what's queer about musicology now - rachel lewis

Lewis, What’s Queer about Musicology Now? 43

terms of both the scope and the quality of the papers presented. These ranged from conversa-tions on gay and lesbian historiography and mu-sical reception (Samuel Dorf, Emily Wilbourne, and Tekla Babyak) to representations of queer male sexualities in popular culture and opera (Samuel Dwinell, Jeremy Mikush, and Kevin Schwandt) and from accounts of queer perfor-mance in terms of disidentifi cation (Katie Brewer Ball, Tina Majkowski, and Žarko Cvejic) to keynote speeches on David Bowie and Andy Warhol (Judith Peraino) and the use of music as a form of torture at Guantánamo Bay (Suzanne

The three articles featured in this “Queer Vibrations” special section of Women & Music initially emerged as a

result of an interdisciplinary graduate student conference on music and queer performance held at Cornell University in March 2007.1 Jointly funded by the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program and the Department of Music, the conference brought together graduate stu-dents and faculty working within the fi elds of musicology, women’s and gender studies, the-ater studies, and performance studies. “Queer Vibrations” proved to be an exciting event in

theorizing gender, culture, and music

“Queer Vibrations”

What’s Queer about Musicology Now?

Rachel Lewis

1. There are a number of people without whom the “Queer Vibrations” conference would not have been pos-sible. These include Amy Villarejo for kindly inviting me to organize a queer musicology conference for the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program at Cornell; my won-derful graduate student co-organizers, Lindsey Cummings and Jennifer Williams, in the Department of Theatre,

Film, and Dance; Hope Mandeville and Amy Sindone in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program for their tireless administrative and organizational work on behalf of “Queer Vibrations”; Rebecca Harris-Warrick in the Department of Music; and Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies faculty Nick Salvato, Sara Warner, and Ellis Han-son for generously agreeing to be faculty respondents.

44 Women & Music Volume 13

and sexuality, it was the work of feminist mu-sicologists like Susan McClary and Ruth Solie that paved the way for what we have now come to refer to as LGBTQ musicology.3 Indeed, many of the articles published in the groundbreaking collection of essays Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology were ini-tially presented at the fi rst “Feminist Theory and Music” conference in 1991, organized by Lydia Hamessley and Susan McClary.4 More re-cent LGBTQ musicology, including book-length studies of music and queer identity by Nadine Hubbs and Judith Peraino, along with the edited collections of essays, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity and Queering the Popular Pitch, also retains a strong feminist core.5 In the absence of separate conferences and journals, queer work tends to be presented at feminist musicology conferences like the biannual “Fem-

Cusick). The “Queer Vibrations” conference also served to raise some fundamental ques-tions about the relationship between feminin-ity, transsexuality, and embodiment in the con-text of both women’s music festivals and Third Wave feminism (Elizabeth K. Keenan), in Zarah Ersoff’s reading of transsexual subjectivity in the music of Dana Baitz, and in Baitz’s own account of queer musicology’s fraught relation to trans-sexual embodiment. In short, I can only use this opportunity to thank all those who participated in the conference—both graduate students and faculty alike—for their commitment to LGBTQ musicology and for helping “Queer Vibrations” live up to its name.

The existence of “Queer Vibrations” is also strongly indebted to Judith Peraino, without whose presence in the Department of Music at Cornell a conference devoted to queer mu-sicology would have been scarcely imaginable, let alone possible. Indeed, when Amy Villarejo fi rst invited me to organize a graduate student conference on music and queer identities for the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program at Cornell, I was forced to confront the somewhat disturbing (though perhaps not altogether sur-prising) reality that “Queer Vibrations” would be only the second queer musicology conference to date. The fi rst queer musicology conference, “Anything Goes,” which took place in 1992 at the University of California, Berkeley, was also a graduate-run conference. Organized by Ju-dith Peraino, herself a graduate student at the time, “Anything Goes” featured the keynote speakers Philip Brett and Suzanne Cusick.2 This initial conference on music and sexuality was enabled by the kind of feminist theorizing that took place both within and outside the fi eld of musicology during the late 1980s. In much the same way that second wave feminist theory and, later, poststructuralist feminism facilitated the emergence of queer theory by challenging the relationship between categories of sex, gender,

2. I am particularly grateful to Judith Peraino for providing me with information regarding the above conference. Some of the papers presented at “Anything Goes” were later pub-lished in the journal Repercussions 3, no. 1 (1994).

