Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
Across ages and cultures, music has been associated with sexual allure, gender inversion and suspect sexuality. Music has been theorised as both a putative agent of moral corruption and an expressive mechanism of gender and sexual signification, capable of arousing and channelling sexual urges and desires. This research examines musically facilitated expressions of queerness and queer identity, asking how and why music is used by queer musicians and musical performers to express non-normative gender and sexual identities. A queer theoretical approach to gender and sexuality, coupled with interdisciplinary theories concerning music as an identificatory practice, provides the theoretical landscape for this study. An investigation into queer musical episodes such as this necessitates an exploration of the broader cultural milieu in which queer musical work occurs. It also raises questions surrounding the corpus of queer musical practice—that is, do these practices constitute the creation of a new musical genre or a collection of genres that can be understood as queer music? The preceding questions inform an account of the histories, styles, sensibilities, and gender and sexual politics of camp, drag and genderfuck, queer punk and queercore, as well as queer feminist cultures, positioning these within musical praxis. Queer theory, music and identity theories as well as contemporary discussions relating to queer cultural histories are then applied to case studies of queer-identified music performers from Brisbane, Australia. A grounded theoretical analysis of the data gathered in these case studies provides the necessary material to argue that musical performance provides a creative context for the expression of queer identities and the empowerment of queer agency, as well as oppositional responses to and criticism of heterosexual hegemony, and the homogenisation and assimilation of mainstream gay culture. Resulting from this exploration of queer musical cultures, localised data gathering and analysis, this research also supposes a set of ideologies and sensibilities that can be considered indicative and potentially determinant of queer musical practice generally. Recognising that queer theory offers a useful theoretical discourse for understanding the complexities and flexibility of gender and sexual identities—particularly those that resist the binary logics of heteronormativity—this project foregrounds a question that is relatively unanswered in musicological work. It asks: how can musicology make use of queer theory in order to produce queer readings and new, anti-oppressive knowledge regarding musical performance, composition and participation? To answer this, it investigates the history of resistance towards embodied studies of music; the disjuncture between competing discourses of traditional and ‘new’ musicology; and recent developments in the pursuit of queer visibility within music studies. Building upon these recent developments, this work concludes that the integration of queer theoretical perspectives and queer aesthetic sensibilities within musicological discourse allows for a serious reconsideration of musical meaning and signification. In the development of a queer musicology, a committed awareness of queer theory, histories, styles and sensibilities, together with an embodied scholarly approach to music, is paramount. It is through this discursive nexus that musicology will be able to engage more fully with the troubling, performative and contingent qualities of gender, sexuality and desire.
Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music
Sociology Compass, Vol. 7(3), 2013
For both the heterosexual and queer subject, subcultural participation and stylistic modes of cultural production and consumption, including popular music, are critical mechanisms aiding in the construction and expression of identity. Yet, in spite of abundant empirical examples of queer music cultures, subcultural studies scholars have paid minimal attention to queer sexualities and their concomitant stylistic modalities. In this article, I claim the importance of queer subterranean music cultures by synthesising significant literatures from various fields of inquiry including cultural sociology, popular musicology and queer studies. To begin, I will briefly clarify to whom and about what queer (theory) speaks. I then go on to offer an overview of subcultural and popular music research paying particular attention to the subaltern queer subject and surveying queer criticism within each field. Accordingly, I discuss various sites of popular music production and subcultural style such as punk and hip-hop, to show how non-heterosexual subjects carve space for resistant queer sexualities and merge queer sensibilities with pre-existing cultural forms. This article consolidates interdisciplinary approaches that will benefit scholars invested in the study of queer subcultures and popular music.
Exploring Being Queer and Performing Queerness in Popular Music
2020
I extend my thanks to my second reader, Dr. Emily Ansari, for the careful editing and feedback that proved to be invaluable to delivering a quality thesis. To my parents, Bina and Shreekant, I thank you for your continuous love, support and words of encouragement. To my brother, Ghyshan, I thank you for your infectious sense of humor and the hours of laughter you provided during my time in graduate school. Finally, I would like to thank my dogs, Bob and Maya, for their irresistible cuteness and hours of cuddling during difficult times.
