Gender and Sexuality in Music Industry with Yesenia

To Highlight the experiences that many young women may face throughout their lives, navigating through love and sexuality in different, artistic  ways. This is a bi-weekly podcast. You can make fun of podcasts, discuss a day in the life from your perspective (being a tall woman, african roots, how you see gender in your neighborhood)

Transcript

Welcome back again to this week's episode of my podcast, where I’ll be delving into the  beauty of gender and sexuality in relation to the music I love, you love, and everybody else hopefully loves– no matter how niche and underground or popular and sensationalized it may be,there’s always a place for music in the heart of every woman I’ve ever met.

Today, I’ll mainly be discussing moments of relatability that I hope all of you guys can connect with! Unfortunately I have no co-host with me today due to last minute changes, however I hope my own opinions can help you, whoever you are out there, understand the 
connection between music and love just a tad bit better– hopefully!
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Like with most artistic mediums, song is a strong way to express your own feelings. Whether they range from hate or love, admiration or condemnation, depression or exhilaration, 
they’ll always have a place in art. Artists can express their happiness through shapes, textures, and colors as they put each 
small brushstroke on a page, just like performers can express their sorrow on a theater stage through different dance moves, costumes, and ranges of voice. 

In Might Could’s essay on Turning Thoughts and Feelings into Art, it’s highlighted how our own thoughts can influence 
what we produce thereafter, and it’s easier to coexist with so many overwhelming things if we have some kind of outlet to pour them into.


“Art is a way of seeing ourselves, [...] we’ll discover something profound, like thought patterns inside us that we never knew were there.” is another sentence I enjoy later down the  essay, alongside the writer discussing how looking at their own art made them a bit more self-
aware on their own problems. Personally, I can relate to that a lot– as I’m sure a lot of other people, hopefully you as well, can connect the same way back to. Sometimes when things get hard and you have no  simple way of communicating your innermost thoughts, the easiest way to comprehend them (or 
share them to the world) is through something else.
If you can’t communicate your emotions through everyday words, perhaps a portrait, a dance, or a song can translate that even better. In Youth Music’s Tuning Into Identity: 

Music’s  Role in LGBTQIA+ Self-exploration, it’s shown how music and song truly encapsulate what maybe hard to see beneath a surface of stubbornness and fear.
I understand that well, being somebody who randomly sends my closest friends songs every once in a while to express how excited I might be about something good, or depressed I may be about something terrible.
This feeling was even more prevalent when I was much younger, being a kid in middle  school slowly exploring my sexuality and gender while seeing everybody else around me alreadyknow what they wanted to be and who they wanted to be with, seemingly. 
It probably sounds stupid now, doesn’t it? Of course nobody knew what they were doing at the time, we’re all in middle school reading How To Kill a Mockingbird and other stories like that, yet these self- imposed expectations kept falling flat onto my body.

I was content with being feminine, and I was even more content dating one of my female classmates during those years– yet, it was music and song that truly blanketed me in moments 
where I felt uncertain, shooken by the unknown that I just didn’t know how to face.
Like most queer teens in the 2010s, one of my biggest ways of expressing myself was  through the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe. You either hate that show, or religiously love it with a heart full of gold; nevertheless, so many songs are clear staples for gender and sexuality.
 Love Like You, the ending to the show's first half, funnily enough helped me get into  my first two relationships.
Something about the love that the characters all shared– whether it be the unrequited and one-sided love between the lead Pearl and the main characters mother, Rose Quartz, or the genuine beauty and connection of Ruby and Sapphire as their love physically morphed into them becoming another character– translated terribly well into song.
[Insert tangent]
[Insert conclusion, probably asking listeners [...] and whatnot