My So-Called Academic Life

Last semester in Rhetorical Criticism, I wrote my final paper on the misrepresentation of female musicians in popular music journalism, specifically in Portland's own Willamette Week. I'm really proud of the title: "Nymphs, Waifs, and Little Sisters: The Misrepresentation of Non-male Musicians in Male-centric Music Journalism." My thesis was that the national trend of sexist reporting on female musicians was also a problem in this local publication. It was a fun paper for me to write because I like to think of myself as a "wannabe music journalist," and I have personal stakes in local media.

Willamette Week is one of two alternative news weeklies in Portland, and has been in operation since 1974

I worked on the paper for maybe two months, collecting sources and culling through the past six months of Willamette Week. What I found was surprising to me, but supported my thesis: hardly any women at all write for the paper, and more often than not, the depictions of female musicians were sexist. I developed a whole framework for analyzing the representations, went well over the page limit, and eventually developed this paper into another paper for my final Feminist Theory project.

I did well on the paper and moved on with my life, though I still think about it quite a lot. Right after we got back from winter break, however, Kundai (my Rhetorical Criticism professor) emailed me to let me know that he had met Mark Zusman (the Editor-in-Chief of WW) and told him about my paper (!!!) and that this Zusman guy was interested in reading it (!!!!!!). O.M.G. Right? After some laborious copy-editing and fine tuning, I emailed my paper to Zusman and held my breath.

Last night, just two weeks after I sent the paper, I received a reply from WW Music Editor Matthew Singer. He was really nice about the whole thing... I think my paper sort of ruffled his feathers, but I do tend to be a little heavy-handed on assertions when I write. He allowed me how he was extremely interested in remedying the problem of not having enough female writers, and that my paper had brought something to his attention that he would really like to work on changing. Oh, and the best part--he wants to meet in person some time to talk about it!

The weird/cool thing is, Singer started following me on twitter maybe two or three weeks before I sent my paper to Willamette Week. And he is still following!

I'm looking forward to meeting with him and talking about feminism and music journalism, but I'm mostly excited that something I worked really hard on last semester got some real-world acknowledgement! It feels great to have people read my work and actually respond to it. In all the things I do--writing for the Pioneer Log, blogging on my music blog, blogging here, Tweeting, etc., it always feels most rewarding when something comes of it.

I encourage all of you to work hard on things you're passionate about--at the very least I will probably get a free coffee out of this. And, who knows, I'm a woman who likes to write about music and Singer implied he needed more of those... ;)

If you're interested in reading (any version of) my paper, let me know! It will also be part of the poster show at the Gender Studies Symposium coming up on March 13th.