Music and Gender

There can be no such thing as genderless culture. One's social sexual identity, or gender, is a very central concept in music, linked with interaction between the sexes. I think the girls or woman are much more violent and hot-tempered than the men. For example, the maledictory songs against unfaithful lovers are addressed in far greater number to men than women. Moreover, women in music are still prisoners of their sexual roles. An ageing female rock star is almost impossibility. For example, Tina Turner is the shining exception, but she is black. Someone already on the margins through being black, gay or diverging from the norm in some other way, can bend the limits. However, Many songs, and women singers, feature cross-gender situations, such as Madonna, or the 'Female Warrior' ballads. In these songs women were extending their space. Although women are known to have occasionally smuggled themselves into the armies and navies of earlier centuries, the disguise songs do not operate primarily as records of actual practice but as a challenge to the gender coding of dress, work and terrain.