Musical and visual reactions to (trans-)misogynies in Austrian popular music

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss musical and visual reactions to gender-based violence, hate speech, power abuse and disinformation in everyday life; furthermore, I examine the performance and staging strategies and the role of languages in the concepts of Austrian musicians and bands, such as Dives, Шапка (Schapka), Fijuka, Fatima Spar, and Kerosin95, as well as the de-/construction of (trans-)misogynies in popular music. Since the analyzed songs and performances correspond to the clichés of masculinity prevalent in contemporary pop culture, I draw on work dealing with (trans-)misogynies and empowerment in popular music to highlight how the aforementioned musicians deal with experienced threats and criticize hegemonic power relations.

Primer

When we contemplate cliches of dating situations involving cis heterosexual men, questions that imply heteronormative body norms, prejudices and sexism such as “Can you really eat a whole burger?,” “Why are you so tense - can't you take a compliment?,” or—especially for musicians—“How is it to make music as a woman?” and well-intentioned advice such as “He doesn't mean it that way!” might sound familiar. In this paper, I discuss musical and visual reactions to (trans-)misogyny in everyday life primarily concentrating on the works of the Viennese bands Fijuka, Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries, Dives and Шапка (Schapka) as well as the rapper and transactivist Kerosin95. I begin my inquiry with an insight into the research on the relationship between music and misogyny, followed by an introduction of the methodical and conceptual approach. Hereby I concentrate primarily on the performing subject in popular music by using a new cross-genre approach based on German film scholar Jens Eder's ideas on the analysis of musical performance. Throughout the text, I focus on the role of languages in the aforementioned artists’ concepts as well as the de-/construction of (trans-)misogyny in popular music. Since the analyzed songs and performances correspond to the clichés of masculinity prevalent in contemporary pop culture, I draw on work dealing with misogyny and empowerment in popular music to highlight how musicians deal with experienced threats and criticize hegemonic power relations.

Music and misogyny

By researching on the relationship between misogyny and music, we find approaches that focus on the study of aesthetics or musical texts as well as those concentrating on the relationships between attitudes and behavior in the context of music by studying human participants. These studies have primarily focused on rock, hip-hop and heavy metal by researching misogyny through sonic features such as distorted guitars, disturbing chord progressions, discordance and atonality, accented backbeats, screamed, shouted or growled vocals, rapid vocal delivery, and fast tempos (Iwamoto, 2003; Järviluoma et al., 2003; McLeod, 2009; Walser, 1993; Weitzer and Kubrin, 2009). In his study “Music and Misogyny: A Content Analysis of Misogynistic, Antifeminist Forums,” Sam de Boise reveals through content analysis of 1173 posts, from six “misogynistic antifeminist movement (MAM)”-forums that although hip-hop, rap and metal artists are the most commonly mentioned, musical preferences and justifications differ significantly. Even tough masculinist lyrics were the main reasons for music preferences; the musical judgments MAM-communities are a “confluence of sonic and extra-musical discourses which are shaped and amplified within these online communities” (De Boise, 2021).

Primack et al. (2009) demonstrate in an experiment with US high school students concentrating on the influence of music lyrics on adolescent development and health that the consumption of sexually humiliating lyrics was related to the increase of adolescents’ sexual activity compared to their peers that listened to non-humiliating lyrics. While Primack et al. (2009) suggest that sexual content is recurrent in popular music, the study “Undressing the Words: Prevalence of Profanity, Misogyny, Violence, and Gender Role References in Popular Music from 2006–2016” by Cynthia M. Frisby and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz reveals that genres popular with most teenagers, such as pop and hip-hop, use references involving misogynistic positions, profanity and violence and tend to convey negative stereotypes of females. Effects of this exposure include the increase in aggressive behaviors, the desensitization toward domestic and sexual violence as well as negative attitudes toward (in particular African-American) women (Frisby and Behm-Morawitz, 2019: 18). Fittingly, therefore, Johnson et al. (1995) demonstrate that women who watched rap videos depicting females being sexually discriminated, in sexually subordinate roles or videos reproducing misogynist topics, showed greater tolerance of (sexual) violence than women who were not exposed to the aforementioned materials.

