Stirling, C. (2016) '"Beyond the Dancefloor"? Gendered Publics and Creative Practices in Electronic Dance Music', Contemporary Music Review 35(1): 130-149.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2015), this article addresses the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed 2004) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with change.
