Unsilenced : Women Musicians, Gender-Based Violence, and the Popular Music Industry

This book explores how women who have experienced gender-based violence within the music industry represent this violence through their creative outputs.

Through three case studies – Kesha, Lingua Ignota, and Alice Glass – it examines how the artists’ experiences of this violence is represented in their music, lyrics, and visual accompaniments; how they narrate and talk about what happened, incorporating the experiences and their responses into their public persona; and what it is about the music industry itself that might facilitate or enable such experiences, or perpetuate the abuse. The analysis in the book provides insight into how survivors construct their experiences.

Beyond this, the works of these artists are themselves cultural artefacts working to (re)inscribe understandings of gender-based violence.

They therefore hold further significance as products that shape how other survivors (and the broader community) understand such violence.

The book reveals how these women view the role of the industry in relation to gender-based violence.

The genre location and subject position of each artist shapes the extent to which they can articulate the industry as central to their abuse, and a type of abuser in its own right, and how they see resistance and positive change as possible.