Conference Agenda

The newest Mennonite hymnal Voices Together, published in 2020, intentionally incorporates numerous and diverse representations of femininity. Johnson and Tice (2022) describe textual portrayals of feminine images of God and female humans, and Graber and Loepp Thiessen (2023) analyze the higher percentage of female text writers and tune composers than previous hymnals. However, these and other surveys have not analyzed the musical representation of femininity in this repertoire. By following Leslie Tilley’s (2020) methodology of identifying patterns in “musical equivalency” (and non-equivalency), I seek to “find the unspoken model” of representations of femininity in Voices Together. By listening, participating, and studying transcriptions, my research collaborators and I have noticed that (while there are some outliers), many of these songs musically and lyrically emphasize stereotypical feminine traits of softness, nurture, and motherliness. In followup interviews, I aim to probe the typical sounds as well as the exceptions to find the patterns in what is sonically meaningful to Mennonite practitioners when they sing about femininity. I will compare Mennonite congregational songs by and about women and femininity from musical styles including medieval and jazz-influenced tunes, Southern Harmony, contemporary hymnody, and contemporary worship music in order to explore participants’ experience of singing femininity. This study on a small population and bounded repertoire could have larger implications for understanding how other traditions explicitly and implicitly represent and understand gender musically.

Chappell Roan’s music first captivated mainstream audiences’ attention at a point in her discovery of personal identity where she confidently affirmed her queer identity in her songs and public appearances, a development which would continue in her subsequent releases. Her increasingly uninhibited articulations of lesbian sexuality parallel an intensification of her Chappell persona, beginning with the conventional femininity adopted in her earlier music videos and growing into exorbitant costumes that mirror exaggerations of femininity found often in drag. In this paper, I will examine Chappell Roan’s concomitant development of a campy, feminine persona and sapphic identity as a deliberate act of queering femininity to move beyond a binary, heterosexual viewpoint which requires women to be “pretty” to be successful in the hetero dating scene to a female-gaze, queer vision of attraction that does not hinge on outdated male-gaze beauty standards.

When asked about her style inspirations, Chappell responded, “I love looking pretty and scary, or pretty and tacky — or just not pretty, I love that too,” in a feather-adorned outfit on The Tonight Show. Chappell Roan’s selection of a feminine, drag-inspired appearance empowers her to navigate the liberation of female sexuality and disrupt gender roles through her conscious use of camp, connecting her musical project to her childhood admiration of ultra-feminine aesthetics. Across her songs “Casual,” “Red Wine Supernova,” “Good Luck, Babe!,” and “The Giver,” and concurrent live performances, Chappell continuously restates her queer identity through a variety of campy visual aesthetics explored across multiple performances of the same song, with each iteration adding to an evolving work-concept. Chappell intentionally disentangles herself from the exacting standards of mainstream, heterosexual viewpoints through her combination of overstated feminine appearance with unmistakably queer narratives, defining a space for her unrestricted expression of lesbian sexuality within the popular music space. Chappell Roan’s curation of an explicitly sapphic persona provides insight to the methods by which queer women have created a space for themselves within the larger popular music landscape.

Women in country songs are often represented as one of a myriad of hyper-feminized characters: the good country wife and mother running the household, the girl in short denim shorts on a tailgate, the cheating woman who “done a man wrong.” Since the late-1990s, women have responded to these tropes via an unnamed category of angry country and country-rock music that stands apart from earlier songs about revenge by telling explicitly violent stories that speak to the real experiences of many women. Artists such as The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, and Ashley McBryde tell stories about being victims of abuse, domestic violence, and infidelity via songs that sound much harsher than their more “ladylike” counterparts. The portrayal of violence in these stories deviates from what is acceptable behavior both legally — with depictions of crimes such as arson, assault, and murder — and traditionally acceptable song material.

In this paper, I argue that the stories that are told in what I refer to as revenge anthems draw clear boundaries between what is and is not acceptable within the confines of idealized behavior in North American country music (Pecknold and McCusker 2004; Hubbs 2014; Leap 2020). Building on conceptions of authenticity and sincerity as they pertain to storytelling in the genre (Goldin-Perschbacher 2022; Peterson 1997) I perform brief narrative analyses of three revenge anthems: “Goodbye Earl” (The Chicks, 1999), “Gunpowder and Lead” (Miranda Lambert, 2007), and “Martha Divine” (Ashley McBryde, 2020). I argue that when the man in these stories deviates from the ideal masculine archetype, his bad behavior provides the woman license to behave outside the norm, an opportunity they then take full advantage of. Working within this framework, I demonstrate a possible line of thinking that moves away from the woman-as-victim trope that arises in other violent song types, such as murder ballads, and towards a way of thinking that highlights women’s agency as they loudly and violently reclaim power in song.