Female singers, or women singers.

[qwerty5]

6 Music are playing female singers tonight... and prompted a Twitter storm about it not being women singers. Clearly they've done something wrong, but I don't do Twitter so I'm not quite sure what. Any ideas?

[WoTmania]

I'm not sure. I've always known choirs for example to be female or male voice choirs so not sure what the problem is. At least they didn't call them 'laydee' singers

[qwerty5]

I suspect that the truth is a slight grammatical difference and so the 'twiiter storm' was caused by the people who get VERY excited about apostrophe errors and those feminists so entrenched that they have opinions about the exact use of this word / that word and other banal semantical minutiae.

[HugosGoatee]

Well I'm a pedant and a feminist and can't see any issue

[FreyaoftheNorth]

^Well I'm a pedant and a feminist and can't see any issue confused

^
Ditto.

Can't see it...

The terms "women singers" and "men singers" grate - and I'm really not happy with the syntax either. Female singers, male singers: usual terms, nothing wrong with them.

[samandi]

I know "women singers" is popularly used, but it doesn't make any sense. "Female singers" is much better IMO.

[Arcticwaffle]

I can see why people are not happy with the "female singer" tag. In feminist academic writing there's pressure to say women and men (of your participants) instead of female and male subjects. It's an attempt to acknowledge people as agents, also in psychology it's an attempt to move away from viewing people you are researching as like rats. Also I think it's got a relationship with racism, Black people were often categorised in the US as Male Negro/Female Negro etc, when white people would not be categorised like that, they'd be a White Woman.
So you'd have a Male or Female voice choir, but in that choir you have men or women. not males or females.

[DontCallMeFrothyDragon]

I have no idea. My main problem with the "Female Singer" tag is the fact it's needed. It realigns the norm as being "male", with "female" being a deviation from the norm.

If that makes sense?

[WoTmania]

I suppose it depends on the genre of music. In classical or choral mjsic you would usually use 'male' or 'female' to differentiate because they have very different range and sounds.

Frotthy - are you working on the assumption that only women get the tag?

[meditrina]

The only example I can think of that's definitely passed into common parlance is "male voice choir", the members of which I would refer to as men. To say "men singers" would seem really odd to me.

At least they're not saying girls...

[DontCallMeFrothyDragon]

WoTomania, the tag is applied a lot more frequently to women. I've yet to hear of a "male singers hour".

[WoTmania]

I think we're coming from different music backgrounds. I'm classically trained and when doing (only the first year) a music degree male singers were always referred as exactly that.