3. See Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gen-der, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Ruth Solie, “Introduction: On Differ-ence,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexual-ity in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, 1–20 (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1993). Susan McClary is a particularly good example of a musicologist whose work spans both feminist and queer musicology. See, for instance, her “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 205–33 (New York: Routledge, 1994). Also see the following edited collections of essays: Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1995); Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley, eds., Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999); and Linda Phyllis Austern, ed., Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (New York: Routledge, 2002).4. See Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” 27–66; Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Seri-ous Effort Not to Think Straight,” 67–83; Lydia Hamess-ley, “Henry Lawes’s Setting of Katherine Philips’s Friend-ship Poetry in His Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, 1655: A Musical Misreading?” 115–37; Susan McClary, “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” 205–33; Martha Mockus, “Queer Thoughts on Country Music and k. d. lang,” 257–71; and Karen Pegley and Virginia Caputo, “Growing up Female(s): Retrospective Thoughts on Musical Preferences and Meanings,” 297–313, all in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Queering the Pitch.5. See Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of Amer-ica’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and Na-tional Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press,


the academy, effectively supplanting the latter’s “vanguardist position” in academia.7 In David Halperin’s words:

As queer theory becomes more widely diffused

throughout the disciplines, it becomes harder to

fi gure out what’s so very queer about it, while

lesbian and gay studies, which by contrast

would seem to pertain only to lesbians and gay

men, looks increasingly backward, identitar-

ian, and outdated.8

If, as Halperin appears to be implying, the “problem” of lesbian and gay studies was one of visibility and recognition, then the “problem” of queer studies has arguably become one of specifi city. Given such seeming impasses within the fi eld of queer studies, what kind of a future, I wondered, could possibly exist for queer mu-sicology, and, more to the point, did it have a future? Assuming for a moment that queer mu-sicology did have a future, how might its future depart from and/or converge with that of queer studies more generally? What, in short, is queer about musicology now?

The question that frames this introduction is, of course, a deliberate reference to the 2005 special issue of the journal Social Text, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Published fi fteen years after Teresa de Lauretis coined the term “queer theory” for the title of a conference she held in February 1990 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the fall 2005 issue of Social Text was intended to respond to charges that queer studies was suffering from a crisis of intellectual identity within the academy. While scholars such as Halperin have suggested that it is the dissemination of queer studies across the disciplines that has resulted in its premature demise, the editors of Social Text argue that it is precisely the ability of queer studies to en-gage intersectional modes of analysis that is re-sponsible for its continuing vitality and critical

inist Theory and Music” and published in jour-nals such as Women & Music. The question is, If queer musicology already has a home in feminist musicology, are conferences and journals exclu-sively devoted to LGBTQ musicology really nec-essary? What, if anything, I asked myself, was queer about musicology fi fteen years after the initial conference? Now, as I write this introduc-tion to the “Queer Vibrations” special section of Women & Music, almost a decade and a half after the fi rst edition of Queering the Pitch was published, I still ask.

At a time when many critics have already begun to view queer studies as a thing of the past, refl ecting upon the historical trajectory of queer musicology along with its relation to both feminist and LGBT musicology seemed to raise an important question, or set of questions, not just about musicology but about queer studies more generally. As is apparent from the titles of individual essays in recent queer special is-sues of journals like Social Text, the Journal of Homosexuality, and South Atlantic Quarterly, the future of queer studies seems to be viewed as fundamentally uncertain, if not utterly pre-carious.6 Neville Hoad has even gone so far as to suggest that the “transnational” and the “global” have become the “new queer” within

2004); Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, eds., Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Sheila Whiteley, ed., Queering the Popular Pitch (New York: Routledge, 2006). For other notable exam-ples of LGBTQ musicology see the work of Mitchell Mor-ris, who has written a number of essays on queer topics ranging from gay male opera queens to the lesbian Count-ess Geschwitz in Alban Berg’s Lulu. See his “Reading as an Opera Queen” in Solie, Musicology and Difference, 184–200, and “Admiring the Countess Geschwitz,” in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 348–70. For a relatively up-to-date list of publications on music and sexuality see the “Bibliography for Lesbian and Gay Music” compiled by Emily Wilbourne for the new edition of Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., 379–89 (New York: Routledge, 2006).6. See, for instance, the queer special issues of the Journal of Homosexuality 45, nos. 2–3 (2003); Social Text 84–85, nos. 3–4 (2005); and South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007).

