Women Singer-Songwriters as Exemplary Actors: The Music of Rape and Domestic Violence

Abstract

At the 2016 Oscars, Lady Gaga, joined onstage by fifty rape survivors, performed the song "Til It Happens to You." The Oscar-nominated song by Lady Gaga and Diane Warren was written for The Hunting Ground, a documentary film about campus sexual assault. Over thirty-one million people viewed the Oscar performance, which brought some in the audience to tears, and the video on Vevo has received over twenty-nine million views with another twenty-eight million views on YouTube. The film, video, and performance are the result of a growing political and social movement by young high school and college women to force schools, universities, and colleges to vigorously respond to rape and sexual harassment on campus. In response to complaints filed by more and more young women, the Obama Administration and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department Education began investigating claims that schools, colleges, and universities were not actively and adequately responding to claims of sexual assault and harassment despite passage of the Clery Act of 1990. The Clery Act requires colleges and universities to report data on crime on campus, provide support and accommodations to survivors, and establish written policies and procedures for the handling of campus crime.1 Since 2011, the OCR has expanded its efforts to address sexual assault on campuses as violations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs or activities that receive federal funds. 2With twenty years between the creation of the first domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (1994) and forty years between the beginnings of the movements and Lady Gaga's performance before a worldwide audience, the anti-rape and anti-domestic violence movements, like the women's rights movement, have experienced waves of activism and optimism followed by bureaucratization and backlash and at times a degree of immobilization. Meanwhile, women singer-songwriters have increasingly accessed popular music, and in the words of Eyerman and Jamison, have served as exemplary actors, carrying the message of the movements into wider popular culture.3 Thus, while the political movements sputtered, socially, Americans were still increasingly becoming aware of the issues of rape and domestic violence.