Already in 1978, Frith and McRobbie stated that “masculine” traits such as aggression, control, power and dominance can be seen and heard in performances of male musicians (Frith and McRobbie, 1978: 374). According to McRobbie (2009), the appearance of girls and women in subcultural scenes is strongly connected to inferior roles such as girlfriend or sexual object that only reinforce the stereotyped image of women. She analyzed the exclusion of female protagonists on the level of the male dominance in subcultural spaces and practices as well as on the androcentric bias present in (male) researchers’ choices of subcultures that do not attract a female audience. It seems that female identifying individuals are relegated to subordinate positions when it comes to the relationship between dominant masculinity ideologies and subcultures. By drawing on Goth culture that emphasizes femininity over masculinity, Guerra et al. (2018: 54) found out that “while male androgyny is understood as a position against dominant notions on masculinity and therefore associated with a social-political value, female androgyny is only seen as a poor and unattractive option.” Accordingly, Guerra et al. (2017: 5–16) point out that even in a completely manufactured culture like teenybopper you can find negotiation and resistance processes. By drawing on that, Guerra et al. (2018: 54) emphasize that the “existence of a double standard” ensures that “the freedom given to boys was much greater than that given to girls.” They conclude that “participation in this culture did not require one to spend free time away from home; also, it did not require much money or entail many personal risks” (Guerra et al., 2018: 54). This subculture “offered girls an opportunity to define themselves as different, whether from their youngest or their oldest acquaintances” (McRobbie and Garber, 1997: 120), as a result it allowed young women to be musically active.

When we take a deeper look at the genre rap, we find female artists struggling to succeed in the industry's patriarchal structures. Women are underrepresented not only in rankings but also in other parts of the music business such as award shows. In 2019, Cardi B made history as the first female rap artist to earn a Grammy for “Best Rap Album”; however, she happened to be an exception. In 2020, only two female musicians were featured on a nominated album, while no other female rapper was nominated for a Grammy award. When Professor Stacy L. Smith and her team analyzed the artists of 700 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts from 2012 to 2018 in a USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study, they discovered that only 12.3% of songwriters were female, 21.7% of the musicians were female, and only 2% of producers were female (Smith et al., 2018). Music production as a male-dominated environment has not only consistently lacked female representation, but prevents female identifying artists from achieving their career goals.

By tracing gendered power relations that lead to misogyny in the field of popular music, the topic gender and working conditions needs to be addressed accordingly. Since the turn of the millennium, various studies concerning the field of music have been dedicated to the marginalization of women (Strong and Raine, 2019: 1). Lafrance, Worcester and Burns's findings in “Gender and the Billboard Top 40 Charts between 1997 and 2007” (2011) demonstrate that “1. male artists have more extreme highs and less extreme lows than female artists; 2. men's worst showings of the decade are often just a few hits away from women's bests showings; and 3. when male hits surpass female hits, the difference is a good deal larger than when female hits surpass male hits” (Lafrance et al., 2011: 566). Regarding music streaming as a crucial tool for musicians in the 21st century, Pelly (2018) discovers that “Spotify's most popular and visible playlists to be staggeringly male-dominated” resulting in the fact that females are undervalued in streaming playlists. Regarding electronic music, the Austrian transnational online database and network of women, non-binary, transgender and gender fluid artists, producers and researchers in the cis-male-dominated field of electronic music “female:pressure” conducted a survey as a continuous project to quantify the gender distribution of artists performing at electronic music festivals globally in 2013 that was updated in 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2022. The 2022 study shows that the proportion of female acts rose steadily from 9.2% in 2012 to 28% in 2021, while the data on non-binary artists increased from 0.4% to 1.3% from 2017 to 2021 (Female_pressure, 2022: 17). Meanwhile, Schoop and Ptatschek (2022: 6) note that the fact that the “female:pressure”-study includes non-binary musicians indicates that the binary gender system is being increasingly scrutinized.

According to Strong (2011), the disappearance of women in the historiography of music genres is common throughout history, regarding the fact that being a woman per se leads to processes of erasure. Consequently, Guerra and Straw (2017) mention the constant novelty of female bands by drawing on the idea of a perpetual novelty (Davies, 2001) that defines each new successful female band “as the first” (Guerra et al., 2018: 54). In consequence, the underrepresentation of female artists in many sub-sectors of the music industry, the struggle to succeed in the industry's patriarchal structures as well as the effects of the consumption of sexually humiliating lyrics and the depiction of women in sexually subordinate roles in music videos and performances not only prevent female musicians from achieving their career goals but lead to misogyny deeply rooted in the industry's structures.

Methodical and conceptual approach

Performative aspects such as staging a live performance, acting on stage, the construction of the “performance persona” (Auslander, 2004) or “star personality” (Frith, 1996), audience participation, and also socio-cultural developments, contribute to the overall concept of a performance in popular music. Music styles that do not or only loosely refer to a written notation require special methods of style analysis. Ethnomusicology and jazz research have developed a transcription-based approach to the auditory analysis of improvised music; the analysis of pop music generally uses a semiotic approach to combine the interdependencies of music, text and image. Since about 1980, attention has also been paid to aspects of performance (e.g. Popular Music Vol. 4). New methodological perspectives have been developed in current popular music studies that have linked historical, structuralist or phenomenological paradigms with the discourse of performativity.

