Chapter 6: Navigating Gendered Spaces: Activists' Synergies in Montreal's Electronic Music Scene

Data from international journals show that woman* and other minorities continue to be drastically underrepresented in the music industry worldwide and in the electronic music industry in Europe, Canada, and Quebec. Recent work focusing on the contributions of female electronic music DJs and producers also testify to the intersectional difficulties they face. In this chapter, we examine the strategies they deploy daily to make a career in an overwhelmingly male environment by studying the case of the Montreal electronic music scene. To do so, we use qualitative interviews and observations using the shadowing technique and we deploy a gender-as-social-practice approach, which focuses on how people practice gender in everyday life by considering gender not as a stable state or characteristic of people, but as a dynamic process performed in interactions that produce difference. Our research, which runs from 2021 to 2025, aims to find explanations for the persistent underrepresentation of women* in the electronic music world. More specifically, our results highlight the strategies and coping mechanisms our participants mobilize to negotiate their place and identity in the electronic music industry, paying particular attention to the collective aspect of their mobilization and to their feminist practices, such as creating solidarity networks.

*People who identify as woman.