Unsilenced: Women Musicians, Gender-Based Violence, and the Popular Music Industry

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This book explores how women who have experienced gender-based violence within the music industry represent this violence through their creative outputs. Through three case studies Kesha, Lingua Ignota, and Alice Glass it examines how the artists experiences of this violence is represented in their music, lyrics, and visual accompaniments; how they narrate and talk about what happened, incorporating the experiences and their responses into their public persona; and what it is about the music industry itself that might facilitate or enable such experiences, or perpetuate the abuse. The analysis in the book provides insight into how survivors construct their experiences. Beyond this, the works of these artists are themselves cultural artefacts working to (re)inscribe understandings of gender-based violence. They therefore hold further significance as products that shape how other survivors (and the broader community) understand such violence. The book reveals how these women view the role of the industry in relation to gender-based violence. The genre location and subject position of each artist shapes the extent to which they can articulate the industry as central to their abuse, and a type of abuser in its own right, and how they see resistance and positive change as possible.

Author Bio

Rosemary Lucy Hill is Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is the series editor of Advances in Metal Music and Culture and on the editorial advisory boards of Cultivate and Metal Music Studies. Bianca Fileborn is Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social and Political Sciences at West Virginia University, USA. Her work is broadly concerned with interrogating the intersections of identity, space, place, culture and experiences of violence. Catherine Strong is Senior Lecturer in the Music Industry program at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Among her publications are Grunge: Music and Memory (2011), Death and the Rock Star (2015, edited with Barbara Lebrun), and Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (Bloomsbury 2021, edited with Sarah Raine). Her research deals with various aspects of memory, nostalgia and gender in rock music, popular culture and the media. She is currently Chair of IASPM-ANZ and co-editor of Popular Music History journal.