Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:01am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Rebels, Freaks, and Feminists: Avant-Garde Women in the 1970s Session Chair: Kathryn Pisaro | |
    | |
Girl, Juxtaposed: The Formation of Feminine Vocal Signifiers in Punk Rock Case Western Reserve University To subvert and overcome the gendered expectations of punk culture, female punk musicians became well-versed in varying musical strategies that resulted in distinctive signifiers within their music, fashion, visual art, and gestures. In this paper, I identify artistic influences and vocalic strategies employed in female punk performances that exemplify some of those signifiers, despite the punk desire for a genderless culture, resulting in the formation of a feminine musical rhetoric. Drawing on vocal performances by the likes of Poly Styrene, Kathleen Hanna, and Kat Bjelland, I analyze consistencies in female vocal expressions from the 1970s and 1990s, tying together two eras of female vocal performance. By engaging with the existing work on rock vocality, female performance practices in rock music, and punk rock aesthetics by Helen Reddington, Stephanie Doktor, Laura Cofield, and Dick Hebdige, as well as philosophical scholarship by Sara Ahmed, Susanne Langer, and many others, I distill female punk vocality into various juxtapositions, foregrounding the contrast between which expressions were deemed socially appropriate and inappropriate for female rock singers. Some timbres found in punk rock, like heavy distortion, had been traditionally coded as masculine, resulting in any opposing timbre, such as pure tone quality, to be coded as feminine. Sonorousness and speech, purity and distortion, the guttural and the nasal, the permeable and the compressed; female punk singers purposefully set timbres against each other through their vocal production to illustrate the depth of the female experience. Through dichotomous vocal expressions, female punk singers brought attention not only to feminine interiority but to the female form and body. Punk women’s creation of feminine signifiers went on to have widespread effects on multiple genres, including the silky indie of the 2010s as described in Dan DiPiero’s Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. Timbral juxtapositions in punk music characterizes a departure from the traditionally masculinist sound of rock music, an innovation which would expand the affective possibilities within subcultural rock music. | |