This paper explores what it means for women to be professional instrumental musicians in North India through labor, physicality, and embodiment. How do expectations of domestic labor circumscribe women’s ability to pursue instrumental musicianship? How might expectations of feminine presentation—I.e. through wearing traditional garments—interfere or interact with musical practice? And most specifically, what class-positioning do these expectations imply? Part of this ties in with the fact that women are, under varying circumstances, obligated to undertake various kinds of work in order to do the regular labor of pursuing instrumental music. In some cases, this involves undertaking the brunt of domestic duties for an extended family as a young bride as older family members relinquish them. In others, this involves acquiring additional skills of expertise such as instrument building and repair in order to ensure that they and any of their students are able to work with playable instruments. In writing this I consider the labor women undertake to participate in music circles a considerable barrier to their general inclusion as professional musicians in Hindustani classical music. I base my findings on dissertation field research conducted in 2023 as a series of long form interviews combined with active learning through becoming a proficient female instrumentalist in the Bishnupur gharana.

According to the IFPI Global Album Sales Chart, 19 of the top 20 albums were released by K-pop groups. This was not a viral phenomenon, but rather the result of sustained fan labor. Once a single is released, K-pop fans systematically—yet voluntarily—“work” to place the song at the top of music charts by repeatedly streaming it on platforms such as YouTube and Melon and purchasing multiple copies of the same album during the first week of its release. Often portrayed as “14-year-old girls,” these fans are dismissed as unproductive and delusional consumers who are allegedly manipulated by romantic fantasies into purchasing excessive quantities of albums. In this paper, I examine how female fans resist such misogynistic narratives of fandom pathology by defining their own notions of fandom and constructing new forms of fan authenticity. By legally and commercially valorizing intimacy as a commodity produced through co-creative labor, K-pop fans assert and protect their rights as consumers. At the same time, they establish fandom rules and ethical norms that facilitate a more “professionalized” mode of idol-fan communication. This paper situates these practices within broader debates on gender politics in contemporary South Korea, engaging with feminist discourses on consumption, labor, and popular culture. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how a musical space becomes a political site in which women constitute intimate publics (Berlant 2008) through the sustained moral economy of K-pop.

In the United States, a particularly vibrant hub in taiko’s global distribution, the necessity of taiko groups fabricating their own drums due to the often prohibitive cost of importing drums made using traditional methods in Japan, is well-known. Focusing on the almost exclusively female taiko drum builders in Arizona, this paper moves beyond a story of DIY industry by focusing on the politics of drum making as a reflection of the builders’ identities and the taiko communities they serve and steward. These women, all non-Japanese American and taught by a White drum builder, illuminate the tension of taiko’s multi-ethnic, yet always tacitly Japanese American, reality that can support narratives of innovation that obscure the contributions of non-Japanese Americans. Getting into the tacks, sawdust, and odors, this meditation is founded on the author’s ongoing apprenticeship with an Arizona drum maker, and the messiness grounded in the realities of how taiko communities are literally built and sustained. This extends the richly phenomenological explorations by Wong (2019) and Ahlgren (2018) of identity amongst U.S. taiko players. In the broader context U.S. taiko’s connections to the Asian American Movement and legacies of the Internment, who “owns” taiko becomes a story of belonging, stewardship, and tradition.