Air Guitar, Gender and Sexism, Ethnomusicology
In theory, air guitarists are not trying to mimic the bodies or exact performances of the original guitarists, but the notion that the male body is more naturally suited to playing guitar still plagues women air guitar competitors, whose bodies are sometimes sexualized by judges. Women competitors tend to receive comments by judges that compliment their beauty, grace, and flexibility, while men tend to receive compliments that highlight qualities such as aggression, power, and intensity. Although members of the community stress that anyone may compete in the competitions, women often face a particularly tough challenge, since they represent a marked category to [male] judges who assume men are the “natural” and default players of real guitar and, by extension, air guitar. While considering ways to challenge these ideas, Rocky Rhoads mentioned to me that she debates which strategy would produce equality among air guitarists: celebrating a distinctly powerful womanly style of playing air guitar (a kind of strategic essentialism) or erasing all references to gender from the air guitar competition (genderless air guitar). This gender inequality in the competition points to the idea that the ability to interpret and represent popular music in any kind of aesthetic competition often involves complicated ideas about who has a right to manipulate the media—the validity of an interpretation of popular music may depend as much on identity as it does on one’s ability to choreograph or configure media.
McDaniel, Byrd. 2017. "Configurability, Choreography, and the Air Guitar World Championships." Ethnomusicology. 61(3).
September 26th, 2014
Hello Gina,
My name is Byrd McDaniel, and my friend Joe gave me your e-mail. Joe said that you were interested in gender issues related to air guitar, and I am very interested in these issues as well. As it so happens, I am currently beefing up on some performance theory and gender theory to really grapple with gender in air guitar. I have been really fascinated by whether or not air guitar reconstitutes some of the gender divides implicit in rock performance and also how the ambiguity of gender may challenge some of those conventions. I became interested in this especially after the heated exchange about women competitors at the US Nationals this year.
Anyway, all of this goes to say: I am interested in anyone’s perspective who wants to talk about gender and US Air Guitar. I would love to hear your thoughts, stories, or any info you have. Would you want to set up a little phone conversation?
I hope all is well, and I think I’ve become inspired to write another blog post this morning! I can’t believe I haven’t written about these issues, since I think about them quite a lot.
Sincerely,
Byrd
September 27th, 2014
Hi Byrd,
Yeah, that heated exchange was me. I would love to talk to you about gender and air guitar. I really enjoyed your blog post, I thought you did an excellent job of articulating the matters at hand, I am not nearly as eloquent in my delivery hahaha. Also, I gotta tell you I have been comparing Air Guitar to Drag for YEARSSSS. I mean really, I would love to talk to you about ANYTHING regarding air guitar, I've been competing since 2010, attending Nationals every year since 2011, and I planned and hosted the Chicago qualifier competitions the past two years.
Yeah, I can do phone or whatever. I'm not sure what your schedule looks like, but I'm reasonably flexible, the best time for me is usually the evening actually, though I am free during the day sometimes.
Rocky
October 10th, 2014
Hey Gina,
I just submitted a research grant (Pembroke Center for Women’s Studies Steinhaus / Zisson Grant, specifically), in hopes that I will get funds to specifically study air guitar and gender. It’s pretty competitive, so I’m not sure that I’ll get it. BUT I thought you might be interested in the content, just because we talked about these kinds of things on the phone. Please only read this if it interests you. Anyway, here are some excerpts from it:
After she performed a routine on stage to an all-male panel of judges, Rocky Roads [witnessed] the following critique from a judge [directed at another female competitor]:
“It’s easy for women in air guitar to rely solely on the fact that they’re a woman, and they have parts of their bodies that other people find arousing. (audience boos) Don’t boo me! Let me finish… It’s easy for women to rely solely on their sex. It’s ok to use that, but you also have to some talent and skill to go with that!”
