213BOOK REVIEW
Anamarija Šporčič
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Book Review: Words, Music and Gender (Michelle 
Gadpaille and Victor Kennedy, eds.)
Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest… And me, I’m in a rock ’n’ roll band 
–Lou Reed, “Sweet Jane”1
Words, Music and Gender is a collection of 17 contributions by scholars hailing from a variety 
of academic backgrounds, enabling the volume to cover an impressive array of ways in 
which gender, words and music intersect and intertwine, affect and challenge each other 
in relationships that frequently reflect broader societal concerns. The editors, Michelle 
Gadpaille and Victor Kennedy, are no novices to the field, having not only themselves 
authored publications on the convergence of language and music (see e.g. Kennedy’s Strange 
Brew: Metaphors of Magic and Science in Rock Music from 2013), but presently also delighting 
us with what is already the fourth monograph in a series of interdisciplinary studies on the 
matter (succeeding Words and Music (2013), Symphony and Song: The Intersection of Words 
and Music (2016) and Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics (2017)). The 
latest tome offers a welcome continuation to this sequence, with its focus predominantly on 
gender, sexism, misogyny and sexuality in the world of music and music-related literature. 
The experienced editors were successful in putting together a notably coherent unit wherein 
individual papers shrewdly follow each other most of the time, in spite of their extremely 
varied content. 
The musical journey begins with the reader being pushed straight into the deep end of the 
scintillating pool of rock, with what I find to be two of the most compelling undertakings 
in this collection. Mojca Krevel’s lucid exploration of David Bowie’s sexual fluidity and 
gender-bending performances goes beyond the artist’s importance as a chameleonic 
LGBTQ icon, and asserts his position as a transgressive postmodern composite, a pioneer 
of the non-binary, master of fractal subjectivity and “intrinsic to the formation of identity 
within the ontological framework of postmodernity” (2020, 7). Equally impassioned and 
intriguing is Melanija Larisa Fabčič’s piece on the rock goddess Kim Gordon, in which 
the author explores the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist’s understanding and use of lyrics 
(and their delivery in particular) as tools with which to (re)conceptualize gender and 
deterritorialize it in the Deleuzian sense. 
Lessons at the school of rock continue with Dolores Hunsky’s absorbing and concise, yet 
vexatiously less thorough, overview of Joan Jett’s career and her contribution to gender 
equality, and Victor Kennedy’s illuminating insight into the Canadian New Wave, which 
1 Reed, Lou. 1970. “Sweet Jane.” Track 2 on Loaded. The Velvet Underground. New York City: Cotillion Records.
2021, Vol. 18 (1), 213-215(222)
revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.18.1.213-215 
214 A. Šporčič Book Review: Words, Music and Gender (Michelle Gadpaille and Victor Kennedy, eds.)
provides the reader with many examples of the role the genre (and bands such as Rough Trade 
and Pukka Orchestra in particular) played in the development of “new forms of personal 
identity through criticism of older, binary gender and authority roles” (2020, 85). Before 
venturing into the stereotypically male worlds of rap and metal, a foray into glam metal 
by Ana Maiken Kores acts as an interesting intermediary that, through meticulous analysis 
of Mötley Crüe lyrics, exposes the oxymoronic nature of a genre that provides a platform 
for gender experimentation and is, at the same time, also a breeding ground for extreme 
misogyny. 
Jožef Kolarič acquaints the reader with some examples of homophobia in rap music and 
argues that the genre is not inherently homophobic, but is likely to exhibit homophobic 
tendencies due to the influence of the musicians’ upbringing and social influences. The author 
concludes that rap is actually becoming less homophobic – an intriguing hypothesis that is 
briefly discussed in the paper and will hopefully be further explored by the author in the 
future. Bojan Kašuba’s segment offers a linguistic intermission that would perhaps be better 
placed as the text linking the musical and the literary parts of the monograph, but fo’ shizzle 
makes for an engaging read on new lexical items entering English vocabulary through music. 
After this somewhat unfortunately positioned detour, Words, Music and Gender takes the 
reader back to analyses of different musical genres with three contributions that focus on the 
role of women in music. Tina Ritlop opens a gutsy discussion on female growls and screams 
in metal with an exciting piece that would nevertheless benefit greatly from being expanded 
with additional research and examples. The volume narrowly avoids being called out for 
focusing purely on Western music production by including an informative piece by Marged 
Flavia Trumper on the Hindustani genre of thumri and its role as a tool of affirmation for 
female singers in Northern Indian society. While such single entries do tend to have the 
inexorable scent of tokenism wafting about them, Trumper’s contribution gives the reader at 
least a (wonderfully moreish) taste of the vast musical landscapes that are yet to be tackled 
by scholars to an extent comparable to that of their Western counterparts. Zmago Pavličič 
concludes the first part of the volume with an original and orderly investigation into the 
history of female jazz musicians in Slovenia. 
The second part of the publication consists of seven texts dealing with music and gender in 
a literary context, covering diverse examples from prose, poetry and drama. F. Zeynep Bilge 
and Michelle Gadpaille both sink their proverbial teeth into Shakespeare, one by examining 
Ophelia’s thought-provoking portrayal in a French operatic adaptation of Hamlet, the other 
by uncovering the importance of the Bard’s musical puns (in combination with Elizabethan 
theatrical gender conventions), as “they simultaneously foreground gender difference, draw 
attention to gender norms and their breach and permit the staging of sexual arousal for both 
homo- and hetero-sexual viewers” (2020, 211). Ana Penjak, Jason Blake and Tjaša Mohar also 
delve fruitfully into three distinctly different literary texts (Joyce’s classic “The Dead”, Miriam 
Toews’s novel A Complicated Kindness and Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the 
Mountain”), as they analyse the influence of assorted musical elements, events and references 
on narration, character portrayal, the setting (both temporal and spatial), interpretation and 
numerous other aspects of literary worlds. Jerneja Planinšek-Žlof and Nastja Prajnc Kacijan 
A. Šporčič
215BOOK REVIEW
perform equally rewarding music-themed dissections of Tennessee William’s seminal play Cat 
on a Hot Tin Roof and Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude”, thus concluding the 
reader’s journey in style. 
One of the volume’s most attractive qualities is the fact that an impressive number of the 
authors are themselves not only scholars but also performing musicians, and therefore 
uniquely equipped with an additional perspective that enriches many of the contributions. 
However, as with most volumes that come to life as a result of interdisciplinary conferences, 
Words, Music and Gender struggles somewhat with uniformity and its individual parts can 
vary greatly in length, ambition, purpose and attention to detail, as well as in quality of 
writing and research. Some of the authors engage with the gender aspect much more than 
others, yet most manage to offer a pleasing amalgamation of the three key components 
highlighted in the collection’s title. Overall, the volume is a strong addition to the series 
that competently continues the mission of its predecessors, with many of the segments 
representing an important contribution to both gender and music studies, and will certainly 
be read with relish by scholars across the humanities, musicians and music lovers alike. 
References
Gadpaille, Michelle, and Victor Kennedy, eds. 2020. Words, Music and Gender. Newcastle upon Tyne: 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kennedy, Victor. 2013. Strange Brew: Metaphors of Magic and Science in Rock Music. Newcastle upon Tyne: 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kennedy, Victor, and Michelle Gadpaille, eds. 2013. Words and Music. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing.
—. 2016. Symphony and Song: The Intersection of Words and Music. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing.
—. 2017. Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars 
Publishing.