Publication: L. J. Müller: "Hearing Sexism. Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach"

L. J. Müller: "Hearing Sexism. Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach"

In 2019 L. J. Müller received the IASPM book prize for their German first book “Sound und Sexismus”, which is a study of how sexism (= an unequal presentation and construction of gender) can be fruitfully analyzed in pop-sounds and voices and how through sound different modes of engagement with the singer’s voices and different imagined embodiments are encouraged. 

A slightly reworked English translation named “Hearing Sexism” is now available.

If pictures can be sexist, can analyzing sound reveal sexism, too? Where is the language to discuss sexism in music? LJ Müller tackles these important questions in their 2018 German book titled Sound und Sexismus, which was awarded the IASPM 2019 book prize. Analyzing the voices of Kurt Cobain, Kate Bush, Björk and others, Müller demonstrates how gender is performed vocally and interacts with gendered aspects of embodiment and affect. The book is written from a strongly positioned and personal feminist perspective and is appealing to readers from various backgrounds – singers, producers, music lovers, as well as academics and anyone with an interest in feminist takes on pop culture.

The book is:

  • radically rethinking ways of popular music analysis form a feminist perspective.

  • focusing on popular music as a means for the cultural distribution of conceptions of embodiment of self and others.

  • discusses differences in how music offers separate options for affective engagement with voices, particularly as material for identification or as objects of desire or mystified complementation.

  • criticizing particularly the central position of white masculinity in popular music as partially constructed in sound and through sonical means and thus legitimated on an affective level as most “relevant” and “real”.


Further information:

News, PublicationHelene Heuser