Title:

Improvising Sexism: Post-Feminist Ideologies in Free Improvisation

Abstract:

While John Corbett claims that free improvisation is “open to everyone” (2016, 1), the vast majority of performers active in contemporary scenes of this practice are cisgendered men. While male dominance is nothing unique to free improvisation, this talk examines the relationship between this demographic skewedness and the fact that these scenes foreground improvisation. In order to do so, it draws on several years of ethnographic participant-observation as a woodwind performer and interactive media artist in free improvisation scenes in Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco. On one level, gender imbalance manifests itself in these scenes not only in the numerical breakdown of active performers, but through a post-feminist ideology in which cisgendered male members of these scenes assert that the scene has achieved gender equity despite the easily verifiable fact of male dominance. On another, sexism reveals itself to be an improvisatory behavior in the context of an experimental ethnographic methodology in which I have designed a variety of virtual performers of free improvisation and asked improvisers to compare them to a human being. In my work with one such virtual improviser, whom I have given the gendered name “Maxine,” performers find that this system exhibits a broad array of deficiencies in comparison to human improvisers. Rather than revealing a uniform stereotype of female-gendered performance, criticisms of this system are a chaotic mix of contradictory ideas about femininity as it might manifest itself in real-time musical interaction. In other words, commentary on this system suggests that sexist prejudice is improvised in the sense that male participants invent sexist evaluations impromptu rather than necessarily relying upon fixed ideas about the essence of particular gender identities.