Research seminar in Cultural Anthropology with Anna Gavanas

  • Date: –12:00
  • Location: Engelska parken Room Eng/3-2028
  • Lecturer: Anna Gavanas is a social anthropologist with a focus on dance music history, working life, migration and family politics. She has published a number of interview based and archival studies on Swedish electronic dance music scenes with a focus on technological shifts, gender and cultural politics. Gavanas has also worked as a DJ and producer since the 1990s and onwards. 
  • Contact person: Chakad Ojani
  • Seminarium

Swedish Dance Music Scenes, Female Career Trajectories, and the Neoliberal Shift.

This paper investigates the career trajectories of female pioneers in underground electronic dance music (EDM) scenes in Sweden. Due to Sweden´s anti-commercial cultural policies in the 1970s and 1980s, it provides an interesting example for analyzing the introduction of neoliberalism to the cultural industries and its gendered outcomes. Female pioneers in Swedish EDM scenes in the late 1980s and early 1990s were generally assigned to “supporting” roles, while being part of the changing neoliberal relationships between culture and society, which favored entrepreneurism. As a result of their skills and contributions within a gendered labor division, some female pioneers were in positions to launch DIY careers out of their previous unpaid work in design, fashion, media, retail, and club promotion. Thus, DIY subcultural capital transferred into careers in the cultural industries.

Print