"I had no choice but to turn fearless.” Feminine roles in Kim Gordon’s memoir A Girl In A Band (2015)

Abstract

Kim Gordon (born 1953) is an American no-wave/punk musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the bassist, guitarist, and vocalist of Sonic Youth. Her memoir, Girl in a Band (2015), is based on Gordon's experience of alienation, presented from a female perspective, in a musical environment based on masculine hegemony, and in her personal life during the active years of Sonic Youth. In addition to writing the subjective history of the band Sonic Youth, she reflects in detail from a feminist perspective on the double standards stemming from social expectations as a girl living in the shadow of her brother, on the relationship between femininity and being a musician, on the hierarchies within male-dominated genres, musical and artistic environments, and homosocial relations. The memoir simultaneously aims to heal its author and expose the mechanisms of the music industry: with a sociological intention, it discusses the dynamics of human relationships in the case of a slowly disintegrating family and band, the music industry, and the New York art scene as a machine driven by material interests, and presents the dark sides of the roles offered by them through the general and personalized destruction of the rock star myth. In the title of her memoir, Gordon reflects on how, as the only woman in the band, she came to be the object of attention and the male gaze, as a person marked only by her gender and deprived of her name (“girl”), and also on how the girl makes the musical product marketable. The study also analyzes the history of the appearance of the female gaze on stage through the songs of Sonic Youth.

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