Revisiting Women and the Electric Guitar: Why the Research Needs to be Updated and Expanded

This article investigates the state of the research on women and the electric guitar and argues that there is a strong need for further research in this area. Existing scholarship primarily focuses on factors that inhibit women from playing the electric guitar, is mostly centered on offline/pre-Internet women and guitar relations and tends to link the electric guitar with masculinity and male sexuality and characterize it as a male-dominated practice. This means that the reasons why women do play the electric guitar are not given much attention, the Internet’s impact on women’s guitar practice is largely omitted, and other ways of approaching the relationship between gender and the electric guitar are given minimal consideration. I argue that all of these aspects are vital for better understanding women and the electric guitar, and for advancing the cause of gender equality in music and are therefore in urgent need of further research.