Re-articulation of Subjectivities in Popular Culture: Language and Gender Discourses in the Works of Ani DiFranco

• Published in: Women and language Vol. 22; no. 2; p. 49
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Urbana George Mason University 22.09.1999; Organization for the Study of Communication Language and Gender
• Subjects: Articulation; Artists; Audiences; Class identity; Cultural identity; Cultural values; DiFranco, Ani; Everyday life; Gender; Gender identity; Gender stereotypes; Language culture relationship; Marginality; Mass media; Mass media images; Music; Musical recordings; Negotiation; Popular culture; Popular music; Racial identity; Resistance; Self concept; Sexuality; Singers; Stereotypes; Studies; Television; Women; United States > US
• ISSN: 8755-4550

While representations of gender and sexuality in television, film, and print media are highly significant variables affecting cultural norms, within musical forms emerge an avant-garde of identities. This exciting, dynamic process of emergent resistance and identity formation is ever adjusting to the demands of marginalized social subjects in search of articulation, legitimization and power. Within cultural negotiations of power people are afforded marginalized positions often in keeping with their gender, race, class and sexual identity. Women have historically experienced such positioning in the stereotypes of the homemaker, the nurturer and the victim. This study focuses on the positioning of women in the works of one of popular music's most successful and fiercely independent female artists, Ani DiFranco. Having released more than ten CD's, DiFranco has built a broad fan base whose subjugated knowledges will be incorporated in this project. This study combines a textual based analysis with an audience analysis of Ani fans within a cybercommunity examining the negotiated meanings existent within these cultural artifacts, their appropriation in everyday life and the re-articulation of fan subjectivities. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]