How are girls represented in your favorite songs?

Have you ever thought about it?

Alternative Girls considers the impact that girls and women have had on current and past music scenes and the alternative ways of viewing themselves that their work has made possible. Looking beyond the front-woman of the music stage, we explore the work of women behind the scenes in the music industry in the male dominated roles of sound technicians, promoters, and CEOs. You will glimpse into the public and private worlds of the alternative music scene and the different ways of viewing our experiences as girls and women through one of the most powerful cultural products: music.

We highlight women from across the world for whom music is a passion and a career, from promoters to photographers, academics to sound technicians. While female artists have always provided female audiences new ways of thinking about their experiences and lives, much of the behind-the-scenes production remains dominated by men. As part of Alternative Girls, we brought together these different voices and experiences to provide a space for exploring what it means to be a girl or a woman in terms of making, appreciating, sharing and experiencing music.

We hope this exhibition introduces you to new musical heroines, from the stage and beyond.

Women in the Music Industry

What roles are available for women in the music industry?  What is it like to work in a field dominated by men? This is a common experience for women across a range of jobs in the music industry. The reasons are complex, but gender stereotypes and expectations play a part in the comparatively lower number of female music industry professionals, particularly in the management or technical sectors.

This section has been supported by Sound Women a network that encourages and promotes women in UK radio. In the UK, over half of radio employees are women, but men still hold most presenter and management positions. Sound Women supports its members and aims to help women get more out of working in radio, and to help the radio industry get more out of women.

Groups like as Sound Women are providing a supportive space for women in the music industry, and a network of people that encounter the same issues and want to change the industry. They work to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to develop their skills and move forward in their career, playing their part to highlight and address gender inequalities.

Photographing Women in Music

Making and enjoying music has been a vibrant and interesting subject for photographers and artists alike for many years and plays a large part in forming the ways we think about music history and culture. For example, image of the mohawk-wearing punk with a safety pin earring has become an icon of the Punk genre of music.. However, girls and women have long been invisible or sidelined as iconic representatives of the music that they love. This is especially true for ‘alternative’ music genres such as punk and rap.

Girls and women are often photographed as audience members, or listening to their music in their bedroom. Whilst these experiences are important to girls, they are often one aspect of how girls and women engage with music. Girls also form bands, they learn to play a range of instruments, they DJ with records, CDs and electronic music files, they show their musical passion through their clothes and their hair, through where they go and who they spend their time with.

Music is important to girls and they like to express this in a range of ways. Photographers Maggie Shannon from New York (USA) and Bethany Kane from Birmingham (England) share their work, documenting girls and women in music. Maggie’s ‘Noise Girls’ moves beyond the expectation of women to be fans, documenting a range of different women who make experimental music in New York. Bethany’s ‘Women in Subcultures’ make their mark in music scenes that are typically expected to be masculine, from punk to northern soul. Both Maggie and Bethany address the stereotypes of female music fandom.

‘Women in Subcultures’

by Bethany Kane

Bethany Kane is an independent photographer based in Birmingham, UK. Bethany aims to reveal aspects of identity, focusing on music scenes such as punk, skinhead, Oi! and northern soul. Her work has taken her all over the UK, but as she prefers to take photographs of people that she knows and who trust her to not misrepresent them, much of her work was created in the Midlands. For Bethany, the stereotypes and assumptions placed upon young people in subcultures, particularly punk and Oi!, has inspired her to represent the full diversity of experiences and the passion of these music fans, in particular as women in music scenes traditionally considered to be masculine. Bethany also contributes to the Youth Club archive, based in London.

Here, Bethany talks about photographing women in music scenes and her experiences as a photographer.  All images are the copyright and property of Bethany Kane, unless otherwise stated.

Being Part of a Music Scene

The term ‘music scene’ is used to describe a community that brings together people who enjoy a particular type of music. Lots of people across the world are so passionate about music that they spend their weekends and evenings listening to it, dancing, talking to other people about it, and making their own music. Some people are dedicated to just one type of music, but others enjoy being part of several musical communities.

Of course, women and girls engage with different aspects of being in a music scene. For some music scenes, an ethos of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (or DIY) is very important, and this is central to the production of home-made posters and ‘zines’. For others, collecting and playing records is a key part of being a member of a music scene, especially those that enjoy music from a time before CDs and the internet.

When we talk about music, it is also important to think about dancing, an action which requires us to listen to and engage with the music in a variety of physical ways. Members of different music scenes dance in different ways, in styles that have developed over many years and that seem to fit with the type of music. Certain dance styles that have become associated with male dancers, and sometimes this means that women are excluded from the activity. In this section, we celebrate girls in music scenes who made it their own and didn’t take no for an answer.

Linder Sterling, ‘SheShe’ (1981) Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Creating Alternative Identities through the Grrrl Zine

By Megan Sormus, PhD student at the University of Northumbria

Riot Grrrl…. Is because we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings…

Can you imagine a time without social media? Instagram is unheard of. The words ‘face’ and ‘book’ have not yet not been joined together to make the billion dollar corporation that Facebook is today, and “tweeting” is just something birds do. Welcome to the early 1990s. WhatsApp? What’s that? There’s not even such a thing as Snapchat. Want to complain, compliment, or create? Got a message to share to a mass audience?   Back then, the quickest way to communicate was to telephone (via a clunky landline), by picking up a pen and writing, or through designing and photocopying hand-made posters, notices or fanzines (which will be the focus of this piece), and getting them out into the world by mail or spreading them by hand.

