What identities are produced by the conventions of your genre?

For this assignment, I’m asking you to recognize the broader patterns and conventions that make up your genre of expertise’s boundaries and write about them. It is important to consider both the keystone “texts”- particular songs, music videos, instrumentation, styles of fashion, speech, etc.- that make up a genre’s norms, and the discourse that circulates about them, both the keywords that make up an insider’s lingo and the descriptors used by outsiders to refer to these subcultures, as well as the flops, why did fans hate this song or slight modification on themes so much. Similarly, consider the relationship between fans, artists, industry and the relation of this subculture to hegemonic society, or the “mainstream.” How do these relationships trade on ideas of race, gender, class, sexuality, location, etc. Who does the genre claim to represent? Who is its intended audience?This assignment therefore asks you to consider your genre of expertise as a product of cultural practices, rather than a stable, self-evident term. Genre categories do not simply emerge from the texts that they categorize, but rather are created, debated, refashioned, and dismissed in various cultural sites. Every genre category gathers a cluster of assumptions and practices that connect to its presumed cultural significance, viewership, aesthetic value, and industrial strategies. Genres are fully embedded in their contexts, shifting across historical moments, national origins, and subcultural groups. The ways that a category is used are what makes it important and relevant to understanding its broader social, political, and cultural implications.Guiding Questions:Think of the defining songs, albums, music videos, fashion styles, icons, phrases- What patterns emerge among them (think geno/pheno-song)? How is the music played/performed? By whom? What themes are most prominent in your genre? Who is the target audience? What is the genre’s relation to the industry? What is its relation to “mainstream” society? How does your genre imagine its community? Oppositional, hegemonic, negotiated?How do fans recognize one another? How is fandom defined and policed? What do others think of these fandoms?How is the genre marketed (think phono-optics or oto-erotics)? How do artists align with or subvert these market values? How do fans?What affects (emotions/states of mind) is your genre most associated with? How do song structures produce this affect?What identities are produced by the conventions of your genre? Who does your genre hail as an insider and who does it cast out as outsiders? In other words, who counts as authentic?