2012 Feminist Working Group: Turn It Up!

Here's the call for our 2012 action:

Turn It Up! Listening to Difference
A series of panels sponsored by the Feminist Working Group
Click here to be taken to the new Feminist Working Group page and get all the latest info about current and future projects of this group.
The Feminist Working Group will host a series of panels and meet-ups at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference, presented on March 22-25, 2012 by NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music(IASPM-US). The aim of these events is to provide social space, a forum for research and ideas, and opportunities to network for women, lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, people of color, and anyone without traditionally privileged access to academia, journalism and/or the music industry.

The theme of this year's conference "Sounds of the City" invites us to reconsider the 'gorgeous mosaic' that is the metropolis. How do we make our voices heard, listen to others, and share the groove? How should popular music and sound studies engage questions of diversity and inclusion? How do we continue to think in the 'singular plural,' accounting for the overlapping and ever-evolving way in which identities are lived and imagined? How do we learn to listen to (and for) difference?

We invite and encourage a wide diversity of discourses related to experiencing sound in the city including the work of scholars,activists, journalists, teachers, musicians, and archivists. Bring us your scholarship, your manifestos, your archives, your communities, your selves. Priority will be given to topics that address the ways identities and communities intersect and overlap, and that pay attention to the multiple aspects of difference: including gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, religion, region, and able-bodiedness. Accepted presentations will be grouped onto panels by the organizers, and should be designed to accommodate a 20-minute time limit, and minimal tech requirements beyond classroom A/V and internet access.

Email submission deadline: October 15th, 2012
Email a 250-word paper or presentation proposal, with 50-word bio, to turnitup2012 at gmail dot com

Please Note: Submission to Turn It Up! should not preclude submission to the open call for EMP/IASPM-US:
(http://www.empmuseum.org/education/index.asp?categoryID=26).
All proposals that are NOT accepted for Turn It Up! will automatically be sent on to the EMP/IASPM-US committee unless the proposer indicates otherwise.

Thank you!

A big round of applause goes out to all the participants and sincere thanks to all the attendees of Work It! at USC on February 24th. We have over a hundred attendees, lots of frank (and, even better, Phranc) talk about gender, sexuality, race, and careers in scholarship, journalism, and the music industry.

If you have resources to share, links, or documents, please do email them to musicwriting at gmail dot com, and they will be placed on this website to share with all.

Thanks!

The Work It! Team: Karen, Daphne, Sarah, and Ann

Work It! Day Of Schedule

9:30: Doors open, coffee and tea, courtesy of USC Arts and Letters

10am: Welcome and opening Remarks: Alice Echols, USC

S/he works hard for the money (10:30am—12:00pm)
Moderator: Ann Powers, chief pop critic, Los Angeles Times

This panel features women working in the music industry discussing how issues of race, gender and sexuality affect their day to day experiences. What are the career benefits and challenges that difference may bring to musicians and music industry professionals? How does the practice of making and marketing music support traditional concepts of race, gender and sexuality? Subvert them? How have things changed for people outside rock's "straight boy's club" in the past few decades?

With:
Ceci Bastida, vocalist
Amy Blackman, Cookman Management
Nicole Vandenberg, head of Vandenberg Communications
Evelyn McDonnell, journalist and memoirist
Lauren Onkey, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio
Rachel Reynolds, music publicity director at L.A. public radio station KCRW
Judy Miller Silverman, head publicist, Motormouthmedia

Lunch and Break out sessions (12pm-2:30)
Organized by: Sarah Dougher, Portland State University

Catered lunch (Mexican with a vegetarian option)

In this lunchtime session, groups will form with one or more team leaders for discussion on the politics and pragmatics of taking gender and sexuality seriously in the following fields:

On Musical Practice, with:
Anna Huff is a multi-media artist, composer and performer, Anna Oxygen
Jen Smith, musician and activist
Allison Wolfe, musician and activist

On Education, with:
Jack Halberstam, USC
Alice Echols, USC
Elizabeth K. Keenan, Fordham University
Gayle Wald, George Washington University

On Activism, with:
Justice by Uniting in Creative Energy, or J.U.i.C.E., a LA-based project that curbs youth violence and crime through hip hop culture
Becky Gebhardt, bassist Raining Jane, co-founded Rock n' Roll Camp for Girls, Los Angeles
Emily Lacy, folk and electronic sound artist

