This work explores the everyday uses of rock music by women rock musicians, fans and DJs (amateurs), in a specific place (Portugal) and time (1990s-2014). Drawing on the work in the two main fields of music sociology and gender studies and its performative perspective to both gender and music (but also taking contributions from techno-feminist studies, science and technology studies, sociology of work, leisure and sports), this research takes a ‘music-in-action’ approach. This approach understands music as a social activity, as a network of connections between people, materials, discourses and activities. Rock music is best understood as a genre-in-action (not just as a semiotic text or reflection), as socio-material practice, in its collective, relational, performative, situated contexts of use - as rock musicking. As such, there are socio-material processes that constrain and enable women (as a minority group) doing and being in a masculinist rock music world. Taking a ‘mutual shaping’ approach to genre and gender, this research also takes into account how people use aesthetic materials in the processes of performative gendered identity making and relationship with others, as well as world building. The data consists of sixty in-depth interviews with Portuguese rockers (between 2012 and 2014), and supplementary field observations and follow-up interviews. The research found that girls and women’s musical opportunities are more restricted, but that they are also actively negotiated. Parental support and the presence of rock fathers in early years, as well as participation in male networks – whether or not a woman is romantically involved with ‘one of the boys’ – throughout the life course are pathways into rock musicking, as documented in other studies. Adding to the literature, this research highlights how not only in early years, but throughout the life course, rock musicking practices are dependent upon specific aesthetic (musical and visual) gender performances. From female masculinity to alternative femininities, rock music and its visual and material cultures are ‘active ingredients’ in doing and undoing gender. In Portugal, the absence of a strong riot grrrl movement and the lack of female/feminist networks, turns membership in male bands the norm. Consequently, either the “girl in the band’ or girl/female bands have to deal with their ‘novelty’ value. These rockers negotiate the labels of riot grrrl, feminist and grunge within a ‘girl power’ discourse, but mostly, struggling not to let their musical skills and value be obscured by their sex/ualization – developing high standards of musicianship, managing on-stage bodily disclosure, naming and praising their peers, aligning with an Anglo-Saxon rock female canon, but also othering female fans. In male bands, due to male skill ascription, women are segregated into traditional female musical roles, the singer, the bass player. On the other hand, women drummers get token value. At the expenses of instrument specialization, women undertake multi-instrumental pathways. Becoming musical agile selves and re-valuing (traditionally female) musical roles, playing conventions and body techniques. Women also appropriate mixers to spread their love for rock music. These women creatively expand rock music’s material culture, crafting it with clothes, acessories and even food. For rockers who are mothers, rock musicking becomes a technology of mothering. Taking Portuguese women rockers and their socio-musical practices, at both the everyday level and on the “spectacular” rock stage, this research adds to the international and growing body of work on gender and (rock) music across different disciplinary fields (sociology, popular music studies, feminist studies). It extends the traditional focus within popular music scholarship on Anglo-American rock culture, feminist mo(ve)ments, and subcultures, to place emphasis instead on an age group and place that has otherwise been overlooked.

Der Autor entfaltet zunächst seine Zweifel daran, ob man Musikstunden überhaupt dadurch gerecht wird, dass man sie ins 'Licht' von Theorien stellt. Ebenso schwierig, wenn nicht unmöglich, dürfte es sein, didaktische Theorien ins Licht von Praxis zu stellen, etwa im Sinne einer Bewährungsprobe. Solchen Zweifeln setzt der Autor dann aber die Überlegung entgegen, 'dass der schönste Skeptizismus keiner ist, wenn er sich nicht auch gegen sich selbst wendet'. Er stellt also die (Thüringer) Stunde ins Licht einer ethnographischen Methode, der 'dichten Beschreibung' nach Clifford Geertz, und erzählt die Interaktion zwischen Mädchen, Jungen und Musiklehrer als (hypothetische) Geschichte nach, in der sich Mechanismen der Benachteiligung von Jungen zeigen, wie sie möglicherweise - wenn man nicht aufpasst - im Klassenmusizieren verstärkt werden. / In the beginning the author develops doubts in the possibility to live up music lessons by throwing on them the 'light' of theories. Comparably difficult, if not impossible, may it be to throw on theo-ries the light of classroom situations, e.g. as a practical test on theoretical validity. But the author subtends this insight, reflecting 'that the most beautiful scepticism is worthless if not applied even to itself'. So he exposes the 'Thuringia' lesson to the light of an ethnographic method, Clifford Geertz'' 'Thick Description'. He tells the interaction between girls, boys and the teacher as a (hypo-thetic) story, in which mechanisms of boys'' disadvantages emerge that possibly - if we don''t care - may be aggravated when we practice to play music in class.

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).