What’s Queer About Ethnomusicology Now?
Allan Zheng, Emily Kaniuka, Jordan R. Brown, Garrett Groesbeck, and Anton Blackburn
Introduction
Allan Zheng
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
University of California, Riverside
azhen018@ucr.edu
This special column emerged as a response to this issue’s theme: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. As guest editor for this issue of Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology, I found myself confused by the lack of substantive engagement with queer studies in the accepted submissions. Scholarly conversations surrounding gender and sexuality can’t only be about resisting the white cis-heteropatriarchy, though it is important to unpack. Of course, the essays within the overall issue are not only about resisting the dominant structure. And there must be a number of graduate students engaging with queer and other non-normative subjectivities in their research. At minimum, Queering the Field (2019) and Queer Nightlife (2023) had to have pushed graduate students to start thinking about queer studies and music. I asked Hannah Snavely and Garrett Groesbeck, co-editors of Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology, if I could create a space for early career scholars to discuss the relationship between queer studies and ethnomusicology. Graciously, they agreed! Then, I prepared the call for papers, circulating it within the Rising Voices editorial team and reaching out to individuals in our network.
I sent out a provocation returning to David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz’s (2005) article: “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” They examined the scope of queer theory and its radical approach to the study of empire, nationalism, neoliberalism, diaspora, and epistemology while acknowledging queer theory’s US-centric narrative and approach. I was curious about emerging thoughts and concerns about ethnomusicology’s relationship with queer studies, especially after the publication of Barz and Cheng’s edited volume Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (2019), which was broadly anticipated to be the intervention that deepened our discipline’s collective engagement with queer theory. I had high hopes that it would disrupt the Euro-American centric framing of both queer studies and ethnomusicology while navigating concerns surrounding cultural relativity. To start the conversation, I asked my colleagues an endless barrage of questions: What is queer about ethnomusicology now? What has been our engagement with queer theory? What is the radical edge of queer ethnomusicology? How might ethnomusicologists take up the radical approach of queer theory? What theoretical or methodological approaches are emerging?
I approached this special column with the plan to have multiple short essays with critical and contrasting perspectives and engagements with queer studies and music. Opening the column, Emily Kaniuka draws attention to the lack of crosstalk between ethnomusicology and dance studies. While queer ethnomusicology begins to address embodiment, they argue that ethnomusicologists must also listen to and engage with the vibrant work within dance studies in ways that “demands an attachment to reality and acknowledges that the subjects we study are always already theorizing and deconstructing as we speak.” Jordan Brown writes about the outgrowth of scholarship in Black queer studies that critiques the abstraction of Black sound and aesthetics in nightlife, noting also that these scholars generally work outside of music studies. She argues for the need of heterogeneity through a queer creolité that is capacious and accepting of contrasting approaches to music studies. In his essay, Garrett Groesbeck interlinks the concepts of vulnerability and failure to discuss the conservatory model of composition in relation to Japanese anime music composers. He indicates that the expression of vulnerability through failure generates new possibilities for reimagining composition and research as collaborative and restorative. Anton Blackburn proposes trans ethnomusicology as an alternative to queer ethnomusicology, critiquing how queer theory fails to acknowledge the multiply complex lives of trans people. In particular, they underline how queer studies’ emphases and investments in the radical detract from the “ordinary and less-than-radical lives of our collaborators” of whom ground our research. Thus, queerness reifies itself as a political metaphor rather than an instigation of radical change. I conclude the essays by interrogating how scholars have leveraged “queering” and effectively divorced it from its radical, disruptive dimensions, wondering what it means when everything is queered and how it impacts the radical edge of queerness. I also note my concerns about the portability of “queering” as it reproduces Western liberalism in the Global South. Across the five essays, the authors articulate pointed interventions into ethnomusicology and its identitarian engagements, challenging ongoing disciplinary divides and recognizing undiscussed identity formations in ethnomusicology.
I am immensely excited by the range of ideas and connections. I also really wanted to hear from the authors what they thought of each other’s work. During the revision process, I asked everyone to write short response pieces to each other’s essays. What I wish to accomplish is an asynchronous roundtable where we start a dialogue about the scope, trajectory, and potential of queer and trans music studies. In other words, this is only the beginning of the conversation! I really hope these discussions will spark further discussion among students in music studies.
REFERENCES
Adeyemi, Kemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramon Rivera-Servera, eds. 2021. Queer Nightlife. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Barz, Gregory F., and William Cheng, eds. 2019. Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Eng, David L., Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. 2005. “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 1–17.
