Introduction

According to musicologist Rita Steblin, the masculinization of the drums has roots extending as far back as the Renaissance.¹ In the fifteenth century, European sensibilities discouraged women from playing physically demanding percussion instruments in favour of quieter, more subdued (and thus feminine) instruments such as psalteries and lutes. This very same sentiment is alive and well still today, making the drum kit one of the most explicitly gendered instruments in Western popular music. The result is that, at both the professional and amateur levels, women and gender minority drummers remain severely underrepresented. For instance, in 2011 Rolling Stone magazine created a list of the top 100 drummers of all time and featured zero women. The magazine subsequently published another list in 2016, this time increasing the number of women drummers to five. And Modern Drummer, the industry’s most widely-read magazine published monthly since January 1977, has featured only eight women on its cover – with three of those covers sharing space with men. To be sure, there are more than a few examples of accomplished women drummers: Karen Carpenter, Sheila E, Terri-Lyne Carrington, and Cindy Blackman-Santana, among many others. Yet these women are the exception and not the rule, which suggests the ongoing need for women to mobilize as a distinct drumming community.

Like other communities of interest, social media offers a space to do so. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Instagram: a social media platform that affords participation through both photos and video. ‘Drumming Instagram’ is a vibrant online community where drummers share photos of their gear and performance venues, videos of their practice routines, live performances, and jam sessions, and other moments in their professional and personal lives. Here, users can learn about new performers; acquire new skills and techniques; find inspiration; and offer support to others on their musical journeys. For women, Drumming Instagram does all these things while also enabling a form of public visibility and real-time interaction with other drummers that has not been otherwise possible. As a result, drummers like Anika Nilles (@anika.nilles), Taylor Gordon (@thepocketqueen), and Sarah Thawer (@sarahtdrumguru) (among many others!) have gained recognition within the professional drumming scene, in large part because of their vibrant social media presence. These artists are among the most followed drummers on Instagram regardless of gender, and their contributions have gone a long way for inspiring other up-and-coming women drummers globally. The momentum surrounding the participation of professional and amateur women drummers offers a form of networked visibility that makes Instagram a productive space to challenge the historically gendered norms of drum kit performance.

This networked visibility, however, is highly ambivalent. Just as Drumming Instagram supports women’s participation in a traditionally male-dominated musical domain, it also sets them up for public scrutiny and unwanted attention. From gendered critiques of their performances to sexual objectification, the participatory nature of social media presents a series of challenges that are specific to the experiences of women drummers. In light of these challenges, we ask, what is the range of public responses to women’s visibility on Drumming Instagram? What are the social norms and codes that guide participation in this networked public? And is Instagram a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge? To answer these questions, we examined three notable Instagram accounts dedicated to the promotion of women drummers: @femaledrummers, @tomtommag, and @hitlikeagirlcontest. While they differ in terms of their publishing aims and approaches, each account functions as a community hub while highlighting how Drumming Instagram is a contested site of meaning and power. Borrowing from feminist literature on the politics of online visibility, we argue that visibility is a currency that both legitimizes women on Drumming Instagram while simultaneously rendering them more vulnerable to public scrutiny and unwanted attention. The digital drum kit performance space may make it easy for women to be seen, but it remains challenging for feminists to be heard.

Emergent Online Communities and Popular Feminism

This study of women’s participation on Drumming Instagram builds upon a series of distinct, yet interrelated bodies of literature. Among them are studies of gender, sexuality, and musical performance developed in the sociology of music.² Over the past several decades, questions of gender and sexuality have offered an important conceptual framework for the study of musical subcultures,³ particular celebrities,⁴ and audiences alike.⁵ Alongside this body of research, scholars have also raised questions about music education and participation, and how gender mediates the “acceptability” of instruments for particular groups of people.⁶ This discussion extends into women’s instrumental performance in contemporary music, although work in this area tends to highlight the role of guitarists, bassists, and vocalists at the expense of drummers.⁷ Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Were Women (1997), Meghan Georgina Aube’s dissertation Women in Percussion (2011), Angela Smith’s Women Drummers (2014), and most recently, Matt Brennan’s Kick It: The Social History of the Drum Kit (2020) are notable exceptions, offering revisionist histories that question the gendered norms of contemporary drumming culture. Our research contributes to this body of literature by examining an emergent drumming community where gender plays a central role. However, we do so by considering musical performance through the lens of digital media, which is a (and perhaps the) primary channel for the circulation of popular music.⁸

