Popular Listening as Method: A Feminist Affective Analysis of Third-Wave Emo
Abstract
This interdisciplinary dissertation combines theory and methodology from feminist affect theory, popular music studies, and cognitive musicology in pursuit of elucidating how music listening shapes listener bodies through feeling, and how that feeling in turn interpellates listeners into culturally specific notions of gender. In this way, I aim to identify how music can and does affect listeners both in small-scale musical moments and in large-scale regimes of power. Following Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, I apply the same model of impression to musical objects as they impress into listeners, who then negotiate individual and communal understanding of those objects and their affects. To demonstrate those mechanisms, I chose emo music of the 2000s as my object of analysis specifically because of its unique performance of masculinity, emotionality, and shame. The men associated with this era and genre presented an alternative and ostensibly more feminist masculinity than the hegemonic American ideal, but their genre scene remained entrenched in patriarchal power dynamics and glorified the authentic male artist while denigrating the female fan. That denigration often came in the form of sexual shame which was levied on women, but which I argue actually represents a sadomasochistic form of masculinity, per Aneta Stępień. Using cognitive musicology research on the phenomenological experience of sound and time in music from Mariusz Kozak, my analyses elucidate how individual musical moments work within emo’s affective regimes to shape listener feeling. With added context from both queer theory and religious studies, I demonstrate how those listener feelings interact reciprocally with public and private politics, affording possibilities for interpellation into social conformity as well as into social transgression.