Experience is Evidence: Ethnomusicology, Dance, Embodiment
Emily Kaniuka
PhD Candidate, Dance Studies
The Ohio State University
kaniuka.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu 
As a queer scholar who walks the disciplinary line between dance studies and ethnomusicology, my approach to research is informed by my understanding of the body as an essential site of meaning-making, both within the communities I study and in my scholarly pursuit of understanding their cultural practices and identifications. While my research on manifestations of gender and sexualities in hardcore punk makes significant references to the ethnomusicological canon, my fieldwork approach rarely follows the methodological practices of ethnomusicology, opting instead for those of critical dance studies. Aligned with its emphasis on embodied knowledge, dance studies has given more ample consideration to queer theory’s relationship with embodiment and its applications to analyses of cultural practices—something that I find largely lacking, but essential, to ethnomusicological work.
The idea that consideration of the body is critical to a queer approach to ethnomusicology is not a unique one. In his introduction to Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, Gregory Barz lays out five principles that ground his and co-editor William Cheng’s intervention into ethnomusicological tradition:
[T]he queer rejection of heteronormativity in field research design and implementation, the queer embrace of sound as embodied, the queer critique of gendered binaries, the advocacy for queer-identified musical individuals and traditions, and the queered rethinking of inherited theoretical models for analyzing and performing global music traditions” (9; emphasis mine).
Dance studies has long addressed each of these principles. Jane Desmond’s 2001 anthology Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage—comparable to Queering the Field in its role as seminal queer dance studies text—explored the kinesthetics of sexuality and shifting definitions of “queer” and “dance”; Clare Croft’s Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (2017) revisited these themes with sixteen years of additional perspective on both dance studies and queer theory. Both works consider ethnographic methods and research design, embodiment, destabilizing binaries of gender and those imposed by academic institutions, and both queer people and queer perspectives on performance in a transnational context.
Aileen Dillane and Nic Gariess (2020) put forward a corresponding perspective in their contribution to Barz and Cheng’s text. In their chapter, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet: Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of ‘Traditions,’” Dillane and Gareiss posit that, “[c]ompared with ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology (not forgetting the related disciplines of critical dance studies and dance anthropology) arguably has more deliberately engaged with sexual and gender diversity, regularly employing queer scholarship and indeed creating its own queer theory” (252). The authors design to present dancing bodies as a queering methodology by highlighting dance/dancers and ethnochoreological perspectives (236). The poignancy of their suggestion is echoed by the number of other chapters in the volume that focus on dance subject matter (Paudler 2020; Santana 2020; Garcia 2020; Hankins 2020; Thorne 2020). Thus, a consistent theme across Queering the Field is that the embodied experience of musical production and listening is fundamental to the “queering” project. Yet, beyond Dillane and Gariess, contributors do not employ dance as a theoretical lens so much as discuss dance cultures as objects of study. I echo their awareness of the importance of dance, or embodiment more broadly, to ethnomusicological study, but suggest that further engagement with theories and methodologies that arise from the body is needed in queer/ing fieldwork.
In his searing critique of queer theory and ethnomusicology’s infelicitous intersections, Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity: Silence = Death (2024), Stephen Amico (2024) identifies that the hierarchy of textual over experiential is a manifestation of colonial and masculinist values. He calls for prioritizing the experiential as a legitimate source of knowledge that escapes the disciplining traps of ethnomusicology as an institution. Across works on queerness in critical dance studies, these divisions are remedied through a bridging of theory (mind/textual) and method (body/experience). Ramón Rivera-Servera considers danced “theories in practice,” or “the knowledges by and within performance” of queer Latinidad (2012, 18), which Hannah Kosstrin applies as “practice-in-research,” a methodology by which the researcher uses kinesthetic analytical tools to read a dance archive—she mobilizes her own dance training and bodily knowledge to understand the theories in practice of her subjects (2020, 20). Similarly, Kareem Khubchandani uses drag as a method, engaging in the performances he studies because “[p]erformance as method, optic, and object of analysis allows for us to consider a greater range of axes of power functioning in the space and on the bodies inside” (2020, 189). Hannah Schwadron’s writing encourages readers to “see and perceive in queer ways, identifying and disidentifying with the material from inside-outside points of view” (Schwadron 2018, 21). To realize, rather than just romanticize, Barz’s call for “the queer embrace of sound as embodied” (2020, 9), perhaps the most beneficial offering of scholarship on queer dance (or more aptly, queer dance scholarship) is this unification between theory and method.
A methodology that assumes that experience is evidence, or as Jane Desmond cited in 2001, “Bodily motion [is] specific evidence” (Desmond 2001, 13), challenges binaries by moving away from the mind-body divide. It questions what we consider to be knowledge, expands where and when theorization happens, and includes activism and practice within conceptions of “scholarship.” Queer theory is often critiqued for its ambiguity and utopianism, where the promise of non-normative futurity prevents any realistic application. A queer approach to ethnomusicology that centers embodiment in both theory and method demands an attachment to reality; it accounts for queer experiences of the euphoric and dysphoric, urgency, violence, joy, survival, and desire as housed in and understood through the bodies of subject and researcher alike.