Current Musicology, 2020
Reviewed by Runchao Liu Popular Music and the Politics of Hope (2019) weaves together diverse scholarship rooted in the political promise of popular music to envision and construct alternative realities for queer and feminist individuals and allies. "Critical hope" is the emergent theoretical framework that inspires and informs the chapters in this collection. The epistemology of critical hope is to see "making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world"; in doing so, it is possible to unveil "the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism" (i). This framework offers a wide range of approaches, including Afrofuturism, Afro-Asian collaboration, queer diasporas, gender and racial politics, genre conventions, decolonization, and age. This collection will appeal to scholars and students in popular music studies, gender/feminist studies, queer studies, critical media studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary studies. None of the methodologies in this book incorporate traditional musical analysis as a main approach and only a few authors adopt it as a supportive methodology. The collection illustrates various ways that minoritarian musicians challenge dominant understandings of subjectivity and foster solidarity beyond cultural and political boundaries. Informed by pioneering research that reconceptualizes musical performance and consumption for and around marginalized pleasure and empowerment, this collection nicely aligns with and it contributes to a strand of queer and feminist musical scholarship also found in the works of
2015
Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place" (Muñoz 5). 1 Professor Stan Hawkins's latest book, Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality, takes up the queer aesthetics and politics of performance within pop music as its subject. Over the course of seven chapters, Hawkins invites his readers to "partake in his own experiences, delights, and impressions" (Hawkins 2) of such figures as Madonna, George Michael, and David Bowie. This volume joins recent works in analyzing the political and social dimensions of pop music and its performers as Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of
Scenes and Sexualities: Queerly Reframing the Music Scenes Perspective
Historically, research on music cultures has favoured examination of the subcultural affiliations of the youthful urban white working-class heterosexual male. While the prominence of this subject has since been contested by a number of scholars, even the most celebrated forms of scholarship in this area continue to work within heteronormative discourses. In fact, omitted considerations of non-heterosexualities and sexual styles are a stark reminder of the frequent invisibility of the queer subject, not only in relation to much subcultural and post-subcultural theory, but also in relation to broader discussions about musical and extra-musical style generally. This paper addresses these omissions. Specifically, it reviews existing music scenes literature demonstrating how, as a theoretical concept, scene has emerged out of the reductiveness and rigidity of subcultural theory. It examines work on musically mediated performances of sexuality, identifying the need for more work around sexualities and music scenes in everyday contexts. It proposes how and by whom such work can be done. And it details the integration of queer theories into the music scenes perspective, showing how ‘scene’ can accommodate a more flexible approach to queer collective formations which is necessary for everyday musically mediated queer subjectivities to be understood.
A Way of Loving, A Way of Knowing: Music, Sexuality and the Becoming of a Queer Musicologist
"Music is an expressive mechanism of gender and sexual signification, capable of arousing and channelling sexual urges and desires. It is often through music that we express and make sense of our life-worlds, our bodies and our emotions; in music we give meaning to sound and give meaning to self. From the perspective of a queer female musician and music scholar, this chapter examines musical and musicological performances of queer identity and queer life-worlds—that is, the context and conditions of being and doing queer in and through music practice and scholarship. Using autoethnography, I reflect upon my intimate relationship with musical practice and scholarship, exploring how and why I have used music to express my non-normative gender and sexual identity. Moreover, I reveal the personal processes that led me to finding a space for my queer sexuality within music and how these processes have enriched my understanding of other queer musical practices and practitioners. Through a willingness to be vulnerable—to lay bare my ways of loving—I have found new ways of knowing myself, of knowing others and our musics. Taylor, J. (2009). A way of loving, a way of knowing: Music, sexuality and the becoming of a queer musicologist. In B. Bartleet & C. Ellis (Eds.), Music autoethnography: Making autoethnography sing / making music personal (pp. 245-260). Bowen Hills, Qld: Australian Academic Press."
Spewing Out of the Closet: Musicology on Queer Punk
Musical Islands: Exploring Connections …, 2009
Taylor, J. (2009). Spewing out of the closet: Musicology on queer punk. In E. Mackinlay, B. Bartleet & K. Barney (Eds.), Musical islands: Exploring connections between music, place and research (pp. 221-241). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.