By analyzing a musical performance, we have to consider that we normally only get to see fragments of the ‘person’ behind the artist or the band; thus the parity between the “performance persona” and the “character” (Auslander, 2008) is usually foregrounded. Musicians participate in contemporary socio-cultural discourses by developing stage personae along the axes of sexual identity, social background, race and other identity categories. The stage persona is usually based on certain conventions and existing models defined by movement, expressiveness, costume, make-up, countenance and gestures. Musicians on stage and in music videos participate in contemporary socio-cultural discourses concerning these aspects. They are thus not separated from the societies in which they appear but can be interpreted as comments, projections or spaces of negotiation of socio-cultural topics and diverse forms of identities.

Performance analysis differs from transcription methods of musicologists, notation methods of dance research or analysis methods of theatrical performance. Shifting the focus to performative aspects of popular music means a move beyond the analysis of musical structures. Performance analysis includes aspects of visual imagery, histories of style and fashion, certain knowledge of popular cultural aspects and economics and interdisciplinary studies devoted to identity categories as central categories of analysis. Based on analysis of the characters (Eder, 2010: 16) that appear in the theatrical setting of a popular music performance, the central element of a performance is the “character.” Characters on stage and in music videos are of fundamental importance for our music experience. They confront us with questions concerning their performance, production, structures, meanings and effects. Performative art is bound to the concrete moment of its performance; consequently it must be experienced by the audience. According to Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Performativity results in performances or manifests itself in the performative nature of acts” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008: 29). The audience is thus also assigned to a previously unrecognized position: from a passive observer it becomes an active actor, whose interaction with the performers provides the performance's concrete corpus.

To analyze, describe and discuss characters in differentiated ways, we need a set of conceptual tools. Jens Eder creates a comprehensive analysis model that incorporates and integrates interdisciplinary aspects. Eder's concept of understanding characters includes characters in film and television, their characteristics, their actions and the involved audience. The author describes film characters as “identifiable fictional beings with an inner life that exist as communicatively constructed artefacts” (Eder, 2010: 18). The information contained in films is produced by filmmakers, depicted by actors and actresses and processed by viewers. However, characters are neither described as signs in the film's text or mental representations in the viewer's head; they can be defined as collective constructs with a normative component. Filmmakers and viewers might model similar characters that are built from shared knowledge about media conventions and concepts of reality. Eder's basic schema distinguishes four aspects that may be considered in the analysis: “Characters are, firstly, inhabitants of a fictitious world; secondly, artefacts of a particular mould; thirdly, symbols conveying meanings and themes; and fourthly, symptoms permitting inferences about their production and reception, causes and effects” (Eder, 2010: 24).

“Character as artifact” examines the production side and includes the dramaturgical intentions of the directors, as artifact characters are shaped by audio-visual information. “Character as fictional being” deals with the character's specific physical, psychological and social characteristics, as fictional beings; characters have certain bodily, mental and social features. “Character as symbol” and “character as symptom” examine different meanings that can be read into characters, their symbolic content as well as the historical and political contexts in which they were created and unfold their effect. As symbols, characters impart higher-level meanings. By analyzing “character as symptom,” socio-cultural causes in the character's production and effects in their reception are revealed.

Musical and visual reactions to misogyny: An Austrian case study

In this section, I discuss musical and visual reactions to (trans-)misogynies in Austrian popular music concentrating on the works of the Viennese bands and artists Fijuka, Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries, Dives, Шапка (Schapka) and Kerosin95.

Fijuka—“Ca Ca Caravan”

The band Fijuka consists of Ankathie Koi (Katharina Winkelbauer, vocals/synthesizer) and Judith Filimónova (Judith Walzer, bass/vocals). Founded in 2011, the German-Austrian duo (Burghausen/Vienna) met at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The band deliberately combines elements of pop music with rock, electronics and jazz. In the music video “Ca Ca Caravan,” ( Fijuka, 2015) Ankathie Koi and Judith Filimónova embody the space agents “Caty Cosmos” and “Judy Jupiter.” The music video deconstructs the style and content of the science fiction genre of the 1960s; it projects earthly conflicts, battles, wars and conquests into space. The song is sung by Ankathie Koi and Judith Filimónova. The accompaniment is provided by synthesizer (Patrick Stürböth), drums (Ivo Thomann) and bass (Judith Filimónova). The song's chorus deals with the relativity of space and time:

