Thesis Format
Monograph
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Music
Supervisor
Norma Coates
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.
Summary for Lay Audience
This project looks at popular music and the people who listen to it, asking how the physical experience of listening can not only provide feelings of enjoyment or excitement, but also how it can build and shape feelings of gender. Emo music of the 2000s provides a particularly useful example of this phenomenon, as the genre is known for its explicit emotionality as well as its non-standard presentation of masculinity. The dissertation opens by exploring the vocabulary of feminist theory, as well as affect theory and phenomenology—two fields of study that are often used to examine the physical experience of feeling. With this primer, the short history of emo that follows reveals how different aspects of emo’s masculine performance are influenced by feelings of outsider-ness, resentment, despair, shame, and even misogyny and homophobia. The subsequent three chapters demonstrate an affective methodology for popular music analysis, first building on the shame of “Bitter Emo Boys” to establish the emo scene’s problematic misogynist affects and their musical manifestations in vocal and instrumental grain—the roughness or smoothness of a sound. The second analysis looks at a fundamental building block of music—time. Using songs from Panic! at the Disco and Say Anything, the chapter closely examines the interplay between feeling and time in popular music listening, seeing potential for both the reinforcement of and resistance to patriarchal gender norms in the ways that music pushes and pulls its listeners temporally. Finally, the last analysis takes the previous methods and applies them to American political movements and their attendant feelings in the 21st century. Specifically, it examines Christian emo-pop band Relient K as a vector for evangelical and theoconservative affects as part of a decades-long political project that presumably culminated in the election of George W. Bush. The chapter does not look to prove Relient K’s complicity in the administration or any subsequent societal notions of masculinity and shame, but to explore the ways in which popular music acts within fields of political and social discourse that shape American subjects.
Recommended Citation
Trigg, Peter, "Popular Listening as Method: A Feminist Affective Analysis of Third-Wave Emo" (2025). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 10908.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/10908
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