ABSTRACT
Many authors argue that historically women have been alienated or marginalised from the means of musical production and public performance within the ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ genres and assigned very specific roles within the music industry in general (Reynolds and Press 1995; Schilt 2003a, 2003b; Leonard 2007). Recent UK figures support those claims and show that fewer than 14 per cent of over 95,000 registered members in the music Performing Right Society (PRS, 2012) are women, highlighting that this exclusion, or omission, is not limited to alternative music genres alone. These figures include songwriters, publishers and performing musicians from classical music to jazz and everything in between. This low figure would suggest that, as well as being invisible in many areas of music creation, a large number of women are losing out economically by not tapping into various royalty streams and potential earnings from music. The numbers claiming royalties are likely to be much lower than the numbers of women actually taking part in music. Two music movements which challenge the state of affairs, Riot Grrrl and Ladyfest, are discussed in this chapter within the context of what I call feminist music worlds. The idea of music worlds draws on the art worlds concept attributable to Becker (1974, 1982) and adapted in work by Crossley (2009, 2015), Bottero and Crossley (2011), and Crossley and Bottero (forthcoming). Little has been written on Ladyfest and Riot Grrrl, although more on the latter. While it is common to refer qualitatively to the networks of musicians, feminist activists, and organisers in much of this work and to discuss the importance of accepting differences, feminist cultural activists, music lovers and producers can sometimes appear elusive and cliquey. This chapter aims to bring a mixed-methods approach to bear on our hitherto qualitative understanding of the networks of Riot Grrrl and Ladyfest and to investigate the role of homophily in understanding why birds of a feather might flock together in feminist music worlds. Riot Grrrl was born out of a desire to counter male dominance in the alternative and indie music scenes, in particular, the punk music scene. According to some it helped a new generation of young girls become feminists, find their voices, and fight for their rights (Rosenberg et al. 1998; Coulombe 1999). It originated in the United States in the early 1990s as a pre-internet underground feminist cultural revolution by and for girls. Bands like Bikini Kill spearheaded
the movement from Olympia, Washington, and on the other side of the Atlantic, British band Huggy Bear paved the way. The movement had a strong manifesto, it dealt with difficult issues such as abortion, rape and sexual harassment by providing a support structure (for those that could find out about it) through letter writing, sharing mix-tapes and ‘zine’ publications. Zines were small-scale self-produced low-quality prints, frequently in the style of a music fanzine, but with additional content. Riot Grrrl lay dormant for the best part of 20 years, although not extinct like some of its critics would suggest. It is currently experiencing renewed academic interest (Triggs 2004; Moore and Roberts 2009; Meltzer 2010; Downes 2012; Dunn and Farnsworth 2012; Pavlidis 2012; Payne 2012; Starr 2013) and non-academic interest with films (Anderson 2013), biographies (Marcus 2010) and retrospectives (Darms 2013) of the movement, while its imagery and ideology are being used by contemporary feminist groups such as the Russian protest art group Pussy Riot (see True 2012; Neu and Finch 2013). Some argue that Riot Grrrl laid the foundations of the Ladyfest movement which was to follow (Schilt and Zobl 2008), while more recently others have argued against drawing direct connections (Dougher and Keenan 2012). Evidence presented in this chapter sides with the former opinion. Ladyfest originated in Olympia in 2000, one of the Riot Grrrl city strongholds. The moniker ‘Ladyfest’ acts as an umbrella term for a not-for-profit woman-centred music festival and a signifier for an expanding translocal, music and cultural feminist social movement. Primarily motivated by music, both the movement, as a process, and the festival, as one of the tangible outcomes, aim to create a safe space for women to take ownership of, and participate in, music, creative activities, political debate and gender-based activism. Between 2000 and 2010, there have been 263 Ladyfests forming a loosely bound translocal network in 34 countries worldwide with 32 separate events taking place in the UK alone during this period (Zobl 2013).1 But who are the organisers and participants of these feminist music worlds and what impact do their relationships have on network structures? Do they really embrace difference or are activists more similar to each other than they think? McPherson describes homophily as ‘the principle that a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people’ (2001, 416). In sociology the concept of homophily has been in development since the early twentieth century (Simmel and Levine 1971). In social network terms, homophily helps us predict the likelihood of a relationship existing or occurring between two people (also referred to as actors or nodes) based on a particular attribute. Homophily is closely related to social influence and social selection network theories. Social influence theory tends to look at how people influence each other’s behaviour or attitudes, whereas social selection network theory looks at how particular pairs of actors may be drawn to one another based on specific characteristics or attributes. Attributes can include a wide variety of variables such as attitudes towards feminism, music preference, gender, social class, education, occupation, ethnicity, age or sexuality.