Time is now behind the times

And we were never here

And you were never born my friend

Time, you can’t define the time

And you were never here

And now it's time to leave my friend. (Transcription by the author)

The duo Fijuka uses a short film (duration: 5:32) to promote “Ca Ca Caravan.” The music video contains a prologue in the form of a dialog that takes place on a fictitious distant planet. The music starts afterwards. Closing-credits are uncommon for music videos. In “Ca Ca Caravan,” the closing-credits take 40 s and list all persons and institutions involved in the video's shot. The video deals with the subject of space and therefore differs from the song's lyrics, opening up further dimensions. The artists move their mouths within the framework of diegetic dialogues, which can be read as subtitles by the audience. “Ca Ca Caravan” is called an episode of “Fijuka Space Patrol.” The structure of story-telling in the music video can be seen as pastiche. The short film consists of a prologue, the song, the credits and various visual and musical quotes referring to Star Trek, James Bond, Star Wars, Barbarella and Glam Rock.

As artifacts, Katharina Winkelbauer, known professionally as Ankathie Koi, and Judith Walzer, known professionally as Judith Filimónova, embody the space agents “Caty Cosmos” and “Judy Jupiter.” Two empowered women are on a space mission; they fight, use weapons, defeat an extra-terrestrial being and control a spaceship. As fictional beings, Caty Cosmos and Judy Jupiter cannot be identified as the singers of the duo Fijuka. Only the name “Fijuka Space Patrol” allows a diegetic reference to the band. Their clothing and styling correspond to the ideas of space heroines in science fiction films and TV shows of the 1960s. The two characters are not musicians but part of space nostalgia. The video was shot in the nuclear plant Zwentendorf in Austria. It was the first commercial nuclear plant for electric power generation built in Austria, but the plant never entered service. As symbols, the musicians represent the aspiring generation of the Viennese pop/rock/electronic scene. Ankathie Koi and Judith Filimónova embody self-confident, successful musicians that are underrepresented in the Austrian music scene. As symptoms, the two musicians become movie characters in the music video “Ca Ca Caravan.” The change of name, the science fiction costumes and the setting embed the music video in the precarious present. As space agents, the two women can act freely but are still subject to a supervisor. Exactly this imbalance needs to be deconstructed in the music scene of the 21st century.

“Fijuka Space Patrol” visually corresponds to the staging of women in science fiction series and films of the 1960s and 1970s. Both musicians wear tight clothes and wigs. Especially in TV shows and films from this era, we find mysoginist statements and female characters being sexualized. Heroines such as Princess Leia or Barbarella are often dressed in short skirts and tops, or wear less; consequently, these characters correspond to patriachal ideas of female power in Science Fiction. The character Leia, for example, was something new; she was not only a princess, but a senator, a member of the rebellion and the only female character in the Star Wars original trilogy that was allowed to talk. Even though she was kidnapped, an act that could be interpreted as a sign of her weakness, and her rescue failed, she grabbed a blaster and liberated herself along with the characters that tried to save her. As a sign of oppression, Princess Leia was forced to wear a metallic bikini by her kidnapper. Sexualization through clothing such as Leia's bikini, Barbarella's bodysuit with one “bare” breast that allegedly refers to the Amazons or the short uniforms of female characters in Star Trek leads to the visual processing of bodies as objects and can be regarded as a form of sexism in popular culture.

It is particularly striking that the female musicians show much more skin than men in the video “Ca Ca Caravan”; in contrast to the male actors’ robes, skin and legs are on display concerning the suits worn by the Fijuka duo. However this gender-differentiated representation is subverted by the camera perspective that focuses on the women's upper bodies, respectively, the female subject. The women in Fijuka's video are not reduced to their bodies; accordingly, the camera portrays the female character as an artist rather than as a sexual object. As feminist incarnations of science fiction heroines, in tight retro costumes, armed with phallic laser cannons, Judy Jupiter and Caty Cosmos fight absurd creatures and aggressors in artificial backdrops. The ironic homage to B-movies and Science Fiction series of the 1960s celebrates camp: the artificial, the theatrical exaggeration as well as the triumph of style over content to “dethrone the serious” (Sontag, 1999: 62).

In the music video “Ca Ca Caravan,” Fijuka tries to deconstruct androcentric ideas of womanhood in Science Fiction. In addition to its empowered position, the duo uses elements and props that disturb heterosexual desire such as exaggerated make-up, pompous wigs, phallic laser cannons and costumes reminiscent of space nostalgia to construct new empowered identities.

