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Following revelations about sexual abuse in theatre and other entertainment industries in autumn 2017, this chapter explores the conditions which allow or

The term ‘Night-Time Economy’ was coined in the late twentieth century (Shaw 2014) in town planning circles, and increasingly used into the twenty-first century to describe the expanding number of pubs, bars and clubs concentrated in city centres and targeting predominantly 18–24-year-olds (Roberts 2006: 332). But what exactly is the Night-Time Economy, and what role does it play in the lives of young women today? How has it changed as a site of leisure, and what does it mean to say that neoliberal forces have played a role in shaping it? What do we mean by the supposed ‘feminisation’ of the NTE, and what are the implications of this process for the ways that women engage with these spaces? This chapter charts the development of the NTE in the UK and the rise of the ‘24-hour city’, highlighting the ways in which neoliberal ideals have shaped both the landscape of the NTE and the types of behaviours and consumption practices that are expected within it. Such considerations are important for research that attends both to the wider social structures within the NTE and the individual specificities of the lives of young people as they participate in it. I will then explore the significance of space and place in research focusing on the NTE, situating the current study geographically and exploring Newcastle’s own NTE in more depth and detail.

As has become increasingly evident throughout this book, the girls’ night out clearly offers specific and nuanced ways in which to do femininities and friendships which are not present in other types of night out, and perhaps also specific types of pressures to do femininity. Whilst the NTE is increasingly recognised as a useful avenue through which to research young people’s lives, less attention has been given to the girls’ night out as a specific type of engagement with the NTE that may illuminate nuances in the ways in which young women ‘do’ gender and femininities. This book thus marks a unique contribution within a wider body of research on young people’s drinking and clubbing. This concluding chapter will pull together the main arguments outlined throughout this book, highlighting the tensions and contradictions embedded in young women’s negotiations of femininity and the ways in which these reflect the idea that the successful embodiment of ‘girly’ and ‘girliness’ is simultaneously something that is desired yet derided.

‘Going out’ is widely recognised as a central leisure activity in the lives of many young people (Chatterton and Hollands, Urban nightscapes: Youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. Routledge, 2003; Waitt et al., ‘The guys in there just expect to be laid’: Embodied and gendered socio-spatial practices of a ‘night out’ in Wollongong, Australia. Gender, Place & Culture, 18(2), pp. 255–275, 2011), and engaging in leisure practices in the Night-Time Economy (NTE) is likely to be an important part of women’s lives in the UK. Indeed, the ‘night on the town’ is framed in many research accounts as offering important opportunities for young women to relax, socialise with friends and escape from the often mundane realities of everyday life, work and other responsibilities (Guise and Gill, ‘Binge drinking? It’s good, it’s harmless fun’: A discourse analysis of accounts of female undergraduate drinking in Scotland. Health Education Research, 22(6), pp. 895–906, 2007; Jayne et al., Emotional, embodied and affective geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(4), pp. 540–554, 2010). Yet, young women’s experiences of the NTE are also clearly shaped by neoliberal and gendered expectations around consumption, body work and self-regulation. In particular, it is important to explore in more depth how—within a supposed ‘post-feminist’ context—expectations around ‘appropriately’ feminine dress and behaviour may continue to shape the experiences of young women like Nicole in contemporary leisure spaces. But what does it actually mean and look like for young women to be ‘feminine’ today? Is this something that is relevant or important to them? How are tensions around girliness and femininity lived and negotiated in practice in women’s everyday lives? And crucially, is it still more difficult for some women to adopt ‘appropriately’ feminine identities than others? This book considers these questions and explores the ways in which women’s participation in the UK NTE continues to be constrained in a supposedly post-feminist society (Harris, Jamming girl culture: Young women and consumer citizenship. In A. Harris (ed.) All about the girl: Culture, power and identity. Routledge, 2004).

