The first academic study into the sweaty pursuit of air guitar playing is to use the work of French philosophers to explain why men and women do it differently. Doctoral research has begun under the supervision of Britain's first professor of pop music, who is also overseeing a PhD into the art of "moshing", the vigorous head-shaking dance popular among concert crowds. For the next three years, Amanda Griffiths, 32, a dance teacher from north Wales, will attempt to explain, in 60,000 words, why the attractions of an invisible guitar are generally overlooked by women, and how the girls who get involved do it differently.To do so, she will use the complex arguments of French post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Marxists such as Roland Barthes. Miss Griffiths, who is funding her research at a cost of about £10,000, said: "The time seems right for a cultural study of phenomenon, because there is a very hardcore air guitar scene that has been bubbling away for years. But as a feminist I am interested in why there are so few women at events."
Her work, one of the subtitles of which is "air guitar: celebrating the fakeness of the inauthentic", has come to the attention of the organisers of the World Air Guitar Championships, and she has been invited to address a training camp for competition entrants in Finland this month. Britain created the first world record for an air guitar ensemble when more than 4,000 people flailed along to Sweet Child o' Mine by the heavy metal band Guns 'n' Roses at the Guildford Festival in Surrey last month. But Miss Griffiths's interest grew after she entered a regional air guitar competition on the eve of her 30th birthday two years ago. Her unusual PhD was suggested by Prof Sheila Whiteley, chair of pop music at the University of Salford, whom she met on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, who has also overseen PhD studies into "post-anarcho punk" and heavy metal music.
The mind boggles.