‘I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Camp Cope’: Forging feminist identities through music fandom.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5429/2079.387(2025)v15i1.7enKeywords:
Music Fandom, Identity, gender and popular music studies, Feminism, Popular MusicAbstract
This paper explores the real and lasting impact of the all-women, indie-rock trio, Camp Cope on their fans’ identity formation. In interviews, women, and gender-diverse fans of Camp Cope described strong emotional and experiential connections to the band that helped them to forge and activate feminist identities, define their morals, values, and goals, and heal from sexual harm. This study considers what it means to be a woman or gender-diverse fan of women musicians in an Australian music industry that not only privileges male tastes and talent, but often excludes women and gender-diverse people from full and free participation.
References
Anderson, B., 1991. Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
Baym, N., 2018, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. New York University Press, New York.
Bessett, D., 2006 ‘“Don’t step on my groove!”: Gender and the social experience of rock’, Symbolic Interaction, 29 (1): 49–62.
Cavicchi, D., 1998. Musically Shaping the Self. In Tramps like us: Music and meaning among Springsteen fans. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
Cohen, S., 1997. MEN MAKING A SCENE: Rock music and the production of gender, in: Sexing the Groove. Routledge.
Connell, R.W., 2005. Masculinities. Taylor & Francis Group, Sydney, Australia.
Cooper, R., Coles, A., Hanna-Osborne, S., 2017. Skipping a beat: Assessing the state of gender equality in the Australian music industry.
Davies, H., 2001. All Rock and Roll Is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press. Popular Music 20(3): 301–319.
DeNora, T., 2000 ‘Music as a Technology of Self.’ Chapter. In Music in Everyday Life, 46–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi-org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433
Denzin, N.K., 1989. Interpretive Biography. SAGE.
Driessen, S., 2022. Look what you made them do: understanding fans’ affective responses to Taylor Swift’s political coming-out. Celebrity Studies 13: 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2021.2023851
Ewens, H., 2019, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, Quadrille Hardie Grant, London.
Fairlamb, H.M., Fileborn, B., 2019. Experiences and perceptions of gender in the Australian music industry. Perfect Beat 20: 8–39. https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.39800
Feldman-Barrett, C., 2021. A women’s history of the Beatles, Bloomsbury, New York.
Frith, S., 1996. Music and Identity. In Questions of Cultural Identity edited by Stuart Hall, and Paul du Gay: SAGE Publications, SAGE Publications, London, 108-127.
Frith, S., 1987. Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music. In Taking popular music seriously: selected essays. Routledge. 258-273
Gerrard, Y., 2022. ‘Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype.’ American Behavioral Scientist, 66(8): 1044-1059. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042284.
Green, B., 2016. ‘I Always Remember That Moment’: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies. Sociology 50: 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038514565835
Griffiths, N., 2018. Falls Organisers Respond to Camp Cope Calling Out Festival For Lack Of Female Acts. The Music, 3 January. https://themusic.com.au/news/falls-organisers-respond-to-camp-cope-calling-out-festival-for-lack-of-female-acts/MYMiJSQnJik/03-01-18 (accessed 12 December 2023).
Hains, RC 2014, ‘The Significance of Chronology in Commodity Feminism: Audience Interpretations of Girl Power Music’, Popular Music and Society, 37(1): 33-47.
Hennessy, K. 2018 “‘You expect us not to call you out?’ – Camp Cope and the Australian musicians fighting industry sexism” The Guardian Australia 9 March. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/08/you-expect-us-not-to-call-you-out-camp-cope-and-the-australian-musicians-fighting-industry-sexism (accessed 19 September 2020)
Hesmondhalgh, D., 2013. Why Music Matters, John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, Hoboken.
Jaffe, S., 2018. The Collective Power of #MeToo. Dissent 65: 80–87.
Author 2023
Larsen, G., 2017. ‘It’s a man’s man’s man’s world’: Music groupies and the othering of women in the world of rock. Organization 24, 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416689095
Macarthur, S 2002, Feminist aesthetics in music, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut.
Reger, J 2007, ‘Where Are the Leaders? Music, Culture, and Contemporary Feminism’, American Behavioral Scientist, 50 (10): 1350–1369.
Sowards, S.K., Renegar, V.R., 2004. The rhetorical functions of consciousness‐raising in third wave feminism. Communication Studies 55: 535–552. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970409388637
Strong, C., 2016. Harder, faster, louder: challenging sexism in the music industry. The Conversation, 13 July. http://theconversation.com/harder-faster-louder-challenging-sexism-in-the-music-industry-58420 (accessed 31 August 2022).
Support Act Limited 2022 “Raising Their Voices: An independent review into sexual harm, sexual harassment, and systemic discrimination in the Australian contemporary music industry” https://musicindustryreview.com.au/
Trier-Bieniek, A.M., 2012. When Women’s Musical Activism is Motivated by an Activist Musician. Humanity & Society 36: 260–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160597612451247
Trier-Bieniek, A.M., 2013. Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md.
Trott, V., 2021. Networked feminism: counterpublics and the intersectional issues of #MeToo. Feminist Media Studies 21: 1125–1142. https://doi.org/0.1080/14680777.2020.1718176
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 IASPM Journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright, while licensing their work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