On Journalism and publishing, with:
Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times music writer
Daphne Carr, Best Music Writing series
Marissa Meltzer, author and freelancer

Work it! A roundtable discussion about performance, pop, profit, and the academy (2:30—4pm)
Moderated by: Karen Tongson, USC

In this panel, leading scholars of gender, sexuality and race have a conversation about the interventions feminist/queer/of color scholars make in the reception of contemporary popular music and culture, especially in light of the EMP Conference's theme on "Music and Money." To what extent are academics themselves pop professionals, especially when pop music and culture are our primary objects of study? How do we understand "working it" not only in the music profession, but in the neoliberal and entrepreneurial environment of contemporary universities? And how are our own versions of "working it" critical of, as well as deeply related to, the performers and pop industries we write about?

With:
Karen Tongson, USC (moderator)
Christine Bacareza Balance, University of California, Irvine
Daphne Brooks, Princeton University
Jayna Brown University of California, Riverside
Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University
Gayle Wald, George Washington University


Thanks to: Nikki Darling, Rebecca Das and Jeanne Weiss for administrative and promotional support for the conference. You rock!

Parking and public transit for the Work It! Conference

Parking on the USC campus is $8 daily. Click here for general parking info at USC.

The Event is at the Tutor Campus Center (TCC) at 3607 Trousdale Parkway.

For the conference space, the Tutor Center, try to park in PSX (Parking Structure X), Entrance 3 on Figueroa and McCarthy (between Jefferson and Exposition).

If the lot is full, try PSD (Parking Structure D), Entrance 4 at Jefferson and Royal between (Hoover and Figueroa)

People also have the option of parking offsite at the Shrine Auditorium (across the street from Parking Structure D on Jefferson and Royal). More info about offsite parking is available here.

Information on public transit to USC can be found here. More information TBA.

The Work It! Poster

Work It! Organizers and Participants bios

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her writing has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women & Performance, Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the indie band The Jack Lords Orchestra and a self-professed Gleek, she is currently writing a book on popular music in Filipino America.

Ceci Bastida is a Tijuana-born vocalist who began her career in 1990 as the frontwoman for the punk group Tijuana No., and in 2000 joined Julieta Venegas’s band before branching out on her own six years later. Now a solo artist, she recently released her first full-length album, Veo La Marea (EMI), in Mexico. The CD includes collabos with Brooklyn band XXXChange, Monterrey rapper Niña Dioz and heavyweight dj/producer Diplo, with whom she worked with on the song “Have You Heard?” inspired by the war against drug trafficking in Mexico.

Amy Blackman is the Manager of Amy B MGMT/Cookman, which includes the internationally renowned musicians Ozomatli.

Daphne Brooks is Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), winner of the The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR; and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musical Subcultures from Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

Jayna Brown received her PhD in African American and American Studies from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press), which won both the Errol Hill best book award from the American Society for Theatre Research and the George Freedley award from the Theater Library Association. Her current projects focus on race, music and utopias in speculative fiction and global pop and black women and postpunk music in Britain.

Daphne Carr is a writer, editor, and scholar who lives in New York City. She is the series editor of Best Music Writing (Da Capo 2006-present), author of Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine (Continuum 2011), and co-writer of the afterward for Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis On Rock Music (U. of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, editor in chief of the scholarly journal Current Musicology, and a certificate candidate for the Harriman Institute and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Nikki Darling writes for the LA Weekly music department and Huffington Post as a cultural critic. In December 2009 she appeared on the KPFK radio show Feminist Magazine to discuss being a feminist rock critic in a ‘male dominated industry.’ She co-hosts the Five Points Reading series at Workspace Gallery in Lincoln Heights with writer Kate Wolf and received her Masters in Critical Studies from the California Institute of the Arts this past May. Nikki is currently finishing her thesis, a novel about objectification and fame in Depression era America. You can follow her musical, feminist and nonsensical ramblings at http://imnikkidarlingandyourenot.blogspot.com/

Sarah Dougher is an educator, writer and musician from Portland, Oregon. She teaches at Portland State University and writes music for a choir, which she also directs.

Alice Echols is the author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75, and Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks. She is a professor of Gender Studies and English at USC.

