Votre recherche

This article examines our ethical responsibility toward artists engaged in harmful behaviors. Specifically, I demonstrate when and why we are morally obligated to withdraw our public and financial support from Artists Who Cause Harm such as Louis C.K., Terry Richardson, and Ryan Adams. Using a moral distinction presented by Philippa Foot and others, I identify this support as enabling harm when the wealth and influence that we support removes typical barriers that protect victims from harm and interposes barriers that prevent victims from avoiding harm. I proceed to demonstrate that our personal support is morally significant, and we have a moral responsibility to make contributions to collective action when the cost is low or the degree of belief that others will contribute is high. Here we have both a strong belief that others will withdraw support and a relatively low cost to ourselves to do so. I acknowledge that enabling current harms is only a sufficient condition to withdrawing support from an artist and should not minimize other reasons for avoiding certain artists and their works. However, when we do believe that our support enables an artist engaged in harmful behaviors, we have an obligation to withdraw that support.

The economic, social and cultural contributions of the creative industries are essential elements of many societies and their governments' policies. However, there is growing evidence that precarity, competition and lack of regulation within these industries is exacerbating inequalities with respect to gender, race and class. With a focus on gender and sexual harassment among female workers, this study involved 32 in-depth interviews with women working in the Netherlands' creative industries. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Findings suggest that sexual harassment is prevalent, and many women considered it to be part of their occupational culture and career advancement. Four factors influenced this phenomenon: competition for work; industry culture; gendered power relations; and the importance of informal networks. Implications include the need for a climate of non-tolerance, sector-specific research and guidelines, sensitivity training and further work with unions and professional associations to provide worker protection strategies traditionally undertaken by organizations. The article concludes that effective sexual harassment prevention requires action at the individual, educational, sectoral and governmental levels, beginning with public conversations to convey the message that sexual harassment is never acceptable.

Is it appropriate to honor artists who have created great works but who have also acted immorally? In this article, after arguing that honoring involves identifying a person as someone we ought to admire, we present three moral reasons against honoring immoral artists. First, we argue that honoring can serve to condone their behavior, through the mediums of emotional prioritization and exemplar identification. Second, we argue that honoring immoral artists can generate undue epistemic credibility for the artists, which can lead to an indirect form of testimonial injustice for the artists’ victims. Third, we argue, building on the first two reasons, that honoring immoral artists can also serve to silence their victims. We end by considering how we might respond to these reasons.

Despite several high-profile cases and years of #MeToo activism, a lack of systemic change and consistent consequences for many alleged offenders has led journalists and fans to wonder when the popular music and stand-up comedy industries will truly have their ‘MeToo moment.’ In this article, we explain that this moment has already arrived, but has produced inconsistent results in these industries due to the unique cultural and structural obstacles they share, and which frustrate civil sphere actors’ attempts at civil repair. Our analysis draws on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (2018, 2019) theory of societalization – the process by which institutional crises come to be seen as social problems that demand the intervention of civil sphere actors. We argue that where #MeToo and the popular music and stand-up comedy industries are concerned, the process of societalization has been (and will likely continue to be) ‘blocked’ or ‘stalled’ (Alexander, 2018, 2019). We suggest that the potential for societalization is reduced due to a combination of the arts sphere’s anti-civil values and weak institutionalization in the popular music and stand-up comedy industries.

Sex workers are subjects of intrigue in urban and creative economies. Tours of active, deteriorating, or defunct red-light districts draw thousands of tourists every year in multiple municipalities around the world. When cities celebrate significant anniversaries in their histories, local sex worker narratives are often included in arts-based public offerings. When sex workers take up urban space in their day-to-day lives, however, they are criminalised. Urban developers often view sex workers as existing serviceably only as legend. A history of sex work will add allure to an up-and-coming neighbourhood, lending purpose to its reformation into a more appropriately productive space, but the material presence of sex workers in these neighbourhoods is seen as a threat to community wellbeing and property values. This paper considers how sex workers, continuously displaced from environments they have carved out as workspaces, may use the arts to draw attention to these ongoing contradictions. It investigates how sex workers may make visible the idiosyncratic state of providing vitality to a city’s history while simultaneously being excluded from its living present. Most critically, it suggests ways in which sex workers may encourage those involved as producers and consumers of neoliberal urban revitalisation projects to connect these often fatal paradoxes to the laws that criminalise their labour.

Le 19 août 2020, la soprano Chloé Briot dénonce dans La Lettre du Musicien des agressions sexuelles répétées portées par un collègue chanteur lors de la production de l’opéra L’inondation. Faute d’avoir été entendue et défendue par sa direction, elle annonce encore avoir porté plainte devant la justice française dès le mois de mars de la même année et vouloir ainsi « en finir avec la loi du silence ». Pourquoi l’artiste lyrique n’a-t-elle pas été entendue à plusieurs reprises malgré ses plaintes auprès de ses collègues et de la production ? Dans quelle mesure cette agression sexuelle est-elle symptomatique d’un mode de fonctionnement sexiste plus large du monde de l’opéra français ? Peut-on parler effectivement d’une « loi du silence » dénoncée par la chanteuse ? Si oui, que risquent ceux et celles qui dénonceraient des faits sexistes et des violences sexuelles ?

