Against the Patriarchy

US singer-songwriter Tori Amos's 1996 album, _Boys for Pele_, directly invokes Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire. This title of Amos's highest-charting release is one example of the album's abundant mythological references. Amos's previous albums foregrounded musically- and lyrically-straightforward autobiographical songwriting that catalyzed listeners' identity exploration, a musical discourse that guided the feminist politics of her teen girl fans. For Amos, mythological references were another way to tether identity-construction to music-making and -listening. Amos told Performing Songwriter (1996), "Personality becomes these myths, and we all see ourselves in whatever and whoever we want to." In _Pele_, Amos expands "whatever and whoever" beyond mythology by recruiting other female characters for this same purpose, including celebrity, religious, and historical figures (e.g. Judy Garland, Mary Magdalene, Anne Boleyn) whose biographies are likewise marked by myth and mystery. Amos was known for her metrically- and tonally-straightforward songs for voice and piano, and _Pele_ departed from this signature sound. In this paper, I argue that _Pele_ merges the stories of mythic figures with equally mysterious sonic landscapes in ways that led to myth-building around Amos herself, ultimately galvanizing feminist activism among new listening audiences in the 1990s.


To analyze the myths of Amos as queer and heretical icon, I interpret Amos's music and reception through queer and religious frameworks informed by Cusick's proposal for "embodied music criticism" (1999) and Häger's theory of religious icon-construction in popular music (2018). I begin with musical and lyrical analyses that show how _Pele_ invited listeners' myth-building around Amos. _Pele_ eschews straightforward musical and narrative storytelling with mysterious sonic profiles, and lyrics that mediate Amos's autobiographical story with those of others. As a result, listeners' understandings of Amos's persona are left to speculation. I next show how this invitation for speculation precipitated communities of faith-questioning and queer women's myth-building around Amos, which led to Amos's centrality in how both communities challenged contemporary patriarchal power structures. Finally, I analyze Amos's reception in present-day popular culture, revealing how the mythic Amos indelibly shaped feminist musical activism in the US.

Sexual violence is common fair on the opera stage and, in its most misogynistic narratives, works to complicate the male protagonist and dehumanize the survivor. Rape-related pregnancy, however, is a perspective on gendered violence that has been absent from the opera repertoire, that is until the 2006 premiere of Kaija Saariaho's _Adriana Mater_ (2005). In the feminist musicological discourse that addresses sexual violence in opera (i.e. Gordon 2015, Hartford 2016, Cusick and Hershberger 2018), there is a surprising lack of scholarship on this opera that concerns rape and pregnancy. I argue that  _Adriana Mater_ has emancipatory potential in its critical handling of rape-related pregnancy, which not only works to deconstruct rape culture by interpollating spectators into the experience of survivors, but also disrupts the subject-object binary of which misogynistic and patriarchal hierarchies depend. Rape culture theory was first developed in the 1970s, but it wasn't until after the turn of the century that its theoretical framing of gendered violence gained critical momentum, most notably in 2017 by the Twitter-sphere's invention of a discourse on rape via #metoo. The emergence of compositions like  _Adriana Mater_ and movements like Me Too, (and later #metoo), signals an unprecedented cultural shift towards the perspective of the survivor that is, to this day, drastically affecting art, media, and spectatorship.
In considering the libretto and music, as well as the intent, staging and reception of  _Adriana Mater_, my paper is divided into four topics that align with each character: those who reject rape culture myths but still suffer assault, those who adhere to rape culture scripts, those who commit acts of sexual violence, and those who are impacted by the trauma of their parents. In my analysis I draw from the growing field of critical masculinity studies, and build on Michael Kimmel's work on men and anger (2013), alongside Kate Manne's work on misogyny (2017). Through these methodologies, I theorize  _Adriana Mater_ as a sonic discourse of dramatized assault that foreshadowed #metoo and offered a feminist alternative to a genre that still too often indulges and beautifully orchestrates rape culture.