Becky Gebhardt is a native of Los Angeles and has been playing the bass since age 13. She has recorded and performed with Jason Mraz, Willy Porter, Trevor Hall and many other artists, but her main gig is indie band Raining Jane, together since 1999. Other current music projects include Thee Nathaniel Fregoso and The Bountiful Hearts and Alex Davis. In 2010, Becky co-founded Rock n' Roll Camp for Girls Los Angeles, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering girls through music education. She also composes music and plays the sitar.

Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist research at USC. Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

Justice by Uniting in Creative Energy, or J.U.i.C.E., is a Community Partners sponsored project that curbs youth violence and crime through hip hop culture. It is a free, safe and positive place, inviting young people to breakdance, create graffiti art, freestyle rap and blast loud music.

Elizabeth K. Keenan completed her doctorate at Columbia University in 2008 with a dissertation examining the connections between feminist politics, popular music, and the American middle class. Her work has received the Wong Tolbert and Lise Waxer Prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicology and has been published in JPMS.

Emily Lacy is a folk and electronic sound artist generating works in music, film, and other media. She has performed in exhibitions at PS1 MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hammer Museum, and LACMA, in addition to various DIY spaces all throughout America. She works very closely with Machine Project.

Evelyn McDonnell has been writing about popular culture and society for more than 20 years. She is the author of three books: Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork and Rent by Jonathan Larson. She coedited the anthologies Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap and Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth. The Los Angeles-based journalist has been the editorial director of www.MOLI.com, pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at SF Weekly. Her writing on music, poetry, theater, and culture has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Ms., Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Us, Billboard, Vibe, Interview, Black Book, and Option.

Marisa Meltzer is author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music and co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. Yes, she really loves the nineties that much. As a freelance writer, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Slate, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, and many other publications. She has covered such diverse topics from why Miley Cyrus is a good role model to which Pride and Prejudice adaptation has the best Mr. Darcy and she's reported on Parisian riots and overachieving New York City high school students.

Tavia Nyong'o is an assistant professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he teaches courses on race, popular culture, history and theory. He has published on the intersections of punk and queer in the journals Social Text and Radical History Review. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, was published in spring 2009 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Lauren Onkey is Vice President of Education and Public Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers (Routledge 2010) and teaches rock history courses at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University.

Anna Huff is a multi-media artist, composer and performer. She has extensively toured Europe and the United States under the name Anna Oxygen, performing dance pop recitals and interactive performance pieces. Best known for her aerobics live performances, she has released several albums of electronic and acoustic music, most recently "This is an Exercise” on indie label Kill Rock Stars. Her performance and video work has been presented at PS1 MOMA Contemporary, The Seattle Art Museum, NYU, The Hammer Museum, PICA, and the Rohsska Museet in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Ann Powers is the chief pop critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Rachel Reynolds is the music publicity director at L.A. public radio station KCRW.

Judy Miller Silverman is the head publicist for the boutique firm Motormouthmedia.

Jen Smith is an enthusiastic participant and feminist. With her post punk band the Quails, she has played music halls, street protests and squats, made posters, zines and anti-war ephemera and recorded three albums. An essential human practice, she has lately been curious about food, how it is grown, the politics of its production and how it is prepared and eaten. As an expression of that interest, she cooks and makes pickles for people. Smith received her BA in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Her pickles may be investigated and procured easily at fullmoonpickles.blogspot.com.

Karen Tongson is Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC, and the author of the forthcoming book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, Spring 2011). She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies (with Gustavus Stadler), and the series editor for Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press (with Henry Jenkins).

Gayle Wald chairs the English Department at George Washington University. She is author of Shout, Sister, Shout: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as various articles on gender, women/girls, and pop music. She actively worries about the state of feminist teaching and scholarship in the academy today.

Nicole Vandenberg is the head of Vandenberg Communications, which provides media relations, community relations, crisis communications, strategic philanthropy and special event coordination for clients in arts and entertainment, business, and nonprofit sectors. Past and current clients include: Pearl Jam, Gloria Steinem, the 2004 Vote for Change tour, Choice USA, Living Legacy Foundation, YouthNoise, Music for America, Future of Music Coalition, Air Traffic Control, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Groundwork 2001 concert series, Experience Hendrix, Honor the Earth, People for the American Way, The Songbird Foundation, Avocado Productions, Voters for Choice, Vitalogy Health Club Foundation & the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 2000 tour. Prior to starting Vandenberg Communications in 1998, Nicole oversaw the arts and entertainment division of Seattle- based Pyramid Communications, a national public affairs firm.

