Love, Popular Music, and "Technologies of Gender" in Karen Duve's Dies ist kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love Song)

Using Karen Duve's 2002 “postpop” novel as its basis, this article examines the gendering of consumption of popular music in the Federal Republic of Germany between the 1960s and the 1990s. The novel suggests that the amassing of popular music cultural capital was restricted to male connoisseurs, whereas women tended to engage with music on a more emotional level. Duve is ambivalent about how beneficial this more pleasurable mode of consumption may be. The article also examines how the mixtape is thematized as a new form of intersubjective communication within romantic relationships, undermining the monopoly of the love letter. Lewis and Hurley suggest that popular music and its technologies of self-production and consumption have not made good on their promise of a shared language but are inscribed instead as “technologies of gender.”

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Consumption (sociology) · Literature · Popular music · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German History and Society · Literature and Cultural Memory · Psychology