Fatima spar—“Trust”

The Austrian musician of Turkish origin Nihal Sentürkal has constructed an artist's identity for herself called Fatima Spar. The musician lives in Vienna where she is the singer of various projects that crossover into jazz and world music. She writes her songs in Turkish, English and German. Her musical style ranges from swing, Balkan brass and calypso to oriental music. In 2004, she founded Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries; the band toured through Europe and won the Austrian World Music Award in its founding year. The band consists of eight musicians with different backgrounds. Their musical style combines the musical and cultural heritage of Fatima Spar and her bandmates.

The song “Trust” is accompanied by trumpet, accordion, double bass, trombone, saxophone, guitar and vocals. It can be described as a mixture of jazz, tango and pop song. After a short intro of the double bass and a single counter (“uno, dos, tres …”), accordion and piano provide the harmonic structure to formal section A: Fm Db Bbm C. The first and second stanzas (eight bars each) are followed by a four-bar interlude of the basic model. This proceeds, according to the tango form, on to a lyrical-expressive B-part. The song ends with the twelve-time repetition of the line “trust in me.” The music video (Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries, 2012) was recorded during an acoustic session in Istanbul. The video's intro was shot in the streets of Istanbul; the performance was shot in the back room of a theater.

As an artifact, Fatima Spar represents a female musician who blends jazz and world music. The name of the band Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries already clarifies the position of the singer in the ensemble; she is the bandleader. In contrast to the song's strong religion-critical positioning, the character is rather inconspicuously staged. As a fictional being, the singer is the only woman in the band. Fatima Spar wears taupe trousers, a gray shirt and a black coat; a megaphone is used to spread Fatima Spar's message. Her stage name refers, on the one hand, to the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed and, on the other hand, to the European supermarket chain “Spar.” As a symbol, Fatima Spar criticizes major religious groups such as Islam or Christianity and positions herself as an autonomous individual. During the song she becomes a prophetess:

I would not like to be Jesus

Nor the other great prophet himself

I do not trust in Jesus

Nor the man whose name I do not dare to pronounce

You preach life and immortality

Stay here with wide open doors

The bright side of life you'll always see

But I do not believe in mankind

I woo you

Come trust in me

Rely on me

In your depths of despair, I'll be there. (Transcription by the author)

In Nihal Sentürkal's biography we see two worlds collide. She mentions Jesus as a reference to her childhood in Austria's countryside; besides she also sings about Muhammad as a reference to her Turkish origin. By regarding the lyrics, the song's character can be interpreted as a critical metaphor for current religious conflicts at the beginning of the 21st century. The persecution and annihilation of dissenters by the religions Christianity and Islam have a long history. Titled as crusades, religious and economically motivated battles as well as the oppression of women already took place in the Middle Ages. Fatima Spar's “Trust” spans a historical arc right up to present conflicts and shows a socio-critical position with ironic and sarcastic elements. The music video captures a backroom session in a theater in Istanbul. The musicians and the singer perform together in a seated and relaxed atmosphere; the camera documents the performance in a small room without audience by a constant slow panning back and forth. This uncut recording is preceded by a 1:30 min intro with blurred impressions of Istanbul.

As a symptom, the song's character becomes literally a prophet with an offer of salvation to the patriarchal religions Christianity and Islam. The “blasphemous” statement does not take place in public space. It is hidden by incomprehensibility (through the use of a megaphone the lyrics are not unintelligible), an anonymous location (the session takes place in a back room) and groovy tango sounds. Misogyny and sexism are explicitly woven into the traditions of all mainstream religions. With God being personified as male, his representatives have to be male. They are believed to be of some sort of higher spiritual authority to women, with many religions prohibiting the ordination of women into the clergy, refusing women from sitting at the front in their places of worship or entering places of worship. The song “Trust” can therefore be interpreted as musical and visual statement to sexism and misogyny in patriarchal religions even though the message seems to be hidden in the first place; a closer reading of its lyrics and performance reveals its empowering meaning.

Dives—“Burger”