In the midst of the 2014 U.S. National Air Guitar Competition, a heated debate occurred between Rocky Roads and the judges, with over six hundred live audience members watching in awkward silence. The exchange evoked issues common to many types of music competitions—those related to the male gaze, the problematic sexualization of women’s bodies, a disproportionate number of male judges analyzing female performers, and questions about sexuality versus skill. For the hundreds of air guitarists who compete each year, these kinds of debates hold important consequences for their own bodies in the competition and their sense of gender embodiment within the social networks of which they are a part.
I am applying for a Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grant in order to continue my fieldwork on the U.S. Air Guitar Championships during the summer of 2015. As an ethnomusicologist, I have been conducting participant-observation fieldwork on air guitar and related practices for the past two years. Placing air guitar alongside karaoke, lip-synching competitions, and related forms of virtual performance, I conduct research that analyzes the myriad ways in which individuals repurpose and re-perform popular music.
In the U.S. Air Guitar Competition, performers advance to the national level by winning local and regional contests. During these competitions, performers choreograph routines to pre-recorded backing tracks (usually a guitar solo), and they are given scores by a panel of judges based on their ability to interpret music through “playing” the air guitar—simulating the strumming, bending, and picking of a “real” guitar player. The performances go beyond simply imitating the “real” guitar and represent expressive ways of engaging with pre-recorded music.
Air guitarists are judged based on three criteria: technical merit, stage presence, and “airness.” Technical merit refers to the extent to which a performance reproduces the actual movements required to produce the sounds on a guitar. Stage presence refers to charisma and the ability to entertain on stage. “Airness,” an ambiguous catch-all category, refers to “the extent to which a performance transcends imitation and becomes an art form in and of itself,” according to the official rules. This emphasis on “airness” reveals how one might consider air guitar as a type of performance art, although the practice challenges many of the highbrow connotations typically associated with these kinds of practices.
Performers describe the art form as both “funny” and “serious,” revealing both the ironic and sincere dimensions of this double-voiced performance practice (Bakhtin 1981; Schechner 1998). Rather than viewing air guitar as mechanical mimicry of pre-existing music, practitioners view their performance as an interpretive commentary on popular music production and consumption—one saturated with irony, performativity, and cultural critique. However, media depictions of the competition from ESPN, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Rolling Stone tend to treat air guitar as an esoteric hobby and lowbrow music practice. For example, CNN’s Jack Cafferty called it the “one of the dumbest things [he’s] ever seen.” A cursory glance at YouTube comments for air guitar videos reveals an abundance of hate speech and outright hostility towards practitioners, especially women. Since air guitar competitions do not appear “serious” or “authentic” in the first place, many women face resistance from outsiders who do not take air guitar seriously, as well as resistance from within the community from those who view women’s bodies as deviant from a normative male masculinity.
In an attempt to account for gender in air guitar, I am currently expanding my theoretical approach to my research. Theories of drag performances appear particularly applicable to air guitar. Specifically, Judith Butler argues that drag can do one of two things: it can challenge existing gender norms through playing with ambiguity and categories on stage, or it can reaffirm and idealize gender categories by showing one’s inability to “cross over” from “natural” categories (Butler 1993). My advisor, Kiri Miller describes a kind of “rock drag” in video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, where virtual performers exaggerate traditional signifiers of the rock genre in ways that challenge their normative meanings and authenticity (Miller 2009). Virtual instrument playing—with either a controller or an air guitar—provides the opportunity to infuse traditional rock practices with camp and queer sensibilities (Sontag 1964), yet, at the same time, these virtual practices may also support normative ideas about which bodies are more artificial, constructed, or naturally suited to play guitar.
Finally, all of these debates become particularly complicated when considering how they relate to class, race, and able-bodiedness (Lorde 1984; hooks 1985; Samuels 2014). Ellen Samuels, in Fantasies of Identification, describes a social model of disability in the U.S., in which racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies have been constructed as essentialized categories that deviate from “normal” bodies—this is part of the “fantasy” she attempts to deconstruct. Since air guitar involves many individuals with non-normative bodies who enact familiar rock archetypes on stage, an analysis of air guitar should take into account how certain performances authorize or challenge notions of the “ideal” or “normal” body.