7. Neville Hoad, “Queer Theory Addiction,” South At-lantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 511–22, 516.8. See David M. Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, nos. 2–3 (2003): 339–43, 342.


of scholars such as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan.11 As Grewal and Kaplan argue in their important essay, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality”:

Since ignoring transnational formations has left

studies of sexualities without the tools to ad-

dress questions of globalization, race, political

economy, immigration, migration, and geopoli-

tics, it is important to bring questions of trans-

nationalism into conversation with the feminist

study of sexuality.12

Despite the newly emerging body of literature devoted to theorizing sexuality from a trans-national, global perspective, however, there has been a signifi cant lack of attention to the ways in which lesbianism, or female same-sex desire, emerges globally and transnationally. Within the vast majority of such scholarship, “lesbian” is frequently subsumed under “gay” and “queer” as analyses of so-called transna-tional queer formations become little more than analyses of male homosexuality.13 The erasure of femininity and lesbianism “played straight” (to borrow a phrase from Biddy Martin) within the context of what might be referred to as a “transnational queer critique” is due, at least in

edge. In their introduction to the special issue, editors David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz consider what a queer critique might have to tell us about contemporary po-litical concerns such as citizenship and immigra-tion. How, they ask, does queerness get defi ned in relation to human rights discourses on gender and sexuality, neoliberal state formations, bor-der crossing and migration, travel and tourism, surveillance technologies, terrorism and secu-rity, detention and deportation, and other states of exception? As the editors rightly point out, in a time of war and U.S. empire building it is vital that queer studies engages in broader social cri-tiques of race, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, and nation as well as sexuality.9

The “transnational turn” in Social Text builds on an earlier issue of the journal entitled “Queer Transsexions of Race, Nation, and Gender” along with calls by queer theorists such as Eliza-beth Povinelli and George Chauncey to think sex-uality “globally and transnationally.”10 The new preoccupation with so-called transnational issues on the part of queer scholars may also be attrib-uted to the popularity and general marketability of transnational studies within the U.S. academy at large, particularly in the fi eld of women’s and gender studies. From the mid to late 1990s on-ward transnational feminism has become increas-ingly institutionalized within women’s, gender, and sexuality studies programs across the United States due in large part to the foundational work

9. See David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” So-cial Text 23, nos. 84–85 (2005): 1–17, 4.10. See Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Es-teban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen, “Queer Transsexions of Race, Nation, and Gender: An Introduction,” Social Text 52–53 (1997): 1–4; and Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction,” GLQ 5, no. 4 (1999): 439–50. Also see U.S.-based studies of diasporas by Rod Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Da-vid Eng, Racial Castration: Making Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

11. See, for instance, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s introductory textbook to women’s and gender studies en-titled Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Trans-national World, 2nd ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2006). Also see their earlier essays, “Introduc-tion: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, 1–33 (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1994), and “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminism, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, 349–63 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).12. See Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79, 666.13. The majority of scholarship purporting to address the internationalization of LGBT identities focuses primarily on gay men and queer masculinities. A representative ex-ample of the wholesale erasure of lesbianism from discus-sions of homosexuality in international contexts can be found in the work of Dennis Altman, who, despite using


lessness, and immobility. As Biddy Martin has written of the tendency amongst certain queer theorists to valorize cross-gender identifi cation at the expense of both women and femininity in general, “Conceptually . . . as well as politi-cally, something called femininity becomes the tacit ground in relation to which other positions become fi gural and mobile.”16

It is precisely the above aspects of queer stud-ies—its radical anti-identitarianism, its masculin-ist gender bias, and its tendency to abstract and/or erase the material realities of queer lives—that have made me cautious about accepting a form of critique that would attempt to present itself as some kind of “corrective” both to LGBT studies and to feminism.17 “Queer Vibrations” emerged

part, I would suggest, to the rather disturbing tendency in queer studies to confl ate queerness with mobility and transgression. The result of this association is that the terms “queer” and “migrant” are automatically assumed to share a kind of conceptual proximity within a trans-national queer studies; migrant, queer, and diasporic identities are all unproblematically celebrated as somehow “transcending” and sub-verting identity politics and “identity fi xity.”14 Such a metaphorization of migration and border crossing, however, not only does violence to the migrant subjects it seeks to represent but fails to take into account the extent to which mobility is itself gendered and the fact that women, due to continuing economic disparities between the sexes, are often less mobile than men.15 We need to be wary of a transnational queer critique that has the potential to further reinscribe the kind of binary sex-gender system in which femininity is automatically confl ated with passivity, power-