In October 2017, #metoo 2.0 reinforces the gendered sexual violence in the creative sector [Marghitu, 2018. “It’s Just art: Auteur Apologism in the Post-Weinstein era”, Feminist Media Studies, 18(93): 491–494] Building on this movement, on 11 November that year, 2912 women “testified about the situation in the Swedish music industry”, signing an open letter condemning sexual violence [Nyheter, 2017. “2192 Women in the Swedish Music Industry Behind Appeal Against Sexism.” Dagens Nyheter, November 17. https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/2192-women-in-the-swedish-music-industry-behind-appeal-against-sexism/]. After the Swedish initiative, on 12 December 2017, the #meNOmore hashtag was established by 1000 women who signed an open letter to the Australian music industry speaking out against similar behaviour [Whyte, 2017a. “Artists Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment in the Music Industry.” AM – ABC Radio, December 13. https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/sexual-harassment-in-the-music-industry/9253956]. Using a content analysis framework, this study examines the media framing of 26 stories about #meNOmore by the Western press from 22 November 2017 (height of the Swedish campaign) to 21 December 2017 (a week after the hashtag surfaced in Australia). Research from journalism studies and musicology highlights that sexual violence is historically engrained in the media and music industries. However, findings from our study of the first month’s coverage of the #meNOmore content analysis in 2017 reveal that media reports about women and sexual violence were framed around addressing gender inequality and systemic structural issues in the music industry. This raises the question, has the media has turned a corner when covering sexual violence in the post #metoo era?

This article contextualizes some of the roles that women played in Montreal’s interwar jazz scene. The archives testify to the importance of pianists such as Vera Guilaroff and Ilene Bourne, piano teacher Daisy Peterson Sweeney, dance teachers Olga Spencer Foderingham and Ethel Bruneau, as well as black women performers on the variety stage in the development of Canada’s most thriving jazz scene in the first half of the twentieth century. This article explains why women were drawn to these particular performance spaces (piano, teaching, theatrical dance) and documents the historiographical processes that have led to their marginalization from the historical record.

Dance, ballet and modern in particular, is culturally defined as a feminine activity in the United States. The purpose of the present study was to examine the experiences of professional male modern and ballet dancers in the United States. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 current professional ballet and modern dancers. We examined the ways in which the dancers initially became involved in dance, any support or opposition they may have confronted, and the ways in which they negotiated the stereotypical assumptions surrounding men’s involvement in dance. Four emergent themes are discussed: (1) exposure to and entrance into dance; (2) the gay stereotype; (3) negotiating the gay stereotype; and (4) homophobia within the dance community. The social significance of this study is rooted in the ways in which our culture constructs gender, the body, and movement, restricting both males and females from using and exploring their bodies in ways not deemed gender-appropriate. Attention is also given to the ways in which we can create and nurture meaningful experiences for a greater number of individuals.

Recent research about sexuality and dance has begun to address the needs of gay male dancers, yet the needs of lesbian dancers have remained mostly absent from scholarly discourse. Exploring the lesbian lacunae, or invisible spaces of dance education, reveals the personal, political, and pedagogical implications of their existence within the dance community. The experiences of lesbian dancers “on the fringe” combined with new approaches to acknowledging lesbian artists and perspectives within dance history suggest the need for re-envisioning lesbian invisibility as a “liminal presence” within dance. In addition, ways dance educators can reduce the effects of heterocentrism within their institutions and celebrate the contributions of lesbian artists and educators to the field are proposed. By reconfiguring the invisibility of lesbian dancers as a liminal presence, we make visible the borders and limits of the dance profession's notions of sexuality and gender, acceptance and equality, and thereby strengthen our potential for dancing beyond them.

Chaz Bono’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) marks one of the first primetime, network appearances of a postoperative transgender person. This article deconstructs the mediated gender subjectivities of Bono as constructed by the show itself via prerecorded segments, costume and song choices, dance partner interaction, and judges’ commentaries as well as those projected by Bono during the live, unscripted portions of the show. Combining notions of the normalization of taboo sexual subjectivities through mediated contexts with lens of gender performativity, we demonstrate how transgender subjectivities are presented to a mainstream audience via such mediated choices, but also how Bono welds some agency to resist such normalization through his live performances. Bono’s appearance on DWTS stands as an important step toward acceptance of transgendered persons in mainstream society, however through a neutered, sex-free rhetoric as projected by the mediated portions of the show, his appearance is not without controversy. Additionally, we posit that Bono represents a transnormativity of a White, upper-class postoperative heterosexual male, which others all transgendered persons who fall outside of those hegemonic parallels of safe subjectivities.

Over the last decade, mainstream media sources from the US and UK have shown an increased interest in topics involving transgender and non-binary populations. Yet, their portrayals of such individuals tend to reaffirm rather than challenge cisnormative ideas surrounding bodies and gender. In this article, we consider this ongoing trend within the highly body-centric, traditionally-gendered artform—classical ballet. With a transgender studies and dance studies lens, we analyze current discourse surrounding the recent move for classical ballet companies and schools to adapt casting and training curricula to better include non-binary dancers. Through these analyses we reveal ways media sensationalizes the transgender body by focusing on information regarding hormone therapy and surgeries, and with the topic of ballet in mind, how this transphobic move becomes intertwined with ballet-specific processes of reshaping the body. We claim that although these popular press pieces contribute to a greater awareness of the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary dancers, they simultaneously reiterate ongoing balletic gender tropes that mark the artform as feminine and designate particular body types and movements to specific binarized genders.

A few pioneers have shown the way, but who will follow?