Be‐in‐tween the Spa[ ]ces: The Location of Women and Subversion in Jazz

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2007 American Culture Association Conference It is surprising and disturbing to find an area of discourse where the location of women and questions of gender have seldom been addressed, especially one as large and as problematic as jazz. Rather like the Bermuda Triangle, jazz is a mysterious, curious area of complicated intersections where women frequently disappear. However, within the vanishing point, and within the representations of its location on the map of music history, jazz is a site of subversion in performance and language, where power is asserted and appropriated and undermined. Like elusive and untranscribable blue notes, women in jazz exist, invisible, in-between the spaces, creating voices through subversion and speaking in ways that are nearly impossible to transcribe into a discourse traditionally owned by men, and where questions of gender are nearly always overshadowed by questions of race. Language surrounds jazz and is embedded within it, in ways that frequently intersect and interweave, and ways that often become problematic because of these very intersections and inter-weavings. These intersections in the discourse are part of why jazz, why music "does not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organization (along with many other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated" (McClary, qtd. in Heble 142). The avoidance of jazzwomen-and more particularly, jazzwomen instrumentalists - is a deliberate lack constructed in the hegemonic jazz discourse to veil the crisis of identity within jazz. Identity comes to crisis when an idea assumed to be static is displaced, and replaced, with doubt and uncertainty (Mercer, qtd. in Heble 11). Because the area of discourse surrounding women questions constructions of gender-and of race - the women instrumentalists must be removed from the discourse of jazz so that the construction of jazz as a masculine space cannot be destabilized. Women have been playing jazz and singing jazz since jazz "began" in the late 180Os, but in order to play jazz women have had to pass as men, perform as men, pass as white, and pass as black. By performing aspects of identities that are generally naturalized, according to hegemonic white male discourse, women have had to be largely written out of jazz, in order to prevent them from rewriting the power structure of discourse itself. Jazz in/as Language-Masculine Space To musicians, "jazz language" is the system of language surrounding the music, the language used to describe the music, to discuss the music (Monson 85). Even within jazz language, systems for talking about jazz can differ significantly, from jazz in academic language, jazz in music critic's/reporter's language, and jazz in the slang language of the jazz musician's community. With the acceptance of jazz into the university, music departments have created not only jazz majors, but also academic language for discussing jazz. The distinction between academic jazz language and the critical language of newspapers and magazines is important because although the language in academia is not necessarily jargon packed, it does revolve around a white European musical tradition and also creates the canon of jazz sanctioned by university music scholars. The language used by newspapers and magazines does not create the same sort of intellectually sanctioned canon, although the two languages are similar in that they are predominately used by white men, and both languages can be said to center around exclusion. Within the space created by these two languages, singers are not "real" musicians, women are largely ignored, and men are portrayed according to how well they can play-the better a male musician's "chops," the more likely he is to be idolized within the canon. Color becomes problematic within these languages because male musicians are put into color binaries, either misrepresenting musicians as black, or overlooking musicians that are nonwhite and nonblack, with few exceptions. …