A micropolitics of becoming-woman and Moya Henderson's rinse cycle

Women's music continues to be under-represented in music performance venues (Ayres 2013; Macarthur 2013; Macarthur 2014), which is an issue with which the Australian composer, Moya Henderson (b. 1941) has grappled for several decades. Henderson is well known for her views on gender inequality and has repeatedly called for an overhaul of policies in music funding bodies (e.g. Henderson 2013) but these have been largely Ignored. However, as I will argue in this chapter, while it is urgent and necessary to call for equal representation of women with men in music composition, the identity politics that underpin such calls tend to reinforce the gender stereotypes that position men as dominant and women as subordinate. Identity politics are divisive because they are founded on binary logic, therefore polarizing male and female. A politics based on identity is also limited in that identity categories conceal as much as they reveal, and individuals will mostly traverse multiple identities simultaneously. It is for this reason, in recent years, that I have become attracted to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for their work offers a productive methodological framework for rethinking identity. They call for a politics of becoming which, as cultural theorists Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins (2007: 6) write, 'seeks to dismantle the social stratifications and open onto an unknown field of differentiation'. Despite philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1993) famously canvassing why some feminists have resisted Deleuzian philosophy, I will suggest that its productive possibilities far outweigh the criticisms it has received for its masculine orientation. There is also a view that Deleuzian philosophy is a 'thinker's paradise' that is unable to solve real or actual world problems. Performance theorist Laura Cull (2015) says that this has been one of the stumbling blocks for feminists who have struggled to reconcile a Deleuzian micropolitics of becoming with the goals for actual change pursued in the real world by contemporary feminist groups. In Deleuzian thought, as cultural theorist Kenneth Surin (2005) points out, micropolitics is molecular and internal to what is produced, creating an ethos of a permanent becoming (162, 163). It differs from macropolitics, which, with its emphasis on standardization and homogeneity, sets out to change the actual world. In so doing, as Surin says, it leaves 'no room for all that is flexible and contingent' (162). In the spirit of a micropolitics of becoming, Deleuze's project of liberating difference in- itself is, in Cull's view, 'ultimately more important than pursuing the macropolitical goals of feminism or Marxism or postcolonialism, which tend to pursue wholesale social change on behalf of identity' (Cull2015: 1 ). Like Cull, I am drawn to the idea of pursuing difference-in-itself, for such a concept has the potential to transform real-world problems in music.