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Kieron Faller from CI reveals best-practice for diverse businesses…

This article examines the feminist response to a 2013 online “feud” between singers Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor that began when Cyrus connected the video for her single “Wrecking Ball” to O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.” O’Connor’s response criticised Cyrus’ sexualised image, and the exchanges that followed sparked debate among feminists over the limits of sexual “agency,” and the sexual politics of feminism. This took place within a wider media context that has seen an apparent increase in female celebrities explicitly identifying themselves as feminist. Critics of this “celebrity feminism” argue that the sexualised star systems of its proponents are at odds with the aims of feminist politics. This article draws on post-structuralist feminist theory to question the positioning of celebrity feminism as exterior to an imagined “feminist movement.” Using the Cyrus/O’Connor feud, I argue that such a binary potentially reaffirms the structures of power that feminism seeks to oppose, and ignores the ways celebrity culture and contemporary media practice might combine to produce new understandings of the field of feminism.

In this book Fiona Hutton provides a fascinating insight into women's experiences of clubbing. Based on a rich ethnographic account of the Manchester club scene, Risky Pleasures? is set within the context of the theoretical literature on youth subcultures, female friendship, consumption, risk and the city. The work highlights both the producers of club scenes - promoters, DJs, dealers - and the consumers - women negotiating pleasure and risk in club spaces and in the city at night. It explores the range of club spaces, developing a typology of 'mainstream' and 'underground' clubs, and considers how different types of participants are attracted to different 'scenes'. It examines women's recreational drug-use within a club context and discusses issues of sexuality, tolerance and the importance of 'attitude' in terms of women's feelings of safety. Revealing the important role of different spaces and different atmospheres in how women participate in club scenes, Fiona Hutton argues that drug taking and sexual pleasure are always contextualized within the environments created in different spaces, and that the risk and danger negotiated by women clubbers are counterbalanced by fun and pleasure - and ultimately empowerment.

Sweden is often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world and held up as a model to follow, but the reality is more complex. This is the first book to explode the myth of Swedish gender equality, both offering a new perspective for an international audience, and suggesting how equality might be rethought more generally. While the authors argue that the gender-equality mantra in Sweden has led to a society with increased opportunities for some, they also assert that the dominant norm of gender equality has become nationalistic and builds upon heteronormative and racial principles. Examining the changing meanings and parameters of gender equality against the country's social-democratic tradition and in the light of contemporary neoliberal ideologies, the book constitutes an urgent contribution to the debates about gender-equality policies and politics.

Increasingly, it is becoming evident that those involved in socio-musical studies must focus their investigative lens on musical practice and articulation of the self, on music and community involvement and on music as a social medium for social relationships. What motivates people to be involved in musical performance, and how do they articulate these needs and drives? What do performers gain from their involvement in musical activities? How do audience members perceive their relationship to the performer, the music and the event? These questions and many more are addressed here with the benefit of detailed empirical work, including case studies of a chamber music festival and a contemporary music summer school. Pitts investigates the value of musical participation for performers and audience members in a range of contexts, using a multi-disciplinary approach to place new empirical data in the framework of existing theory and literature. Themes examined include: the shared musical experience; the social structures of performing societies; how people identify with music; the values implicit in musical preferences; the social responsibilities of the performer; the audience view of concerts and festivals; the social power of music and educational implications and responsibilities. Pitts draws upon literature from musicology, sociology and psychology of music, ethnomusicology, music education and community music to demonstrate the diversity of enquiry about musical behaviours. The conclusions of the book are based upon empirical evidence gleaned through case studies, with the data integrated thematically throughout, to enable a greater depth of discussion than individual studies usually permit.

The 2016 Billboard Power 100 is dominated by white men born before Elvis had a hit. This isn’t only a problem of representation – it’s also bad for the industry

Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched. The article considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The paper argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy, despite the importance of culture to British and thus international policy agendas. The article uses the example of higher education in the UK to think through the relationship between cultural consumption and production. In doing, so the article maps out a productive possibility for a new research agenda, by sketching where and how research might link cultural consumption and production to better understand inequality.

