In the organizer's words:

FEIERWERK AND FACHSTELLE POP PRESENT:

"Feminism isn't fun, it's complex and it pisses people off - and it's work! And Sonja Eismann has done it for herself by proving with verve and anger and countless examples how patriarchal things still are in the music industry." - Christiane Rösinger

Young women and their bodies - naturally beautiful, youthful, sexy - are the raw material from which the music industry and the logic of pop are made. They are pined over and fetishized in song lyrics, insulted and degraded, they serve as a projection surface on stage and backstage. Female fans are seen as a screaming mass or a will-less groupie, incapable of any serious interest in the music or serious taste.
And when a woman performs as an artist, she is first a woman and only then a musician, then her body is either too fat, too thin, too perfect or otherwise wrong, then she is either a whore or a saint, and then - suddenly - she is too old anyway.

In a mixture of analysis and reckoning that is as angry as it is instructive, Sonja Eismann shows how deeply sexism and ageism are inscribed in the music industry, how we as consumers have learned and internalized the male gaze, how abuse and paedosexuality are accepted in almost all scenes and genres.
She writes about old men who let underage female singers perform sexualized songs, about the seeming impossibility of proper aging, sexist music journalism, superstars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé or Peaches, about femicide in song lyrics - and of course about examples of self-confident appropriation, resistance, angry middle fingers against the music patriarchy. (Source: Book description)

SONJA EISMANN (*1973) is a journalist and cultural scientist. She studied comparative literature in Vienna, Mannheim, Dijon and Santa Cruz (USA) and was co-founder of the magazine "nylon" and "Missy" Magazine, where she is still part of the editorial team. She was/is an author and journalist for Spex, taz, Freitag and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, among others, and researches gender representations in pop. From 2016 to 2022 she was a member of the Goethe-Institut Music Council, in 2024 she held the pop lectureship at the University of Paderborn. She lives in Berlin. (Source: Organizer)

Location: Feierwerk Hansa 39

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