Pop Conference 2018

Don't think we have a thread yet? Could be wrong! Here's the theme:

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? MUSIC AND GENDER
2018 MOPOP POP CONFERENCE
April 26-29, 2018, Seattle WA

Popular media in the 21st century is rife with radical differences around gender. Even as audiences cheer on shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, viewers and voters reward toxic masculinity at the box office and the ballot box. Popular music voices and reinforces, or challenges and explodes, assumptions about gender, which itself intersects race, ethnicity, sex, the family, labor, religion and morality. The artists we select in canons, historiography, and the musical moment represent an intimate referendum on the subject. Gender performance has a long history: crooners of the 1930s "pansy craze," the bull daggers of classic blues, pop stars exploiting the feminine ideal from Doris Day to Britney Spears and workingman heroes like Muddy Waters and Bruce Springsteen. Today's gender-fluid groundbreakers, like Anohni and Syd, follow on vaudeville’s Annie Hindle and rocker Little Richard. Musical virtuosity and technique, too, are gendered, from the hypermasculinity of hip hop's "wheels of steel" or rock's technophallic guitar heroics to disco's feminized vocal soarings. And gender frames genre: distinctions of salsa dura and salsa romántica or monga (flaccid) echo in country’s “hardcore” honkytonk and “soft shell” crossover divide.

Acceptances have been going out today and happily I'm in this time around -- here's my planned presentation:

http://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/168682900002/so-my-proposal-for-the-2018-pop-conference-has

MoPOP (aka EMP) Pop Conference 2018

Ah, thanks!