Online discussion sites, such as social media platforms and discussion forums, have long served as spaces in which fans of specific musical genres can negotiate their identities and construct the borders to their musical community. Due to less involvement from corporate popular music labels, the most tight-knit online communities form around non-mainstream musical topics when compared to their mainstream counterparts. Despite the common assumption that the anonymity of the internet allows for equitable dialogue, the marginalization and silencing of women and minorities is prevalent throughout non-mainstream music communities. In this thesis, I integrate methodologies from media studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, and sociology to examine the ways in which user-generated content serves to police the boundaries of online music communities. Each chapter delves into the unique ways fans in different communities use language to preserve the white, male hegemony. Chapter 1 delves into an examination of the 1970s punk fanzine, Slash to introduce the ways in which music fans leverage performances of masculinity to demonstrate authenticity and power in punk communities. Chapter 2 continues this line of inquiry, but I shift my focus to performances intellectualism in the contemporary online independent (indie) music community. In Chapter 3, I move away from genre-based dialogues and examine self-fashioning, essentialism, and taste in high-end audio blogs and forums. Together, these three chapters demonstrate that online dialogues do significant cultural work in the silencing of women and minorities both within and outside of the digital realm.
Read
