278 Liz Dobson
But symbolic capital, the currency of credibility around who we assume
to be in command, can be given:
If you can be at least with other people who are mutually empower-
ing and not competitive or not about throwing knowledge around,
or throwing weight around, that doesn’t necessarily have to be
an all-female space, but it does have to be understood that that is
what we’re going after. It’s easier in some ways to be, okay, let’s
just make it an all-female or female identied space because then
to some degree we know what we’re after and what some of our
mutual values are.
Fischer
. . . and empowerment is separate from gender:
how we deal with gender in society and, moreover, how we deal with
power in society and where our feelings of being empowered come
from or disempowered come from, and that it’s not necessarily a one
on one relation to male/female binary but has something to do with a
lot of other elements.
Fischer
Indeed, Goh and Thompson’s Cyberfeminist (Haraway, 1990) inspired
development of sonic cyberfeminism (Goh, 2014; Thompson, 2018) asks
us to deconstruct our very conceptual framing of society as a precursor
to system change, to address “the very categories in which we think and
speak, the very categories which create the gendered subjects we com-
monly call ‘male’ and ‘female’ ” (Goh, 2014: 57). Sonic Cyberfeminism
offers “a way of understanding better the logics of inclusion and exclu-
sion which are at play” (Goh, 2018: 86), referring not only to gender but
also our conceptions of technology that further embed and reinforce norms
around class, race, gender, and disability.
I suggest that the more empowering audio education situations include
better opportunities for learning because staff understand the learner’s pri-
orities and interests, create more appropriate spaces (socially and physi-
cally) by exploring less hierarchical models of education, and encourage
confidential feedback around inclusion, the learning environment, and the
curriculum design, as much as the delivery. As educators I suggest that
we consider who we are intentionally and unintentionally empowering
through our course design and delivery.
POLICING SELF
My conversation with Rezza required a translator. She narrates her experi-
ence of difference in the electroacoustic performance domain:
. . . when she came here [to the festival we both attended] and needed
to prepare the presentation and to deal with other people in the festi-
val, especially the technicians, they all were men, all of them. So in
279 Conversations in Berlin
that context they were somehow discussing technical issues or tech-
nicalities about the sound and whatever, she doesn’t feel that because
they are evil or mean in any way, but only because they are men, they
just put her aside somehow and did not include her by themselves
in the conversation. One of the things that she was learning during
this process of the [festival name] was to deal in a context in which
she needed to negotiate with almost 12 men at the same time in the
same room. She learnt that she needed to let them discuss rst and to
have this thing of who knows more about this and who knows more
about this. After that she just put herself in the middle and started giv-
ing her points of view. She said I [the translator who is male] was so
blinded about that, so using the situations we were sharing during this
process, she made me truly, I don’t know, acknowledge the fact that
these things happen and that it was happening in front of my eyes and
I wasn’t really aware of that. I was like why are you so aected about
this meeting and she said no, you didn’t realise that this and this and
this happened. Then I started paying more attention and yes, it was
happening actually, it was happening all of the time. She says that she
was able to kind of put in context a lot of things that I wasn’t, as a man,
really aware of in this kind of situation.
She says that it was actually a very enjoyable process and a fun
process, because she had this fun way of dealing with it and kind of
understanding that dealing with it in a fun way could be better than
dealing in a negative, ominous way.
[Rezza] thinks that if she hasn’t her ideas as clear as she has, per-
haps they will always override her or somehow ignore her. But as long
as she was very minimal in what she was saying but at the same time
very clear about what she wanted and how she wanted it, they were
very receptive at the end. Men in a group is the problem. Men sepa-
rately it’s just okay, they can speak at the same level.
Rezza had to find her way in to navigate a lot of male energy. There
are power dynamics amongst men, described as male “homosociality, a
hierarchical structure in which men compete together ‘as a team’, whilst
simultaneously policing themselves and others against and by accusations
of effeminacy (Sedgwick, 1985; Hawkins, 2017: 36).
GENDER FEEDBACK LOOP
One magazine I love is called [Name removed] Magazine, I think it’s great.
They produce great content, but early on I was reading it and I wrote a
piece about . . . I went through and I noted all of the male names that
were the author, the editor or mentioned in the entire magazine [to] female.
I noticed that the ratio was . . . something like 200 to four. So, I was thinking
about this in relation to music, like electronic music and the idea of the
remix, and so I was thinking part of the problem is just that if all of your
references are male, then you’re going to remix those same males. Who
are your samples? Your samples are men and then you sample from those.
Fischer
280 Liz Dobson
If all your tools are already men and your references are already men,
mostly, then mathematically you’re just going to keep having more and
more and more of them. So the less women that we see, it obviously
is going to produce that in the way that we write and the way that we
talk about it. I think a lot of it is about trend and who we are talking
about actually. This online, just names that are thrown around as who is
important and who to listen to. There is a lot of elitism in that and there is
a lot of who you know, name your call kind of stu.
It’s sad but also understandable in the sense that we’re so saturated
with new artists, new sounds, new music, you can’t possibly listen to
everything. So if your best friend, who you respect tells you listen to
this person, then you do. I think a lot of things operate that way to some
extent.
Fischer
The individual and systemic issues that shape this homogenous male
majority in audio remains unchallenged, may be connected with a long
and unchallenged precedent of ‘self’-amplification, possibly shaped by
confirmation bias that constantly brings us back to the same narratives and
people. In popular culture, people who have established greater promi-
nence on the scene ultimately reinforce the greater prominence of a par-
ticular white male demographic in audio.
