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I Don't Play Girly House Music

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I Don't Play Girly House Music Chapter 14 “I Don’t Play Girly House Music” Women, sonic stereotyping, and the dancing DJ Tami Gadir In this chapter, I explore the assignment of particular gender stereotypes to sound and performance in contemporary electronically produced dance music, focusing on the sonic quality of ‘fluffiness’ (cf. Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 68). I underscore this exploration with a critique of idealistic theorisations of electronic music, in which machines have the potential to liberate us from the limits of traditional gender frameworks.1 In order to illustrate the iteration and perpetuation of these stereotypes,2 I draw upon interview material with DJs, extracts from sources of online journalism, and online (YouTube) dance music fans’ commentaries. These stereotypes, which participants learn and circulate, are complicated by the specificity of links between gender fluidity and queerness and the development of the types of DJ-based dance music practices that are recognisable as dance music culture today. I argue that the flexibility of gender is overlooked or denied by participants through their conflations of terms such as ‘fluffy’ with what they believe to be ‘feminine’ musical sounds. One of my approaches to examining the idea of fluffiness is through a discussion of tracks from three different dance music genres: ‘Friend of the Night’ by Prosper (psytrance), ‘For An Angel’ by Paul van Dyk (trance), and ‘Eivissa’ by Robert M (progressive house).3 Last, I consider gender-related prejudices as they pertain to the moving body, including dancing, ‘incidental’ movements unrelated to dance, and communication (verbal and non-verbal) with participants and video cameras. My analysis is centred upon the interactions of dance music fans, commentators, and practitioners with the performances, on- and off-stage, of DJ-producer Nina Kraviz. Using the case of Kraviz, I show how movement can provoke reactions to DJs’ performances, based on the binary conceptions of gender that dictate sexist attitudes in many clubbing communities, regardless of the extent to which the DJ fits these norms. To this end, I discuss two YouTube videos of Kraviz performing in Boiler Room DJ sets – one in Berlin (Kraviz 2013b) and another in Edinburgh (Kraviz 2015) – and Gadir, Tami. 2017. “‘I Don’t Play Girly House Music’: Women, Sonic Stereotyping, and the Dancing DJ.” In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender., ed. Stan Hawkins, 196–210. London and New York: Routledge. a YouTube video documentary about Kraviz made by the online dance music magazine Resident Advisor (2013). The extensive commentaries on Kraviz by journalists, other DJs, producers, and fans, some of which I present alongside the videos, demonstrate the specificity of Kraviz’s position in the wider global (and in particular Western European) techno milieu, and constitute some evidence of the continuing dominance of the idea that DJs are men by default (cf. Farrugia 2012; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013).4 Intentionally, I adopt the language of music- and performance-related gender binaries as used by dance music participants, including addressing women DJs as a gender category. In doing so, I do not mean to claim that a homogeneous ‘women’s experience’ exists, or that these gender categorisations are helpful (cf. Sullivan 2003, 190). On the contrary, by employing the language of participants, my goal is to highlight aspects of gender normativity that I argue are implicit in how participants of all genders interact with many women on dance floors and at DJ booths. Dance music and gender My exploration of the problems of gender stereotyping in dance music settings is built upon an understanding that heteronormativity is an irrelevant and unproductive framework for human interaction, achieving little more than to reinscribe prejudices. J. Jack Halberstam (2012) challenges heteronormativity – meaning the normalisation of, and assumed heterosexuality in, everyday life – through a series of questions that commence with the phrase “what if …”, and proceed to invert widespread and deeply held gender assumptions. For Halberstam, heteronormativity constitutes a range of troubling gender essentialisms that constitute part of a ‘script’ or ‘formula’, put into practice via ‘training’ that is begun in childhood (2012, 8–13). Moreover, the ostensibly stable classifications of male and female that are under redefinition have “no essential … traits, desires, or inclinations”, and are therefore increasingly “inadequate placeholders for identity” (2012, 67, 70–71). Indeed, the gender essentialisms that I discuss in this chapter have their roots, as Judy Lochhead (2008, 64–70) points out, in Western Enlightenment philosophy. In this