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How do you see music and gender intersecting in the music that you listen to regularly?

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How do you see music and gender intersecting in the music that you listen to regularly?

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I believe that you can see music and gender intersect very regularly in our culture today. Music is a form of art and art is meant to send a message and many artists use their music to express their message to their audience. The music that I listen to is primarily r&b/rap and pop music and I believe that the messages that are relayed on these medias are ones that are taken on by their audience.
Many male rappers sexualize women by painting them in the light as objects of pleasure as opposed to women which has influenced our culture to see women differently. Drake in particular has painted women in the light that they can't be trusted and I've noticed a shift in views toward women in the people closest to me after these messages were normalized.
Male artists are not the only ones that send messages through their music. Pop artist Beyonce shares her message of equality between men and women through her music. Her song Flawless states that "We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much, you should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man". Through this statement we can see that despite being an female artist that is as successful as Beyonce, even she feels like equality between genders is something she considers an issue. Flawless is a message to women about how they don't have to worry about how they look or what others think of them, that they are "flawless" from the moment they get out of bed to the moment they go back to bed.

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Beyoncé - ***Flawless ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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How are representations of femininity and masculinity constructed through song (and music video)? 

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How are representations of femininity and masculinity constructed through song (and music video)? 

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I believe that music videos are one of the biggest ways that a message can be portrayed to an audience. I believe in "actions speak louder than words" and in many of these rapper's music videos we can see the subliminal messages in their videos.
In the video posted below, you see women that Chris Brown wakes up with women around him even though Chris Brown is in a relationship currently. For many male rappers you see women dressed provocatively and males in a position that the women are flocking to them. This does two things: display women as an object to be sexualized, and portrays what it means to be a "man" as a womanizer. This is further supported by how other artists in the industry want to be like Chris Brown because he is seen as the man for being a womanizer.
Female artists like Beyonce also use their sexuality for their own purposes. In the Flawless video, we see Beyonce dressed provocatively but not for the purpose of depicting herself as a sexual icon. Her song promotes feminism and her video and the way she carries herself is a testament to her view of feminism that "women can do whatever they want, whenever they want". So Beyonce's attempt in her music videos with her message and the subliminal messages in the way she dresses is an attempt to turn the perception of women seen only as sexual objects on its head but instead promote the message that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

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Lil Dicky  - Freaky Friday feat. Chris Brown (Official Music Video)

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What do these songs, images, and critical interpretations say about how music and gender work in our contemporary world? How and why do these images matter to you? 

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What do these songs, images, and critical interpretations say about how music and gender work in our contemporary world? How and why do these images matter to you? 

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The biggest thing that I can infer from these messages is that gender inequality is an issue in our world today. Even though we have had the women's rights movement, there is still differences in the way the different genders are treated. To be a man is to be a muscular person who has relationships with many women. To be a woman is to be attractive and sexualized for the pleasure of the man.
The issue for me is that I don't agree with these messages that these are the only ways to be a man or a woman. I believe that the world is so big that its impossible for there to be so small a "way" for a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman.
The thing I love about music is that music is a message and these artists recognize these issues as well and they're using their platform to attempt to make a difference. Whenever Beyonce released the song Flawless, all the girls were walking around singing the song and wearing less makeup and feeling more confident in themselves. I love that because the music empowers the message that penetrates and changes the lives of people.

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Postfeminism and the sexualization of women's bodies

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A few media examples for us to consider re: this particular dimension of postfeminist culture:

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Chimamanda Adichie is one of the world leaders in the subject of feminism. Below are a few quotes from her that highlight the problems between the genders and what we need to do about it.

1) “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
2) “Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
3) Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, appearing before a packed house at Johns Hopkins University's Shriver Hall on Wednesday night, challenged the ideal of American optimism in the face of what she believes is a time of anxiety.

The prominent writer and feminist activist said she's been struck, post-inauguration, with "how really fragile America's conception is of its own self," with new uncertainty looming over the security of its core institutions.

"If you're going to create, failure has to come-not just failure, but drought."

