Female Conductors: Eternal Pioneers

If music remains, on the whole, the least feminized field among art crafts and artistic interpretation, conducting a symphony orchestra is a paroxystic example of that fact. Women conductors remain extremely rare. Most of all, they have a difficult time fitting in and being recognized as genuine conductors. Studying this world of power, extremely hierarchical and very « masculine », still resisting the arrival of women musicians, reveals what is symbolically at stake in the power to create. It questions the way in which gender crosses the fields of power, as it does any work or learning environment, and – paradoxically ? – the fields of creation. It also reveals how the gender of very sexed practices progressively changes.