Ann Werner

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Musicology

During the past decades media technologies for producing and consuming popular music have gone through major changes. The digitalization of older media and so-called new media has transformed the landscape for music use. Technological developments in radio, television, the internet, computers, mobile phones and mp3 players shape the ways in which p...

With the internet and digital media technology increasingly central to practices around music, this shift is often seen as contributing to a networked music use characterized by individualism. Drawing on a focus group study with young adults in Stockholm and Moscow, this article argues, however, that digital music use today is shaped by discourses...

The importance of understanding gender, space and mobility as co-constructed in public space has been emphasized by feminist researchers (Massey 2005, Hanson 2010). And within feminist theory materiality, affect and emotions has been described as central for experienced subjectivity (Ahmed 2012). Music listening while moving through public space ha...

Human feeling or emotion is a growing area of interest for cultural theory, particularly as a site of cultural negotiations of symbolic and affective kinds (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 1997; Massumi, 2002). Rather than perceiving emotions as a 'thing' outside or determined by culture, seeing emotions as an important part of the cultural process opens up...

Popular music is produced, listened to and distributed all over the world. While there is no doubt that popular music studies, as well as popular music histories and the commercial popular music industry is predominantly Anglophone, popular music is not. This might seem like an obvious statement but looking at current discussions in the field of po...

Countries in the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe have been called home by some of the great composers of music history, and the region hosts some of the world’s most prestigious higher classical music education institutions. Despite this fact, Liisamaija Hautsalo states in her essay, the last of this section, that the Finnish-born composer K...

Classical music is an artform symbolically and materially constructing ideas about nation and gender. The conservatoire, the highest music education institution, is a central institution of classical music, gendering instruments and building on ideas about feminine and masculine styles of music. Further, patriotism and nationalism have been evident...

This chapter considers the representation of students, faculty and classical music on the websites of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (Estonia), the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts (Finland) and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Hungary) in the context of neoliberalism affecting higher music education and the classical music lab...

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in pop- ular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with c...

In recent years, a growing body of research has been reassessing the role of higher music education institutions in light of the challenges posed by the dominant neoliberal economic system and the growing sensitivity to the reproduction of social inequalities in access to higher education and the labour market. This open access book offers internat...

In this article interpersonal communication in Gender Studies teaching is mapped and compared in feminist pedagogy in three universities: Södertörn University in Sweden, Novgorod State University in Russia and Vilnius University in Lithuania. The aim of this article is, first, to compare the uses of feminist methodologies in teaching during the fir...

Vad betyder dokusåpan du ser på tv? Eller deckaren du läser på väg till jobbet? Spellistan du lyssnar på? Reklamskyltarna på bussen? Vilka föreställningar om kön möter vi omkring oss, och hur kan vi förstå dem? Kulturen återspeglar världen. Genom att analysera kulturen kan du också förstå den värld du lever i. De ojämlikheter som finns där finns oc...

Through #MeToo social media feminist digital grass root activism, in tweets, threads, and groups, in petitions and in the intermedial debates following the hashtag, a girl took shape. This girl was constructed as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, or duped and was central for bringing on feminist social change in policy and practice in the 2010’s. The f...

When the need of transforming and remixing music education is illuminated, fields of tensions in relation to the traditional master-apprentice model of teaching often appear. Binaries have been constructed and critiqued in research to describe tensions at various music educational levels. Some studies have also asked for a holistic, "both/and" hold...

This article takes its’ starting point in the ongoing debate about gender and gender equality in higher music education (HME) institutions where new policies, projects and initiatives have been developed during the first decades of the 21st century. This article’s analysis is framed by feminist scholarship on gender equality, and gender mainstreami...

I kapitlet analyseras berättelserna från #närmusikentystnat som arkiverats för att besvara frågan hur genus och feministisk politik föreställs i dem.

What does it mean, in a polarized political climate, that feminism is popular in mainstream popular music during the 2010s? Engaging with feminist theory and previous research about gender and music, this book investigates the meaning of current trends relating to gender, feminism and woman-identified artists in mediated popular music. The examples...

Based on a national Swedish survey among former gender studies students followed by focus group interviews, this article investigates the students’ perspectives on gender studies and work. We ask how they understand their education in between generic critical knowledge and the labor market. How can the students’ backgrounds and talk about gender st...

