Abstract
Feminist media studies routinely ignore how popular music shapes femininities and feminisms. Moreover, while scholarship on gender and communication addresses intersections between feminist politics and social media in the global north, the global south remains undertheorised. This chapter fills these gaps. It examines the contradictory ways in which subcultural music communicates gender in contemporary Palestine. The author asks how young adults’ cultural practices simultaneously rupture and reproduce gendered power structures at different geopolitical scales. The author makes two arguments: First, young women and men play with patriarchal codes through lyrics and performances. Such transmissions disrupt heteropatriarchal expectations about identity and desire. Second, however, popular music does not constitute utopian sites of wholesale gender ‘emancipation’. While transgressing some gender norms, performances—and musicians’ framings of their performances—often assert novel controls. Young women particularly mobilise postfeminist frames to assert their personal ‘success’. These narratives foreground migratory (neo)liberal scripts of gendered freedom, sutured to individual agency, choice, and autonomy. The chapter concludes that as these young adults challenge local gender codes, they simultaneously conform to transnational, postfeminist notions of gendered ‘progress’. Thus, neither fully resistant nor entirely compromised, musicians’ practices highlight the ambiguous ways that music communicates gender in Palestine.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed overview of Israel’s complex system of identification cards, see Tawil-Souri (2011).
- 2.
All names have been changed, and full ethical permission to reproduce quotes was established before each interview.
- 3.
Women also critique gender normativity and patriarchal power in their music and media productions. In the post-MeToo movement, for instance, Palestinian artists like Maysa Daw and Safaa Hathot use their songs and videos to express and cultivate different feminist critiques of misogynistic masculinity. For further discussion of women’s music and the diverse feminisms (anti-colonial, popular, postfeminist, etc.) that emerge through their songs and music videos, please see Withers (2022
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Withers, P. (2023). Feminism Ruptured, or Feminism Repaired? Music, Feminisms, and Gender Politics in Palestinian Subcultures. In: Skalli, L.H., Eltantawy, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11980-4_24
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