The all-female trio Dives was founded at the Pink Noise Girls Rock Camp 2015 in Linz (Upper Austria). The band consists of Tamara Leichtfried (electric guitar, vocals), Viktoria Kirner (electric bass, vocals) and Dora de Goederen (drums). With their lineup, the band's instrumentation resembles a classic rock band formation, while using elements from punk, indie rock and garage. Characteristic of Dives’ sound are the two-part vocals by Kirner and Leichtfried, as well as melodious bass lines. As an all-female band, the band is often reduced to its members’ looks and outfits, “You often get compliments or comments that are more about appearance. For example, some of our friends say that we look absolutely cool on stage — as encouragement. That is also meant nicely, and you like to hear it. But people often don’t get that being on stage as a musician is not primarily about your look” (Dora de Goederen, cited in Darok, 2018). The song “Burger” is described as more than a single, it is also a statement as a unique project against the still prevailing gender gap in the multimedia arts. The single release was accompanied by a video created by 3D animation artist Sarah Kreuz and by an 80s-style video game that was developed by Kinaya Studios, a young, all-female programming collective. The game in the Dives’ music video (Dives, 2021) consists of four “lands.” They start in “burgerland,” followed by “surfland” and “flyland”; ultimately the game finishes in “skateland.” In an authentic 80s game design, the Browser Game “Mortal Burger Kombat” demonstrates that women can beat burgers, fries, salad and misogynist statements. In the game, we follow a talking burger through various stations of sexism towards people identifying as female, while we hear a special 8-bit remix of the single. To a certain extent, it describes the journey and scenarios of everyday misogyny experienced by the three protagonists.

As an artifact, the band Dives represent three independent musicians that focus on feminist topics and empowerment in their music. The band combines a certain attitude with garage rock and surf pop, Breeders harmony chants and indie rock with a 90s twist as well as references to their musical ancestors such as the (post) punk band The Slits and empowering lyrics to herald the fall of patriarchy. As fictional beings, the band can be regarded as a successful all-female band in Vienna's music scene. The three musicians are dressed in clothes they usual wear on stage; additionally their hair is styled differently. The sunglasses and make-up resemble the looks of female popstars in the 1990s. Each band member wears fake plastic wings. The background is animated and looks like an 80s video game with mountains, palm trees, burgers and a red wave that symbolizes monthly periods. Burgers attack the band, but they fight them with their fists, leg kicks or instruments. Song lines such as “can’t you take a complement,” “you look so nice today […] one might be allowed to say,” “must be this time of the month […] you are emotional at once” are inserted. During that insert, we can see the musicians surf on the red wave. The band sings and plays their instruments: bass, guitar and drums. While the musicians perform, points are gained from defeating monsters, burgers, enemies and misogynist statements. In the sequence “flyland,” the characters fly like superman and are able to choose their superpower: “power of justice,” “call of matriarchy,” “power chord,” “mega slap,” “wisdom of the past” and “douche immunity.” This sequence shows the support among the band members, while one character “flies,” another character uses the “base” and fights the games’ enemies. The song ends with the line “he doesn’t mean that way.” The credits are accompanied with pillars decorated with burning burgers and a reference to the video game. As a symbol, the trio celebrates empowerment, feminist musicianship and female networks. The lyrics criticize the common assumption that everyday sexism should be taken as a compliment. Questions such as “Can you really eat a whole burger” are just the tip of the sexist iceberg. Such statements imply heteronormative body norms, prejudices and sexism. In a certain way, the three musicians declare war on all those who continue to believe that their everyday sexism should be taken as a compliment. As symptom, the band plays with sexist statements and clichés and packs them into a surf rock tune. The critique of heteronormative ideas and misogyny is underlined with a creative music video and its extension in the form of a video game that shows verbal and visual weapons against misogyny.

Шапка (schapka)—“how is it to make music as a woman”

The band шапка (Schapka) consists of Marie Luise Lehner (electric guitar, vocals), Laura Gstättner (synthesizer, vocals), Dora de Goederen (electric bass, vocals) and Lili Kaufmann (drums). шапка (Schapka), which means hat in Russian, was founded in 2012 when the band members were between 14 and 17 years old, in an expression of solidarity with the feminist collective Pussy Riot. Furthermore, шапка (Schapka) was the opening act for Pussy Riot and their stage show “Riot Days—Days of the Uprising” in 2018. The group combines the punk genre with elements of indie rock and rap. Their lyrics make reference to queer feminist ideas, address safe spaces, queerness and gender quotas, as well as masturbation and female ejaculation. Marie Luise Lehner describes the band's ethos as “queer feminist propaganda” (Marie Luise Lehner, cited in Karlbauer, 2018). шапка (Schapka) plays with ideas of power and gender performance. In their music videos, the band members perform as lightly dressed women that sport beards and play with heterosexual tropes, such as ejaculating on each other with spray cream or feeding each other berries.

Although the band performed on the Red Bull Music Stage at the Popfest Wien in 2018, they did not miss the opportunity to clearly criticize the namesake company and its founder Dietrich Mateschitz. During the very first song, the musicians, whose first album is called Wir sind Propaganda (We are propaganda), unfurled a banner reading “We are propaganda, but not for right-wing populists” (Kramar, 2018). Besides, they accused Dietrich Mateschitz of sympathizing with Russia's President Vladimir Putin and authoritarian politics (шапка (Schapka), 2018b).