the terms “gay” and “lesbian” throughout his articles and books alike, speaks only of gay men. See Dennis Altman, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 48 (1996): 77–94, and “Global Gaze/Global Gays,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 3 (1997): 417–36, 421.14. In the introduction to the special issue of Social Text in 1997 editors Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen state that the goal of bringing transnational studies together with queer studies is to further “query” the fi eld of “identity poli-tics,” “challenging . . . the ‘identity fi xity’ on which that politics is predicated” (1). In other words, then, the two discourses are brought together so as to facilitate greater mobility away from the presumed “fi xity” of identity politics so that “identity,” in short, can remain fi rmly at arm’s length. For a discussion of the representation of the queer subject as migrant see Anne-Marie Fortier, “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment” in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Mi-gration, ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, 115–36 (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 117; and Bob Cant, ed., Invented Identities? Lesbians and Gays Talk about Migration (London: Cassell, 1997).15. The use of migration as a metaphor for queer mobil-ity and transgression is perhaps rendered most explicit in the article by Cindy Patton entitled “Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of ‘Alterity’ in Emerging Democ-racies,” which appears as part of the edited collection of essays Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan, 195–218 (New York: New York University

Press, 2002). Patton’s article is littered with references to migration and travel as synonyms for queer mobility, al-though it is perhaps the following statement that I fi nd most disturbing: “‘Queer,’ if it is to have any utility, is best understood, not as a model of identity and practice that can be imitated or molded to a local setting, but as evidence of a kind of unstoppable alterity that fl ies, like a stealth bomber, beneath the annihilating screen of nation” (210).16. See Biddy Martin, Femininity Played Straight: The Sig-nifi cance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93. An example of this valorization of cross-gender iden-tifi cation can be found in Judith Butler’s reading of Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning, where Butler refers to Livingston’s camera on Venus Extravaganza’s body as “the transsexualization of lesbian desire.” See Ju-dith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 135. For a critique of Butler’s appropriation of transgendered subjectivity here see Jay Prosser, “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgen-der and the Transubstantiation of Sex,” in Second Skins, 21–60 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).17. For example, in her most recent book, A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam celebrates the women’s music artist Kathleen Ferron’s ability to take her older audiences back in time “to that place between the time of lesbian and the time of queer.” See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 185–86. The kind of progressivist narrative offered up by Halberstam in the above passage—a narrative that uncritically equates les-bianism with lesbian feminism—is necessary insofar as it enables Halberstam to legitimize “queer” by establishing it as the “proper” successor to “lesbian.” The implication, of course, is that the “lesbian” has been replaced by a more “hip,” more “fl uid,” and more “inclusive” queer politics. For a more rigorous discussion of the relationship between feminism, lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies see Ju-dith Butler, “Against Proper Objects,” Differences: A Jour-nal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 1–26.


Gay Music” in the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a critique that (assuming my own department is anything to go by) is still highly relevant today:

The widespread adoption of a neo-serialist

technique, the development of arcane forms of

music analysis, the separation of a high art from

any form of popular cultural expression, and the

equation of musical scholarship with scientifi c

inquiry are all signs of a dominant masculinist,

highly rational, heteronormative discourse in

music all too unhappily but accurately charac-

terized by the word “discipline.”21

It was as a reaction against the kinds of con-servative and neoconservative forces at work in musicology—forces that still sadly view matters of gender and sexuality as “special” or “mi-nority” interests—that the title of the confer-ence was created. I chose the term “vibration” (literally, sounds that resonate or continue to be heard) as a metaphor for queer musicology not merely because of its obvious musical and sexual connotations but because of its ability to evoke queer voices that continue to be heard, or resound, against the force of their erasure within both musicology and queer studies alike.22 I or-ganized the conference with the hope that we might think further about the subject of queer voices in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. Indeed, while we planned the conference around a series of key themes—music, desire, and the body in performance, queer male sexualities, queer performance and the politics of (dis)iden-tifi cation, and femininity, transsexuality, and embodiment—an underlying concern of the vast majority of the papers presented at the confer-

out of my belief that a queer musicology could and indeed was well placed to confront and tackle some of the aforementioned concerns—the debate over “lesbian” and “gay” versus “queer,” the erasure of lesbian sexuality and de-sire, and the relationship between queer perfor-mativity and embodiment. LGBTQ musicology, which, as noted earlier, has retained strong ties to feminist musicology, has long since taken the body seriously as an object of investigation and critique. I am thinking, especially, of the work of many of those who contributed to Queering the Pitch. At the center of much of this scholar-ship is an attempt to imagine and conceptualize a “performance-centered, embodied music criti-cism,” one that builds on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to understand music as “a way of performing the [gendered and sexed] body,” of “thinking of music as among the dis-courses through which we perform ourselves as embodied, having gender and sex.”18