For this reason, we also borrow from existing research in the area of feminist media studies. As feminism has enjoyed a ‘new luminosity in popular culture’ scholars have considered the political implications of this growing visibility.⁹ Although the proliferation of images of strong and powerful women in media and advertising is indeed a welcome departure from the past, it has the potential to give rise to a postfeminist sentiment that sexism no longer exists and collective struggle is no longer necessary.¹⁰ Feminist scholarship remains largely ambivalent to this notion, which is made tangible by ‘hashtag feminism’: a media practice that has fundamentally altered how we discuss gender and sexism, who participates in that conversation, and what types of political actions are possible.¹¹ Generating visibility and attention through the deployment of buzzwords and catchy political slogans while encouraging others to signal boost its message in the hopes of ‘going viral’, hashtag feminism is a type of performative politics that aims to disrupt the status quo by presenting an alternative version of the world (i.e. #YesAllWomen, #MeToo). However, like other identity-based movements, scholars have questioned whether this emphasis on visibility and attention overshadows structural inequities.¹² In other words, a demand for visibility and recognition within a system may come at the expense of dismantling or even challenging that system.

Feminist media scholarship also reminds us that visibility may at times even run counter to feminist goals. Under late capitalism, feminism can become vulnerable to co-optation and commodification when marketers regularly use images of ‘empowered’ women to sell everything from soap to clothing and cosmetics in the name of feminism.¹³ Visibility can also engender certain kinds of vulnerability, with Larisa Kingston Mann listing the male gaze¹⁴ and the hypervisibility of black female bodies¹⁵ as examples where visibility itself is not necessarily liberatory.¹⁶ This becomes particularly clear when we consider the paradoxically symbiotic relationship between ‘popular feminism’ – a feminism widely accessible across the mediascape – and ‘popular misogyny’.¹⁷ As part of the contemporary backlash against feminism, popular misogyny aims to silence women who ‘make too much noise’.¹⁸ In this sense, popular feminism in digital culture refers to media content meant to be seen rather than political demands that are meant to be heard.

Although the scholarly discussion about the politics of online feminism is robust, its applicability to women’s online drumming communities is not quite so straightforward. Most of the existing scholarly discussion concerns women as media consumers and not as content producers.¹⁹ And when it does consider women as producers of digital content, it mainly applies to young women engaged in explicitly feminist activities online.²⁰ In the case of women’s online drumming communities, and Drumming Instagram in particular, women are both the producers and consumers of media content. Commodities may be a part of the discussion (through mention of specific brands of sticks, drums, cymbals, or other performance accessories), but do not figure as prominently as in other online communities such as influencer marketing spaces. And although the visibility of women performers in the highly male-dominated world of drumming is not politically insignificant, the motivations of women posting their videos may not be as explicitly political as those of young feminists aiming to confront sexism and misogyny in 140 characters or less. Taking this into consideration, we ask the following questions: What is the range of public responses to women’s visibility on Drumming Instagram? What are the social norms and codes guiding participation in this networked public? And is Instagram a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge?

Method: A Content Analysis of Drumming Instagram

Our analysis is based on an examination of three popular Instagram accounts dedicated to the promotion of women drummers: @femaledrummers (~75k followers), @tomtommag (~15k followers), and @hitlikeagirlcontest (~5,300 followers). @femaledrummers is the largest community-based account for women drummers on Instagram. Rather than developing original content, @femaledrummers amplifies individual performers’ content by reposting one-minute videos of amateurs and professionals alike. Launched in 2016, the @femaledrummers Instagram account (and corresponding website) has since accrued a steadily growing audience that – at the time of our study – totalled over 75,000 followers. @tomtommag is the official Instagram account for Tom Tom Magazine, an online and paperback publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting women, queer, and non-binary drummers. The only trade publication made by and for women, the New York-based Tom Tom Magazine is distributed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. Lastly, @hitlikeagirlcontest is the official Instagram account for the annual women’s drumming competition Hit Like a Girl, featuring women artists and promotional content. The Hit Like a Girl competition began in 2011 through the work of drum industry marketing exec David Levine and is presented in in association with Tom Tom Magazine. Together, these Instagram accounts function as foundational digital infrastructure that networks the women’s online drumming community.

