Artist Statement and Critical Research Context
Our ironic digital story (Raimist) is part of a larger exploration of Generation Z (Gen Z) cisgender women college students' sensemaking around expectations and desires for future romantic relationships, parenthood, and anticipated work-life integration (Ellingson and Thompson, forthcoming). This gendered process of multiple role planning toward imagined futures is common among emerging adult women anticipating both high-status careers and romantic partnerships with children (Weitzman). The Ideal and the Real was created by the first author, under the direction of the second author, following their collaboration on a more traditional qualitative analysis of arts-based research (ABR) data (Leavy). Our ABR data included music playlists, illustrated timelines, and bodymaps, along with written reflections on each (Palmer-Wackerly et al.); this project focused on the playlists and corresponding reflections.
The music playlists and reflections were created by senior women college students to illustrate their hopes and expectations for future romantic partnerships. The authors engaged in a constructionist grounded theory analysis of the data (Charmaz), which yielded one root theme of mutuality that undergirded five themes, which included: growth, authenticity, security, interdependence, and risk (Ellingson and Thompson, forthcoming). In developing these themes and selecting illustrative examples, the authors noticed two distinct voices, or ways of discussing their anticipated relationships, that formed a dialectic (Baxter; Baxter and Montgomery). On one side are feminized romantic fantasies and yearnings, and on the other are messy, gritty relational realities that participants have witnessed amongst friends and family, and in some cases, experienced themselves.
We wanted to creatively crystallize our project by representing findings in genres that crossed the art and social science continuum, establishing a postmodern validity rooted in multiplicity and partiality (Ellingson; Richardson). Musical composition and performance was an obvious choice given our music playlist data, and we consciously strove for a joyous, playful mode of making and (re)presenting data (Sotirin and Ellingson). Music is a social and cultural practice that is performed (McRae). Moreover, music constitutes an embodied way of knowing ourselves and our communities that complements more analytical modes of representation (Pacheco-Costa et al., Solomon). At the same time, music and music videos constitute significant cultural performances of gender, race, sexuality, and other identities, and "music plays an important role in producing communities" (Galway and Yerichuk, 2; see also Kelly and Currie). Embodying our cultural critique in music video format enabled us to highlight pervasive, heteronormative, romantic fantasies through a visual parody of the same genre our participants embraced in their playlists.
The original song, "Ideal & the Real," written and performed by the first author, is a creative analytic response to our data and analysis practices (Richardson). The song is an homage to all of the young girls who were socialized to believe in the perfect, fairy tale love that ends with a happily ever after. The type of love that is easy and enveloping and secure. The type of love that is effortless and where you are wanted for everything you are. It is this hegemonic performance of romantic love that girls and women are taught to covet and believe in (Cerretti and Navarro), contrasted against strikingly different relational realities. People tend to deceive—both themselves and their romantic partners. They lie and they cheat and they do not live up to our expectations. This is what Ideal & the Real aims to capture through musical performance and video montage: our participants' expressions of the tension between the naivety of the fairytale and the understanding that humans are complex and flawed, and therefore our romantic relationships will inevitably be messy and imperfect, too.
Video clips in the digital story were drawn from music videos of songs included in participants' playlists. Further bolstering our critique of the longings and constraints embodied in the lyrics and music, the clips repeat popular tropes of romantic love that are woven into the cultural landscape in which participants make sense of their romantic hopes and expectations. We intentionally designed our music video to provocatively inhabit the space between critical performance and musical performance. As performance studies scholar Chris McRae explains,
Just as music is always already a form of performance, performance is always already a form of music. Performance is music that is a productive and embodied act characterized by resonance, reverberations, harmonies, tempos, rhythms, and melodies. Performance is music created when bodies interact with technologies, instruments, and other bodies in order to expressively create aesthetic, cultural, and social insights, critiques, and/or meanings…. Performance is music that is difficult to describe using language because performance is music that always exceeds language (McRae, 17).Our performance in song (and video) exceeds the language available to researchers expressing a feminist critique in a scholarly writing format. We embraced integration of words (i.e., lyrics) with tempos, rhythms, melody, and other performative aspects of music to critically examine gender performances. In particular, we played (pun intended) with pop music genre conventions—including their official videos—to problematize the taken-for-grantedness of traditional gender roles, heterosexual relationships, and simplistic romantic plotlines.
