ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the patterns in and ramifications of gendered power in Norwegian music academia. An essential premise is that higher music education is a social field in which gender relations and hierarchies are produced and reproduced in particular ways. However, there has been an equal gender distribution between female and male students in higher music education in Norway for decades. In addition, there are more female staff members now than ever before in music academia. Nonetheless, the total number of female full professors does not mirror this situation: compared to other disciplines within the country’s higher education, the ratio of females to males is still relatively low. Bourdieusian concepts and metaphors, such as symbolic violence and the Kabyle house, are used to analyse structural dominance within the field by asking which ‘rooms’ are available for women in the music academia ‘household’. They also highlight which positions have been kept hidden in the dark interior of the house and which have been brought out into the daylight at the front. Analyses of when, how, why, and what kind of musical genres and research topics have been studied in Norwegian higher education and research, combined with an examination of how gendered agency and power have been part of these historical processes, have led to the detection of several cases of what is here referred to as genderfication.
