Music and Gender Symposium

Abstracts: 

Michael Simants: Worldview and Destiny at Midnights: Listening to Taylor Swift with Douglas Davies 

In this paper, I explore Taylor Swift’s lyrical output to understand Prof Douglas Davies’ Idea-Destiny Scheme. This scheme posits that ideas are things humans grasp hold of, add value and emotion too, and after this addition, they form destiny, either this-world or other-worldly. For Taylor Swift, this Idea-Destiny Scheme is rooted in her search for lasting love in her early music and becomes expressed in a form of feminism that critiques the music industry from the inside. Along the way, the article discusses some of Swift’s lyrics using Davies’ worldview typology. Finally, the piece concludes with a Theological Postlude in which I attempt to answer the “So What” question for theological education and ministerial formation.

Daniela Fazio Vargas: Joining the ‘Dance of the Expendable’: Visibilising the Demands from the Shores in the 2019 Chilean Social Uprising   

 Music has played a crucial role in recent Chilean history as conduct for social and political demands, and the protests of 2019 were no exception. “El Estallido”, apart from being a social and political uprising, was also an artistic outburst. In part because demonstrators resorted to art to mobilise themselves and for the greater visibility acquired by artists and their performances during the protests. As I have been arguing, the transformative force of the uprising could be explained by referring to the convergence of all the ‘dancers’ that, from the margins, have been performing practices of dissensus for many years. Amongst these, it is worthwhile emphasising the wave of feminist protest that 2018 shook up the country and whose effects continued resonating in the 2019 Uprising and which were powdered by feminist collectives such as LASTESIS. However, for their practices to become visible, they required a shift in the regime that enabled subjects to ‘ask the impossible’. In changing this regime, the movements that little by little joined the ‘dance of the expendable’ played a fundamental role: visibilising the outcasts, making their demands audible, and doing what, otherwise, would be deemed impossible. Nevertheless, they were not dancing without music: for many years, music has accompanied their moves, supporting protesters in propitiating the conditions to alter the regime and claiming a new distribution. 

Zoe Solomon: The Harp in Modern Britain  

Abigail Cawte: The Voice of Women in Hillsong United  

In this paper I will look at the changing role of women in Hillsong United, a worship band that formed out of the youth ministry of Australian mega-church, Hillsong, in 1998. I will show that although women have written songs and performed throughout the band's existence, they did not have the same longevity as the men and there were fewer involved overall, which created a male core to the band’s identity. Through a study of the concert film Hillsong UNITED: People Tour Live From Madison Square Garden (2021), I will show how Hillsong United’s inclusion of their origin story in the concert works to sideline the involvement of women. I will then look at the live performance elements of the concert to contextualise the gendered performance gestures of vocalist Taya Gaukrodger, who disrupts the male-centric expression of the band but also embodies a femininity that aligns with Hillsong’s ideology. This allows her to provide a new way for the worshiping female body to be represented on stage, which widens the repertoire of gestures available to both the congregation or audience watching and women who wish to participate in worship bands.