Sam de Boise: “Gender, Music and Emotion: Discourse, Difference and Disagreement”

Associate Prof. Sam de Boise, Örebro University:

“Gender, Music and Emotion: Discourse, Difference and Disagreement”

This presentation explores how gender has been understood in relation to emotional experiences of music. It first discusses how the gendered history of emotions been understood in relation to men’s and women’s capacities to create and be influenced by music. It then moves on to consider how experimental and survey-based studies have sought to establish if there are different “levels” of emotional musical experience between people of different genders. The presentation finally looks at how the concept of gender difference is itself a contested domain which tends to presume essentialist differences between men and women particularly, and which requires re-thinking in relation to both empirical and theorical work on music, gender and emotions.