Author Description

"This woman's work is a collection of essays by 18 female writers, writing about exclusively female experiences in music, co-edited by Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon and Irish author Sinead Gleeson. This book celebrates the instrument makers, the experimentalists, the harmonizers, the avant-garde, the genre-breakers, the pop queens, and all those on the margins who expose the lack of intersectionality in this industry. For a long time, the narrative of music has been male-centered and hyper-masculine. The purpose of the women within it was to orbit these men: swooning to Elvis, screaming en-masse at Beatles gigs, or trying to get backstage to sleep with the rock bad boys. When women gained visibility in the music of the 1960s, they were - again - allocated specific tropes: backing singer, lone woman in the band, Motown trios singing innocuous love songs. In the 1970s, at the time Kate Bush became the first woman (at just 17) to have a number one with song she'd written herself, the women of punk began to make their voices heard. But many didn't like these acts of assertion; the femaleness, the raging against gender stereotypes, the Amazonian loudness of it all. Joan Jett recalls being knocked over on stage by flying bottles; The Slits were chased and threatened after gigs and their singer Ari Up was stabbed twice. Even as late as the 1980s, as hip hop gained prominence, it made room for only a handful of women, while trading in misogynist rhymes, where women could only be hoes, bitches or gold diggers. How were young female rappers of color to participate when they didn't see themselves represented in that culture? Trapped within an entertainment industry relentlessly catering to men, these rappers, and many other budding female musicians across a variety of genres in modern music, were often othered and exoticized--until the moment when they dared to own it. To speak up. To shout louder. Digging into the depths of an industry hard-coded for sexism, This woman's