With what Chatterton and Hollands call the ‘ritual descent’ (2002: 95) of young women into bars and clubs every weekend, we must take seriously young women’s participation in such spaces and explore further what role participating in the NTE plays in young women’s lives. Participating in the NTE has been increasingly recognised as an important component of the lives of many young women (Hollands 1995), and the participants in my study were no exception. Set against a backdrop of conflicting debates positioning the NTE as simultaneously a site of both pleasure and regulation, it is important to understand the value engaging with the NTE has for young women and the ways in which this can offer opportunities for ‘doing’ femininities or girliness and cementing friendships within these spaces. The girls’ night out represents a discreet and distinctive mode of engagement with the NTE, yet one that has received little attention in research, despite the fact that it is likely to reveal a huge amount about the individual and collective production and negotiation of femininities and friendships in nightlife venues. This chapter provides the backdrop for the remainder of the book by exploring what the girls’ night out means to young women and the central role it can play in the negotiation and maintenance of friendships and in doing ‘girly’. Whilst previous research has depicted friendships within the NTE as potentially shallow or instrumental and consumption practices as highly individualised, this chapter highlights the ways in which going out was described as an important and valued opportunity to maintain close female friendships, spend time together and enjoy opportunities to socialise and relax. I will also introduce some of the ways in which alcohol consumption was central to the young women’s negotiations of the NTE. Drinking could take on a particular role on the girls’ night out, where alcohol could function in the maintenance and cementing of friendships and the creation of intimacy (particularly when ‘pre-drinking’ at home). Consuming certain types of alcohol could also enable ‘girliness’ to be embodied in particular ways through certain consumption choices. I argue that the ‘girling’ of drinking and clubbing is particularly significant because alcohol consumption in public spaces has traditionally been recognised as a masculine pastime, rendering drinking and femininity fundamentally incompatible. If young women are able to rupture the linkages between public drinking and masculinity, they may be able to recast women’s presence and alcohol consumption in the contemporary NTE as feminine and respectable. I also explore the ways in which getting ready for a girls’ night offered further opportunities to do girliness collectively.

Against a backdrop of research suggesting that young women are still expected to engage in active risk management on a night out (Brooks, ‘Guys! Stop doing it!’: Young women’s adoption and rejection of safety advice when socializing in bars, pubs and clubs. British Journal of Criminology, 51(4), pp. 635–651, 2011), this chapter will explore the centrality of understanding of space and visibility to young women’s negotiations of risk and safety in mainstream bars and clubs in Newcastle’s NTE. Visibility comes into play in two distinct ways here—firstly, as in the previous chapter, participants drew on narratives of ‘fitting in’, this time to describe the types of venues that felt comfortable and safe to them. Attending a venue where they felt out of place or ‘different’ to other patrons could leave women feeling exposed, visible and vulnerable, and these spaces were positioned as risky and dangerous. Secondly, women recognised that bars and clubs are spaces where ‘everyday’ experiences of heterosexualised violence are trivialised and normalised, and they managed their dress and appearance in particular ways in order to position themselves as less visible—or even invisible—to try to avoid ‘unwanted attention’ and harassment.

As the previous chapter has highlighted, alcohol consumption plays an important role in the maintenance of friendships and in the individual and collective production of ‘girly’ or feminine identities in the NTE. Yet long-standing and pervasive images of alcohol consumption as a threat to femininity mean women’s negotiations of drinking continue to be fraught with tensions and ambivalences. In something of a paradox, ‘the contradictions engendered by post-feminist discourse constitute drunkenness as unfeminine, [yet] young women are enthusiastically exhorted to consume within the neoliberal culture of intoxication’ (Hutton et al. 2016: 82). In other words, to be a good, neoliberal citizen within leisure sites such as the NTE requires women to consume alcohol, yet the demands of femininity necessitate that they also show restraint. At the same time, the NTE is portrayed as a site where abandonment, hedonism and ‘rowdy’ behaviour are to an extent normalised, perhaps even encouraged, yet such behaviour ruptures traditional expectations of femininity as passive and ‘ladylike’. How do women negotiate and make sense of some of these tensions as they confront the ‘orderly disorder’ (Smith 2014: 2) of a typical night out? Is there a degree of acceptance of ‘rowdy’ or transgressive behaviour? And how does this sit alongside an expectation to be girly, as outlined in the previous chapter?

This chapter charts the ways in which young women’s negotiations of dress in the NTE are shaped by notions of visibility and authenticity and also by class. I explore the ways in which an exaggerated or emphasised mode of femininity is normalised to an extent within the NTE and highlight some of the pleasures and values young women found in their negotiations of femininity through dress, whether wholeheartedly embracing or ‘flashing’ femininity. Tensions and ambivalences are exposed as the participants both adopted and resisted elements of ‘girly’ and ‘tomboy’ identities. I then explore the ways in which forms of classed othering function to construct the feminine self in contrast to those who are perceived to lack the taste and resources to ‘do’ femininity appropriately and instead embody a somehow inauthentic and overdone performance of femininity. I briefly consider the intersections between hyper-feminine and ‘slutty’ dress, and finally explore how attempts by working-class young women to resignify a more excessive look as ‘glamorous’ may be mocked and judged beyond the local context.

This chapter considers “passion” as an enthusiastic orientation to work within creative worlds: work motivated by intense attachments to the products of work and their conditions of production. Drawing on Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique and justification, the chapter argues that the passionate lens most usefully trains our sights on normative questions: not what or how—but why such work is undertaken. Embedded in research on cultural and creative industries, the contemporary recorded music sector is presented as a “passionate” industry in transformation. Interviews with workers, who both criticize and defend their industry, act as a springboard to explore three possible interpretive approaches: affirmative, critical, and pragmatic. Theoretical flexibility is needed to keep “passion” open to future inquiry—particularly regarding inequalities in creative work.

