It's in correspondence with the terms given to us by language, film, advertising, and music that individuals are socialized, or take on gendered identifies. Composers from as far back as the 17th century dealt with the problem of gender construction and how to represent the social world on the stage. How would someone depict men and women in the medium of music? Since sex is a biological given, and gender/sexuality are socially organized, depictions of behaviors, appearances, duties and rhetoric would vary based on time, status, race, place, ect.
With that said, I agree with McClary when she says that "music and other discourses do not simply reflect a social reality that exists immutably on the the outside; rather, social reality itself is constituted within such discursive practices."
Since most people don't know how to explain how music creates certain effects, we get the illusion the music operates outside of cultural mediation, as though it's a, as McClary says, "a mysterious medium within which we seem to encounter our "own" most private feelings." Thus, music is able to contribute to the forming of personal identities. It socializes us.
The whole of musical activity is full of question about gender and sexuality, for example the staging of the female body in Salome, and even in the narrative demands of tonality(this something I want to explore more in a later post). If the whole enterprise of musical activity, as McClary says, is already fraught with gender-related anxieties, then feminist critique provides fruitful way of approaching some of the anomalies that characterize musical institutions.
"But as long as we approach questions of signification exclusively from a formalist point of view, we will continue to conclude that it is impossible to get from chords, pitch-class sets, or structures to any other kind of social meaning."
Though this probably seems absurd to my friends, I feel that feminist theory applied to music, as it is to film, literature and art(with obvious variances) offers great insight to many aspects of musicology that are usually ignored. Or that were completely ignored in my undergraduate studies, much to my obvious disappointment...
