| Summary: | This thesis examines the construction of gender identity in cohorts of 15-18 year old boys and girls in relation to music composition and digital technology. The thesis is a response to what I perceive as a strong deterministic trend in the recent technology in music education literature that ignores the socially constructed nature of computers and computer use. By placing my discussion of music technology within the wider framework of gender and the sociology of technology studies, I critically explore the processes by which Information and Communication Technologies (lCTs) have become gendered, in their material use, their symbolic meanings and their ideological function. Through this lens, I examine how these processes underpin the construction of gender and gender relations vis-it-vis technology and their reproduction in the music classroom. Throughout this thesis I have viewed technology as a social practice of which gender is an integral part, highlighting the social embeddedness of technology that posits technology and society as mutually constitutive. I argue that 'symbolic masculinity' and 'material men' retain their hold on technological artefacts, expertise and knowledge. As such, gender-technology relations are constituted in the dominant discourses and practices of technology and have a profound effect on the ways adolescents compose music when using digital technology and on the construction of gendered identities in the technologized music classroom.
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