Still, in 2019, the majority of computer scientists developing systems
that touch every aspect of our individual lives are men. Research approved
for publication in computer science (including digital signal processing)
prioritizes certain people and topics (Alessandrini, 2007), but it is also
a cautionary example for our own technological eld [computer
music, but also broader areas of audio systems development] of how
discourses contributing to discrimination are re- produced – con-
sciously or unconsciously – in institutions, ultimately determining not
only who performs research, but what research is performed.
(Alessandrini, 2018: 6)
Alessandrini asks how this research could be different “if the relevant
fields were more inclusive in terms of gender and race?” (Alessandrini,
2018: 8). It is not enough to create better spaces and check our bias; we
must diversify our awareness, and engage with the writers, thinkers, inno-
vators, and explorers who bring diverse lives and contributions. It is not
sufficient to make women and racialized minorities more visible, to tick
a diversity box, or be seen supporting diverse people, because diversity
takes us to much more diverse places, and this makes me feel so optimistic
for the future of audio.
I believe this begins with education. Patrick Bell suggests that we need to:
foster a culture in which learners go beyond simply using music
technologies and retroactively navigating their pre-programmed
biases to avoid perpetuating a simplistic user mentality. Instead,
281 Conversations in Berlin
music educators must engage their students in activities of iterative
technological tinkering that nurture a design mentality. Then, not
only will we play the studio, but we will design it too.
(Bell, 2015: 140)
I urge you to watch this stunning short film from the Yorkshire Sound
Women Network (https://tinyurl.com/YSWNsolder), because this cap-
tures Bell’s sentiment perfectly. Not only are the girls inspired by audio
electronics, but they realize that with this knowledge they can change the
world.
To accomplish this though, we must also acknowledge and deal with
issues of sexism, racism, unconscious bias, discrimination, and tokenism
within STEM, music technology, and music cultures.
KEY RESOURCES
Questions for Reflection and Debate
1. How can inclusive and welcoming audio practices be fostered and
communicated beyond the immediate circle of people who already
‘belong’?
2. Could experiences of sexism, gender-based unconscious bias, token-
ism, and other forms of explicit discrimination (such as racism,
homophobia, and ableism) inform the creation of an ‘inclusion risk
assessment’ pro forma?
3. Is it possible to train a community to consider microaggressions relat-
ing to power and motivate investment in empowerment mindsets in
audio?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With my thanks to Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill for feedback, challenges, and
insights on this work.
NOTES
1. https://femalepressure.wordpress.com/facts/facts-2017-discussion/
2. Womxn is used here to include all women, genderqueer, non-binary, and gen-
der non-conforming people; people who are typically masked behind a cis
male majority in audio and therefore of interest in my work, avoiding heter-
onormative gender norm/denitions.
3. https://keychange.eu/
4. https://makeiteql.com/
5. www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/resources/infographics
6. www.ickr.com/photos/bdu/albums/72157621935462430
7. https://soundcloud.com/kaltes
8. https://solrezza.com/
9. https://soundcloud.com/borusiade
282 Liz Dobson
10. www.there-is-something-wrong-with-the-view.net/
11. http://stadtbesetzung.de/kuenstler/ora-koenemann/ora-koenemann/
12. www.hyenaz.com/about/
13. https://at.freudianslit.com/
14. http://alfabus.us/about/
15. The participants have read these transcripts, withdraw, or update their mean-
ing/position, and also approved the presentation of their words in this chapter.
16. https://yorkshiresoundwomen.com/
17. Pronouns: them, their, they.
18. As an aside I nd this interesting because UK HEIs are measured according
to the National Student Satisfaction Survey and Teaching Excellence Frame-
work, so the idea of not providing sucient technical support is in complete
contradiction with the notion that students may benet from facing certain
challenges. Those challenges can easily be presented in other ways, but in
music technology agency comes from understanding which equipment to
choose, how to set it up, solve problems, imagine and also explore unfamiliar
technologies.
FURTHER READING
Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Available at: http://people.oregonstate.
edu/~vanlondp/wgss320/articles/haraway-cyborg-manifesto.pdf
Gavanas, A., & Reitsamer, R. (2013). DJ technologies, social networks and gen-
dered trajectories in European DJ cultures. In DJ Culture in the Mix: Pow-
er, Technology and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music. New York:
Bloomsbury Publishing (pp. 51–78).
Goh, A. (2018). Why Sonic Cyberfeminisms? In Alessandrini, P., & Knotts, S.
(Eds.), In Array. The International Computer Music Association 2017–2018
(pp. 83–89). Available at: http://computermusic.org/media/documents/array/
Array-2018-special.pdf
Nicholas, L., & Agius, C. (2017). The Persistence of Global Masculinism: Dis-
course, Gender and Neo-colonial Re-articulations of Violence. Cham: Pal-
grave Macmillan, Springer International Publishing.
Plant, S., & Sadie, Z. (1998). Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture.
London: Fourth Estate.
Women’s night safety charter (2019). Available at: London.gov website. https://
www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/arts-and-culture/24-hour-london/womens-
night-safety-charter
REFERENCES
Alessandrini, P. (2007). Not all ideas are the same: Challenging dominant
discourses and re-imaging computer music research. In P. Alessandrini &
S. Knotts (Eds.), Array. The International Computer Music Association
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.