Because there is much to learn from the visual, auditory, and textual content of every Instagram post, our initial thoughts were to develop a critical analysis of discrete posts. We quickly realized however, that in order to learn about audience reception and popular discourse it would be necessary to focus not on content, but instead, on discussion. For this reason, our study examines user comments and the dynamics of the online conversation by, and about, women on Drumming Instagram. Our data set is comprised of comments (n=3,370) from the 100 most recent posts for each of the three accounts (i.e. @femaledrummers = 100, @tomtommag = 100, @hitlikeagirlcontest = 100). To generate the data set, we made use of ExportComments.com: a freemium online tool that converts comments from Instagram accounts into spreadsheets. Once downloaded, we imported the spreadsheets into NVivo (qualitative research software) for further investigation using content analysis: a research method involving the systematic reading, interpretation, and coding of texts to quantify patterns in communication materials.²¹ A staple in media analyses, content analysis is an ideal method for the study of women on Drumming Instagram as its context-sensitivity makes it suitable for analysing large and varied social media datasets. The flexibility of NVivo software allowed us to refine categories as the analysis progressed, eliminating redundancies while aggregating similar coding items to produce more sensitive results.

Our coding protocol was developed through a pilot study conducted in early 2019 using only the @femaledrummers account. During this phase, we developed a series of broad categories according to the function and overall meaning of comment types. These include the following: ‘Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support’ (all of which fall under the broad category of positive feedback); ‘Conversational’ (which could be an expression of gratitude, a question, a reply, a user challenging a comment, or tagging a friend); ‘Unsolicited Comments’ (typically criticism or sexualization); ‘Self-Promotion’ (typically the assertion of one’s own artistic merit or promoting an outside interest); and ‘Other’. Although these categories adequately captured the range of sentiments expressed, there are nevertheless limitations to the approach: Since we limited each comment to a single code, it was at times challenging to decide which category took precedence when comments straddled different categories (i.e. tagging a friend while also complimenting the drummer). Additionally, it was also challenging to decipher the meaning of particular comments. For instance, when do flame and heart emojis signal admiration and when do they signify sexualization? This required careful decision-making, and it illustrates the highly interpretive dimension of content analysis and internet research.

The following chart illustrates each category, its corresponding definition, and examples of the comments that are typical to each.

TYPE OF COMMENT	DEFINITION	EXAMPLE
Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support	User expresses a positive sentiment regarding the drummer’s skill or expresses agreement with the post’s overall message	‘Wow!!! ’ ‘Amazing ’ ‘GET IT ’ ‘TOP ’ ‘YASSSSS ’
Conversational	User comment engages other users
e.g. Gratitude	User thanks another user	‘OMG! TY for the feature! ’ ‘I love this! Thank you so much!’
e.g. Question	User posts a query in response to the post	‘Wow! What’s the name of this drummer?’ ‘What kind of sticks are you using?’ ‘Whoa! How did you do that?’
e.g. Reply	User responds to another user	‘@username you’re welcome ’ ‘@username right?! The best!’
e.g. Challenging commenter	User counters another user’s comment	‘Cheers to the users who actually appreciate her talent instead of commenting on how she looks’ ‘I can’t believe you all are giving her a hard time. She is way better than most of us. Her playing might not be pro, but she played it well. Nicely done!’
e.g. Tag a friend	User tags another user	‘@username check her out’
Unsolicited Comments	User comment is deemed negative or inappropriate
e.g. Criticism	User expresses negative judgement towards another user or post	‘It’s all about attention these days. She thinks she’s the best even though her drumming sucks’ ‘Finally, a drummer who has REAL talent, not just another hot girl’
e.g. Sexualization	User reduces drummer to their physical appearance	‘Wow, so talented AND beautiful!’ ‘Super sexy’
Self-Promotion	User comment serves to promote own interests	‘Awesome! Check out my bio @username if you want to jam sometime’ ‘Hey everyone, check out my new track on YouTube! http://link.com’
Other	Function not listed here (i.e. user expresses a neutral fact or observation) or translation of non-English was unclear	‘The name of this song is Highway to Hell.’ She was last year’s winner.’

Interpreting the Data

Our analysis is based on a sample of 3,370 comments from the 300 posts we examined. In terms of distribution between the three accounts, the majority of these comments (69%, n=2,309) came from @femaledrummers, 25% came from @tomtommag (n=826), and 7% (n=236) came from @hitlikeagirlcontest. While there was user activity on all three accounts, it was clear that @femaledrummers attracted the greatest amount of participation, largely due to the size of its following.

