An intersectional feminist critique is relevant to current music therapy improvisation theories and practices.•The potential for embedded oppressions within music therapy improvisation is made visible and addressed by an intersectional perspective.•Further educating music therapists regarding intersectionality would benefit improvising music therapy practitioners and their clients. In this recuperative critique the author analyzes aspects of music therapy improvisation, including the therapeutic relationship, music, and the act of improvisation as well as its inherent body politics and its understandings of situated knowledge, from an intersectional feminist perspective. Based upon this analysis, the author invites readers to reconsider and reshape the accepted theories and practices of improvisation in music therapy. Links are made to relevant music therapy literature. Recommendations are offered to establish intersectional awareness as a foundational competency in music therapy improvisation.

During the Great Depression, a time when twenty-five percent of Americans were unemployed, and thousands of businesses closed their doors, gospel music publishing companies of the southern United States experienced a boom in production. The first half of the twentieth century was arguably the most robust period for southern gospel music. Despite, or perhaps due to, international conflicts, a plummeting economy, and a massive migration of southerners throughout the United States, these publishing companies sold millions of songbooks each year. More than a repertoire of commercial popular music, the books were an integral part of a participatory religious musical tradition as well as a fan-based musical tradition centered in the South that crossed regional and international boundaries. Publishers produced songbooks, hosted singing schools and conventions, and facilitated gospel newsletters; fan generated, faith-based worship and entertainment allowed Southerners to work out complex issues of theology and perform intersectional identities through musical culture. This dissertation explores these intersectional identities, specifically the roles of migrant, mother, laborer, and white southerner through music, song lyrics, cover images, and discussion in gospel newsletters.

apanese popular music, particularly the video-sharing website Nico Nico, represents a site of creation and production that encompasses a complex interplay between vocality, expression of identity, and capitalistic ventures. In this thesis, I will explore how expressions of gender and sexuality are articulated through both vocality and the (digital) body, or the visual aspect of music videos on Nico Nico, and the dialogic relationship between business models and the articulation of these modes of identity.

In terms of both gender and sexuality, contemporary Japan is composed of interweaving histories, ideologies, and traits characteristic of the transculturalism experienced by many nation-states of an increasingly globalized world. How Japanese popular music - utilizing the internet as a space for dialogic interchange - transforms these gender ideologies within frameworks of commercialization and global discourses is a topic that significantly informs current notions of gender. Additionally, music culture, not only a source of empowerment or power for a group of people, has become a commercialized product, one that has become an integral part of global commercial exchange. Given the significant influence that Japanese popular culture has on global popular culture, J-pop should be further interrogated as a linguistic imaginary riddled with contestations of gender norms, sexual binaries, and power, all of which operate under the auspices of global capitalism.

The ryouseirui, a Nico Nico term designated for a singer that utilizes both “male” and “female” voices, contributes a substantial part of Nico Nico content, with ryouseirui music videos present on the website. By investigating vocality, the business model of video-sharing websites, and various ryouseirui and their respective music videos, I will describe how economic practices may form and inform resistance and change of gender on the video-sharing website Nico Nico. Considering a diverse range of literature, from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to Gottlieb and McLelland’s compilation of work on Japanese cybercultures, this thesis will explore female ryouseiruis’ role on Nico Nico as a catalyst of deconstruction, negotiation, and reimagination of gender identity.

As students progress through adolescent development, researchers have observed a lack of male participation in choral music activities. This male to female imbalance is often attributed to a perception that singing is a feminine activity and results in a lack of balance in choral music ensembles. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore adolescent gender identity as it relates to singing interest and choral music participation. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was used, in which quantitative data were collected and analyzed followed by in-depth qualitative interviews. A group of 9th grade students (n=174) completed the Children’s Sex Role Inventory and the Singing Interest Inventory to gauge their self-perceived levels of masculinity and femininity along with their level of singing interest. Information from the quantitative portion of this study indicated that girls had both a higher interest in singing and a higher rate of participation in choral music ensembles than their male peers. A significant contribution of this study was that although singing is often perceived as feminine, no significant differences were found between categorized gender groups and singing interest. Qualitative interviews were conducted with two groups of male students who were not enrolled in choir: low singing interest scores (n=4) and high singing interest scores (n=4). Transcribed and coded interviews resulted in the following themes: low singing interest, Guys are physical, Girls are feminine, Shared perceptions, Guys don’t sing, and Calling them names; high singing interest, Men want muscles, Girls are expressive, Shared perceptions, Choir is for girls, Get made fun of, and No labels. The shared theme Shared perceptions suggests that participant perceptions are the same as their parents and friends. The theme No labels was unique to the high singing interest group. Participants in that group demonstrated a higher level of acceptance for atypical gender behavior.

This article draws on qualitative interviews with 40 gay male undergraduates at four universities across England to explore the dynamics of participants’ friendship networks in the context of decreased homophobia. Describing their schools and universities as gay-friendly spaces, most participants developed close friendships with both straight and sexual minority peers in spontaneous ways, away from institutional venues such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender student societies. Building on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the symbolic economy of class, I introduce a new concept to understand how having a visible gay identity can act as a form of privilege in inclusive, post-gay social fields: gay capital. Through shared knowledge of gay cultures, belonging to gay social networks, and having one’s gay identity recognized as a form of prestige, gay capital supplements cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital. These findings trouble traditional generalizations of gay youth as victimized due to their sexual minority status. However, finding that participants’ experiences differed across the four research settings, this article also develops an intersectional analysis by highlighting that access to gay capital is limited by other forms of class, gender, and sexual hierarchy.

To imagine Black women's sexuality as a polymorphous erotic that does not exclude desire for men but also does not privilege it. To imagine, without apology, voluptuous Black women's sexualities.

This article argues that the notion of the `sexualization of culture' is too general to be a useful conceptual tool. The article has two main objectives. First, it seeks to interrogate the notion of `sexualization' as a way of understanding the proliferation of sexually explicit imagery within contemporary advertising. Rather than taking up a position `for' or `against' `sexualization' (in the familiar way), it seeks to open up the notion in order to explore the diverse practices that are commonly grouped together under this heading. Using advertising as an example, it argues that `sexualization' is far from being a singular or homogenous process, that different people are `sexualized' in different ways and with different meanings — and indeed that many remain excluded from what has been called the `democratization of desire' operating in visual culture. Secondly, the article develops a feminist intersectional analysis to critically read some of the different ways in which advertising might be said to be sexualized. It looks at three different and contrasting, but easily recognizable `figures' within contemporary advertising: the good-looking male `sixpack', the sexually agentic heterosexual `midriff' and the `hot lesbian', usually intertwined with her beautiful double or Other. The aim is to highlight the point that sexualization does not operate outside of processes of gendering, radicalization and classing, and works within a visual economy that remains profoundly ageist and heteronormative. The article argues that an attention to differences is crucial to understanding the phenomena, practices and scopic regimes that are often lumped together under the heading `equalization of culture'.