Principal Investigator

Marc Lafrance, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University

Co-investigator

Lori Burns, Music, University of Ottawa

Project Description

Policy makers and community organizers around the world have identified men’s emotional inexpressiveness as an important part of what contributes to gender inequality. Despite its importance, however, men’s inexpressiveness has not been widely explored by scholars. A small amount of scholarship exists in the social sciences, but almost none exists in the humanities. To fill this gap in the humanities scholarship, we seek to study heterosexual men’s emotional expression in popular music. Given that music is “the cultural material par excellence of emotion” (DeNora, 2000, p. 46), men’s expression of emotion in and through this material is a worthy object of enquiry.

Bringing together scholars with expertise in both gender studies and popular musicology, we set out to explore men’s emotional expression across a variety of popular music genres. In doing so, we will ask four key research questions: 1) how is emotion expressed by heterosexual men in popular music; 2) how do their emotional expressions take shape across a variety of popular music genres; 3) how do men’s expressions of emotion challenge dominant norms of heterosexual masculinity; and 4) how do these challenges allow for a more complex understanding of what it means to be a man? By attempting to answer these questions, we aim to develop a deeper understanding of how men express themselves through the music that circulates widely in the popular media.

Many scholars make persuasive arguments about the connections between heterosexual men’s emotional expression and patriarchal power. More specifically, these scholars suggest that men’s expression of emotion is bound up with broader patterns of privilege that result in the oppression of women. As a result, men’s manifestations of anger and aggression have been carefully considered, while their manifestations of love and commitment, attunement and reflexivity, and pain and suffering have been largely overlooked. Examining men’s anger and aggression is of paramount importance, but this examination must be expanded in order to avoid reinforcing the essentialist assumption that men are inherently destructive. As our study seeks to show, doing so requires understanding the ways in which men express emotion that not only reinforce but also resist stereotypes of heterosexual masculinity.

Our proposed approach is informed by three key perspectives that allow us to complicate prevailing understandings of heterosexual men’s emotional expression in popular music: relationality, intersectionality, and multimodality. By relationality, we understand an approach that undoes binary oppositions and emphasizes mutual constitution; by intersectionality, we understand an approach that sees power and privilege as unequally distributed across social categories such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age, and ability; and, by multimodality, we understand an approach that conceives of popular music expression as a complex combination of words, music, and images.

Drawing on thematic, musical, and visual analyses, we will consider a corpus that consists of artists whose music was released over the course of the last 20 years. This time period will allow us to account for artists with different intersecting identities working within diverse cultural contexts. We will select both alternative and mainstream artists whose work allows us to answer our research questions as they relate to five meta-genres: Alt/Indie; Pop/R&B, Rap/Hip-Hop, Rock/Metal, and Punk/Hardcore/Emo. Popular music offers us a rich set of resources with respect to men’s emotional expressions and, by shedding light on them, we will be in a position to better understand heterosexual masculinities in contemporary Western culture.