ABSTRACT
Music education has a long history of producing and reproducing gendered practices, and from the end of the last century, there has been a rapidly growing interest in gender studies related to music education. This chapter explores gendered aspects of musical gentrification in higher music education. Based on an extensive survey of all master’s and PhD theses written in music academia in Norway, from the first thesis in 1912 and until 2012, the chapter presents findings regarding how the uptake of popular music in Norwegian music academia is shown to be strongly gendered. In other words, it looks into the aspects of gender visible in the extensive survey mentioned above, or what can be termed the genderfication of popular music academisation in Norway. The empirical exploration is conducted against a theoretical backdrop building on Bourdieusian theories of masculine domination in the educational field, where social order is always considered as gendered and masculine domination is a normalised situation. Thus, the framework offers an opportunity to look at Norwegian music academia as a particular social space in which gender relations and hierarchies are produced, and to describe how this genderfication is intertwined with processes of musical gentrification.