This article focuses on the concept of ”strong women” in popular music and interrogates the idea of role models. Ideas of ”strong women” are analysed in the context of a contemporary Western society characterised by neo-liberalism and post-feminism. Advocacy of role models is regarded as an example of a political strategy that places the responsibi...

In this article, the music, lyrics, and music videos of Maxida Märak’s 2019 debut solo album Utopi (Utopia) are analysed using feminist, decolonial theories. The article discusses how the construction of resistance to colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist oppressions takes form on Utopi, and shows popular music’s relationship to feminist and Indige...

This article builds on research about gender in music practice, concerned with skewed musical canons, ratios and quotas of gender representation, unfair treatment and power dynamics, and the exclusionary enmeshment with music technologies. The aim is to critically discuss what ‘gender’ is understood to be, how it has been studied and how gendered p...

Sammendrag I den här artikeln analyseras marknadsföringen av The Smirnoff Equaliser utifrån syftet att undersöka vilken sorts feministisk medieintervention (Gill, 2016) verktyget presenteras som och hur verktyget placeras in i musiklyssnandets algoritmiska kultur (Morris, 2015; Striphas, 2015). The Equaliser mäter könsbalansen i Spotifys användares...

In this article, the gendered aspects of music streaming are discussed as both discursive and material processes. Its findings are based on focus group discussions about music streaming, analysis of the functions of a music streaming service (Spotify), and examples of when this service promotes gender equality. Using a science and technology perspe...

This chapter is a collective autoethnography that reveals the messiness and fractured identities of (non)mothers and (non)researchers in and out of academic contexts. Luce Irigaray’s writing on breath, interiority and autonomy brings together the reflections. In Between East and West, Irigaray (2002) has learnt “the importance of breathing in order...

Spotify is self-reporting to have 232 million monthly active users in July 2019, including 108 million paying subscribers. Often naturalized by listeners as a mere window into great collections of music, Spotify is an intricate network of music recommendations governed by algorithms, displayed as a visual interface of photos, text, clickable links,...

‘What does gender have to do with music?’, is in this article a question explored in order to 1) give an overview of important themes and areas in feminist interdisciplinary research on music and gender from the past decades, and to 2) theoretically advance what is specific about music’s relation to gender, and discuss how music and gender research...

this article focuses on the concept of "strong women" in popular music and interrogates the idea of role models. ideas of "strong women" are analysed in the context of a contemporary western society characterised by neo-liberalism and post-feminism. advocacy of role models is regarded as an example of a political strategy that places the responsibi...

Often when equality in music culture is discussed-in public debate as well as research contexts-it seems hard to avoid talking about numbers, and cis women. How many women are in the room? How many women DJs, producers, guitar players, singers, and executive record label managers are there? The word balance-which was also in the title of a recent c...

This chapter explores identity issues in commercial streaming services, which have grown steadily in the 2010s to become the dominant form of music consumption in the Nordic countries, with about 60% of all Internet users in 2015. The chapter offers an alternative to the dominant trend in music industry studies by focusing not on the industry’s int...

In the past decades a large number of students have taken courses and degrees in Gender Studies around Europe and proceeded to find employment. This article is based on a quantitative and qualitative study carried out in 2012 of Gender Studies students in Sweden, their education and employment. The design of the study was inspired by a large Europe...

In 2006 while I was conducting research about music use and gender among teenage girls in a Swedish town, one of the girls I was working with sent me an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video clip of a toddler dancing to Shakira’s song ‘Hips Don’t Lie’. Before Facebook, distributing URL links in e-mails was a common method for spreading viral videos...

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork done with a group of 14 to 16 year-old girls in a medium sized Swedish town. The study aimed to investigate the relationship between everyday music use and gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The question posed here is: "What negotiations take place when the girls discuss their favorite music and artists...

Den här skriften handlar om genusvetenskapens pedagogiska och didaktiska verksamhet. Den handlar om vad som händer i det genusvetenskapliga klassrummet, hur lärandeprocesserna och utmaningarna ser ut och vad som betraktas som viktiga pedagogiska ställningstaganden. Den handlar om hur lärare i genusvetenskap på olika sätt arbetar för att skapa goda...