Overwhelmingly, the discussion that takes place within all three accounts expresses a sentiment that is positive, supportive, and encouraging. In fact, nearly 60% (n= 2,004, 59%) of all comments fell into the category ‘Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support’. Participants regularly complimented the abilities of featured performers and expressed support for women drummers and the musical initiatives with which they are associated (including bands, events, competitions, etc.). In terms of the individual accounts, this sentiment appeared most frequently on @hitlikeagirlcontest (n=152, 65%), which we paradoxically attribute to the competitive dimension of the initiative. Although it is ultimately a competition that might otherwise produce antagonistic sentiments, @hitlikeagirlcontest is foremost an organization designed to encourage participation among women, girl, and gender minority drummers. Its posts consist not only of competition winners who almost always earn public congratulations, but also of general competitors, finalists, and advertising and promotion for the event, all of which also generates public interest and support. The prevalence of such enthusiastic and supportive forms of dialogue, not only on @hitlikeagirlcontest but across all three accounts, are typical markers of feminist online communities, where maintaining a positive and encouraging atmosphere is a part of the social infrastructure and genre.

It is also worth mentioning some of the secondary but no less important types of communication operating in the online community of women drummers. Nearly a third of comments (32%, n=1,085) were conversational or interactive in tone. For instance, tagging a friend comprised 15% of all posts (n=516), which was done to share content with others who may have particular interest in a given post while also initiating further commentary and discussion. 10% of all comments were replies to other users in the context of dialogue (n=334), 5% expressed gratitude (n=160), and 2% posed a question (n=74). All of this activity is an important part of community dialogue, where users aim to interact with artists, acquire new techniques, or thank others for their posts. These types of comments most commonly appeared on @tomtommag (40%, n=330), where user dialogue was more prominent than the expression of enthusiasm and support for female participation we saw on other pages. We read the nature of @tomtommag’s dialogue as an expression of a community with aims extending beyond visibility, instead gravitating around questions of artistry and curiosity amongst distinct musical cultures.

In the context of community dialogue and conversation, gratitude was particularly apparent and operated as a type of community currency. For instance, drummers whose original content was reposted on any one of the three accounts regularly thanked account administrators for their support and recognition. Similarly, amateur drummers often took the time to personally acknowledge the compliments of other users through their own expression of gratitude. Gratitude appeared in 5% of comments (n=160), typically in the form of drummers thanking account moderators for posting or reposting their content. This was most common on @hitlikeagirlcontest (11%, n=27), where users regularly thanked page moderators for sharing their content or organizing the competition itself. This type of activity indicates the highly supportive and reciprocal nature of this online community.

Our data shows, however, that no matter how supportive, the public and visible nature of these online communities does not insulate them from criticism. Although only a minority of comments (4%, n=149) were negative and fell into the ‘unsolicited’ category, they nevertheless warrant discussion. Such comments tended to be either rude, critical, or sexualizing, and were often misogynistic in tone. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these comments appeared on @femaledrummers posts (6%, n=143), which is perhaps expected in light of the visibility and popularity of this particular account. Some of these negative comments came off as slightly patronizing when they contained terms like ‘dear’ or ‘sweetie’, but they more commonly appeared in criticisms of a performers’ technique or appearance (4%, n=95), or even in sexually-objectifying language (1%, n=34). Criticism sometimes occurred as a form of disruption, usually interrupting a stream of praise (i.e. ‘she sucks!’). But it also occurred in comments where users criticized women drummers generally as a way to compliment a woman drummer specifically (i.e. ‘You should post talented drummers like this more often instead of ones that just look good on camera’). We also found that some of the most vitriolic comments appeared not when drummers posted videos of themselves playing, but when they made political statements about gender and drumming. In user responses to one such video, some users replied that the video was shitty’, that the drummer needed to ‘shut the f*** up’, and repudiated identity politics altogether, asserting that gender had little to do with music. Although the comments in our sample were for the most part positive, we wondered how that might change if drummers in this space had made more politically charged – and therefore controversial – statements.

What it may have also done, however, was increase the frequency by which users challenged those who left critical comments on performers’ videos. In our sample, we found seven instances where users defended performers against unfair critiques, suggesting that community members will enforce informal norms around keeping Drumming Instagram a positive and supportive space for women. On one post we examined where various commenters made inappropriate comments about the drummer’s appearance and performance style, we saw a number of users come to the performer’s defence. One user in particular accused those leaving harsh comments of being envious of her talent and feeling unfulfilled in their personal lives. They reiterated their support for women drummers and encouraged critics to have a more positive outlook. Remarks such as these demonstrated both the strength and the resilience of the community, and the fact that its members feel strongly committed to defending fellow performers from the unfair critique and occasional vitriol that accompanies women daring to be seen and heard on Drumming Instagram.

