Opera as resistance — Felicity Wilcox on reclaiming women’s stories

Magdalena Kožená and Jonas Kaufmann in Carmen at the Salzburg Festival 2012. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

This article discusses sexual violence against women, including rape.

Dr Felicity Wilcox is the keynote speaker at the 2025 Annual Academy Symposium, The Humanities & Creative Practice.

From Puccini to Wagner, female characters in opera are often subject to violence, discrimination and humiliation in narratives written and developed by male composers and librettists.

“The narratives are pervasive. Women go mad, they fall from a height, they commit suicide, they’re raped, or they’re killed in some other violent way,” says composer Dr Felicity Wilcox. “The theme of women’s disempowerment and otherness is exploited for a ‘good old rollicking’ kind of story, and that comes at a cost.”

This violence forms what Wilcox describes as an “underlying thread in traditional opera” that has largely gone unquestioned.

A composer and academic, Wilcox’s ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Emergence: Examining gender equity in music via a new contemporary opera, on gender in opera is challenging one of the most traditional art forms and questioning not just what stories opera tells, but how those stories get made.

Wilcox has been described as one of Australia’s most versatile and prolific composers. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound Design at the University of Technology Sydney.

She will deliver the keynote address at the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ upcoming 56th Annual Academy Symposium, The Humanities and Creative Practice on Thursday 13 November.

Women & minority genres in music

Wilcox’s 2023 report, co-authored with Dr Barrie Shannon, Women and Minority Genders in Music, revealed stark realities about the Australian and New Zealand music industries.

Surveying over 200 music creators, the research revealed 47% of women and gender diverse music creators experience some form of sexual assault or harassment in the workplace. The figure aligns with similar studies in the UK and internationally.

The research reveals women and minority genders also face what Wilcox calls a “matrix of barriers” to career advancement within the music industry, including agism, the prevalence of harassment and assault, and the impact of gendered care work.

“We had responses from women in their late twenties saying they were already considered ‘too old’ for certain genres, and women said their marketability was completely linked with their sexual attractiveness.”

“It might be a generalisation to say that music is still a ‘boys club’ but our research found it is a generalisation that holds up, plays into, and advantages cisgendered men.”

From research to practice

Wilcox keynote address Reclaiming opera for women and gender minorities through process and practice will demonstrate how research can drive practical change in artistic practice.

Her DECRA project centres on creating Emergenc/y, a full-length opera developed with librettist Alana Valentine and a diverse team of nine singers representing various gender identities, cultural backgrounds, and performance experiences.

“A key goal of this opera is reclaiming opera’s traditional narratives of sexual harassment and assault and re-present these through an authentic lens mediated by lived experience.”

With such high rates of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, the thematics of production and the lived experiences of the artists and professionals creating the piece are deeply interlinked.

“One of the things that was important to me was making sure I booked a therapist to be available during development workshops with musicians,” says Wilcox. “That’s not all that common, but our feedback from performers said it made a world of difference.”

“If we’re going to make art, we must do in a way that’s responsible. We need to do it holistically and in a way that holds people through the process, and through the telling of these kinds of stories.”

Opera as resistance

Wilcox’s artistic process itself challenges traditional operatic hierarchies. Rather than the typical composer-librettist model where two artists create work for others to perform, she integrates consultation, improvisation, and what she terms “distributed creativity” into the compositional process.

“At the end of the day it is down to me to decide what music stays in, to give it a structure, to put the dots on the paper. So I’m still the composer,” Wilcox acknowledges. “But it’s very important to acknowledge there’s been other contributions along the way.”

“My keynote will examine how we change the way we make art, as much as how we change, or reclaim, the message that we’re putting out.”

For Wilcox, artistic practice itself, as well as most types of humanities research, are acts of resistance.

“A few weeks ago, I gave a masterclass where a transman described the work we were doing as an act of resistance, and that really struck me. If you’re a historian, an artistic researcher, a sociologist looking at gender, or you’re putting out First Nations knowledge in academia, that’s all work of resistance. And the question in the current climate is ‘how do we continue to do meaningful research without potentially the institutional support that we’ve enjoyed?’ I think these are really urgent questions.”

2025 Annual Academy Symposium: The Humanities & Creative Practice

Join us from 13 to 14 November 2025 in Sydney and online for our 56th Annual Academy Symposium, as we turn a lens on the vital role of creative practice in Australian social, cultural, and economic life.

>> Tickets on sale 

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