Publications and Research
Document Type
Book Chapter or Section
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
This annotated bibliography of academic writing on women in rock in pop should provide an overview of most of the scholarly literature on the topic and reflects my personal interest in methodology. When I returned to graduate school in the late 1990s to study American studies and popular culture, I discovered that academe had changed considerably from my undergraduate days when I studied history of art. Although traditional academic disciplines continue, I found that in the humanities and social sciences, there were no longer neat categories for disciplines and disciplines no longer were isolated from each other.
The topic of rock and pop music, in particular, attract scholars from an amazingly broad array of disciplines. Academic areas range from musicology to sociology to history to literature to religious studies to psychology as well as newer disciplines including cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies. Pondering an overall organizational structure for this bibliography, I came up three basic criteria to break up the content: is the material:
1) about specific female performers or
2) about special genres, topics, related subcultures and/or women as fans or as listeners or
3) of a more general and theoretical nature, touching on multiple performers, topics, etc.
Although I could have chosen to organize this bibliography by discipline, I think most users would find more pleasure in moving from specific to general by perusing by personality, then genre or topic, and then ending with some of the broader works. Who wouldn’t enjoy considering the massive collection of academic writing on Madonna or on Riot Grrrl? I have added to many of the annotations, in italics, a few keywords or comments related to discipline. Journal articles are not annotated but integrated into the bibliography in the first section under topic. In the second section where materials are annotated by methodology, journal articles are listed at the end of each subsection.
Comments
This work was originally published in "Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music," edit by Patricia Spence Rudden and published by Cambridge Scholars.