REFERENCES
Amico, Stephen. 2024. Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity: Silence = Death. Palgrave MacMillan.
Barz, Gregory. 2020. “Queering the Field: An Introduction.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. New York: Oxford University Press.
Croft, Clare. 2017. Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings. Oxford University Press.
Desmond, Jane. 2001. Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On & Off the Stage. University of Wisconsin Press.
Dillane, Aileen and Nic Gariess. 2020. “The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet: Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of ‘Traditions.’” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Garcia, Luis-Manuel. 2020. “The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Hankins, Sarah. 2020. “Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis: A Queer Look at Sex and Race in Fieldwork.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Khubchandani, Kareem. 2020. Ishstyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. University of Michigan Press.
Kosstrin, Hannah. 2020. “Kinesthetic Seeing: A Model for Practice-in-Research.” In Futures of Dance Studies, edited by Rebecca Schneider, Janice Ross, and Susan Manning. University of Wisconsin Press.
Paudler, Heather J. 2020. “’I’m Not Gay, I’m Black’: Assumptions and Limitations of the Normative Queer Gaze in a Panamanian Dance-Drama.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Rivera-Servera, Ramón. 2012. Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. University of Michigan Press.
Santana, Matthew Leslie. 2020. “Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?: Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Schwadron, Hannah. 2018. The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, & Jewish Joke-Work in U.S. Pop Culture. Oxford University Press.
Thorne, Cory W. 2020. “’Man Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas‘: Saluting the Orichá in a Cuban Gay Bar.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Queer Creolité
Jordan R. Brown
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
Harvard University
jbrown@g.harvard.edu
Within the American cultural landscape, queerness, as articulated through social, political, and aesthetic means, functions as a critical site through which the hegemonic negotiations of American society are both mirrored and contested. Much like the painful legacy of Blackface minstrelsy embedded within United States popular music, race within the queer community still remains sharply divided, particularly for Black and brown queer-identifying individuals, a dynamic that is further embodied in music scholarship. Within dominant Eurocentric musical paradigms, the act of hearing exaggerated aesthetics of Blackness without the visibility of Black bodies articulates what Matthew D. Morrison (2024) defines as “Blacksound.” From the tokenization of Black queer performance to the co-optation of Black queer dialect, colonizing forces have manifested Black queer aesthetics not only through musical expression but also through the physical embodiment and commodification of Black individuals. To resist the ongoing commodification pervasive within queer music studies and broader cultural discourses, I propose embracing “the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity” in queer ethnomusicology, or what Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Constant call “creolité” (1989, 89).
Matthew D. Morrison writes that blackface performance, beginning in the 1800s, is a “music-theatrical form [that] laid the foundation both for popular entertainment in the nation and for the circulation, embodiment, and construction of racial and racist ideologies in quotidian and commercialized styles” (2019, 786). The legacy of this racialized sonic framework is further reflected in the treatment of the Black voice itself, as Farah Jasmine Griffin reminds us in her chapter “When Malindy Sings” (2015). She writes that the voice can become a powerful representation of false-equity, demonstrating the aesthetic as separate from the people suffering within the system itself:
If we consider the ways that the American State Department selected jazz to represent national culture abroad during the Cold War, even as the government continued to deny black Americans full citizenship at home, or the contemporary global circulation of contemporary hip hop culture, then the black woman’s voice as representative American voice doesn’t seem so ironic after all. When we consider the United States’s uncanny ability to co-opt and commodify voices of dissent, it doesn’t appear so contradictory (19).
If these instances occur in everyday American society, it must be apparent that this divide is only magnified within the queer community, both historic and present. Bars and clubs, central to queer cultural life and community formation, illustrate how neoliberal forces disrupt spaces that once functioned as sites of refuge, further revealing the tensions between commercialization and the cultural autonomy of marginalized identities.
Many seemingly accepting queer bars now have incorporated “no rap” policies into their repertoire, a rule that specifically targets Black patrons (Adeyemi 2022, 14). This attempt to deculturate Black bodies from queer spaces but acculturate Black aesthetics into white spaces marks a transculturation into a new queer political soundscape (Ortiz 1940), one in which authentic Black queerness, with all of our sociopolitics, is commodified under late-stage capitalism while the humanity behind the aesthetic is forced back into the underground. These constrictive policies are further exemplified within the music itself, as the heavy bass, syncopated beats, and polyrhythmic sounds of Black commercial genres such as hip-hop, R&B, funk, and soul, to name a few, are stripped from their original tune. This textural element of Black music is often the one most subject to cultural essentialization, as emphasized by Kofi Agawu. He writes that:
The notion that the distinctive quality of African music lies in its rhythmic structure, and consequently that the terms African music and African rhythm are often interchangeable, has been so persistently thematized in writings about African music that it has by now assumed the status of a commonplace, a topos. And so it is with the related ideas that African rhythms are complex, that Africans are essentially rhythmic people, and that Africans are different from “us” – from Euro-Americans (1995, 380).
