| Since the appearance of the electric guitar in popular music, there has been a significant lack of female performers in mainstream music. Though women have been playing the instrument since its invention in the 1930's, many documentary films pertaining to music history exclude women. This prejudice is primarily due to the misogyny in the music industry and the perpetuation of fixed gender roles that control women, based on the threat they pose to patriarchal power systems.;Gender roles have been defined by the patriarchy as binaries, male and female, creating a culture of difference with labels such as masculine and feminine that act to keep women in a submissive role. Lucy Green writes, "Masculinity tends to be defined as active, rational, inventive, experimental, scientific, unified as a catalyst to culture and an emblem of the controlling powers of mind; femininity tends to be defined as passive, reproductive, caring, emotional, contrary, as a part of nature, controlled by the body."¹ Because women have been defined hierarchically as inferior to men, they are seen as the 'other'. In her famous work, The Second Sex, feminist scholar Simone de Beauvoir adapts the theory of the 'other' and applies it to male domination over women when she states, "She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the "Other."² These definitions of difference exclude women from the music industry as electric guitar players by perceiving them as being a woman first and a musician second, whereas men are accepted automatically at face value.;The music documentary films I have selected to explore this exclusion are: Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music, Heavy Metal: Louder Than Life and Stars And Their Guitars covering a wide range of genres. I will also examine women's role and musicianship dating back to the days of the courtesan. Though much research has been conducted in this area and feminist musicologists have been rewriting women's lost music history, more work still needs to be done to make their presence known.;In the 21st century, the acceptable form of musical expression for women still remains to be singer, groupie, or muse, as they are associated with the more traditionally submissive female role. Female electric guitar players are not being represented and valued as equals in the music industry. They continue to be the exception not the rule and without an accurate accounting of that history and addressing the issue of equal representation, change cannot occur. |
