Barbara Bradby

• Trinity College Dublin

This article draws on research done with migrant women in Bolivia about their hospital birth experiences. It describes the cultural strategies of negotiation employed by migrant women, which draw on rural Andean models of birth. One of these strategies is to go to hospital but give birth to the baby alone there, only accepting attention with the “a...

If rock'n'roll represented new, sexualised gender identities for the teenagers of the late 1950s, why (and how) were such identities constructed through the multiple voices of the group? In Buddy Holly's ‘Oh, Boy!’ the chorus plays a prominent supportive role in relation to the lead singer; but its continual echoing of the singer's ‘Oh boy!’ allows...

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth...

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of...

Ever since the first systematic study of Peruvian music (d'Harcourts 1925), musicologists have puzzled over the relationship of pentatonic, or five-note music, to other modes of music in the Andes. At that time the enquiry was related to the general musicological debate over whether the pentatonic was the universal form of primitive ‘scale’, from w...

Far from the 'Perfect Duet' sung by Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran in 2017, a quantification of gender on the annual Billboard charts from 1955 to 2017 shows that the 21st century has seen a reversal of the gains made by women in the latter decades of the 20th. However, the figures also show that in periods when female acts have declined, mixed-gender acts...

This chapter stems from a moment in November 2005-not long into our research project on migrant music in Ireland-which became a turning-point in our thinking about the topic. Focusing on how new music was entering public, urban spaces, we were looking at concerts and promotion of musics 'other' than the two mainstreams of popular music in Ireland (...

The Beatles' admiration for the US girl-groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s has generally been taken to imply an "androgynous" positioning on their part, particularly in their covers of girl-group songs. However, a comparison of the discourses of girl-group and early Beatles love songs shows a clear distinction between active and passive expre...

This chapter discusses local knowledge in the area of health and medicine in the Andes. It highlights the conflicts between the knowledge and practices of traditional Andean midwifery and those of Western scientific medicine.

Academic work on popular music has had a difficult and intermittent relationship with work on gender and sexuality. Bursts of intense debate have been followed by years of scholarly silence, and questions that were raised in the early days of rock writing remain unresolved today. Is rock a male form? And if so, is this achieved through the gender o...

In a study of childbirth practices in Bolivia, migrant women from rural areas who had given birth in hospital expressed strongly negative feelings about the way in which the experience of birth had become sexualised, under the ‘male gaze’. This arose because of the display involved in lying in front of male doctors with their legs open (the ‘gynaec...

The necessities of the expanded reproduction of capitalism result in the articulation of the capitalist mode of production with ‘precapitalist’ modes. The nature of this articulation and its consequences for the ‘pre-capitalist’ mode of production is a function, first and predominantly, of the needs of the capitalist mode and second, of the interna...