It was also my intention that the “Queer Vi-brations” conference would provide a response to the general erasure of music and sound within queer studies. As Judith Peraino noted in an ear-lier issue of this journal, “The aural dimensions of gender and sexuality—voice and music—have haunted the margins of [queer] theory but have seldom factored as centrally as the visual.”19 The lack of attention to voice and music on the part of queer theorists that Peraino aptly observes is surely not aided by the discipline of musicology itself, which, as Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas pointed out in the preface to the fi rst edition of Queering the Pitch, has a reputation (and perhaps even a preference) for insularity.20 Brett and Wood subsequently com-mented on the sexual and gendered implications of such isolationism in their entry “Lesbian and

18. See Suzanne G. Cusick, “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex,” in Barkin and Hamessley, Audible Traces, 25–48, 25 and 42.19. See Judith A. Peraino, “Listening to Gender: A Re-sponse to Judith Halberstam,” Women & Music: A Jour-nal of Gender and Culture 11 (2007): 59–64, 59.20. See Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thom-as, preface to Queering the Pitch, x.

21. See Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian and Gay Music,” reprinted in Queering the Pitch, 351–78, 357.22. For a particularly compelling account of the voice as a form of sexual vibration see Elizabeth Wood’s discussion of the lesbian composer Ethel Smyth in “Sapphonics” in Queering the Pitch, 27–66. Wood coined the term “Sap-phonics” to refer to the lesbian “vibrations,” or “reso-nances,” she perceived to be at work in the composer’s music.


that certain features of lesbian representation slip in and out of historical view, even though the discourses in which they are articulated change across time? Why does lesbianism and, more specifi cally, lesbian desire appear as unrep-resentable, as outside the frame of representa-tion, as that which is both there and not there? Why is the “problem” of lesbianism so frequent-ly a problem of representation, and what, pre-cisely, is the nature of the relationship between music, language, and narratives of lesbian (im)possibility?

Surely, the ability to ask such questions is part of what it means to “do” the history of sexual-ity in a Foucauldian sense, to turn to the past not merely for understanding but in order to de-velop alternative theoretical models and forms of representation in the present.

In “‘Do You Nomi?’: Klaus Nomi and the Politics of (Non)identifi cation” Žarko Cvejic takes Wilbourne’s discussion of voice and sexu-ality into the contemporary fi eld of (dis)identifi -cation politics. Building on the kind of scholar-ship that appears in Queering the Popular Pitch, Cvejic examines the fascinating but frequently overlooked fi gure of Klaus Nomi, who was part of the New Wave Scene in New York City in the 1970s and early 1980s before his untimely death of AIDS in 1982. Cvejic focuses primarily on the reception of Nomi and, in particular, the latter’s androgynous falsetto voice as creating the po-tential for “totally free identifi cation.” As Cvejic states, “For many of his contemporaries, Nomi embodied the exhilarating prospect of a total-ly free self-invention, especially for those left on the margins of normative identities” (000). Reading the reception of Klaus Nomi through the lens of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic texts on identifi cation and subjectivity by Butler and Lacan along with theoretical accounts of the voice by Derrida and Dolar, Cvejic argues that it was Nomi’s shifting vocal personae that provide the key to understanding the reception

ence turned out to be the voice. As such, the arti-cles featured here are no exception. Building on earlier work in feminist and LGBTQ musicol-ogy, this “Queer Vibrations” special section of Women & Music considers what such a focus on sound and, more precisely, the voice might have to contribute to our understanding of queer per-formance and embodiment.

