Music and Historical Femininity

Music, informally, is often conceptualized as something to enjoy, something that confirms or indicates an individual’s specific type of tastes or personality.

Photo by Laura Wielo on Unsplash

In some understanding, this informal approach to music can be reworked into the idea that the choices in music that we make embody aspects of our identity.

In this sense, music captures pieces of our identity and our identity is in turn constituted and represented by music. This leads to the more complex and intriguing idea that music itself may be responsible for shaping and influencing our identities, at least to some subtle extent.

The ability for music to express ideological power closely relates to its ability to invoke a set of meaningful emotions or feelings in the individual, and this appears to be a consistent theme with much of the examples explored during lecture.

For instance, it African-American blues lyrics explore love, and it is noted in Angela Davis’ work Blues Legacies and Black Feminism that the blues are distinctive in their “intellectual independence and representational freedom” (3).