Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Sweet Nothings: Women In Rockabilly Music: Lavern Baker And Janis Martin, Stephanie P. Lewin-Lane

Theses and Dissertations

Rockabilly music is an exciting and vibrant style of early Rock and Roll that originated in the 1950s. With its aggressive beat and anti-establishment connotations, rockabilly is considered a widely male-dominated genre, a point supported by the majority of scholarship and literature on the subject. However, a review of available contemporary recordings, television shows, advertisements and interviews show that women were an integral part of the history of rockabilly music. In this thesis, I will discuss women in rockabilly music and address how issues relating to gender and race in 1950s culture affected women performers. More specifically, I will examine …

Sexy Songs: A Study Of Gender Construction In Contemporary Music Genres, Lea Tessitore

Honors Theses

This study focuses on gender construction in contemporary music genres, including Rap/Hip-hop, Country, and Punk Rock. Although all these genres are vastly different, each genre creates unique masculinities and femininities which impact the way listeners view male/female relations in politics and their everyday lives. Rap/hip-hop creates a construct which results in the objectification of women through their “pornification” and “commodification” in the lyrics of popular songs. Country, on the other hand, has complex masculinities and femininities which create a complex network of gender characteristics which reinforce and complement each other. Lastly, this thesis looks ‘back’ to Punk Rock, whose prime …

Learning How To Listen': Analyzing Style And Meaning In The Music Of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone And Cassandra Wilson, Lashonda Katrice Barnett

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Learning How to Listen': Analyzing Style and Meaning in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson examines the similarities of singing styles and core narrative traits in the original songs of three African American women vocalist-composers celebrated within the jazz idiom. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, including over 150 hours of personal interviews with musicians, attendance of jazz concerts and festivals both domestic and abroad, and a three-year listening journal (based on live performances and recordings), 'Learning How to Listen' is an Africana cultural studies product informed by vibrant multidisciplinary scholarship that bridges Jazz studies, Linguistics …

A Mirror Of Recognition: How The Empathetic Relationship Between Dusty Springfield And Her Not-Straight Fans Facilitates Their Identity Development, Nancy J. Young

Educational Studies Dissertations

This multi-case qualitative study explores the phenomenon of identity development of not-straight (more traditionally labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or queer) fans through their attachment to British popular singer Dusty Springfield as a fan-object. A purposefully selected sample of four fans, aged 21-45, two male and two female, from the United Kingdom and the United States, were interviewed. The interdisciplinary conceptual framework of the study combines the fields of identity development, fan studies, and psychological theories related to projection.

The themes that emerge from the data suggest that Dusty Springfield’s emotional music draws the listener into fandom and that the …

"You Understand Me Now": Sampling Nina Simone In Hip Hop, Amanda Renae Modell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The overarching goal of this research is to explicate the implications of hip hop artists sampling Nina Simone's music in their work. By regarding Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right, one can hear the ways that hip hop artists are mobilizing her tradition of socially active self-definition from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) in the post-2000 United States. By examining both the lyrics and the instrumental compositions of Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, Common, Tony Moon, Talib Kweli, Mary J. Blige and Will.I.Am, G-Unit and Timbaland, and bearing in mind the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, …