Judith Peraino | Cornell University (original) (raw)

Papers on Rock, Pop, and Queer Theory by Judith Peraino

The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock, 2021

Pussy Riot emerged in 2011 as an anonymous Russian political activist art collective that imperso... more Pussy Riot emerged in 2011 as an anonymous Russian political activist art collective that impersonated a punk rock band in their staging of protests against the autocratic regime of Vladimir Putin. In 2012, three of its members were tried and imprisoned for nearly two years, which garnered the attention and outrage of the United States and Western Euro pean countries. The illegal punk performance actions of Pussy Riot, disseminated in edit ed videos through the Internet, depended on late capitalism's global network, which turns DIY underproduction into viral capitalistic overproduction (to use Shane Greene's terms of analysis). These are the same technological routes and apparatuses of disinfor mation through which Russia attempted to sow social discord to the advantage of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. This essay traces the reconfiguration of punk in the course of the actions and trial of Pussy Riot, from the generic punk music stance of jamming the system with loud noise and mischievous fakery, to an understanding of punk as an ac tivism that works through the court system and champions transparency. In the face the lawless autocracies of Putin and Trump, where shocking disregard for institutions has be come an overproduced political norm, punk rebellion ironically may take the form of a methodical and rigorous investment in the rule of law. Pussy Riot's post-trial punk does not envision anarchy, but rather a functioning legal system and government institutions that that protect human rights.

Oxford University Press Blog, 2020

Right-wing media outlets have dubbed Donald Trump “The Punk Rock President” to validate his rule-... more Right-wing media outlets have dubbed Donald Trump “The Punk Rock President” to validate his rule-breaking crudeness and appeal to white working-class rage. How did this happen? This blog confronts the complex and often contradictory politics of punk songs, symbols, and images to show how punk history can be a tool for political conversation and engagement in the present.

Journal of Musicology, 2019

Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, 2006

In an interview from 1974 David Bowie makes a remarkable statement: “For the West, Jagger is most... more In an interview from 1974 David Bowie makes a remarkable statement: “For the West, Jagger is most certainly a mother figure . . . I also find him incredibly motherly and maternal clutched into his bosom of ethnic blues.” The image is grotesque—intentionally shocking—yet oddly compelling. This essay follows Bowie’s lead through an assemblage of material—songs, performances, film, images, as well as historical and theoretical texts—to demonstrate how Bowie’s cultural reading of Mick Jagger as Mother resonates with the concerns of recent scholarship on race and psychoanalysis, homonormativity and homonationalism, and neoliberalism’s privatization and deregulation in cultural spheres. Citation: Judith A. Peraino, “Mick Jagger as Mother,” Social Text 124 Vol. 33, no. 3 (September 2015): 75-133.

It is well known that David Bowie found inspiration and ideas in the pop art and public persona o... more It is well known that David Bowie found inspiration and ideas in the pop art and public persona of Andy Warhol and his notorious entourage of transvestites. Both Warhol and Bowie played the line between art and commercial product, between earnest and ironic expression, and between surface presentation and deeper meaning—especially via the insinuation of queer sexuality. In this essay I examine how Warhol’s art pertains to Bowie’s music, and what their “paradigm of posing” means for an articulation of sexuality in the principal media of their day—on canvas and on vinyl. I also explore the resonances and parallels between “sound and vision” and attempt to think imaginatively about music in ways that Bowie’s songs invite—especially the cover songs from his most Warholian album Pin Ups. I use one medium to access another—more specifically to understand the challenge to the standard vocabularies of artistic expressivity posed by Warhol in painting, and perpetuated by Bowie in song. Citation: Judith A. Peraino, "Plumbing the Surface of Sound and Vision: David Bowie, Andy Warhol and the Art of Posing," Qui Parle vol. 21, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2012): 151-84.