The Ambivalence of Networked Performance

That user responses on @femaledrummers, @tomtommag, and @hitlikeagirlcontest were overwhelmingly positive was somewhat unexpected in light of the negative discourses that surround discussion of online culture and commenting – particularly when it comes to gender and equity-related issues in historically male-dominated spaces. We attribute this to the fact that the relatively niche and emergent nature of this online community means that many members and visitors are already personally invested in and supportive of women and gender minority drummers. This suggests that, as questions of identity-based online participation goes, context certainly matters. For example, the supportive tone of comments may have differed on more general Drumming Instagram accounts (i.e. @drumeo, @modern_drummer, or @drumlads), just as they would likely differ on accounts supporting more mainstream feminist efforts (i.e. those that promote visibility of women in STEM or campaigns to promote a wider representation of women’s bodies in media).

We also found that women’s Drumming Instagram provided more opportunities for users to interact with one another. Far from serving as a site where users passively consumed content, users regularly commented and replied to each other. Although the majority of this interactive process involved users tagging one another as a means of sharing content, it was also common to ask questions and respond to one another’s comments. This again demonstrated the communitarian nature of this space as well as its users’ commitments. The majority of the users in this space shared a common goal of supporting the increased visibility of women and gender minority drummers, with networked information technologies serving as integral communal infrastructure.

Given the overwhelming positivity of this space, it was unsurprising that hostile and misogynist commentary was uncommon. Whether due to careful moderation by the page owners or the relatively quiet feminism of the content, the popular misogyny evident in so much of online discourse about gender was relatively absent. We wondered how this might have differed had the content been more political or the pages more mainstream. Indeed, content and audience size play an important role in shaping reception. For example, we observed that @tomtommag tended to post more explicitly political content than @femaledrummers (for instance, by posting a photo in support of Dr Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearing), with its smaller audience perhaps insulating it from the backlash one might typically expect. @femaledrummers, on the other hand, had a much wider userbase and online presence that inadvertently courted backlash the few times it posted explicitly political content. Thus, the feminism of women’s Drumming Instagram is a complex and uneven phenomenon that is still evolving.

The nature of this uneven, emergent form of feminism on Drumming Instagram makes it difficult to say whether or not it is a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge. Insofar as women’s Drumming Instagram promotes positive images of women and gender minority drummers that are often side-lined in popular and niche music scenes, it succeeds at making them visible. This is a feminist politics of visibility that is not about individual empowerment nor about unfettered consumption but is about recuperating and celebrating marginalized people’s contribution to music. This visibility is not restricted to white and normatively gendered bodies (though user comments indicate which bodies are seen as worthy of attention and engagement) but is inclusive of a range of different identities. In other words, women’s Drumming Instagram does not exactly resemble the feminist online efforts that tend to be analysed in the scholarly literature.

However, the extent to which women’s Drumming Instagram is emancipatory is complicated because the underlying political struggle that gives life to this community remains relatively muted. Images of women and gender minority performers exist in this space, and they are rewarded with compliments and occasional feminist solidarity. Yet the few times where performers explicitly address the politics of gender and drumming renders them vulnerable to the online vitriol one would come to expect in other online spaces. We would answer our own question with another: although women and gender minority performers may be visible on Instagram, are their demands as feminists in fact being heard?

Conclusion

This study explored the relationship between online visibility, social norms, and political change in the emergent online community of women on Drumming Instagram. What we found, among other things, was that context matters: in online spaces dedicated to promoting women drummers, users are generally supportive because they are explicitly seeking out images that are otherwise side-lined in the mainstream world of drumming. We also found that women’s Drumming Instagram is not so different than other online communities insofar as it invites both detractors and defenders. The openness of online communities, regardless of type, means that users with little personal investment will occasionally leave disruptive or hostile comments that will not go unchecked.²² And although a minority of comments were overly critical or even sexualizing, committed users regularly challenged them while enforcing the shared values of the space (i.e. encouraging and supporting women drummers of all abilities).

Ultimately however, what emerged from this exploration was that women’s Drumming Instagram affords women drummers a specific type of networked visibility that both supports and limits the possibilities for change. Although the increased visibility of women drummers in historically male-dominated spaces is a welcome departure from the past, we wonder about the emancipatory potential of a politics that begins and ends with visibility alone. The drummers on this page received acclaim when their content was about drumming, but courted backlash when the content was explicitly about gender. This may discourage drummers from speaking up on political issues, thus muting the political possibilities of their visibility. In short, Instagram is a space where women drummers are seen, but it remains unclear whether or not we, the broader drumming community, are willing to truly listen.