In “Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love” Emily Wil-bourne offers a reading of the seventeenth-cen-tury Italian Baroque play Amor nello specchio (Love in the Mirror). Wilbourne’s article con-centrates on the play’s central character, Florin-da (played by Virginia Andreini), and her jour-ney of sexual self-discovery from autoeroticism, to lesbianism, and ultimately to heterosexuality. As Wilbourne points out, what is central to Flo-rinda’s narrative of self-awakening is her voice, which provides crucial insight into the charac-ter’s multiple and shifting sexual selves. Even more importantly, however, Wilbourne shows the extent to which the impossibility of lesbian desire in Amor nello specchio is narrativized by way of musical metaphor. As she writes, “Where Florinda could represent her autoerotic sexual pleasure through the sublimated metaphor of musical performance, Bernetta’s recourse to musical metaphorics represents the very nature of lesbian desire in its unrepresentability within compulsory heterosexuality” (000). Wilbourne’s piece not only represents an important contribu-tion to literature on historical performance but provides a crucial point of departure for further theorizations of the relationship between mu-sic and expressions of female homoeroticism in seventeenth-century vocal and literary texts, a subject upon which much more remains to be said.23 Why is it, her essay encourages us to ask,

23. The trope of lesbian unrepresentability to which Wil-bourne calls attention in Amor nello specchio is perva-sive in a number of seventeenth-century Venetian operas depicting female homoeroticism such as Doriclea (1645), La Calisto (1651), and Elena (1659). For an analysis of La Calisto see Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Op-era and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For an excellent discussion of lesbian representation in the early

modern period see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2002).


the lone song “Seven Years Ago”—a ballad in which Grillo sings of contracting the HIV vi-rus—hints at the politics of victimization that Extra Fancy seeks to transform into “erotic, ag-gressive power,” a politics that is both implicitly and explicitly gendered. Schwandt’s piece on Extra Fancy is thus important for feminist and queer theoretical projects insofar as it acknowl-edges the extent to which the social and psychic consequences of violent identifi cation with gen-dered norms can be just as profound as those that arise from a refusal to identify with such norms.

Each of the essays published in this “Queer Vibrations” section of Women & Music shows in a different way what can be gained for femi-nist and queer analysis through a focus on mu-sic and the voice. In doing so the articles open the fl oor for the kinds of debates surrounding transsexuality and vocality that took place at the conference but that have not yet made it into print. Although the subject of transsexuality has been and continues to be hotly contested in a variety of queer musical contexts, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Ladyfest, there is still very little published musicological scholarship devoted to theorizing trans issues.25 Discussions of transsexuality and the voice have not proven central in the literature on transgen-der either, despite the fact that it is often the voice that poses the greatest challenge to trans-sexuals’ ability to “pass.”26 Putting the voice

of his voice as embodying both the promise and pain of “nonidentifi cation” with normative cat-egories of sex and gender. As Suzanne Cusick has commented in another context, we have a strong desire to believe that “the voice is the body, its very breadth and interior shapes pro-jected outward into the world as a way others might know us, even know us intimately.”24 In the case of Nomi, however, Cvejic points out that the singing voice ultimately failed to suf-fi ciently represent, or “embody,” the gender of its owner, resulting instead in the production of a series of “disembodied voices.” Cvejic goes on to argue that the reception of Klaus Nomi in documentaries like Andrew Horn’s The Nomi Song (2004) as an “alien-like” creature depart-ing from a planet not quite ready to embrace him as “fully human” suggests the extent to which those who refuse to identify with pre-existing norms of sex and gender are, in Judith Butler’s terms, “denied recognition.” Following José Muñoz, Cvejic concludes by suggesting that for the sake of political agency, a compromised, strategic (dis)identifi cation, as opposed to “non-identifi cation,” with gendered norms constitutes one of the few strategies for survival open to fi g-ures like Klaus Nomi who fi nd themselves fall-ing on the wrong side of the sex-gender system.

Kevin Schwandt similarly explores the rela-tionship between gender identity and identifi ca-tion in his article, “The Erotics of an Oil Drum: Queercore, Gay Macho, and the Defi ant Sexual-ity of Extra Fancy’s Sinnerman.” Unlike Cvejic, however, who considers the perils of nonidenti-fi cation, Schwandt engages the question of what it means to rigidly self-identify with norms—in this case by examining the performance of “ag-gressive, macho gay male identity” by Extra Fancy’s front man, Brian Grillo. Schwandt sug-gests that Grillo’s enactment of sadomasochis-tic sexuality—literalized via the latter’s naked participation in a staged sex scene with an oil drum—may be viewed as constituting both a “misogynistic” response to gay male drag and a “queer” resignifi cation of (hetero)normative masculinity. As Schwandt points out, however,