Margaret Wappler is a Los Angeles Times music writer who has also been published in the LA Weekly, Rolling Stone and The Believer.


Allison Wolfe was born an identical twin in 1969 in Memphis, Tennessee. After her parents divorced, her lesbian feminist activist mother moved the family to Olympia, Washington, to start the first women’s health care clinic in the area.  She later became quite influenced by the Olympia/Evergreen DIY music/performance scene. After graduating high school and spending a year as an exchange student in Thailand, Allison attended the University of Oregon, where she met a politicized Molly Neuman from Washington, D.C. With the support of fellow Olympians Bikini Kill, they joined forces to create a punk feminist fanzine “Girl Germs,” the girl punk band Bratmobile, and, along with others, third wave feminist punk movement riot grrrl. Allison graduated from The Evergreen State College and moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for The Washington Post and played in the bands Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, a reformed Bratmobile, and Partyline. In a bout of disappointment from anti-feminist backlash and a seemingly mediocre music scene, Allison came up with the idea for in 1999 for Ladyfest, a non-profit feminist indie music festival. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she volunteers for the local Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls and is working on a book about riot grrrl. 

The Work It Conference, February 24, 2011

Work It: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in pop music professions

In association with the 11th Annual Experience Music Project Pop Conference

Thursday, February 24, 2011
University of Southern California
The Forum at the Tutor Campus Center
10am-4pm, Free

The biggest stars of the day from Katy Perry, Nikki Minaj, Lady Gaga, to Adam Lambert, play in the brightest lights with conventions of gender and sexuality, echoing and building upon traditions of pop performance as old as the stage itself. In basements, barrooms, concert halls and cafes across the country, artists of all types do the same—and more—while rooted in various political, performative, and social contexts they might hesitate to call “feminist” but will surely call “doing their thing” or “taking no shit.” And at the same time, an industry shifts dynamically in the wake of dramatic technological changes, rendering concepts of “professionalism” in new light while the academy shifts to deal with popular culture in ways more inclusive than ever before (or not). At this day-long conference, a group of music journalists, scholars, musicians, and music industry professionals come together to talk about the changing role of gender, race, and sexuality in the pop music world.

The conference will include a discussion with feminist scholar Alice Echols about her newest book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (WW Norton, 2010); a panel on gender/sexuality/race in pop careers; a panel on self-objectification as a performance/business strategy with Judith Halberstam, Gayle Wald, Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, and Christine Bacareza Balance; and working groups devoted to discussion/skill sharing on issues of gender/race/sexuality’s role in education, activism, musical careers, and journalism.

Lunch will be served.

This conference is co-sponsored by the USC Gender Studies Program, Center for Feminist Research, Department of Music, The Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Work It! is held in association with the 11th Annual Experience Music Project Pop Conference, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money,” to be held at the music department of UCLA February 24-27, 2011.

The event is free and the public is encouraged to attend.
Please RSVP as food will be provided and we would like to accommodate guests well.
Please email workit2011@gmail.com to RSVP or to ask questions

The conference is organized by Dr. Karen Tongson, Daphne Carr, Ann Powers, and Dr. Sarah Dougher.

Work it! - a short history on how we got here

In 2007, the Experience Music Project Pop Conference held a tribute to the feminist music critic Ellen Willis. The next year, a group of writers, scholars, musicians and fans gathered to continue her legacy through the creation of the EMP Pop Conference feminist working group. The first working group drew over 50 participants from multiple generations and who had a variety of definitions and opinions about what feminism is/does. Some were surprised that such a space as this could operate in the supposedly "post-feminist" era. The next year, even more people came to the group, so we broke into four sub-sections (activism, teaching, writing, performance - although most people could participate in two or more of the discussion) for discussion and skill sharing. In 2010, the group put together a panel that was specially focused on the relationship between gender/sexuality and technology, featuring musicians Tara Rodgers (also author of Pink Noises, 2010), Emily Wells, and Wynne Greenwood.

This year we are proud to announce that the feminist working group will expand to a full day of panels, discussion, working groups, and guest talks under the title, "Work It," a play on a classic Missy tune that fits well with the 2011 EMP conference theme of music and money. We are excited to be presenting the conference at USC with sponsorship from the USC Gender Studies Program, Center for Feminist Research, Department of Music and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. More details will follow this post, of course.

Stay tuned.