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.

This chapter explores the sexual spatialisation of salsa dance spaces through the narratives of lesbian salsa dancers. It draws on conversations with seven

Efforts to map women’s participation in the music industries have been hampered by a lack of data. However, available statistics point to a continuing underrepresentation of women in the music industries; and the disparity is particularly acute within certain areas of practice. In 2010 the Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS), the UK’s leading collection society, revealed that women accounted for only 14 percent of their registered music creators and writers. This statistic prompted the PRS Foundation to fund the “Women Make Music” initiative as a way to raise awareness of the gender gap, correct stereotypes, encourage participation, and increase the profile of women creating new music. Research commissioned in 2008 by the Cultural Leadership Programme and publishedas a substantial report, found that in the UK music sector “only 20% of businesses have any form of female representation on the management team and only 10% have an all female team” (Cultural Leadership Programme 2008: 29). According to the report, women in the music sector were generally very underrepresented within positions of responsibility: the average number of female executives per firm was as low as 0.2. Such evidence of gender inequality in leadership positions within the music industries is by no means unique to the UK. In 2012 the editorial team of the Australasian Music Industry Directory (AMID), in consultation with other industry professionals, ranked for the first time the most powerful people in the Australian music industry. The criteria included who has the greatest “ability to ‘shape’ the scene,” along with “their involvement in industry initiatives, overall career accomplishment, economic impact and public profile” (Fitzsimons 2012). The “power list” included 50 places and 56 people (some business partners held joint positions). Only six women appeared on the list, two of whom shared their place with a male colleague; overall, then, women were just under 11 percent. While the list can be critiqued for its partiality, it indicates the music industries’ gender gap. Books on women working in the music industries usually focus on women musiciansand performers, often with the aim of celebrating women’s contribution to the history of popular music (see, for example, Dahl 1984; Gaar 1993; Hirshey 2001; Downes 2012). In documenting women’s experience, field research with musicians has shownhow women have established their music careers, from acquiring instruments and learning to play, to performing and navigating the music business (see, e.g., Bayton 1998; Tucker 2000; Reddington 2007; Leonard 2007). A few specifically highlight women involved in music production and sound engineering (Sandstrom 2000; Smith 2009). Some recent work on women’s changing relationship with music technologies examines how artist-producers (Wolfe 2012) and women involved in the electronic dance music scene (Farrugia 2012) have navigated a gendered sphere of practice which has historically and discursively been associated with masculinity. Music journalism has also been a focus, with critical accounts addressing the work of women music journalists and the gendered discourse of music journalism (McDonnell 1995; Davies 2001; McLeod 2001). While the literature on women musicians, journalists, DJs, and music engineers is growing, the experience of women working in other roles within the music sector is much less well documented. Indeed, Smith (2009: 308) remarks that, except for musicianship, “scholarship on gender segregation in other music industry roles has been meagre. Because of this, the gendered division of labour in the music industry is not yet adequately understood.” This chapter explores how gendered attitudes circulate within the workplace andin what ways they frame work in different sectors of the music industries. The plural term “music industries” suggests the chapter is not engaging with a unified field of practice, nor is it concerned only with the recording industry (Williamson and Cloonan 2007). I will draw on interviews with eight women who have worked in artist management, tour management, A&R (artist and repertoire), and concert promotion, although first I discuss the contexts in which these women work as a way to establish the extent to which their occupations can be broadly characterized as sex segregated. These women work in largely under-studied but particularly sex-segregated areasof music employment. All eight were based in London, England and ranged in levels of seniority from a booking agent’s assistant to a general manager of a record company. Many of the women had established portfolio careers, having worked in different roles, including radio promotion, international relations, music publishing, and marketing, so had different levels of experience in management, A&R, and concert promotion. For example, one participant worked for two years at a junior level in A&R before moving on to develop expertise in other areas, eventually becoming a general manager of a record company. Another participant began as a regional A&R scout and was promoted to A&R manager, where she stayed ten years. Therefore, they could offer a broad perspective: collectively they were engaged with international professional networks, international tour management, and the management and career development of artists building international profiles. The majority of them worked with rock bands and artists but some had worked with artists in other genres. The participants could also reflect on their experience of working with artists at different stages of career development, from new and developing bands through to major international recording stars. Seven of the approximately hour-long interviews were conducted by telephone; their responses to the open-ended questions were recorded and transcribed. One respondent offered a written response to the research questions via email. The women all seemed candid in their responses. Their comments have been anonymized; references to particular record labels, bands, or named individuals have been omitted.