This group of girls is not a representative sample of female rockers in Finland. But my aim is not to make generalizations but to use the data in two ways: firstly, to describe the phenomenon of girls' rockbands and secondly, to illustrate some theoretical points surrounding these bands.

In this paper I will concentrate on the sex-gender system and the reproduction of gender hierarchy in rock music. The starting point of my line of argument is one of the most surprising results of my study:  that the girls' bands were treated quite well by audiences and other, mostly male musicians. In general, they were not laughed at, they were not said to stop that nonsense, they were not mocked when performing. Of course, they also received negative criticism, but they stated that the vast majority of feedback was positive and supporting. Audiences liked their playing and were pleased to see girls on stage, other musicians showed their respect by talking to them like professionals and insiders do, other bands (which were male in all the cases) in the same town borrowed them gear, the girls' parents were supportive. In sum, it was quite easy for these girls to start to play in a band. They did not have to fight for it. This result contrasts with literature on professional rock music. The position of women in rock is usually described as marginal and subordinated, despite the success of many famous female artists. However, there might be a difference between professional and non-professional rock scenes, at least with respect to women and girls. I will return to this point later.

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.

According to Hirdman, the rule of dichotomy generates and legitimizes hierarchy. Dichotomy comes first and hierarchy comes second. Therefore, changes in arrangements of separation lead to changes in the value disparity between the sexes, Hirdman argues. This notion is especially interesting for my study. The emergence of female musicians clearly challenges the dichotomy of the sexes but does it affect hierarchy as well? In my study I test whether Hirdman's model of change in the whole sex-gender system explains what was happening in the special case of these five bands.

I already referred to the case of dichotomy when I argued that it was not hard for girls to become rock musicians and thus break the rule of separation. Again and again the girls told me their gender was an advantage since it was easier for an all-girl band to obtain gigs. Despite rock being predominantly a male activity, there seemed to be no opposition to female musicians. On the contrary, breaking down the 'girls as audience vs. boys as musicians' dichotomy seemed to be quite easy for the girls, at least at a local and non-professional level.

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.

The rule of the male norm seems already to prevail because we do not talk about "all-male bands" -- they are simply bands, they are the norm from which all-girl bands deviate. But how do the girls deal with this male norm? Not without difficulties. Their experiences of being treated well by other musicians and audiences indicate that the local-level rock scene does not exclude girls. But girlishness excludes rock because of its negative connotation to rock: girlish rock was inferior rock in the eyes and ears of the girls themselves. They insisted that they can play rock music just like men do but at the same time they showed disdain for girlish rock music. They hated what they called a girlish way of playing rock: wearing pretty clothes on stage and holding instruments loosely, not hard and strong. They also thought most all-girl bands were less skilled than male ones. In this way the girls shared the general hierarchy of the sexes. This devaluation had nothing to do with their musical skills or training: for example one of the guitarists, who had been playing the acoustic and electric guitar for more than ten years and studied music, said: "It is true, the guys play better. When you listen to an all-girl band, you can tell they are girls." And she continued: "I do not know, maybe your attitude to guys is different from girls, but still..  You can hear it from our playing that we are girls. I don't know, maybe I myself also have this attitude, that they are worse. That we are worse."             The question of quality is crucial in study of women's music: Is music composed by women as good as that made by men? Can women be as talented as men? These questions stress the equality of the sexes, the common human nature shared by all human beings no matter to what sex, race, class or whatever you belong to. Another viewpoint to the problem of quality is to deconstruct and problematize the concepts itself: what constitutes 'quality' and who has the power to define it?

Let us return to the rocker girls and their struggles. In my examples the problem of the female gender was placed in the conflict between the concepts of 'girl' and 'girlishness' and especially the disparaging term 'all-girl band'. Girls can play rock, as long as they do not play in a girlish way. Girlishness is the problem. The rock scene accepts girls but not girlishness. But the girls did not make a distinction between girls and girlishness: to be a girl and to be girlish were the same. Neither did they invent new, positive meanings for girlishness, they were tied to the negative ones. Their solution was to try to be gender-neutral instead of girls and in this way to escape girlishness. They knew very well the unpleasant nature of the term 'all-girl-band', that is why they wanted their bands to become real bands instead of just 'all-girl-bands'. But while they recognized this they still did not notice the underlying contempt of all that is feminine, which makes the concept of an all-girl-band sound so negative.

Kirsti Määttänen (1993) argues that this kind of confusion between the concepts of 'women' and 'the feminine' is common in Western thinking, also in feminist research. Määttänen calls this confusion unrecognized oscillation. It is unrecognized because we tend not to notice it, which implies that the oscillation itself is self-evident in our ways of thinking. It is both basic and opaque as well as immune to doubt and questioning, she states.

This kind of unrecognized oscillation between girls and girlishness also characterises the stories the girls told me. Girls can and are allowed to play rock while girlishness and rock do not match. But because they did not make a distinction between girls and girlishness, the negative connotations attached to the latter forced them to reject their gender. Still, they were often treated like girls, not like genderless creatures as they would have preferred.