The omission of the stereotyped “Black” musical elements from social spaces represents a sonic distancing from the perception of Afro-diasporic blackness found in the white imagination (T. Morrison 1992). To return to Matthew Morrison, “blackness serves as a performative foil through which to imagine oneself not as, and in fact distant from, the ‘other,’ while constructing one’s own white self through masked and embodied modes of black performativity” (2024, 86). Public figures such as Samuel L. Jackson have also spoken on such a matter such as in his role as “Uncle Sam” during Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Superbowl performance, stating that Black music in America is perceived as “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto,” demonstrating the belittlement of the Black aesthetic as lower-class (NFL 2025, 2:47-3:03). In sum, the erasure of the stereo-typified rhythmic elements of Black music in nightlife spaces is an attempt to depoliticize minority musics to cater to the dominant caste.
These narratives are reflected in both historical accounts and contemporary media, including the documentary Paris is Burning (1990), the musical Rent (2005), and television shows like Pose (2018) and A League of Their Own (2022). Even in the current day, large-scale American LGBTQ+ events such as Pride that were once in place to celebrate the entire community and the true queer spirit of grassroots organizing have now been replaced with persuasive marketing that conflates the consumption of queer merchandising with true “acceptance.”
In response to the physical policing and criminalization of queer and trans people during the 1960s, a wave of political resistance emerged, most notably the Stonewall Uprising on June 28th, 1969. This rebellion, centered at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was led and sustained by Black and Latinx queer and trans youth, including key figures such as Marsha P. Johnson (of Black American descent), Sylvia Rivera (of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan heritage), and Stormé DeLarverie (of biracial ancestry). To commemorate the uprising, activists organized “Christopher Street Liberation Day” on June 28th, 1970, marking the first Pride march and solidifying Pride events as rooted in activism, protest, and political solidarity. However, the radical origins of Pride have been largely obscured by its contemporary manifestations. Today, Pride is often celebrated as a commodified, “rainbow capitalist” spectacle, dominated by white, middle-class representation and corporate sponsorship. This mainstream rendering of queerness marginalizes people of color and renders the complexity of queer and trans lived experience, particularly that of Black and brown communities, largely invisible, relegating it once again to the cultural underground. Academically speaking, this complex history and its ongoing, deeply felt pain is often collapsed into the broad category of “queer studies.” When this is done without intentional dialogue among the oppressed communities it concerns, a dominant narrative emerges, while other voices are silenced and buried beneath it. This dominant narrative persists within music studies, where certain queer and racialized experiences are continually left untheorized.
Queer ethnomusicology as a framework in music studies rarely includes Black history as queer history. Much of racially diverse material specifically on Black queerness comes from outside of the music discipline, resulting in music scholars outsourcing for information on the subject. Jafari S. Allen cosigns this notion, stating “Black/queer ethnographic work draws its understanding of Black subjects as agents centered in their own globally situated political-economic dramas, and of the anthropologist as an observant full participant, coauthoring witness, and chronicler—aligned and in on the joke, the groove, and the affect—from the decolonizing stream of anthropology, which has yet to be fully critically assessed, much less socialized in graduate training” (2016, 621). Scholars of African and African American studies, anthropology, and cultural studies such as E. Patrick Johnson, Jafari S. Allen, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Audre Lorde, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Reid-Pharr, and many more have paved the way for Black queer studies in music from outside of the music discipline. This is not to overlook significant works at the intersection of Blackness, queerness, and music such as the written works Flaming? by Alisha Lola Jones (2020), “Let’s Flip It!” by Gayle Murchinson (2018), and Songs in Black and Lavender by Eileen Hayes (2010), as well as the scoring of E. Patrick Johnson’s Making Sweet Tea film by Guthrie Ramsey (2021). These works begin to scratch the surface of this intersectional inquiry, and should be surrounded by more accompanying sources from within the discipline – at what point can we ask: why does such diversity continue to struggle to take root within the queer music studies community itself?
It is with great hope that I offer a queer creolité, or a radical embrace of the nuanced multiplicities of human experience within queer music studies. Queer ethnomusicology has the opportunity to diversify its heterogeneity instead of homogenize to the dominant narrative under the word “queer.” It is also the responsibility of emerging scholars, myself included, alongside brilliant voices like Joseph Johnson (Indiana University) and Victoria Smith (NYU), to continually reassess queer music studies in ways that reflect and sustain this critical endeavor. Through a queer creolité, I envision a reevaluation of existing queer frameworks and a reconfiguration of queer music studies that critically centers Black and Indigenous epistemologies as among the many foundational origins that shape our scholarly approaches.
REFERENCES
Adeyemi, Kemi. 2022. Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago. Duke University Press.
