Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities

The Women Who Rock Research Project (WWRP) brings together academics, students, educators, musicians and activists in project-based scholarship that explores: the politics of performance, social identity and material access in music scenes, cultures, and industries.  

Daphne Brooks (English, Princeton University) argues that the “confluence of cultural studies, rock studies, and third wave feminist critical studies makes it possible now more than ever to continue to critique and re-interrogate the form and content of popular music histories.” The WWRP implements this approach, asking how particular narratives create the grounds for a performer, band, or scene’s inclusion or exclusion from the annals of memory or ascension to “legendary” status. 

Project Goals

WWRP seek to transform conventional methods and models of popular music studies by:

• Making visible the central role of women in popular music and social justice movements,
• Developing complex, multi-perspectival accounts of their contributions, and
• Generating new narratives and critical knowledge.

WWR project components include:

• Project-based undergraduate and graduate courses offered in Gender and Women's Studies, American Ethnic Studies, and Humanities,
• A conference (to be held Winter 2012), and
• An oral history archive.