{"id":1555,"date":"2026-01-30T22:58:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T22:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/?p=1555"},"modified":"2026-02-02T15:16:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T15:16:19","slug":"the-development-of-community-and-resistance-through-traditional-music-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/18\/the-development-of-community-and-resistance-through-traditional-music-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The Development of Community and Resistance Through Traditional Music Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Madeleine Kelly<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>From the author:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I wrote this paper as my final written work for my major in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I decided I wanted to work on a piece exploring the uses and strengths of music and dance in social movements. I used Audre Lorde\u2019s essay \u201cUses of the Erotic\u201d to relate feminist theory to traditional music and dance and how they are utilized in protest music and cultural dance practices. I used Barabara Ehrenreich\u2019s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy\u201d to provide the historical and anthropological context in which to ground my argument using Lorde\u2019s theory. These were the two primary texts used to develop my analysis and research and they worked alongside each other seamlessly to exhibit how collective joy found in group song and dance creates an environment conducive for community building and change making.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I am very proud of this paper and everyday I am faced with the relevance of this project as political turmoil continues globally and footage is always circulating of crowds dancing, chanting, and singing together in protest. Social change work and music are two passions of mine that I have cultivated my whole life and I feel privileged to have been able to bring that into my academic career.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/files\/2026\/01\/WGS001_25_FIN2.pdf\">The Development of Community and Resistance Through Traditional Music Culture (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cPerhaps the most relevant to Lorde\u2019s ideas of the erotic and joy, Ehrenreich states, \u201cThe joy of the rhythmic activity would have helped overcome the fear of confronting predators and other threats\u201d (Ehrenreich, 26). This is critical to understanding the importance of music and dance in protest. Synchronised singing, dancing, and stomping, galvanises the people, keeps the fear at bay while also intimidating the oppressor in a raucous show of force from a crowd. The act of singing and dancing is a human behaviour so instinctual it has lasted from the primitive human to today, utilizing what Lorde would describe as the erotic, to build and defend a community.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54552],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-54552"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1555"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1585,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions\/1585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}