Agawu, Kofi. 1995. “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm.’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (3): 380–95.
Allen, Jafari S. 2016. “One View From A Deterritorialized Realm: How Black/Queer Renarrativizes Anthropological Analysis.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (4): 617–26.
Allen, Jafari S. 2022. There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life. Duke University Press.
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Constant. 1993 [1989]. Eloge de la Créolité. Gallimard.
Delany, Samuel R. 2019 [1999]. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. 20th anniversary edition. New York University Press.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 2004 “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.” In Uptown Conversation, edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Robert O’Meally. Columbia University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton and Company.
Hayes, Eileen M. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music. University of Illinois Press.
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2001. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (1): 1–25.
Jones, Alisha Lola. 2020. Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance. Oxford University Press.
Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times/Black Futures. New York University Press.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. “The Stonewall Uprising of 1969.” Web page. Accessed May 19, 2025. https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/june-28/.
Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press.
Making Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Accessed May 20, 2025. https://tubitv.com/movies/100018240/making-sweet-tea.
Morrison, Matthew D. 2024. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. University of California Press.
Morrison, Matthew D. 2019. “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72 (3): 781–823.
Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books.
Murchison, Gayle. 2018. “Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations: Black Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to Labelle.” Women & Music 22 (1): 79–90.
NFL. 2025. “Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDorKy-13ak.
Ortiz, Fernando. 1995 [1940]. Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar. Duke University Press.
Reid-Pharr, Robert. 2007. Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual. NYU Press.
Queer Approaches to Ethnographic Fieldwork: Disorientation, Failure, and Vulnerability
Garrett Groesbeck
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
Wesleyan University
ggroesbeck@wesleyan.edu 
“We anthropologists – merely poor relatives of Pablo Neruda – leave behind our own trails of longings, desires, and unfulfilled expectations in those upon whom we descend. About that vulnerability we are still barely able to speak.” (Behar 1997, 25)
“Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” (Halberstam 2011, 2, emphasis added)
Musicians trained within the conservatory system are oriented toward music in particular ways. In Bonnie Wade’s (2014, 22-23) examination of Japanese composers, she draws particular attention to the concepts of “affordances” and “competencies” within the “infrastructures of modernity” that shape their practice: “An ‘affordance’ is a quality of an environment that allows an individual or offers an individual an opportunity to perform an action, dependent on his or her competency.” Wade’s study effectively illustrates the impact of scholars who have been successful under the Euroclassical composer model. In my current research on Japanese composers, I am intrigued by the specters around the periphery of that success who, like myself, for one reason or another, fail to demonstrate key competencies, and whose musical paths skip the grooves of affordance that run deep through higher education music departments. More intriguingly, what about musicians who aspire to the concert hall but arrive there via unexpected paths, bypassing lessons in solfege, orchestration, counterpoint, and keyboard performance?
Much has been written about queer theory’s failure to materialize its presumed potential for the radical, the revolutionary, and the universally transformative. Nevertheless, I am not ready to give up on queer theory yet: I believe that it can still inform aspects of our ethnomusicological practice, particularly due to its foregrounding of disjunctures between the fixity of "institutions" (conceived broadly; for example, the "institution" of marriage) and the messy heterogeneity of lived experience. Reflecting on my current research, I suggest two ways in which queer theory might shape ethnomusicological inquiry. First, on an analytical level, I consider the ways in which scholars in queer theory have urged a continual attention to “reevaluating the logics of success and failure with which we currently live,” given that “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (Halberstam 2011, 2). On a methodological level, queer theory has the potential to shape our stance toward research questions, collaborators, and our own status as musicians of one kind of another: how do we represent ourselves to interlocutors? Who do we gravitate toward as “successful” case studies, typifiers of a given genre or group? How might institutions have failed, missed, or overlooked some musicians? For my purposes, I am particularly interested in the role “failure” (Ibid.) has played in queer theory, in dialogue with Ruth Behar’s (1997) call for vulnerability in ethnographic research.
I understand my own musical journey as being shaped by significant failures. Growing up in Wyoming, playing the piano in church services and violin in the school orchestra, hardly any of the educators in my life could have imagined the path my musical journey would eventually take. Though I enjoyed learning about four-part harmony, my perverse interest in music at the periphery of the orchestra (the harp) and beyond (video game soundtracks) kept pulling me off-course, away from well-worn paths; my skill as a performer was never enough to even dream about life as a professional pianist or symphony orchestra musician. After an undergraduate degree in music composition and several years teaching English in Japan, I received a scholarship from the Japanese government to study composition there, but over the course of the two-year program, my lack of success as a composer grew into a rising sense of “disorientation” (Ahmed 2006, 5). What might it mean to embrace my failure as a composer in my current research? Discovering ethnomusicology, after long experience of musically wandering, felt like a homecoming: “what takes my breath away, are not so much the giddy experiences of moving and the disorientation of being out of place, but the ways we have of settling; that is, of inhabiting spaces that … might come to feel like home.” (Ahmed 2006, 11) Ethnomusicologists are particularly skilled at envisioning musical paths beyond the well-traversed roadmaps often laid out in our formative musical training.