The song begins with the voice of the fairytale, which is then responded to by the voice of realism. The two voices dialogue, mirroring the dialectic that criss-crossed our data. While some participants came down on one side or the other of the dialectic in their selection of songs and reflections, many seemed able to hold space for the contradiction, understanding they could not resolve it. This is the note on which the songwriter (the first author) ends the song—acknowledging the beautiful aspects of the idealized, fairytale love, while refusing to downplay the risks, realities, and everyday factors that come with loving (and being loved by) another human being.
Lyrics for Ideal & the Real
(soundtrack of Ideal and the Real)
I want someone to love me
Someone to tell me that I'll be okay
At the end of the day
I just want to be safe
I believe it can be easy
Stand by my side as the one who sees me
I'm all that I am and I know that you know that's enough
And I've seen it in my mothers eyes when my father says he loves her
And I've heard it in those pretty songs
That this could last forever
Broken homes
Imperfect people
Inured by pursuit of the ideal love
Know I'm wanted to want it but
More than forever I covet my own protection
Empty home
Discarded promise
Words aren't kept
What's meant's not honest
Creatures so flawed in the
Maw of the beast
Why put myself in between
Its teeth?
Because love is magic
Because the soul is so large
We deserve to feel secure in this crazy world
We can never give up
We all deserve love
Life's a shade of grey with pin-pricks of risk because
Love may be magic but it likes to play tricks
So keep your wits about you as you seek what you deserve
And don't lose yourself in this crazy world
Works Cited
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Baxter, Leslie A., and Barbara M. Montgomery. Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics. Guilford Press, 1996.
Cerretti, Gabriella, and Capilla Navarro. "Myths of Romantic Love: Gender Perspectives in Adolescents Dating." AG About Gender-International Journal of Gender Studies 7.13 (2018).
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Ellingson, Laura L. Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research: An Introduction. Sage, 2009.
Ellingson, Laura L., and Adrian I. Thompson. "I Want to Marry Someone who Makes Me Feel like I am Coming Home:' Engaging Music Playlists to Explore Gen Z Emerging Adult Women's Romantic Relationship Aspirations." Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA.
Making a Mess of Everything: Excursions Through Communities, Musics, Academics, Longing, and Belonging." Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 12.1 (2016).
Kelly, Deirdre M., and Dawn H. Currie. "Beyond Stereotype Analysis in Critical Media Literacy: Case Study of Reading and Writing Gender in Pop Music Videos." Gender and Education 33.6 (2021): 676-691.
Leavy, Patricia, ed. Handbook of Arts-Based Research. Guilford Publications, 2017.
McRae, Chris. "Hearing Performance as Music." Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 11.5 (2015): 1-19.
Pacheco-Costa, Alejandra, José J. Roa-Trejo, and Fernando Guzmán-Simón. "Music on the Move: Understanding Music as Otherwise Knowledge in Early Childhood." British Journal of Music Education (2025): 1-14.
Palmer-Wackerly, A. L., Ellingson, L. L., Cooke-Jackson, A. & Dunn, R. Beyond Words: Arts-Based Research Approaches. Handbook of Women and Health Communication, edited by Charee M. Thompson and Iccha Basnyat, Wiley, in press.
Raimist, Rachel. Press Record: Our (Digital) Stories Matter. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 15.4 (2019): 1-6.
Richardson, Laurel. "Writing: A Method of Inquiry." Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., edited by Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln, Sage, 2000, 923-943.
Solomon, Thomas. "Music and the Body: From Cognition to Performance." European Journal of Musicology, 23.1 (2025): 5-30.
Sotirin, Patty, & Laura. L. Ellingson. "Doing Research with Data Joy: Engaging in Play, Becomings, and Vitalities." Doing Research Methods Differently, edited by A. Bristow & M. Distinto (Eds.), Routledge, in press.
Weitzman, Lauren. M. "Multiple-Role Realism: A Theoretical Framework for the Process of Planning to Combine Career and Family Roles." Applied and Preventive Psychology 3.1 (1994): 15-25.