24. See Cusick, “On Musical Performances,” 29.

25. For one of the few musicological studies of transsexuali-ty and the voice to date see Alexandros N. Constansis, “The Changing Female-to-Male (FTM) Voice,” Radical Musi-cology 3 (2008), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk. For an analysis of race and sexuality in women-identifi ed music see Eileen M. Hayes, “Black Women Performers of Women-Identifi ed Music: ‘They Cut Off My Voice, I Grew Two Voices,’” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1999, together with her forthcoming book on the same topic. For a discussion of women’s music festivals and Third Wave feminism see Elizabeth K. Keenan, “Acting like a Lady: Third Wave Feminism, Popular Music, and the White Mid-dle Class,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008.26. See, for instance, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shan-non Price Minter, eds., Transgender Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).


passes the study of musics perceived to be “non-Western,” emerged as a separate fi eld from his-torical musicology, or the analysis of Western European art music, in the early 1950s. The sep-aration of historical musicology and ethnomu-sicology was in part symptomatic of the kinds of geopolitical divisions of “First World” and “Third World” that characterized the cold war period in general. The question that interests me most here, though, is why ethnomusicolo-gists appear to be so reluctant to engage with the work of queer theorists. What might lie behind this seeming resistance to queer scholarship on the parts of ethnomusicologists, and what might this have to tell us about the discipline of musi-cology? Answering the above questions from my perspective as a musicologist of Western art and popular musics, I turn fi rst to consider queer theory itself.

Queer critique at its best, as encapsulated in the work of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, makes use of deconstructive methodologies derived from poststructuralism to challenge the binary sex-gender system, which produces “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” as mu-tually exclusive oppositions.29 “Queer” thus es-chews fi xed identity categories, and, as Richard Thompson Ford has argued, it is precisely queer theory’s anti-identitarianism that holds the key to its “portability.”30 At its worst, however, the

back at the center of both transsexual and queer theorizing, as many of the papers presented at the “Queer Vibrations” conference attempted to do, is clearly long overdue. Indeed, it is my hope that this “Queer Vibrations” section of Women & Music provides at least a starting point for such future conversations.

As I write the above, though, I am acutely aware of those voices that were not heard at the “Queer Vibrations” conference. Despite my hopeful, though perhaps rather tentative, call for papers exploring the impact of queer anti-identitarian politics within the fi eld of ethnomu-sicology, “Queer Vibrations” ultimately failed to adequately address the ways in which queerness gets defi ned in relation to race, class, ethnicity, and nation. As Nadine Hubbs commented in a recent review of Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, the lack of attention to mat-ters of race and class is a problem with LGBTQ musicology in general.27 Given the institutional-ization of both intersectional and transnational frameworks in women’s studies and, more re-cently, queer studies, the absence of any refer-ence to transnational or global issues within queer musicology seems somewhat surprising. Why is it that music scholars have been hesitant to follow both feminist and queer theorists in adopting a transnational perspective?

To begin with, the vast majority of what we have come to refer to as “queer musicology” is produced by historical and popular musicolo-gists rather than ethnomusicologists. As Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood commented in their entry, “Lesbian and Gay Music,” in the 2001 edition of New Grove, “Ethnomusicology has been even more nervous of categories of sexual behavior manifest in music than has historical musicology.”28 Ethnomusicology, which encom-

27. See Nadine Hubbs, review of Queer Episodes in Mu-sic and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whi-tesell, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 10 (2006): 80–88.28. See Brett and Wood, “Lesbian and Gay Music,” 373. For a discussion of the marginalization of feminist and gender theory in ethnomusicology see Margaret Sarkis-

sian, “Thoughts on the Study of Gender in Ethnomusi-cology: A Pedagogical Perspective,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 3 (1999): 17–27; and Ellen Koskoff, “(Left Out in) Left (the Field): The Effects of Post-postmodern Scholarship on Feminist and Gen-der Studies in Musicology and Ethnomusicology, 1990–2000,” Women & Music 9 (2005): 90–98. Marcia Hern-don has also advocated for a more theoretically-informed approach to gender studies within ethnomusicology. See Marcia Herndon, “Epilogue: The Place of Gender within Complex, Dynamic Musical Systems,” in Music and Gen-der, ed. Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, 347–59 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000).29. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).30. See Richard Thompson Ford, “What’s Queer about Race?” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 477–84.


general need to begin deconstructing the prob-lematic opposition that currently exists between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. It is especially vital that those of us working within the former acknowledge the extent to which the very separation of historical musicology and ethnomusicology is informed by longer histories of European colonialism, histories responsible for the production of hierarchies that persist today in alternate guises through new forms of inequality generated within the context of glo-balization.32 As Steven Feld pointedly asks, “In whose interests and in what kind of academy must ethno and world remain distinct from a discipline of music, a discipline where all prac-tices, histories, and identities could assert equal claims to value, study, and performance?”33