The history of Western music is, among other things, a history of sexual anxiety, ambivalence, an... more The history of Western music is, among other things, a history of sexual anxiety, ambivalence, and negotiation. This article examines four moments in this musicalsexual history, each no less than eight hundred years from the next: the Siren episode in the Odyssey (c. 700 B.C.E.), the writings of Augustine (composed 387-413), the music and writings of Hildegard of Bingen (composed 1150 -75), and the performances of Marilyn Manson in 1996. I choose these moments for the sake of coherence; their resonances demonstrate how music transhistorically functions as a technique for conceiving, configuring, and representing queer subjectivity. In other words, music invites individuals to question subjectivity as it is composed according to the structure of "compulsory heterosexuality" in phallocentric, patriarchal culture. In exploring how music functions in this questioning process, I use the word queer as a sexually freighted synonym for questioning. The etymology of queer is uncertain. One source suggests its origin in the early English cwer [crooked, not straight]. 2 Another possible origin is the Indo-European root -twerkw, which yielded the Latin torquere [to twist] and the German quer [transverse]. The word first appears, however, in early-sixteenth-century Scottish sources as an adjectival form of query, from the Latin quaerere [to question]. 3 The question associated with queer clearly became one of sexuality and gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the word peppers such novels as Henry James's Turn of the Screw (1898) and Radcliffe Hall's Well of Loneliness (1928) and appears as a label for dissident sexuality in at least one sociological study from 1922. 4 In the early 1990s the word queer emerged as a term of resistance to the 1970s identity labels gay and lesbian; these identities were rooted to a large extent in gender separatism and in a naturalized hetero/homosexual binary. 5 "Queer," according to David M. Halperin, describes a subject position "at odds with the normal, the GLQ 9:4 pp. 433-470

Papers on Medieval Music by Judith Peraino

Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, 2019

The serpentine flourishes of the monogram No ta in light brown ink barely catch the eye in the ma... more The serpentine flourishes of the monogram No ta in light brown ink barely catch the eye in the marginal space beside a wide swath of much darker and more compact letters (see .1). But catch the eye they do, if not in the first instance, then at some point over the course of their fifty-five occurrences throughout the 233 folios of ms. T-trouv., also known as the Chansonnier de Noailles.1 In most cases the monogram looks more like No ā -where the "a" and the "t" have fused into one peculiar ligature. Variations of the monogram indicate a range of more or less swift and continuous execution (see .2), but consistency in size and ink color strongly suggest the work of a single annotator. Adriano Cappelli's Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane includes a nearly exact replica of this scribal shorthand for nota, which he dates to the thirteenth century.2 Thus the notae, and the act of reading they indicate, took place soon after its compilation in the 1270s or 1280s.

Sonograms are images produced by sound; more specifically, they are produced by ultrasound—sound ... more Sonograms are images produced by sound; more specifically, they are produced by ultrasound—sound waves vibrating at frequencies well above the range of what humans can hear, but suitable for producing maps below surfaces such as skin or oceans. Long before scientific devices transduced vibrating air waves into graphics, cultural devices such as voices, instruments, pens and parchment, transmitted sounds in the form of love songs that had an ultrasonic function to produce sonograms that mapped subjects and objects of desire. This essay unites musicology’s concerns with the discursive force of organized sound, and sound studies’ concern with the discursive force sonic environments, recording formats, and media networks, to consider how the widely transmitted medieval song Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai by Jaufre Rudel, with its famous refrain of amor de lonh (“love from afar”) and evocations of the Saracen kingdom, reverberates across time and space to map subjects and objects of desire below skin and across oceans. The first half of the essay examines Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai in the context the transcultural sound networks, medieval notions of global geography, and the material formatting of songs. The second half of this essay turns to two modern-day resoundings of Jaufre’s song of distant love: these are the 1977 recording by the Clemencic Consort directed by René Clemencic; and the 2000 opera by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho called L’amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf. In both cases the song, and the medieval legend that sprung from it, are sonically reimagined to express twentieth-century strife in the Middle East. Thus while the notes of Jaufre’s medieval song have all but disappeared from these reformattings, its ultrasonic function continues to produce sonograms of desire born of distance.

Musical Quarterly, 2001

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Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2001