A cultural understanding of the gendered iconography and evolution of the guitar also proves important to my analysis, and my previous master’s degree in American studies allowed me to begin exploring some of these issues. Air guitar practice remediates many of the problematic gender and sexual ideologies that have plagued real guitar playing (Walser 1993; McSwain 1995; Waksman 2001). In order to historicize these trends, I have been supplementing my fieldwork with archival research on air guitar and “air band” competitions in the United States. In particular, I have traced the origins of the contemporary competition back to the 1970s, during which “air” practices flourished alongside increasingly portable playback technologies.
Anyway, since I may not get the grant, I figured there’s no sense in letting all of this writing go to waste!
Take care,
Byrd
Women in Competitive Air Guitar Series: Guest Post #2
February 26th, 2015 on the Boston Air Guitar Blog
Despite a long hiatus, I would like to continue providing a platform for women in competitive air guitar to share their stories. I hope that I can showcase more such posts in the future and that we keep looking at solutions together.
Today's post is by Rocky Rhoads.
What kills me about the sexist incidents I've seen at air guitar competitions over the years is that it is COMPLETELY STUPID and unacceptable that it is even a problem because we are all intelligent, empathetic adult humans. We all know that it is wrong but for some reason we keep letting it happen.
We shouldn’t have to be having this conversation, largely because this could have been stopped a long time ago, but it’s become clear that this is necessary as we approach our next season. Explaining the current situation bit by bit is going to make this whole thing sound a lot more extreme and complicated than it actually is, because this should really all be common sense to such good and genuine people. As friends we manage to get together often, drinking mass quantities of alcohol and getting rowdy as hell, and yet I seriously cannot think of one time when any of us was deliberately mean or hurtful to another. There is also a recognized general consensus that our group is exceptionally and unconditionally accepting and supportive. If we were all out partying and one of us girls was being bothered or harassed by some douche, that douche would have like 20+ people all over them telling them to learn some respect or fuck off. Yet, it seems like once we’re on stage and in the public eye our personal standards are forgotten. Air Guitar is important to me and if you’re reading this, I’m guessing that it’s important to you too. I approach this subject in a passionate way because when the stupid oppressive crap that some of us have to live with every day of our lives in the real world because of innate physical or personal attributes we cannot control intrudes on our fun we don’t have the advantage of being able to emotionally distance ourselves. And what’s especially insulting is that these superficial differences—gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, lifestyle, whatever—are the kind of stuff air guitarists worldwide seek to transcend and even heal through air guitar. I’m sick of seeing the happiness that this wacky creative pursuit brings to all of us fly out the window on those occasions when random acts of assholery during competitions, largely from outsiders, eclipse the fun times.
We all know that from the moment they get on stage women are referred to and treated as a separate class of air guitarists from men. We all know that women who do air guitar run the risk of being judged more on their looks and how sexy or un-sexy they are than the actual judging criteria we signed up and practiced to be judged on. Every one of us knows that getting on stage to play air guitar as a woman is basically risking sexual harassment to some degree. Every single one of us has witnessed some kind of ugly sexist thing happen during what is supposed to be a drunken celebration of peace, friendship and fun. It doesn't happen every time, or even most of the time I'd say, but when it does it's a real slap in the face. Why do we as individuals and as a community, continue to allow women be made to feel unwelcome on stage while at the same time loudly lamenting that not more women are willing to compete?
The fact of the matter is that women tend to get personal insults on stage in a way that men don't, and it really sucks and most people seem ok with ignoring it or dismissing it as not a big deal because it doesn’t affect them. When the merit of your performance is ignored in favor of commentary on your sexuality or lack thereof because you happen to be a woman, that's pretty personal. When you are reduced to your gender and your body as you stand on stage in front of an entire venue full of people, that is pretty damn personal. Call me funny-looking, call me stupid, tell me my performance sucked, tell me you hated my song, call me bad at air guitar, but objectifying, ridiculing or penalizing me based on my gender, something I cannot control, is fucked. This isn't about trying to avoid “offending” anyone and this isn't about “political correctness” (whatever the flying fuck that means.) This isn't about winning or losing or scoring well. We can all take victories and losses in stride and for those of us who involve ourselves in the community, Air Guitar has never been about winning or losing or scores. This is about not being a dick and not ruining the fun. Air Guitar is probably the most fun thing in the world. Unfortunately, for some of us, there are some really bad moments where the carefree, escapist, goofy elaborate joke that is Air Guitar stops being all of those things.
