ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the ways in which feminist work transformed musicology. It explores the impact of poststructuralist work on feminist musicology, how it decomposed the field of music, and how a reparative musicology would imagine a feminist time, again, which is also a Deleuzian time. The entry of poststructuralist work which downplayed the importance of the category of woman, championing, instead, difference in general, arguably reinforced the demise of feminist work. Egalitarianism is core to the liberal feminist endeavour, emerging from the desire to demonstrate that women are equal to men. Composing a feminist musicological narrative, on one level, might be a simple task. The radical feminist narrative emerges as a reactionary discourse to the suggestion that women's music is inferior. The paranoia to which Cusick refers relates to the bitter disputes that began to mark and typify the musicological narrative in the decade of the 1990s.