Today I work with composers of soundtrack music for anime in Tokyo, seeking to understand the ways in which their creative work is reshaping not only the digital soundscape, but the concert hall. I seek to overturn narratives of “aspirational cosmopolitanism” (Baratt-Peacock 2022) in which Japanese musicians are simply mastering, imitating, or localizing musics that originated elsewhere. Indeed, anime soundtrack music is proving to be a significant emerging area of programming for orchestras throughout the world, and Japanese composers are important agents in reimagining what roles the symphony orchestra might have in the twenty-first century. In conversations throughout my fieldwork, seeking to foreground vulnerability, I have frequently described myself as a “failed composer,” a phrase that often elicits uncomfortable laughs and reflexive denials (even from those who have not heard my music). I believe this vulnerability opened a space for frank conversations about competitiveness in the music industry, as well as budget concerns, the potential precarity of freelance work, anxieties over critic evaluations, and the never ending process of networking and branding oneself, not entirely different from the “professional rituals of displacement that are at the heart of anthropology” (Behar 1997, 21) (and, similarly, ethnomusicology).
My conversations with anime music composers have highlighted the collaborative role that performers of Japanese instruments, such as the koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi, play in the creation of anime music soundtracks. Given their marginalized role in formal music education in Japan, most professional composers are, in a sense, exempted from the expectation of prior knowledge about how to write for them. In studio recording sessions, with limited time, performers of Japanese instruments are often invited to improvise or broadly adapt composer material in order to make it playable. I contrast this with my own training in orchestration during my undergraduate composition studies. Certainly, we were encouraged to meet with performers and learn about their instruments, and orchestration courses involved a number of arranging projects for a variety of different ensembles. However, the goal of this educational approach seemed to be for the composer to ultimately internalize such knowledge, so as to one day grow beyond the need to consult instrumentalists when writing specific parts for the orchestra. By contrast, anime music composers expressed to me that they are willing to be vulnerable when speaking of Japanese instruments, describing a great deal of collaborative agency afforded to performers.
Symphony orchestras today are confronting a moment of profound disorientation. The model of the successful composer which underlies conservatory-style training is the product of a particular historical context, centered around Romantic notions of the symphony orchestra and its associated patronage models, which are undergoing a long process of breakdown. Bonnie Wade (2014, 23) notes that in Japan “not even professional composers assume that the professoriate will be the primary source of their livelihood … Rather than composing music as an autonomous art, most composers [in Japan] have been and are grounded in the social.” I argue that this type of composition, grounded in the social, is in fact much closer to typical modes of human musical creation, and only appears to be an aberration under the hegemonic conditions of the late twentieth- and twenty-first century global music academy. An invulnerable composer should demonstrate total mastery of the knowledge required to write for symphony orchestra: they should know what instruments are available, their ranges, timbres, idiomatic writing and extended technique. This type of knowledge is schematic and total, and justifies the composer’s genius as an elevated figure who hands down scores from on high. By contrast, queer, vulnerable approaches to composition open the space for collaboration, performer contributions, and admitting to not knowing; for valuing the expertise of instrumentalists and pedagogues, whose forms of knowing and musicking should not be considered as ranking below that of composers in a hierarchy of creation. Furthermore, honestly acknowledging the profound disorientation of the current moment offers the opportunity to look ahead to new musical “homes” for the symphony orchestra, ones which are open to a broader range of composers which includes figures both from the academy and beyond.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
Barratt-Peacock, Ruth. 2022. “Aspirational Cosmopolitanism in Classical Music Anime: Adapting Romantic Legacies in Forest of Piano.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1): 9-26.
Behar, Ruth. 1997. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Beacon Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.
Wade, Bonnie C. 2014. Composing Japanese Musical Modernity. University of Chicago Press.
Trans Ethnomusicology; Or, Deidealizing Queer Ethnomusicology
Anton Blackburn
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
Duke University
anton.blackburn@duke.edu
If the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes, and perhaps also yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively. Judith Butler (1993, 19, emphasis added)
In the wake of Queering the Field, ethnomusicology has suffered the same fate as musicology did with Queering the Pitch. Both fields, to be clear, have pursued queerness as a normative missing person’s case, rather than an intellectual transformation of concepts that responds to political realities. Where scholars in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies have long debated romantic attachments to the inherent radicality of queerness, queer musicology and ethnomusicology are still trying to relate “queerness” to “music” and “the field.” This paper argues that ethnomusicologists, myself included, ought to be critical of the political work we expect queerness to do.