As artifacts, Marie Luise Lehner, Laura Gstättner, Dora de Goederen and Lili Kaufmann embody empowered female musicians that use the video “How is it to make music as a woman” to look back at the almost six-year band history in a snipped archive collage, with behind-the-scenes footage from the album cover shoot, live impressions including nylon stocking masking and rehearsals. As fictional beings, the band members can be identified as DIY musicians. We see them performing, recording, rehearsing and feedbacking each other. The clothing and styling correspond to the ideas of queer feminist (punk) musicians. In some sequences they are dressed in drag or visually celebrate their musical ancestors such as the Riot Grrrl Movement and post punk icons such as Siouxsie Sioux. As symbols, the band members discuss insensitive, offensive and marginalizing comments that female musicians are still confronted with on or behind the stage, in interviews and on social media platforms. The lyrics center around the question “How is it to make music as a woman?,” that usually annoys female musicians and turn the question into something ordinary, with aspects taken from their everyday life such as “How to get up as a woman?,” “Go by bus as a woman?” entering the next stage with “How to dance as a woman?” to the significant question “How is it, to make music as a woman?.” Consequently, activities of music creation such as playing an instrument, carrying the equipment, sound engineering and songwriting are enumerated. The song concludes with “What is a woman? […] I don’t know.” Regarding the performative model of gender in which the categories “male” and “female” are understood as the product of a repetition of actions, the supposedly natural settlement of these categories and the associated heteronormative social classification need to be deconstructed. Judith Butler denaturalizes the construct of gender, “A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender” (Butler, 1990: 45). Gender affiliation does not exist as a stable identity from which performative acts emanate; it only arises through the repetition of these acts.

While most of the lines are repeated by several band members in different vocal registers, the rhythm changes only minimally in the first part of the song. By asking “What is a woman?” and simultaneously answering “I don’t know,” the band deconstructs the heteronormative social classification of woman, consequently the song's rhythm changes. It seems that the second part of the song provides a platform for some sort of radical and angry noise improvisation. As symptoms, the band members connect political activism and empowerment strategies with music. Most of their lyrics are easily accessible to audiences when sung in German, while following familiar rhyme schemes and a stable text rhythm, which makes for easier memorization. The band's lyrics and videos celebrate female pleasure and address the taboos of female bodily excretions, such as menstruation or ejaculation, or the stigmatization of sex work. Overall, the feminist slogan “Off to the golden matriarchy” inspires шапка's (Schapka) art concept. While being part of a feminist network, the band thereby acts independently, as Dora de Goederen explains, “I think if people are interested in queer-feminist punk music, Schapka will quickly become a well-known name” (Dora de Goederen, cited in Karlbauer, 2018). The video has one comment on YouTube that states, “Tolle Vagina Musik. Nach all den Jahrzehnten des Penis Sound (Great vagina music. After all the decades of penis sound).” (шапка (Schapka), 2018a)

Kerosin95—“Trans Agenda Dynasty”

Trans and non-binary musician and rapper Kem Kolleritsch, also known as Kerosin95, not only intends to be a role model for non-binary teenagers but to give them visibility. Kem Kolleritsch is well established in the Austrian pop landscape as rapper as well as drummer. Kerosin 95's EP “Trans Agenda Dynasty,” is a reckoning with heteronormativity and gender stereotypes. They clearly state that there is no place for assaultive cis-men at this party. Tracks such as “Trans Agenda Dynastie” accurately correspond with the rapper's activism. Austrian journalists Dulle and Leibetseder state that “between classic hip-hop tracks (‘Puppy’), Auto-Tune love songs (‘4ever’) and angry punchlines, Kerosin95 is provocative enough to stir up the conservative feuilleton and cause confusion. Tracks such as ‘Trans Agenda Dynastie’ accurately correspond in terms of wokeness to a certain zeitgeist” (Dulle and Leibetseder, 2022). Kerosin95's tracks revolve around topics such as the world as a misogynist, homo- and transphobe place and its consequences as well as the relationship to oneself. As musicexport describes the rapper's music: “Besides small odes to queerness and energetic beats, fragile, very personal songs are presented. Lightness and brokenness carry the listeners alternately in highs and lows and allow them to quickly find themselves in the songs” (NN, 2024), consequently I assume that Kerosin95 offers metaphoric spaces for their listeners, where identity can change and shift, to discover and develop their gender and sexual identities.

