So often, I find myself at a loss for words when I'm writing about music, when I'm trying to turn what I hear into language. To write about music, to turn music into words on paper, is to intervene fundamentally with how those sounds mean. It is an act that both attributes meaning—the writer's meanings, the reader’s meanings—to music, but also risks precluding other meanings. Translating music and sounds into words, trying to verbally represent music, feels like an an act of power, one that I'm extremely uneasy about, and so I try to leave spaces in my words, to leave room for slippages, to allow other stories room to emerge from the gaps between my words. More and more, though, I find that I can't find that space on the page. With writing failing me, I’ve turned back to sound as a way of lifting words off of the page and sending them spinning into the air. I started making podcasts simply as a way of translating my academic work into a popular medium. This project, however, took off in unexpected directions, as sound became not just my object of study, and not just a medium for sharing words and information, but an integral part of the work itself, a vital mode of writing that allowed me to not only talk about music but talk with music.

The act of making music can function as a tool for resistance and empowerment. Rock and roll schools for girls, which have developed across North America in the wake of the Riot Grrl movement of the early 1990s, use feminist approaches to music education to teach young women how to empower themselves and articulate their voices through music. This paper is based on interviews conducted with girls, aged nine to twelve, who participated in a Rock and Roll School for Girls workshop that I organized and facilitated in January, 2007. At this workshop, the girls learned basic guitar, drums and songwriting skills in a non-hierarchical environment informed by feminist and alternative approaches to pedagogy. Drawing on methodologies from feminist theory and musicology I will argue that women have traditionally been prevented from expressing our voices, and that music can act as a vital tool for self-expression and for the furthering of progressive political ideologies. Research from the growing field of Girl Studies and musicological work documenting the exclusion of women from rock music subcultures provide justification for girl-focused music education. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists, including Helene Cixous, I will examine the concepts of voice and vocality, specifically as they apply to young women. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to argue that rock music can function as a feminist activist tool and that rock and roll schools for girls can provide young women with the musical skills through which to subvert gender norms and articulate empowered voices.

At the opening of the Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau introduces his readers to the figure of the madwoman. This madwoman is a spiritual figure who occupies an interstitial space, being at once of this world and of the body, while also able to channel the divine. De Certeau’s mad, mystic woman represents an abject body, constructed from humanity’s scraps. She is the embodiment of all that is excessive, and while this places her outside of society, it nonetheless permits her to introduce new possibilities and new means of communicating and speaking. Her words cross lines, existing outside of the modes of speech to which we are accustomed, creating new meanings, resulting in a form of mystic speech.1

This dissertation explores performances by British girl singers from the 1960s to the present. I argue that vocal performances by singers such as Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, and Marianne Faithfull helped construct emerging models of white femininity in the 1960s that continue to resonate in pop vocal performances today. I show that, through vocal performance, these singers envoice liminal spaces at the boundaries of social categories such as race, gender, and class. My first two chapters explore aspirational performances of femininity by Shaw, Black, and Springfield, from 1963-1969. I show how Shaw and Black positioned themselves as solo singers, and argue that their vocal styles reflected an emerging liberal model of feminine independence that was at turns freeing and regressive. The following chapter argues that Springfield drew on collaborations with African-American women, such as Martha Reeves, to vocalize a different kind of feminine identity for herself, one grounded in a sense of alterity, and to create a space for racial justice that was ultimately limited by structural inequalities. The second pair of chapters look back at the 1960s through contemporary performances. I consider the current work of Lulu and Faithfull as aging singers, and argue that they must contend not only with cultural memories of their 1960s girlhood, but also with discourses of decline, and with the physical impact of aging on the voice. I close with a chapter about Candie Payne, Duffy, and Shelby Lynne, contemporary singers whose nostalgic use of 1960s vocal techniques re-imagines mid-century ideals of femininity in the present. My analyses are rooted in feminist theories of intersectionality and performance, and methods from Voice Studies. I draw on a range of archival sources, including fashion and music magazines, newspapers, memoirs, and television footage.