Hill offers a much needed discussion of the lack of consideration given to gender in academic discussions of hard rock and metal music and the media. Drawing on her own experience as a musician and fan, the author argues that orthodoxies—e.g., the genre is inclusive, the music asexual and sexism non-existent—are only able to persist within the literature because scholars have neglected to understand how musical experiences are gendered. Within the context of feminist popular music scholarship, work on fandom and feminist methodological work, Hill outlines the need to study hard rock, metal and the media with close attention to the influence of gender.

Hill examines the differing theoretical frameworks, e.g., subculture and scene, used to examine hard rock and metal fans, arguing that these have worked to the detriment of understanding the gendered experience of music, including taking pleasure in the music. She proposes a new way of thinking about fandom that incorporates fans’ feelings of community. Drawing on Anderson’s (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991) theory of the nation, and feminist writings on community (Weiss and Friedman, Feminism and Community. Temple University Press, 1995), she argues that ‘imaginary community’ better reflects fans’ sense of community, whilst allowing deep consideration of the ideology of the community with particular reference to values, beliefs, traditions and myths. She argues that these are deployed to create a sense of cohesion in spite of inequalities and unacknowledged privileges.

This chapter challenges readings of hard rock and metal as masculine music. Hill examines women’s accounts of their experiences of musical pleasure. Through analysis of women fans’ descriptions of their favourite bands, she argues that, pace Kahn-Harris (2007), fans can be very articulate about what they like. Work of feminist writers on rock music is enlisted to argue that considering women’s listening pleasure gives new insights into the meaning of hard rock and metal music. The assumption that hard rock and metal is a masculine genre neglects important aspects of women’s fandom which diverge from the dominant myths.

Chapter 6 considers the allegations that hard rock and metal is sexist. Talking to British women fans reveals that in their experiences, hard rock and metal is less sexist than the ‘mainstream’. Using research on sexism across a range of fields, Hill argues that understanding what counts as sexism is complex and requires critical work by fans when sexism is normalised. Listening to what fans say about the context of their experiences within their broader lives is vital for better understanding. The author argues that the genre provides moments in which women fans may gain a feeling of genderlessness. Ultimately, however, the feeling of liberation only comes through assimilation into the culture, a culture that ignores women as much as possible. Nevertheless, that temporary feeling is a valuable one.

The final chapter argues that close examination of the specific experiences of women in their engagements with the hard rock and metal media, the music, and musical events reveals how the experience of music is shaped by sexist assumptions about women and about how music should be listened to. Musical pleasure does not exist on a universal, transcendental plane. It is informed and shaped by the socio-cultural circumstances of the listener. Hill maintains that it is vital to acknowledge how these circumstances make for differing experiences: it is an important first step for countering sexism. The chapter concludes with a short plan for how hard rock and metal may imagine a genderless future, and how this imagined community might work towards it.

This chapter investigates how Kerrang! magazine, a key part of the metal media, creates an imaginary community of hard rock and metal fans. Using semiotic analysis, the author extrapolates four myths that are forged in the letters pages: two that are presented by the magazine as being common sense values of the community (equality and authenticity) and two that are less obvious, the groupie and the warrior, which determine how women and men are portrayed. These myths work together to depict the imaginary community as ideologically invested in maintaining the masculinity of the genre at the expense of femininity. Hill argues that dominant representations of women in the imaginary community render them as adjuncts to the real members of the community—the men—and this has damaging consequences.

Chapter 4 scrutinises the impact that the myth that women fans are groupies has on British hard rock and metal women fans. Women fans must negotiate the stereotype without accepting the title if they want their fandom to be respected, this results in a defensiveness about sexual and fannish reputations, which is an overtly gendered experience. Hill moves to examine the ways in which women’s desire for musicians and the complicated ways in which it must be negotiated impact on fans’ ability to express their fandom and their sexuality. The problem of the groupie myth lies not just with the expectations it places upon women but also in the ways in which it prevents discussion of more sensual and embodied experiences of musical pleasure.

