ABSTRACT
This chapter examines gendered patterns of participation in the Norwegian municipal schools of music and performing arts (SMPAs) by analysing statistics showing students’ choices of musical instruments in five large schools. The chapter also enquires into the discursive facilitation of such choices. First, by investigating the construction of gendered musicianship in text and photographs collected from the schools’ websites, and second, by discussing the conditioning of gendered SMPA participation as operationalized in the national curriculum framework. The purpose of the chapter, then, is twofold: (1) To contribute to mapping out the distribution of musical instruments by gender in Norwegian schools of music and performing arts, and (2) to examine and discuss how notions of gender continue to facilitate certain ways of being and doing in SMPA practices. Furthermore, the authors argue for a deliberate focus on breaking what Judith Butler refers to as citational chains of gender normativity, by taking up her ideas of performative subversion and queering of gendered meaning relations.
