Why Women dont Air Guitar

In America it's all about the competition, in the UK a windmill effect is favoured and in Finland the skill is judged on the precision of fingering. Now air guitar, a favourite pastime of fathers around the world, is to be the subject of a PhD.

But the student who is hoping to become the first person to conduct in-depth research into the air guitar is not your usual leather-wearing, bike-riding, child-embarassing man, but a woman, and an air guitar aficionado herself.

Amanda Griffiths, 32, a dance teacher from Wales, is going to tackle the international phenomenon of the air guitar, investigating how different cultures have different trends and why it's a male-dominated sport.

"The time seems right for a cultural study of the phenomenon because there is a very hard-cored 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," Ms Griffiths, who is funding the research herself, told the Daily Telegraph.

Most countries with an appetite for rock have an air guitar competition and there is a World Air Guitar Championships training camp in Finland this month which Ms Griffiths is due to attend.

Her PhD at the University of Salford will be supervised by Sheila Whiteley, the country's first professor of pop, whose other PhD students have investigated moshing and the sexual politics of the Russian lesbian-branded band Tatu.

"Air guitar gets extraordinarily serious. Over here it's the windmills and dramatic gestures. In Finland they look at how accurate their fingering is. Amanda's going to look at these cultural differences and the gender politics of it.

"It comes out of heavy rock heavy metal so it's heavily gendered as masculine. One of the areas that Amanda's interested in as a woman who has competed is whether women do it ironically, become 'one of the boys' or 'queer' it."

Asked why she thought people were so keen on air guitar she said: "One thing about rock, and this goes for moshing as well, is that it is highly interactive. The relationship between the band and the audience is quite physical. It's the joining in with the main chorus in stadium rock like with Queen, but also the fact that it's a mark of respect that you're actually participating. You get the odd air drummer and bass player as well."

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