conception, ‘properties’ beyond the biological are ascribed to males on the one hand and females on the other. Beauty is understood as a feminine phenomenon and ‘an inferior aesthetic category’ to the ‘sublime’, a masculine mode of experiencing which contains “a power that registers in prerational experience” (2008, 64). Similarly, I have noted in my fieldwork a pervasive discourse by male DJs, producers, and promoters of two types of women DJs – those whose marketing is based primarily upon visual presentation (namely, physical attractiveness), and those for whom it is based upon the possession of ‘serious’ musical and technical skill (cf. Bayton 1998, 3–4, 107–122; Farrugia 2012, 48–55; Gadir, Tami. 2017. “‘I Don’t Play Girly House Music’: Women, Sonic Stereotyping, and the Dancing DJ.” In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender., ed. Stan Hawkins, 196–210. London and New York: Routledge. Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 64–68). Weaving through the gendered discourses of these male participants, beauty is still understood in diminutive terms and is thus perceived as irreconcilable with skill. One of the reasons that I have chosen to discuss Kraviz in this chapter is that, as a figure who is perceived by her fans to possess both of these attributes, she is in a unique position to throw this stereotype into doubt. Another problematic dichotomy upon which gendered-oriented aesthetics manifest in dance music is that of the delineations – or, as Donna Haraway refers to them, “leaky distinctions” (1990, 193) – between masculine and feminine (cf. Leonard 2007, 96–98). This notion holds that human-made technologies are situated in opposition to organic, biological, ‘natural’ phenomena such as the body (cf. Chasin 1995, 74–76; Haraway 1990, 192– 194; McClary 1991, 135–140). This is relevant in large part because of the central role that electronic hardware plays at dance music events. In particular, men are given the exclusive right to exert control over technologies (Farrugia 2012, 8–9, 19–23; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, 54– 57; Haraway 1990, 193; McClary 1991, 138; cf. Bayton 1997, 41–43; Bayton 1998, 41, 124–125; Doubleday 2008; Green 1997, 53). This attitude is clearly demonstrable through the different ways that participants interact with DJs of different genders. Utopian interpretations of electronic music frame it as being freed from the burden of these traditional gender categorisations as they are understood in relation to music (cf. Doubleday 2008; Rodgers 2010, 4). Famously, Haraway’s (1990) vision of the cyborg involves the normalisation and incorporation of machine technologies into our activities and bodily experience, thus freeing us from the past separations between our ‘natural’ selves and the machines that we once attempted to control (191–196, 205, 207). Extending this notion, producing and reproducing music with machines could also emancipate us from biological-determinist understandings of how bodies ought to interact with instruments (cf. Doubleday 2008; Rodgers 2010, 4; cf. Bayton 1997, 40–43; Bayton 1998, 40–41; Bradby 1993, 157, 161–162; Green 1997, 53–80, 116–140; Rodgers 2010, 5; Waksman 2004, 697). By this thinking, electronically produced sounds take us out of dualistic modes of listening, affording us the opportunity to explore more possibilities.5 Yet, this potential is hardly achieved in dance music, as in other genres. In rock, for example, technological interactions (both with instruments and sound production) continue to be gendered, with men having access to and authority over technologies (cf. Bayton 1997, 40–43; Bayton 1998, 40–41,124–125; Bradby 1993, 162; Leonard 2007, 44–52), and indeed, as Helen Reddington notes, over the women involved in the process (2012, 59–65). For Tara Rodgers, the tactile and social interactions with machines, and the electronic sounds themselves, are imbued with violent masculine symbolism (cf. Farrugia 2012, Gadir, Tami. 2017. “‘I Don’t Play Girly House Music’: Women, Sonic Stereotyping, and the Dancing DJ.” In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender., ed. Stan Hawkins, 196–210. London and New York: Routledge. 8–10; Goodman 2010; Rodgers 2010, 6–8). In science and technology as well as the arts, electronic sound has, since its inception as an agent of ‘progress’, been utilised in the practices of militancy and domination, as the handiwork of male expertise (Rodgers 2010, 6–10). Thus, DJs and producers have inevitably had this gendered history deeply inscribed into their own practices (Rodgers 2010, 7; cf. Farrugia 2012, 21–23). This seems at odds with the development of today’s recognisable DJ-based dance music practices, which were initially developed in queer communities. I use the term ‘queer’ here in the same sense as Jodie Taylor (2012, 144): to connote practices that
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