This provocation urges us to look past queerness as a regulatory ideal, an identity, or even a praxis. Drawing on trans studies and trans politics, the stakes of this directive are not rooted merely in ethnomusicology’s consistent misapplications of (queer) theory but are borne out of the broader forestalling brought about by our (academic, personal, political) attachments to queerness. This piece articulates questions central to trans ethnomusicology by first outlining my particular frustrations with queer theory. After then offering a summation of the limits of Queering the Field, I historicize queer studies/theory in order to situate the debated frictions between queer and trans studies. This serves to flesh out why queer may not always be a useful political term for certain political moments. These questions may intimate a trans method which can also inform seemingly non-trans issues (Velocci 2024).
By summoning “trans ethnomusicology” in a partial critique of “queer ethnomusicology,” I am not supporting their opposition. Neither affirming an idealized queerness nor convinced that trans ethnomusicology will not be possible with whatever queer ethnomusicology may be, I am concerned with what transness tells us that queerness does not. I write from a position that is formed by the politics of my home and field site, the United Kingdom. This is an extremely anti-trans nation in which trans philosophers are rightly pointing out that such conditions do not move toward anything that “would target cisgender queer people” (Cashmore 2025). In Britain, “trans” may soon name that within queerness which must be excluded. Accordingly, it must be realized that oppressions of gender and sexuality in the UK are currently rooted in a distinct anti-transness. In writing against – in close contact with – queerness, therefore, I am calling for an ethnomusicology which does not reduce trans people to figures of anti-normative resistance, but hears them as persons whose desires may not always align with how queerness has come to be thought in the academy (Baitz 2018; Keegan 2020; Gill-Peterson 2024). In other words, the field in which I work demands that I look for answers that queerness alone might not be able to give.
Trans ethnomusicology will always have a relationship with queer ethnomusicology (Roy 2016, 2019; Santana 2025); even across the apparent ethno/musicology divide, those of us working at the intersection of music, gender, and sexuality do not treat queer and trans as wholly discrete analytics, methods, or objects (Krell 2013; Pennington 2018a, 2018b; Medina 2023). Putting my affirmation of this relationship aside, however, I want to draw out some of the issues with queerness as it has consolidated in ethnomusicology.
Long after the development of queer musicology, Queering the Field (2019) sought “subversive” transformations of queer for ethnomusicology, from “the queer embrace of sound as embodied” and “the queer critique of gendered binaries” to “the advocacy for queer-identified musical individuals” (Barz 2019, 13–17). However, Barz’s introduction to the volume relies heavily on a definitely indefinite and infinitely mobile conception of queerness, not to mention uncontested commitments to contested categories (embodiment, gendered binaries, and identity). Though an immanent critique could be equally compelling, I believe taking a temporary break from ethnomusicological attempts at queering in favor of learning from gender, sexuality, and feminist studies could be productive. By turning now to historicizations of queer theory and queer studies from without, I hope to unsettle ethnomusicology’s aspirational applications of queer theory.
In their 2005 special issue introduction, David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz echoed previous articulations of queer theory as a commitment to anti-normativity that “need not have a certain kind of political content” (Berlant and Warner 1995, 347). To be clear, the authors celebrated that queer is “a political metaphor without a referent” (Eng et al. 2005, 1). With no actual referent, or political content, queer could be applied to anything, anywhere, anytime. An objectless concept, queerness has been sustained by such desires for its prefigurative pluri-potentialities. Yet Jasbir Puar (2007, 22–23), among others, has critiqued this conception of queer – indefinite and infinitely mobile – for its invocation of “the values of autonomy, individualism, and choice enshrined within liberalism.”
Always on the move, “forever in search of that object,” queer studies long sought an intervention that would “make good on the political promise that inaugurated” the field (Amin 2017, 181, emphasis added). This affective attachment to the political moment of the 1990s is the subject of Kadji Amin’s call to deidealize queer theory. Here Amin follows Puar to caution against queer’s paradoxical lack of object and infinite capacity to attach to any object, instead urging us to look for grounded historicizations that are cognizant of the nostalgic desires for queerness to always be the subversive radicality that was promised in the 1990s.
The most prescient disidentifications with queerness, similarly dissatisfied with queerness’ ahistorically infinitesimal ideality, come from trans studies. In dialogue with Emmett Harsin Drager, Andrea Long Chu (2019, 107–108) has bemoaned trans studies’ allyship with queer studies. For Chu, “transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t,” and thus “trans theory … will be impossible with anti-normativity.” Queerness’ preoccupation with subverting normativity is an enduring case which sidelines the lives (and deaths) of trans people (Gill-Peterson 2024, 125–129). While trans studies is not unanimous on its relation to queer (Keegan 2020), this heterogeneity invites us to ask why we want ethnomusicology to do or be queer. What does an ethnomusicologist write when, say, the transfemme musicians they work with do not claim to disrupt the binary? What if their understanding of their musicking is that it is a search for ordinariness, an attempt to sound out conventional femininity, or even an act of mourning transfemicide? Would we write that these desires, as Judith Butler (2011, 84) did, “cannot be called subversive,” that they are naïve investments which reidealize “hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms?” Or would we disregard our interlocutors and theorize their lives as actually radical and anti-normative anyway? Hopefully neither.