This may all sound rather unbelievable and in a few senses quite unattractive when looking back from the comfort of our present day, with its many modes of communication and its popular ways of sharing ideas, images, and music. But what I’m describing is not some alien world. While it may all seem pretty old school and opportunities may appear stifled, it was a time when individuals and, importantly for you readers of Alternative Girl, young women, used their creative input without the aid of mobile phones, the internet, computers and all of the other advanced technology existing at present that we all hold to our hearts and rely upon so heavily.

Despite this apparent ‘lack’, groups of young women used all opportunities of this era to their advantage. They became active cultural producers, as opposed to passive girl consumers. These young women felt a drive to create, a passion to protest, and to ultimately draw attention and form alliances based on the inadequacies and inequalities that they faced. With this, they built a self-sufficient community called Riot Grrrl, which then grew into allied networks all over America, as well as England (all done without the aid of Facebook!).

Along with music, a popular method riot grrrl used to spread their message was fanzines (or ‘zines’). Zines are small, self-published booklets that contain drawings, writings, photos (either original or appropriated from magazines) and covered either a single topic or a variety of topics. They can take the form of fan fiction made about a favourite band or celebrity, they can be personal like diaries, or contain examples of poetry and literary writing. Zines were originally part of the punk movement, and they reflected punks’ do-it-yourself spirit that was, in turn, copied by riot grrrls. Through the DIY creation of zines, paper cuts undoubtedly ensued, ink was spilled, and there was a guaranteed mess of cutting and pasting to create work that was (to say the least) rough around the edges. Forget posing with the very best filters available on Instagram. The aesthetics produced by riot grrrls were poor quality photocopied images that, in part, made up the crude and imprecise cut-and-paste collages of their zines.

To return to our present day, the question is: why would young women want to come back to these messy methods of creation? The answer lies in the fact that it is about maintaining that original grrrl spirit of seizing the tools available to become active girl agents. In our modern day, this can be strengthened by the technology that now lies at our fingertips. As noted by Mary Celeste Kearney, author of Girls Make Media, the creation of zines is vital as they ‘allow young females to develop other interests through their creative abilities, while also providing a space to explore their identity’.

With the growing interest and obsession with body image in the twenty- first century, zines, much like a visually noisy diary, give young women the opportunity to play with and try out alternative girl identities. To explore ‘alternative’ girl identities in this way means the zine acts as an empowering tool in the way that it reconstructs and reclaims mainstream images. To most girl consumers, these mainstream images of ‘perfect’ girls and the harmful goal to ‘be perfect’ is unrealistic and unattainable. Therefore, riot grrrl networks originally created zines that were specifically girl centred, called ‘grrrl zines’ by academic Mary Celeste Kearney:

The emphasis on femaleness is evident in the multiple female-specific discourses that appear in the pages of zines, including female bodies and health, female beauty standards and body image, female sexuality, female reproductive issues, violence against females […] and female representations in commercial popular culture.

Grrrl zines are a creative practice involving fantasy, facilitating girls’ explorations of different forms of identity, particularly those that subvert the established stories of girlhood.  

– Mary Celeste Kearney, Girls Make Media

The riot grrrl community ran on a specific technology that cost nothing, and better still, was already inbuilt. This was their creative agency, and with this, the ability to make certain modes of production work for you and to, importantly, create your own meanings through following the ethos of DIY (do-it-yourself).

Does this sound impossible in our present day? No, it just needs a little more fine tuning. The most integral point of creating the space to ‘try’ out creative processes and practices, and for young women to explore identities is that they do not have to look, or be, perfect. Rather, creating alternative girl identities through the grrrl zine is about making a mess and presenting a clear clash of ideas. This makes the experiences and images of young women more realistic, and stands outside the restrictions of social media rules. So, next time you filter an image on Instagram, type a status on Facebook, or tweet your thoughts in 140 characters, remember to tune in to your inbuilt technology first, get old school, and be creative grrrl style.

Viewing Girl- / Woman-hood Through Music

Music is a powerful thing. It makes us feel a range of emotions, recall memories of people, places and events, it has the power to take us back in time and shoot us forward to the future. Music can also influence the ways in which we think about what it means to be a girl and the roles that women are expected to play in the world.

Music videos in particular have not always provided their audiences with positive role models, showing women to be sex objects or accessories for men, rather than intelligent and important individuals within their own right. Particularly for younger children, these limited and sexist ways of thinking about women can be highly influential and potentially damaging.

However, there are a range of inspirational musicians and singers who demonstrate that women are much more than a body. They are intelligent, passionate, creative, strong, and play their part in changing society for the better. The power that music holds means that we need these women at the helm to make sure that the messages it spreads are those of equality, solidarity and a celebration of diversity.

Here scholars who specialise in popular music consider the ways in which girls  from across the world engage with music, and how music offers new and liberating ways to be a girl or a woman. Have a think about the sort of music that you listen to. How are women represented?  Does this empower women or force them into certain roles?

Our February 2017 podcast, Girls and Bollywood, explored how women and girls are represented in Bollywood musicals.  We also talked with girls who are part of the Indian diaspora, shedding light on how Bollywood influences real life girls and women. Click the player below to listen.