As an artifact, Kerosin95 embodies a non-binary rapper and transactivist that celebrates life with their queer friends. In the music video “Trans Agenda Dynastie,” (Kerosin95, 2022) the rapper combines a gathering with a boxing fight and a car race. The line “Me and my trans cuties are having a party today,” turns into a debauched gathering whose visitors defy social and gender conventions. It is a supposedly deserted hall that serves as the location. As a fictional being, Kerosin95 wears various outfits such as suit trousers and a shirt that has been transformed into a tank top and glitter eyeliner, boxing clothes and boxing gloves or a leather jacket and exaggerated make-up when attending a car race. While Keroin95 sings the hook, they stand behind a golden picture frame, creating their own legacy which matters to the queer German speaking hip-hop scene. Their own value and supposed self-love become an empowering tool for the rapper's higher self.

As a symbol, they rebel against a society that does not recognize queer individuals. Kerosin95 invites to their party with the lines, “Your theory shatters into a thousand splinters. We are not a made-up dark figure. We are one million existences,” that is celebrated with their queer friends. However, as a boxer, the rapper has to fight this battle alone, without the support of their community, “Welcome to the Trans Agenda Dynasty. I bring aggressive paraffin. TERFs get nothing from me but the middle finger.” The car race offers a change of scenery; it seems as if the battle against a misogynist society continues during the race, “What's for lunch today? I think beef. I'm chilling at the gym. Outside Apocalypse.” Kersosin95 embodies a passenger in the race as they articulate slogans against TERFs, “Such cold-blooded fucking TERFs. They're all scared of their own queerness. Nobody is cis. And nobody listens to you. I am trans and I won. You are losers.” Strongly male-connoted activities such as boxing and a car race are visualized and thus resist heteronormative structures as well as transmisogyny in hip-hop. As symptom, Kerosin95 takes their musical space primarily concentrating on the agenda “Smash the Cistem” by taking on the right-wing transphobic narrative of the ‘trans agenda’ in a self-empowering way. The track's hook possibly cites Sabrine Setlur's “Du liebst mich nicht” (You do not love me), which can be read as a homage to one of the few German female BIPoC rappers of the 1990s. It seems that the German language is the biggest innovation in Kerosin95's project alongside the spoken word, “rap has always been a part of me, but I always thought it was too corny in German. I'll never become Lauryn Hill - even if that's not the point. But at some point, I plucked up the courage. I have the feeling that everything is much more direct in German, and it's also a lot of fun,” as Kerosin95 states (Kerosin95 cited in Jüngermann, 2022). “Trans Agenda Dynasty” can be regarded as an attempt to externalize a wide range of feelings as well as an ironic response to hatred and the assumption that queer people are pursuing an ideology. Kerosin95's appearance relates to the deconstruction of the gender binary; their style of dress reinterprets different typically male or female codes.

Conclusions

Empowerment as a strategy against sexism influences the work of Austrian artists and bands such as DIVES, Шапка (Schapka), Fatima Spar, Fijuka, and Kerosin95. Fittingly, therefore, the selected analytical approach helps to explain these observations. Jens Eder's scheme of character analysis, the “clock of character,” refers to social conditions that are reflected by film, respectively by music videos and documentations of live performances. According to Eder, characters can be analyzed as artifacts, fictional beings, symbols and symptoms. Consequently, a character is embedded in different contexts: as artifact in the music video's textual structures, as fictional being in the diegesis, as symbol in the music video's themes and as symptom in the socio-cultural, historical and political frameworks of its production and reception.

The selected artists and bands not only criticize, deconstruct or differentiate, but also set new feminist impulses within a patriarchal system. Their artistic focus concentrates on the limited spectrum of female identity models that pop culture provides as well as on a staged constant availability of female bodies, including their objectification and hypertextualization. Their audiences should learn to problematize role attributions, but also to understand their own position as an expression of empowerment. Furthermore, the selected artists and bands were concerned with revealing the structural connections between capitalism, racism and sexism and reflecting on their reproduction in music culture and the music industry in general. The emphasis on the sexually active, self-determined subject position is a widespread strategy to counteract the objectification of women in music. However, it can also be just as effective to depict love and lust outside of the hetero-patriarchal relationship matrix and thus refute the idea that female sexuality must always fulfil the male gaze.

The selected artists and bands show a multitude of different positions in terms of gender, sexual identity and social perception and refer to pluralistic patterns of identification. In the analyzed examples, we find ways of dealing with (trans-)misogynies and performing empowering strategies that are presented by a prophetess, activists and DIY band collectives that take place in space and in a video game. The analyzed bands and artists move back and forth between music, performance and social responsibility. The aforementioned musicians focus on playing with identities concerning gender, sexuality, ethnicity and social backgrounds. With these strategies they shift identity politics, as we know them from “established” music traditions. The musicians portrayed here illustrate highly diverse approaches to sexism and empowerment in everyday life and in popular music.