Stereo/Types: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off
There has been a significant increase in the number of women DJs since the turn of the twenty-first century due to advances in technology resulting in increased access to cheap or free digital music and software, inexpensive and user-friendly hardware (such as controllers), and the networking and promotional opportunities afforded by the Internet. Moreover, emergent local, regional, national, and international initiatives to advance women in DJ culture are converging with established underground networks and actions, resulting in the increased visibility and influence of BIPOC and womxn DJs and producers, who continue to organize collective resistance to misogyny, sexism, racism, and heteronormativity within DJ cultureboth generally, and specific to Canada. This multi-dimensional studyconducted from the insider perspective of a professional DJexplores the ways in which Canadian women DJs positionality in DJ culture is impacted by the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality. Particular attention is paid to the effects of homosociality and heteronormativity on womens engagement with DJ technologies, and how we resist these forces by forming networks to establish our own physical and digital spaces in Canadian DJ culture. Although womens access to DJ culture and our representation within the culture in terms of media portrayal, diversity, and sheer numbers has improved, the underground and activist scenes propelling these institutional changes are increasingly vulnerable to commercial cooptation that threatens to dilute any revolutionary potential. This study analyzes how women have been excluded from the majority of academic and popular culture discourse on the history of DJ culture, and the importance of documenting our contributions in order to push for a reconfiguration of this history. The research design for this project consists of a mixed-methods approach incorporating qualitative and quantitative data generated from an online survey of 113 womxn DJs, personal interviews with thirty-five womxn DJs, and participant observation. This rich ethnographic data is explored in detail throughout this study.
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