Feminizing a Musical Form: Women’s Participation as Barbershop Singers

This paper depicts barbershop singing as a masculine social form, and compares and contrasts the original masculine form with the ways the form is feminized. Two organizations, Sweet Adelines International (SAI) and The Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS) perform and promote barbershop singing. We document the devices used to feminize the form (naming, song selection, choreography, fashion, and organizational style), and argue that an interaction between form and content takes place in the women’s organization that genders the form in spite of its original masculine meanings. Theoretically significant is the description of how feminizing a masculine form reinforces the conservative ethos of, and hence senses of membership in, the barbershop form. Demonstrating that forms can accommodate even culturally distinctive content has implications for understanding the interaction between form and content.