A few days ago I erased a post in which I attempted to come to terms with a somewhat controversial text in my field, citing concern about compromising my anonymity. But this subject is coming back to haunt me again and again as I work at overhauling the lit review section of my dissertation, which confronts the fallout from this text and I�m having trouble putting it aside. And so I will, instead, resort to the time-tested insertion of random annoying characters into the author and title of this work in hopes of preventing its searchability. I may also privatize this entry later. But I think I need to write it, because my struggle with this text is at the heart of who I am as a historian, something I have been confronting lately and I�m having trouble with thinking about anything else today.

My title of this entry reads something like a confession. I have never been particularly covert about my feminist beliefs. I attended a liberal women�s college. I have been a card-carrying member of NOW and have supported numerous women�s organizations in one way or another. I have joined several editions of the March for Women�s Lives and I regularly write to my congresspeople about my concerns over women�s issues. I am not on the front lines, but neither am I passive. My concern has nothing to do with thinking women are better than everyone else or with any man-hating tendencies on my part. They have everything to do with my tendency to champion the underrepresented, with my sense of social justice, and of course with my own self-interest � I want a fair shot. Yet I have fought tooth and nail being labeled as a feminist scholar, despite my constant return to women�s history.

Here�s the problem. As a young scholar moving into the working world, there are two things that concern me: 1. Getting a job and 2. Being pigeonholed as something that doesn�t adequately describe me. Feminist scholars are viewed as trendy, a necessary evil for a hip department. But they are not, for the most part, taken too seriously. Their work is treated under the rubric of �feminist criticism,� an alternative, but is rarely truly integrated into course syllabi in a meaningful way. Moreover, women musicians (by which term I include composers, performers, or any other female who identifies herself as a musician) themselves present a problem. Intro music texts include them in such a way that their tokenism is clear. I would rather see a serious section on why they�re missing than the strained inclusion of women who don�t fit the trajectory of history that the books try to present. Even better, I�d like to see a different trajectory altogether � and this is what I try to present in class (although it can be difficult to fight a textbook), one that focused more on cultural setting and less on great works. Because women just can�t compete in the great works department � see yesterday�s entry on Beethoven for some of the reasons why.

But the feminist criticism that I read when I first started graduate school alienated me completely. And most of that had to do with the book that shook the discipline greatly in the early �90s, a slender volume by Su5an Mcl@ary entitled Fem1n1ne end1ngs (and again, I apologize for the annoying notation. Please bear with me.). Why do I need to read sex into every piece I listen to? How does knowing that Schubert was gay (this example isn�t actually from this book, but is by the same author) help me hear his music differently or better? Is it really necessary to think of Beethoven�s 5 as violent rape? Why? The essentialization presented in the essays of this book seemed simplistic and misguided to me and I really didn�t understand why people were paying so much attention to this book.

But the book was radical, at least for our traditionally conservative field. And now that I�ve spent the last several years working on women�s history, I decided to give it another look. The book still annoys the hell out of me, but I also can see that what Mcc1@ry was trying to do was exactly what I�ve been asking for � a new trajectory. And here�s the point I think Mcc1@ary was making: object-centered music analysis � that analysis that treats the artwork as sovereign above author, above cultural setting, is dangerous, because of all the assumptions it makes. In order for a piece of music to get to the point of being analyzed in this way, it has to be canonized. And canonization is famously unjust, governed by the dominant groups of the culture.

I realize that rewriting music history is not exactly the same as a battle for poverty relief and justice for all � one only needs to look at Pakistan or the Gulf Coast to see how little musicology is doing for the world at the moment. I�m not feeding people who need food or helping the underprivileged get what they need and deserve. But I do view my work as helping the underrepresented be heard. It may have less immediate relevance, but our histories are ourselves. I strongly believe that only by reenvisioning the past can we make changes in our future. (And I also believe I should try to stop speaking in trite aphorisms like that one.)

The subject I�m wrestling with in my diss involves women who have been recognized by history in one way or another but, I think, for the wrong things. They were recognized in their own time for those accomplishments that fit the mold of male-written history, the male idea of a successful musician. This meant that the women (as described in the press) fit into one of the two principal stories that were told about women at the time � the �happily ever after� story and the �she came to a bad end� story, depending on whether her musical activities and presentation fit in with social ideas of how women should behave or not. But these women did other things too and these things were not on the radar of the mostly male public critics because they involved only women. Such activities were considered novel, and possibly worthy of a certain amount of attention due to their curiosity, but they were not thought of as important. The new trajectory of history that I seek to write in my dissertation details both types of accomplishments. And I don�t think I could be doing this if that annoying book hadn�t already been written to break the ice. So thank you, Su5an McC1@ry for writing this book so I didn�t have to.

The irony of it all, though is this: I constantly justify my thesis topic to others by the ways these women measured up to men. In fairness, I do this in part because that is what the women themselves did. Their interactions with recognized male musicians are important. Their accomplishments of the male world are also important � I don�t mean to belittle those accomplishments in the interest of raising up the others. But in making these associations with male musical enterprise, I feel like I�m selling the feminists down the river. Moreover, I�m actually contradicting myself. And it�s indicative of my anxiety over being labeled a feminist scholar. I don�t think of myself as a feminist scholar, or at least I haven�t. Because in my mind, feminist scholars are marginal. But for some reason, I have not made the leap in my head to �feminist scholars are marginal because women are marginal.� Because that�s really what�s behind this. I don�t want my work to be marginal. I want it to be central. And this seems to be the most radical kind of feminist scholarship there is.

Women, of course, are only part of the story here. And that�s why at the same time feminist criticism of music was on the rise, so were courses in ethnomusicology, including world music, jazz, popular music, and others ignored by the traditional scholarship of the Western classical music canon.

Women, too, are only part of my story. My problem with the label of feminist also has to do with not wanting to write just about women. There are many things that interest me and many things I want to explore. The same, too, for McC1@ry, whose most recent book deals with Renaissance madrigals. But for me, the questions are still the same � what is the context of what I�m studying. When I first started working on my diss topic, this made me feel alienated from feminist criticism. It was too limiting. Now, however, I�m seeing it from a different angle and am realizing that contextualization, the process of eliminating the reification of the artwork can be considered feminist in and of itself. Feminist criticism isn�t too narrow. Its label is.

Lately I�ve taken to calling myself a cultural historian. It�s a term that�s vague enough to encompass my interests and yet it sounds as if it should be specific. It has that ring of authority to it. But I�m considering bringing my feminism out of the closet.

Are you all still awake? Okay, I promise to write about more domestic topics in my next entry. But first, AJ wants to try to catch some falling leaves.

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