Conference Agenda

In 1980, American feminist and blues historian Rosetta Reitz produced and directed "Blues Is a Woman," a tribute concert and self-proclaimed “fantasy concert” at Avery Fisher Hall during the Newport Jazz Festival. The event sought to reclaim the historical narrative of the blues, which had long been dominated by masculinist portrayals, by spotlighting the foremothers of jazz and blues. Reitz's work foregrounded the contributions of figures like Sippie Wallace, Lil Armstrong, and Bessie Smith, asserting that their artistry had been systematically marginalized. As Reitz noted in a New York Times interview, records initially credited to these women were later reissued under male musicians' names, such as Louis Armstrong, reflecting a broader pattern of gendered historical erasure.

The concert was met with mixed reactions. While Ebony Magazine celebrated it as an "electric night" of vibrant feminist reclamation, critics like Thulani Davis in the Village Voice dismissed Reitz's interpretation as reductive, suggesting it flattened the complexity of Black women's lived experiences into a simplistic narrative of "sassy back-talk." In response, Reitz defended her work by highlighting her empirical efforts to secure jobs, oral histories, and resources for underrecognized women artists, positioning her activism as a necessary, if imperfect, intervention.

This paper examines the ideological and methodological tensions exposed by Blues Is a Woman. I argue that the concert exemplifies a form of feminist canon formation, wherein historical narratives are reshaped to address cultural anxieties surrounding gender, race, and musical authenticity. Drawing on Robyn Wiegman's exploration of how feminist scholarship constructs and simultaneously contests cultural canons, I analyze Reitz's strategic use of “fantasy” as a tool for historical intervention. Reitz's concert disrupts the dominant phantasm of the male bluesman as the genre's archetype by presenting an alternative narrative that emphasizes women's agency, creative resistance, and communal experience.

Finally, the paper explores Reitz's original amateur composition, "Lay Your Hands on Me," premiered during the concert series. I demonstrate how this composition, alongside the concert's broader narrative, reveals the fraught but generative processes through which feminist scholars and activists negotiate the boundaries of historical memory, musical identity, and cultural canonization.

Estrada was perhaps the most well-known musical genre in the Soviet Union. The state-sanctioned vocal popular music genre, characterized by over-the-top spectacle performances and larger-than-life musical personalities, had a broad appeal across all Soviet member states and remains a cultural touchstone in the former USSR today. However, scholars and musicians alike often reject the genre as a serious object of study, leading to a dearth of critical inquiry about estrada musicians and repertoire. This paper seeks to both address this lack of engagement and rectify it by providing an analysis of how estrada might be most usefully understood, specifically during the Soviet Union’s late socialist era.

My argument in this paper is two-pronged. First, I argue that estrada is rarely considered a genre meriting musicological or historical analysis, due in part to gendered generalizations made about the emotional authenticity of the genre’s performers and the genre’s status as an “official,” state-sanctioned music. The genre, especially during the late socialist era, was dominated by massively popular women performers, especially Alla Pugacheva. Relying on published critiques of her performances and my own musical analysis of her repertoire, I demonstrate how Pugacheva and her career are often reduced to an insincere, financially-driven performance, with particular emphasis on her physical appearance rather than her musical talents and innovative musical expression.

Secondly, I argue that as a result of the lack of engagement with estrada as a genre, it is underestimated as a tool for Russification, or forced assimilation of non-Russian peoples with Russian-Soviet culture, furthering Russian cultural supremacy in the Soviet imperial project. By analyzing Moldovan-Ukrainian estrada artist Sofia Rotaru’s repertoire and performances, I demonstrate how Rotaru had to shed markers of her ethnic and cultural identity to achieve widespread success, instead adhering to a “mainstream” style for her music and onstage persona that was informed by Russian culture. In demonstrating that the mainstream Soviet culture that estrada supposedly represented was actually Russian culture masquerading as an unmarked, neutral cultural category, I show how estrada was not simply a musical genre designed for Union-wide success, but covertly promoted Russian cultural supremacy throughout the USSR.

In 2003, Furore Verlag launched an 11-volume edition of Mélanie Bonis’s (1858–1937) complete piano works, dedicating the first volume to Femmes de Légende—seven musical portraits of mythological and historical women composed between 1898 and 1910. This collection emerged amid fin-de-siècle debates on the “New Woman,” situating Bonis at the crossroads of evolving gender ideologies and musical representation.

This article explores how Femmes de Légende engages with Orientalist and gendered discourses in fin-de-siècle France. Bonis’s portraits—depicting figures like Salomé, Cléopâtre, Ophélie, and Mélisande—mirror the era’s fascination with feminine archetypes in opera, theater, and visual art. Actresses like Sarah Bernhardt blurred the lines between historical and contemporary ideals of femininity, a phenomenon Bonis echoes in her music. Through Orientalist tropes and modern harmonic language, she simultaneously reinforces and subverts traditional gender narratives, offering a nuanced protofeminist perspective.

By contextualizing Femmes de Légende within broader artistic and theatrical traditions, this study argues that Bonis’s work transcends pastiche. Instead, she reimagines these women in a medium where historical female icons were rare, crafting an alternative narrative of feminine transformation. Her later reorganization of five pieces into Cinq Pièces and their orchestral adaptation as Trois Femmes de Légende further illustrate her evolving vision.

While scholarship on Bonis has focused on her struggles as a woman composer, her harmonic language, and her Romantic-Impressionist influences, less attention has been given to the gendered dimensions of Femmes de Légende. My approach situates this collection within the cultural and political landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drawing from figures like Max Nordau and Maurice Donnay to examine the New Woman discourse. Using Sarah Bernhardt as a case study, I explore how women in the arts embodied multiple identities, a concept Bonis reflects in her portrayals. Through intertextual analysis of literature, theater, and music, I position Bonis within a broader artistic tradition, highlighting her protofeminist reimagining of the Eternal Feminine.

In today's Iranian media landscape, music videos have emerged as a compelling segment of popular culture and a battleground for ideological debates, particularly regarding the portrayal of women. In this presentation, I examine the multifaceted representations of femininity in Tehrangelesi (Iranian diaspora-driven) pop music videos, focusing on the cultural and economic factors that shape these depictions. By integrating a cultural-economic framework with content and visual analysis methods, this study investigates how social and cultural dynamics influence the re-presentation of femininity in contexts where artists, fans, and cultural practitioners advocate for greater expressive freedom. Drawing on scholarship from Western and Iranian contexts, my study explores how music videos can simultaneously objectify and empower women. As a case study, the Tehran Tokyo music video by famous Tehrangelesi pop artist Sasan Heidari (commonly known as Sasy Mankan), featuring adult film actress Alexis Texas, is a focal point for my analysis. By examining the video's musical elements, lyrics, and overarching themes, this study reveals how new layers of meaning are generated through the interplay of music, visual imagery, and social discourse. The findings contribute novel insights by challenging and expanding existing theoretical models, offering a deeper understanding of how contemporary Iranian pop music videos negotiate cultural identity and redefine femininity. These insights have significant implications for future media studies and policy debates concerning gender representation and media regulation in Iranian society.