Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.     

Value-Based Collaboration Between Leaders at Schools of Music and Performing Arts and Leaders at Compulsory Schools

In this study, we investigate collaboration efforts between leaders at schools of music and performing arts and leaders at compulsory schools, as well as the drivers behind the initiation and maintenance of such collaborative work. One driver is an existing concern about the lack of qualified music teachers at compulsory schools. We argue, however, that the real force behind such collaboration is a strong belief in the pure value of music and art among the collaborating leaders. Our findings indicate that value congruence and social exchanges across the organizations in question, provides the core basis for an effective collaboration.     

Performing Ghana: the politics of being a black woman on the stage, 1966–1979

This article examines the politics of belonging for women in Ghana’s entertainment scene. As a result of instability while a series of different military and civilian leaders controlled the country between 1966 and 1979, Ghanaian women were scrutinized in local newspapers for actions that were deemed inappropriate, such as provocative dancing. Yet, these same Ghanaian journalists contradicted their own language and respectability ideals by celebrating the sexualized images and performances of Caribbean and African American women visiting Ghana during this period. By distinguishing between the actions of Ghanaian women and women of African descent, their language demonstrates that journalists prioritized national identity politics over the claims of respectability expected of all women in their country. Through the use of what I describe as ‘Ghanaianness’, a term indicating that ‘authenticity politics’ were at stake, I argue that journalists purposefully excluded diasporic women from Ghanaian belonging.     

Bole to Harlem via Tel Aviv: networks of Ethiopia's musical diaspora

ABSTRACT

One of the fastest growing sources of domestic labor in the Global North is Ethiopia, whose female population travels to North America, Europe, and the developed Middle East to work for remittances to send home. Once these migrants settle in cities such as London, Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv, Rome, or Toronto, they organize themselves into cultural enclaves that navigate their positionality, namely the state, religious practice, and their bodies. While scholars are occasionally interested in the explicit security ramifications of absorbing these migrant workforces, they pay less attention to the cultural forces propelling citizenship, and to migrants' relationship with their home culture. This gap in knowledge is counterproductive, because scholars and policy-makers will have trouble assessing the Ethiopian migrant population's perspective through interview material alone. The Ethiopian values of honor and respect for authority dictate a hesitance to criticize explicitly, so the population's feelings about marginality rarely emerge in discussion about labor. This taboo curtails the effectiveness of typical ethnographic methods (e.g. interviewing). Rather, this article examines Ethiopian music as a prism through which migrant musicians navigate the complex web of religious, ethnic, national, and embodied identities in their new surroundings. In this article, I present findings based on participant-observation of Ethiopian live music in North American and Middle Eastern diaspora cities (New York, Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, and Dubai), and argue that the populations are linked through the multidirectional cultural influences of Ethiopian diasporic popular music. I will argue that Ethiopian migrants' music offers a stable, alternative form of political discussion to more overt discussions of contested identities, and that these discussions reshape cultural boundaries. By considering performance techniques such as choice of language for lyrics, and the incorporation of Ethiopian or local dance style into music videos that are distributed over the Internet, one begins to understand how the rapidly expanding transnational network of Ethiopian migrants conceptualizes itself as an emerging global source of labor in cosmopolitan urban centers.     

Editorial voices

Jack Smith is an artist on the margins of official narratives of art of the 1960s. This essay attempts to read his works as a means of questioning the challenges posed to normative readings of the work of culture, by presenting ideas about queer performance. Smith's almost hysterical identification with Maria Montez, a 1940s film siren, is privileged in my reading. Her key film, Cobra woman, turns on the image of a wound that will not heal. In this essay, I read the wound as signaling the breaches in our attempts at full communication, and compare this state of being to the idiosyncratic form of the camp effect, which functions as a kind of hieroglyph, or broken sign. Read through Maria Montez, the ‘failures’ of Smith's practice are explored in order to invogorate the seemingly exhausted discourse on camp, as well as to pose a critique of the ways in which certain bodies are failed by dominant culture.     

从功能与意义视角看民间法研究

近年兴起的民间法研究热点表明以国家法为中心的单一研究对象和规范分析方法正在受到冲击,法学研究多元化的局面正在形成之中。文章分析和比较民间法研究中存在的两种不同的研究视角:注重从功能视角探究规则的普遍性规律的自生自发秩序和强调由特殊性生活样态所构织的意义世界的地方性知识,指出了这两种不同视角之间存在的视域交融。     

全球化与"中国法治的民间化障碍"

当今世界全球化和区域一体化并存,两者虽有矛盾,但在法律领域则意味着不同法系、不同国家的法律制度不同程度的融合,全球法治化与法律全球化的趋势俨然存在.在中国社会的历史和现实因素交替作用下形成的"中国法治的民间化障碍"正成为对抗"法治全球化"的巨大阻力.调和这种矛盾的最佳选择是运用"和"的哲学思维和方法论构建强调"和谐"的现代化法治社会,这既是中国文化的传统价值理念在当代的回归,也是融合异种文化后的创新,为中国的法治化建设提供了方向和途径.     

‘Our Culture's Not for Sale!’: Music and the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca in Mexico

The Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), a social movement that emerged in June 2006, was a response to severe government repression of a teachers' strike in Oaxaca, Mexico. This article focuses on the movement participants' involvement with music, and the innovative ways in which songs associated with APPO were shared and circulated during the conflict. APPO's engagement with musical activities created spaces in which the political significance of regional culture was reinterpreted and re-signified. APPO, despite failing in its primary political objectives, thus generated new ways of relating to the performance, representation, politics and consumption of musical traditions.     

历史文化的积淀——从傩戏的起源和发展探傩戏的本质

傩戏是起源于原始宗教的一种民间戏剧艺术,被称为当今戏剧的“活化石”。它的起源或形成与中国历史文化有着密不可分的渊源关系,它的发展更是有其特定的社会因素掺杂在里面。从宗教蜕变成为戏剧,显示出傩戏在历史发展过程中所具有的生命力。本文试图从历史文化的角度探讨傩戏这一特有的文化剧种的演变过程。     

乡土社会中的国家法与民间法

在我国广大乡土社会中,民间法与国家法同时存在,这已是一个基本的事实.民间法与国家法既存在矛盾冲突,但又具有可以消解和转化的条件.在社会转型的过程中,应充分注意到二者的互动与相容关系,在依法治国的大前提下,建构现代农村的法治秩序.