Maybe the community doesn’t realize how ridiculously easy this is to address: Are judges being told before the show that saying disgusting stuff to ladies is not cool? Has anyone ever told a sexist judge “dude, that wasn't OK, cut that out right now”? Did anyone stop and think that it would be at best obviously risky and at worst a completely stupid idea to have some basement dweller who edits for a porn website judge a US Air Guitar show? This is really basic, painfully easy stuff. What would happen if a judge was saying something sexist, or making crude and humiliating jokes, or ignoring a female competitor’s performance in favor of her hotness, and a fellow judge or the host, or anyone else with authority immediately told that asshole to shove it? Unfortunately, when women who do air guitar are dehumanized on stage everyone who could do something about it just sits there and enables it to happen because apparently not rocking the boat, or keeping the show going smoothly, or getting cheap laughs, or looking like a cool guy in front of a moderately famous comedian who might re-tweet you or USAG someday is more important in that moment than not condoning shitty sexist rhetoric in front of an entire theater full of people and the whole world. Consider that every time we allow sexist stuff to happen in our shows, we are alienating at least half of our audience, always including potential competitors. Organizers at ALL levels of competition are evidently not making enough (or any) of an effort to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and when these things do happen they’re either too apathetic or too chicken to stop it in its tracks when they have the chance. It is an abject shame to our entire community and the ideals we say we stand for and we have ALL been complicit by our inaction. What kind of message have we sent to everyone who's come to an air guitar show and witnessed some embarrassing sexist crap go down? Definitely not one about world peace.
Charismatic and insightful judges are the difference between a good show and an amazing show, and when the judging commentary is on point competitors love it just as much as the crowd. We are signing up to be judged, and ideally it's part of the fun. As competitors, WE WANT to laugh and have fun and not take this too seriously. This is ultimately all in the name of fun, after all, but assholes keep screwing it up for us. We all love insult humor, being riffed on for our goofy costumes, or the way we totally messed up one of our moves and looked really stupid, we love talking about boobs and dicks and buttsex and ALL that good stuff. Here's the thing: it's REAL EASY to have juvenile, raunchy fun and “festive abuse” and not be mean-spirited or a disgusting creep about it. It's also extremely easy to tell someone they're looking good on stage without being gross. I think any adult human who regularly performs or interacts with the public can manage that, and if they can't, or won't, then they're probably a jerk you don't want around. It is necessary to educate our judges a little and offer them a set of completely reasonable parameters to work within such as “no sexist, racist or otherwise personal insults” or “you are not scoring how sexy the competitors are,” or “this is a competition so say things about the actual performance.” Explicitly stating clear judging expectations won't keep judges from being engaging and entertaining or from giving their brutally honest and real opinions on performances. Asshole judges can be fun, but there is a line between being an asshole judge and just being an asshole. You may think that this kind of stuff is implied but it evidently needs to be explicitly stated.
Beyond simply not allowing the sexual harassment of women on stage, we also need to consider the way that competitors who are women are often lumped together in the “female competitor” category despite the fact that each one of us is an individual, autonomous human being with our own ideas and performance styles. There is no reason to play up the seemingly unexpected surprise that 50% of the population like fun, and it’s precisely this kind of thing that discourages lots of women from participating. People just don’t like to put themselves in situations where they think they’ll be made to feel marginalized, singled out, or otherwise discriminated against. I mean, we all know the reality of how positive and egalitarian the air guitar community ends up being in private, I personally can’t think of a single moment when anyone in this group made me feel depreciated or victimized or uncomfortable while just hanging out. But to spectators, air guitar is defined by what they’ve seen on stage. While they may be totally cool with all the general bawdy revelry, the occasional unchecked on-stage sexual harassment can make it seem like our air guitar family would not be the most welcoming place for a woman. While they may have awesome ideas and a desire to compete, knowing the way they could be harassed and their creativity and effort easily disregarded can make it seem like it wouldn’t be worth it. Depending on what show they’ve seen, air guitar could seem like a humiliating douchefest of epic proportions, and that definitely sounds super un-fun.
