-womens-oppression-where-from.htm
Macarthur, Sally. (2002). Feminist aesthetics in music. Greenwood Press, CT: USA. ISBN: 0–313–31320–2.
McCormack, Ange. (March 8, 2018). ABC hack: By the numbers 2018: The gender gap in the Australian music industry [Research Article]. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/by-the-numbers-2018/9524084
Mills, Sara. (1995.). Feminist stylistics. Routledge Publishers, London: UK. ISBN 0–203–40873-X.
Olszanowski, Magdalena. (2011) ‘What to Ask Women Composers: Feminist Fieldwork in Electronic Dance Music’ [Article]. DanceCult. Retrieved from http://dj.dancecult.net
Patel, Natasha. (October 2015). Music business journal: gender in the music industry [Article]. Retrieved from http://www.thembj.org/2015/10/gender-inequality-in-the-music-industry/
Rodgers, Tara. (2010) Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound [Book]. Durham NC , USA: Duke University22 Press. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4673-9.
Stewart, Abigail J., &, Winter, David G. (1977). Journal of women in culture and society 2 no. 3: The nature and causes of female suppression [Publication]. Retrieved from https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493386?journalCode=signs
Whiteley, Sheila. (1997) Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. New York: Routledge.
Wikipedia. (N.d). Divinity definition [Website]. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity
List of Figures:
Figure 1. Thompson, Louise. (2017). Me a female producer [Still image]. Copyright Louise Thompson.
