Humanity of songs: a feminist reconstruction of performers’ rights

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of a chapter published in Caoimhe Ring and Eden Sarid (eds), Diverse Voices in Intellectual Property (Bristol University Press, forthcoming, 2026). The definitive publisher-authenticated version [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: [DOI tbc].Music and songs are linked to our humanity. Women and gender-diverse people create and perform music to reach other people, that is, to form a human connection. To deny this, by divorcing the creators from their outputs in copyright law (with performers’ rights) is a systemic barrier in and of itself. This chapter calls for a new vision of performers’ rights in music, which abolishes the distinction in law between performers as the sources of creativity and their performances. It is important to rethink the (in)existent level of legal protection for performers in the UK Copyright Act, because of the intersectional gendered threats of the new technologies, such as the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). With this chapter I build on the existing scholarly criticism of performers’ rights in intellectual property law and use a new theoretical approach (the FIPS model) to offer a reconstruction of the current rules with the view to protect women and gender-diverse people when making music. I focus on the United Kingdom (UK) and specifically its rules on performers’ rights within the music industries. I rely on the evidence collected by the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) about the barriers that women and gender-diverse people endure in the music ecosystem (WEC Report on ‘Misogyny in Music’ (30 January 2024); and WEC Report ‘On Repeat Report’ (4 June 2025)). Performers’ rights must do more than offer economic rewards to performers. In today’s contexts, I argue that performers’ rights, must place the wellbeing of music-makers at the heart of the legal protection and that means they must offer an economic reward, coupled with the power to correct and protect from experiences that are laced with discrimination, sexism, misogyny or violence. Women’s power to control music, must extend to controlling their image, message and emotion, arising from the music they made. Performers’ rights must be a part of the solution to the gendered risks of emerging technologies, such as AI

Monstrous spaces: reframing video game immersion

This is an author's accepted manuscript of a chapter due to be published by Routledge in Farnsworth, S. (ed.) Video Game Monsters: A Compendium. The accepted manuscript may differ from the final published version