The challenge for feminist and queer musicol-ogy in the twenty-fi rst century is to move beyond the kinds of divisive politics that characterized the cold war period—politics that continue to play out within contemporary musicology. If a comparative transnational feminist and queer critique has anything to teach us in musicology, it is that speaking positions cannot be so easily divided between East and West, local and global. Ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists might do well to think more deeply about what it means to encounter the other and to recognize the interconnectedness of the spaces we have long since viewed as separate. The question is not whether historical musicologists and ethno-musicologists encounter one another but rather how such encounters take place.34 How and un-

term “queer” can be strikingly short on specifi c-ities, often functioning as a synonym for sexual fl uidity and “free identifi cation.” It is in this way that the very portability of queer theory becomes most dangerous, particularly when such mobil-ity comes to characterize and even motivates the fi eld’s recent “transnational turn.”

It is queer theory’s reputation for anti-iden-titarianism, I would suggest, coupled with the potentially universalizing implications of much queer theorizing, that has made ethnomusi-cologists cautious about incorporating queer perspectives in their analyses. While ethnomu-sicological resistance to the use of queer theo-retical models developed in the West is more than understandable, however, the problem with the kinds of purely “localized” approaches to gender and sexuality advocated by the ma-jority of ethnomusicologists is that large-scale formations emerging within the context of globalization cannot be adequately addressed. Within a methodological framework that tends to privilege the “local” in this way, the impact of globalization becomes diffi cult to assess. One consequence of ethnomusicologists’ apparent reluctance to engage with feminist, gender, and sexuality studies theories is that so-called queer musicology remains the province of historical and popular musicologists, the risk being, of course, that queer musicology retains a strong Western and even imperialist bias. As the edi-tors of Social Text rightly point out at the end of their introduction, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” there is an obvious danger in the fact that the majority of queer scholarship is produced by subjects residing in the West. In their words: “These uneven exchanges replicate in uncomfortable ways the rise and consolida-tion of U.S. empire, as well as the insistent pos-iting of a U.S. nationalist identity and political agenda globally.”31 For these and other reasons, it is thus crucial that ethnomusicologists start to intervene in the production of queer musi-cologies. Feminist and queer musicologists in

31. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” 15.

32. As Ella Shohat writes, “Globalization is not a com-pletely new development; it must be seen as part of the much longer history of colonialism in which Europe at-tempted to submit the world to a single ‘universal’ regime of truth and global institution of power” (“Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge,” Social Text 72, no. 3 [2002]: 67–78, 76).33. See Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 145–71, 147.34. I am paraphrasing Sara Ahmed’s comment here that “women in different nation spaces, within a globalised economy of difference, cannot not encounter each other, what is at stake is how, rather than whether, the encoun-ters take place” (Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality [New York: Routledge, 2000], 167).


heterosexual and always homophobic.”35 The kinds of feminist and queer musicologies that seek to repair such fractures ought not merely to be about making ethnomusicology “queerer” but about acknowledging the extent to which the legacy of colonialism continues to inform the histories historical musicologists tell as well as the hierarchies we unwittingly perpetuate. If we fail to subject the past to critical scrutiny in this way, then all we can ever hope to feel in the future will be pain in our histories.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Suzanne Cusick both for inviting me to write an introduction to the “Queer Vibrations” special section of Women & Music and for her detailed comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

der what circumstances we negotiate difference is of crucial importance if we are to “remap the map” of music scholarship and begin to imagine alternatives. Feminist and queer musicologists, who have long struggled with questions of dif-ference, surely possess both the imagination and the capacity to seek out such alternatives.

If queer musicology is to have a future, I would argue, it is essential that we advocate for the kind of scholarship that encourages us to refl ect upon our own self-positioning as sexual subjects within an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. Women & Music—a journal that has a strong reputation for reach-ing beyond the historical-ethnomusicological divide—will undoubtedly have a crucial part to play in this process. In the case of queer musi-cology we need, fi rst and foremost, to challenge the ways in which, as Jasbir Puar puts it, “the history of Euro-American gay and lesbian stud-ies and queer theory has produced a cleaving of queerness, always white, from race, always

35. See Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homona-tionalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 78.

what's queer about musicology now - rachel lewis

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