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October 22, 2002
Not that I don't appreciate it
But when someone realizes you'd be interested in a paper titled "Reproduction of Gender Hierarchy in the Case of Amateur All-Girl Rock bands in Finland," I'm thinking that's an indication you're revealing way too much about yourself to the world.
And this is what I told the (purportedly) Good Twin yesterday when he sent the link.
Mavis Bayton (1993) who has studied female rock musicians in England argues that feminism had had a great impact on these women and encouraged them to play rock. In my study the girls had a negative attitude towards feminism. Still, they took equality between the sexes for granted, but they did not want to stress their gender. By not wanting to talk or think about gender they tried to solve what was the major problem for them: their gender, the difficulty of mixing female gender and rock music. Even though it seemed to be easy and unproblematic for the girls to become rockers, there still was something wrong.The concept of the sex-gender system refers to principles of organizing relationships between the sexes in a given culture. According to the Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman (1990), the basic principles of the Western sex-gender system are the logic of the separation of the sexes (dichotomy) and the logic of the male norm (hierarchy).
By dichotomy I refer to all the various practices of separating the sexes, for example division of labour and differences in clothing. Gender hierarchy sets men as the norm and treats women as exceptions of the norm and also places a higher value on the male gender.
I mean, yes, I followed the link, but still. . .
The paper does explicitly mention something I vaguely babbled about yesterday:
However, dichotomy between the sexes did not vanish completely since there seemed to be a tendency to form same-sex bands instead of mixed bands. There are no statistics which tell us the exact numbers of all-male, all-female and mixed rock bands. All I have is what the girls told me about their opinions on mixed bands and some literature on boys in bands. Many girls said they are also ready to play with boys in the future, if necessary. But still none of them actively sought male musicians to play with or preferred mixed bands to all-girl ones. They were quite happy to play with girls. It is also quite reasonable to believe that boys often prefer their own sex. This suggests that there might be a tendency to form same-sex bands. Thus, the segregation of the sexes does not vanish completely but, to some extent, adapts a new position. Girl musicians break the old dichotomy by starting to play rock but the segregation is still maintained because both sexes, more or less, tend to prefer their own sex.
But we're talking Finland here. If you want to go all Sapir-Whorf and talk language,
People often mistakenly assume that languages spoken in neighbouring countries are closely related. For this reason they ask questions like 'Is Finnish like Swedish?' or 'Does everyone in Finland speak Russian?' A simple answer to both questions is 'No.' Swedish - although one of the two official languages of Finland - and Russian belong to the Indo-European group of languages while Finnish is one of the Finno-Ugrian languages. The latter group also includes Hungarian, Estonian, Lapp and several lesser known languages spoken in Russia. The Finno-Ugrian languages share enough common lexical and grammatical features to prove a common origin. Although these languages have developed separately for thousands of years, it can be seen that common features include for instance:1) absence of gender (the same Finnish pronoun hän denotes both he and she),
2) absence of articles (a and the in English),
3) long words due to the structure of the language,
4) numerous grammatical cases,
5) personal possession expressed with suffixes,
6) postpositions in addition to prepositions, and
7) no equivalent of the verb to have.
I'm not sure any conclusions reached in the paper apply to English-speaking. . .
I'm doing it again, ain't I
Posted by Aaron at October 22, 2002 08:47 AM
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