The gendered nature of safety has been explored empirically and theoretically as awareness has grown of the pervasive challenges to women's safety. Notions of ‘safe space’ are frequently invoked in wider feminist environments (particularly, recently, in relation to debates about trans people's access to women's spaces), but are relatively neglected in academia. Indeed, despite a body of scholarship which looks at questions of gender, safety and space, relatively little attention has been paid to exploring the meaning of ‘safety’ for women and, particularly, the meaning and experience of spaces they consider to be ‘safe.’ Drawing on focus group data with 30 women who attended a two-day, women-only feminist gathering in the UK, this paper analyses experiences of what they describe as ‘safe space’ to explore the significance and meaning of ‘safety’ in their lives. Using their accounts, we distinguish between safe from and safe to, demonstrating that once women are safe from harassment, abuse and misogyny, they feel safe to be cognitively, intellectually and emotionally expressive. We argue that this sense of being ‘safe to’ denotes fundamental aspects of civic engagement, personhood and freedom.

Following a meeting of the Victorian Live Music Roundtable yesterday, Victorian Minister for Consumer Affairs, Gaming and Liquor Regulation Jane Garrett

This article will use the cultural and media materials produced around the death of Chrissy Amphlett as a way of interrogating the fact that surprisingly few resources exist that document or commemorate the contribution of women to the rock music scene in Australia. As Amphlett is unusual in being a woman who has, even before her death, claimed a place in the Australian rock canon, examining materials that are designed to construct her legacy upon her passing will provide examples of how women in Australian rock are discussed. It will be demonstrated that Amphlett’s gender is central to these discussions, and that she is used to both obscure the contributions of other women performers and to deny a need for women musicians to even be an object of discussion at all. These indings will be analysed using Aleida Assmann’s concepts of functional and storage memory, and it will be argued that the lack of information that we have about past female rockers makes it harder for women in Australia to see this ield as one they can participate in, and also makes the retention of memories about currently successful women musicians less likely.

In this study, we conducted semistructured interviews with N = 20 adolescent sexual assault victims who sought postassault help from the medical and legal system to understand young survivors’ disclosure and help-seeking processes. Results revealed three distinct disclosure patterns and pathways to help-seeking. First, in the voluntary disclosure group, victims told their friends, who encouraged them to tell an adult, who then encouraged—and assisted—the survivors in seeking help. Throughout this process, the survivors’ disclosures at each step were within their control and reflected their choices for how to proceed. Second, in the involuntary disclosure pattern, victims also first disclosed to friends, but then those friends told adults about the assault, against the survivors’ wishes; the adults made the victims seek help, which was also against the survivors’ preferences. Third, in situational disclosures, the survivors were unconscious at the time of the assault, and their friends disclosed and sought help on their behalf. We also examined how these initial disclosure patterns related to victims’ continued engagement with these systems.

Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary British society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched. The literature review considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The review argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy. The review concentrates on the ‘big three’ issues of inequality – race, class and gender, where most of the literature is to be found, but also touches on disability, sexuality and spatial inequality. All of the research reviewed suggests an undeniable connection between cultural value and inequality. Understanding that connection is currently impeded by problems with data. The report suggests the political saliency of this topic means that public policy must do more to provide robust research, particularly about cultural production.

This chapter addresses work ‘segregation’ by sex in the cultural industries. We outline some of the main forms this takes, according to our observations: the high presence of women in marketing and public relations roles; the high numbers of women in production co-ordination and similar roles; the domination of men of more prestigious creative roles; and the domination by men of technical jobs. We then turn to explanation: what gender dynamics drive such patterns of work segregation according to sex? Drawing on interviews, we claim that the following stereotypes or prevailing discourses, concerning the distinctive attributes of women and men, may influence such segregation: that women are more caring, supportive and nurturing; that women are better communicators; that women are ‘better organized’; and that men are more creative because they are less bound by rules.