"Growing up in Nigeria, political uncertainty is familiar to me," Adichie said, though until recently, she said, she had taken comfort in the notion that "America is a place where that didn't exist."

But this "undercurrent of assuming things will be OK," she said-"I think it's a dangerous assumption to make."

Though the topic of the current political climate featured prominently in the event, Adichie's conversation with JHU Africana Studies professor Shani Mott also touched on a number of other personal topics, including why Adichie avoids Twitter and the humbling experience of having her first book rejected in her early 20s.

"I think after this I won't need to see a therapist," she joked.

The author of the award-winning Americanah (2013) visited Johns Hopkins as part of the student-run Foreign Affairs Symposium. Adichie is a graduate of the JHU's Writing Seminars program, from which she earned her master's degree in 2004. (The university also awarded her an honorary degree last May.)

Beyond her writing, which includes six books along with numerous short stories and essays for publications such as The New Yorker, Adichie has earned a platform recently as a poised activist and speaker after two TEDx talks that went viral. Her 2012 talk, "We Should All Be Feminists", became a familiar pop culture reference when Beyoncé excerpted portions of it for the song "Flawless."

Last night Mott asked Adichie about her experience during a tense BBC interview shortly after the Nov. 8 election of Donald Trump.

In her post-mortem of that interview on Facebook, Adichie wrote that she'd felt "ambushed" when she learned at the last minute she'd be facing a Trump-supporting editor of a conservative magazine, in a "deliberately adversarial" debate designed to create "good television."

"I wanted to walk away, but decided not to," Adichie wrote, because "I did want to talk about the election, which I had experienced in a deeply personal way."

Last night, Adichie said that although she's interested in learning from other political viewpoints-and for that reason "subscribes to some publications that might surprise you"-she shuts down on "conversations that involve dehumanizing people.

"I felt Trump ran a campaign that dehumanized people," she said. "I just don't think there's anything to engage with."

Though Adichie said she felt "anxiety in my soul" over the election result, she acknowledged the chords of economic disenfranchisement that contributed to it. "If everything else has failed and someone says a magical wand will fall down from the sky and fix everything," people want to believe that, she suggested.

When the conversation turned to race, Adichie spoke of her own process of redefining her "blackness" upon coming to the U.S. for college and finding prejudices and cultural nuances she'd never experienced in Nigeria. She splits her time between the two countries-she is a Nigerian citizen but has permanent resident status in the U.S.

"Becoming black in America is a choice" to reckon with the complications of that identity, she said. Though part of that is inevitable, because "the world looks at you as black," she said, there's also a "political choice" to be made.

"I've chosen to identify with blackness in America," Adichie said.

When Mott mentioned Adichie's use of Twitter, the writer quickly confirmed that any tweets appearing under her name are not her own.

"They need to stop, it's just ridiculous," she said of the fraudulent accounts.

Adichie said that she's wary of social media due to its tendency to invite a "casual crossing of personal boundaries" between strangers. "I don't do well with that," she said.

Asked to address the more difficult aspects of writing, Adichie emphasized the necessity of failure.

"If you're going to create, failure has to come-not just failure, but drought," she said, sharing the rejection she faced with her first attempt at a novel, never published.

But, "there's a sense in which I'm so grateful that happened," she said, in that she approached her next novel-2003's Purple Hibiscus, her first published-as "less smug, less sure."

Adichie said writing is the most important part of her life.

"I don't want to sound precious," she said, "but if I couldn't write, I don't know if I'd want to live."
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's U.S. citizenship status was misstated in an earlier version of this article. The Hub regrets the error.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks politics, race, and writing at Johns Hopkins

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, appearing before a packed house at Johns Hopkins University's Shriver Hall on Wednesday night, challenged the ideal of American optimism in the face of what she believes is a time of anxiety.

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1)https://www.npr.org/2007/06/06/10783904/the-complex-intersection-of-gender-and-hip-hop
2)
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/under-the-influence-ofmusic/
3) https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/15-quotes-from-chimamanda-adichie-that-have-change/