This confusion between girls and girlishness was one of the three, inter-connected ways of maintaining the hierarchy of the sexes. The second is what I call a vicious circle. This circle entails the dynamics that keep the girls' bands at the margins. The circle spins as follows: girls' bands are treated well and they get gigs easily and very early. The girls reported that their bands had been practicing only for a couple of months before their first public performance. Girls' bands attract attention and they are asked to play in almost every local happening. Usually it is hard for local groups to get gigs. But girls get phone calls at home and they are asked to perform. However, this good treatment is also bad treatment. The technical skills of girls' groups are sometimes modest, simply because they have only practiced for a short period of time. This reinforces the prejudices many people already have: that girls' groups are worse than those of boys. One of the girls supported this observation with the following: "Because there has not been a good female rock group people believe that there never can be one". 

My analysis of the vicious circle does not imply any statements about the musical skills of the sexes. It is based on what the girls told me: 1) According to their experiences girls' groups get gigs easily. 2) Their bands had performed for the first time after practicing for quite a short period of time. 3) What they knew and reported about the attitudes of other people, for example praises like "for a girl, you play quite well".

The third way of maintaining the hierarchy of the sexes is also the crucial point of my paper, that is the question of whether the band should be called a rock band or an all-girl rock band. In this case, the term 'all-girl-band' is both a division, separating female groups from male ones, and also a hierarchy, separating quality bands from second-rate ones. Thus, the neutral division and the hierarchy are the same.             Let us return to Hirdman's model of divisions and hierarchies. She believes that the erosion of the dichotomies between the sexes leads to a world where the male is not the norm and better than the female. According to Hirdman (1990) the fact that women and men begin to the do same should prove that both sexes can perform any task equally well. But in my data it was not so simple. Contrary to Hirdman's assumption, breaking the dichotomy did not eliminate the hierarchy.

In this case the relationship between dichotomy and hierarchy differed from Hirdman's model. Instead of divisions being prerequisities for the rule of the male norm it seemed that neutral divisions of girls and boys and the value hierarchy of girlishness and boyishness were blended. The best example of this blending is the division between bands and all-girl bands. It is both neutral and hierarchal at the same time.

When the girls talked about bands and all-girl bands they mixed neutral and hierarchal aspects of these two concepts. This confusion was similar to the unrecognized oscillation between girls and girlishness I talked about earlier. There was an unrecognized oscillation between division and hierarchy in the way the girls talked about bands and all-girl bands. By this I mean the way that a division that is meant to be a neutral one suddenly, without the speaker and the listener noticing, becomes a hierarcal statement. And vice versa. One of the girls said: "People should not talk about all-male-bands and all-girl-bands, people should just talk about bands, but you cannot compare us to those guys". At first she argues it is unnecassary to divide rock bands according to the sex of the musicians, since music is music and it is not played with the genitals: "people should just talk about bands". However, a moment later sex division becomes necessary as a hierarchy: "you cannot compare us to those guys".

I claim that it is this unrecognized oscillation between neutral and hierarcal statements, between divisions and hierarchies of the sexes that keeps girl bands at the margins. It is this oscillation, together with confusion between girls and girlishness, and the underlying contempt of the female that prevents all-girl groups from becoming real rock bands. And all of this is done in a very nice and subtle way. Girls are not discriminated against but treated well. There are no conspiracies to keep girls at the margins. Girls themselves do not complain about their treatment but feel guilty of getting gigs easier than boys who "play better and have tried harder for a longer time". The hierarchy of the sexes is maintained and reproduced in a way that is hard to detect, it seems to be so natural.

 

References:  

Bayton, Mavis, "Feminist Musical Practice: Problems and Contradictions". In Bennet, Tony & als. (eds.) Rock and Popular Music. Politics, Policies, Institutions. London: Routledge, 1993.

Hirdman, Yvonne, The Gender System. Theoretical Reflections on the Social Subordination of Women. The Study of Power and Democracy in Sweden, English series, report no. 40. Uppsala: Maktutredningen, 1990.

Knuuttila, Jarna, "Traditionaaliset kehitysteoriat ongelmana rokkarityttöjen tutkimuksessa". Nuorisotutkimus 10(3), 2-9, 1992. (Traditional theories of psychological development as problematic when studying girls who play rock music. Finnish Journal of Youth Studies).

Knuuttila, Jarna, "Tyttöbändi vai bändi - Muuttaako tyttöjen rockinsoittoharrastus sukupuolten järjestystä?" Naistutkimus - Kvinnoforskning  7(2): 25-40, 1994. (Girls' band or band? Does the order of the sexes change?. Finnish Journal of Women's Studies).

Knuuttila, Jarna, Rockia soittavat tytöt. Rockinsoittoharrastus nuoruusiän ja sukupuolijärjestelmän näkökulmista. Licentiate's thesis in psychology, University of Joensuu. Unpublished. 1995. (Girls who play rock music.)

Lähteenmaa, Jaana, Tytöt ja rock: kuuntelu, haaveet ja soittaminen. Sosiologian pro gradu, Helsingin yliopisto, 1988. (Girls and Rock: Listening, dreaming and playing. Masters' Thesis in Sociology, Univ. of Helsinki).

Määttänen, Kirsti, "Naiseus ja banaalin kehä". Naistutkimus - Kvinnoforskning 6:2, 22-32, 1993. (Women's Sphere of Female Sphere? Finnish Journal of Women's Studies).