Regarding an often-mentioned myth of air guitar that hinges on the unfair and unwanted “female competitor” grouping: women, or people for that matter, who rely solely on their sexuality to get good scores simply do not exist beyond the most basic levels of competition. As long as organizers properly choose and brief their judges, they will be scored poorly just like anyone who is not meeting the judging criteria will be scored poorly. The frequency with which people complain about the “untalented-yet-sexy women in air guitar” greatly outnumbers their actual prevalence, and it is worth noting that this criticism is disproportionately targeted towards female competitors. Continuing to act as if this is a real issue is insulting to every woman who participates. It is actually such a non-issue that bringing it up just sounds like you're trying to shit on women in general. Additionally it brings up the question to the audience “which of these women are the bad ones I've been told about?” It could be any of us. How do I walk on stage in a crop top and hot pants and pelvic thrust to the beat of the song after someone just told the crowd that women “using their sexuality” are bad? If a woman chooses to wear a revealing outfit or add some provocative moves to their number they risk being made to feel like less of a competitor and less of a person, and then we congratulate women on not being sexy, or not “using their sexuality,” which is straight-up puritanical, misogynistic noise and probably the most un-rock and roll thing I have ever heard. I should be able to be whatever kind of woman I want on stage without being afraid of being penalized for being too sexy or not sexy enough. Every woman who does Air Guitar should be free to be as sexy or chaste as they want to be without that decision being questioned by some dude.
If we want to improve the chances that every show will be a great show, that more people who come to our shows will vow to compete the next chance they get, that more first-time competitors come back again, and that everyone will have as much fun as they possibly can, organizers and participants alike at all levels of competition need to start addressing this crap pronto. The good news is that we will be able to stop the vast majority of incidents of negativity before the show even starts by just caring a little. We don't need complex rules or dramatic preemptive warnings to the assembled crowd: we just need a little thoughtfulness and common sense and the resounding positivity and fun of the whole occasion will police the tone of the evening for us. It’s really simple. Don't offer a judging spot to anyone who deals in racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted humor. Don't risk fucking anyone's fun up by creating a situation where women or anyone else is guaranteed to have a bad time at the hands of some sad sack with a lack of actual clever things to say. Don't offer a judging spot to someone with little experience actually speaking in front of real people in public. Make it known to your judges, competitors, and anyone else involved in the production that you won’t tolerate sexist or otherwise uncalled for bullshit. If something unsavory does happen, don't be afraid to speak up and set things straight.
Don't try and act like sexist humor is funny for being subversive or “ironic.” Sexism is the definition of status quo, and playing at it in the name of ironic humor, or shock value or whatever you want to call it, comes at the price of validating every real misogynist out there who actually does seek to objectify women or believes women need to be put in their place, or who thinks women shouldn’t play air guitar. Let it be well known that you won't tolerate it, and don’t be too chicken to lay down the law. We are not fighting some system bigger than us, WE ARE the system. We decide whether Air Guitar comes off as infectiously fun and positive and awesome, or like a bunch of dicks who are ok with trashing women in the name of entertainment. Tap into that wonderful sense of community and family that we all love so much, and be ready to have your brothers and sisters’ backs in the face of any kind of blatantly anti-fun bullshit. Make your competition an occasion where any and all can have unabashed, uncensored, humorously indecent good times. Many of us spend all year working on our acts in one way or another, to fearlessly take the stage and potentially make a huge fool of ourselves in front of the entire country: We need to apply the same passion and fearlessness to ensuring all air guitar competitors unconditional, if risqué and self-depreciating, fun. Won’t somebody please think of the fun?