More Emailing

The head of my thesis committee is really, really great, and I think my conversation with him yesterday is narrowing my direction a little bit more. His insight was that, when investigating oppression, it's easiest to find if you look for the ways in which people fight back. I thought that was really interesting; it made me think (at his suggestion) about the DJ collectives through which I've found the women that I'd contacted. So, I went to the library and checked out a couple of books (including "You Better Work!": Underground Dance Music in New York City), read for the rest of the afternoon, and started hunting around some more when the lights went on.

What I realized in the shower this morning (which is, for some reason, where I always have epiphanies) is that I'd only actually Googled "women DJs." Not "lady DJs" or "girl DJs" or any of the other synonyms for women that exist. So I did that tonight, and came up with a bunch of hits, including a boot camp in Philadelphia for women who want to learn to DJ.

I haven't heard back from anyone since this last batch of emails, but I've got my fingers crossed. We'll see what happens in the next week.

Proposing

Today I wrote my draft of my research proposal to use for my Ethno seminar. I was pretty proud of it, all things considered, even though I felt like I didn't spend enough time on it. I drew up a pretty inclusive budget, and, in the process of pretending to sound like I knew was I was getting into, I think I realized that I might actually have an idea.

I heard back from a couple more women this weekend. I like these women so much from our contact so far that I'm really excited about starting the interviews.

Thesis Season

It's been a long and painful trip through the realm of Picking a Thesis Topic. I'm just getting started in the ethnomusicology world (am actually finishing up my performance masters this year), and I have so many things I want to learn more about. My experience with large, musicology-related papers has been that, as I eke out the final few pages, I come across something that could probably turn the paper into a dissertation, and would probably keep me interested until the dissertation was done. That having been said, I was having a tough time committing to a thesis topic; it felt a little like marriage.

I did some work last year on "minimalism" (the catch-all name for the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley) and its relationship with techno. I ended up digging more on the minimalism side, as I'm a little bit of a Steve Reich freak. While I've heard (and vastly enjoyed, and danced to) a lot of techno in my day, I didn't know much about it when I started the project. I felt like I didn't know much when I finished the project, either. I wanted to dig up more. So when I found a passing remark in an article on the religious nature of the rave culture about the number of women DJs being comparatively small, I got sucked in.

I'm very much looking forward to this year. Hopefully I will learn a lot about an area of techno that is rarely discussed.