It is not that trans ethnomusicology requires that queer ethnomusicology ceases operation. What these questions call for, rather, is an account of complex personhood, of actual trans people navigating life musically, socially, institutionally. While this does not require queer ethnomusicology to be at fault, I maintain that it is an ethnographic endeavor that would have to let go of the attachment to queerness as an inherently radical regulatory ideal that we seek to find in the field. This is important for trans ethnomusicology in particular, but I would wager that a refusal of queerness’ universal politicality would also serve any ethnomusicologist concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality.
Going into the field and anticipating or desiring queerness might distract us both from the sonics of gender and sexuality and the institutional constraints through which they are mutually sustained. Since neither ethnomusicology nor musicology have interrogated their attachments to “queer,” our assumptions about its ontological materialization and epistemological promise have limited our understanding of the musical politics of gender and sexuality. In other words, questions of the “radical approach” or the “radical queer edge” perpetuate queer as a political metaphor and, second, urge a commitment to queerness without critically interrogating its efficacy. As such, it might be time to stop listening for queerness altogether.
Butler (1993, 19) once noted the possibility of queerness’ demise in light of more politically effective terms. Though Butler did not provide alternatives, as ethnographers, we are uniquely positioned to offer concepts as they emerge on the ground, as terms like “queer” land in actuality and are worked out, reworked, or refused. The goal of music ethnography has never been to separate the conceptual (theory) and the empirical (ethnography), testing out theories in the field like a laboratory (Born 2010; Boyer and Howe 2015). Whether queer or trans ethnomusicology, we thus have to avoid being interpellated by queerness as a transcendental analytic or prefigurative practice that can preclude the radical generation of new, or at least more effective, political arguments.
If there is anything queer about ethnomusicology, then or now, we ought to at the very least deidealize what we think this achieves conceptually and politically. If trans ethnomusicology were to come into being – whether trans is a method of interrogating any naturalization of cisness (Velocci 2024, 120), or where trans-feminization and -identification are the object and subject of inquiry (Gill-Peterson 2024) – it would have to take a break from the unending search for a sufficiently radical, anti-normative (musical) object that realizes the prefigurative desires of queerness. Accepting more broadly that radical queerness is a regulatory ideal might mean yielding queer as a political desire, terminating our merry chase for queer in the field. Only then might we be able to focus on the often ordinary and less-than-radical lives of our collaborators. Conceptually, it might mean reckoning with what is particular about anti-transness – in ways perhaps incommensurable with queerness. After queerness, we might begin writing about the ways in which music partakes in legitimate desires for, as Andrea Long Chu (2019, 107) puts it, a “normal fucking life.”
REFERENCES
Amin, Kadji. 2017. “Epilogue: Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories.” In Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Duke University Press.
Baitz, Dana. 2018. “Toward a Trans* Method in Musicology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, eds. Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley. Oxford University Press.
Barz, Gregory. 2019. “Queering the Field: An Introduction.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, eds. Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. 1995. “Guest Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 110 (3): 343–349.
Bey, Marquis. 2022. Black Trans Feminism. Duke University Press.
Born, Georgina. 2010. “The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production.” Cultural Sociology 4(2): 171–208.
Boyer, Dominic and Cymene Howe. 2015. “Portable Analytics and Lateral Theory.” In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition, eds. Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus. Cornell University Press
Butler, Judith. 1993. “Critically Queer.” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1(1): 17–32.
Butler, Judith. 2011 [1993]. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge Classics.
Cashmore, Billie. 2025. “On the Political Character of Queerness.” Splinter (April 16).
Chu, Andrea Long and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–116.
Eng, David L., J. Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. 2005. “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23 (3–4): 1–17.
Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2024. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Verso.
Keegan, Cáel M. 2020. “Against Queer Theory.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7 (3): 349–353.
Krell, Elias. 2013. “Contours through Covers: Voice and Affect in the Music of Lucas Silveira.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25(4): 476–503.
Medina, Alejandrina. 2023. “The Trans Ear/(h)earing.” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 4(3): 300–314.
Pennington, Stephan. 2018a. “Willmer Broadnax, Midcentury Gospel, and Black Trans/Masculinities.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 22: 117–125.
Pennington, Stephan. 2018b. “Transgender Passing Guides and the Vocal Performance of Gender and Sexuality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, eds. Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley. Oxford University Press.
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press.
Roy, Jeff. 2016. “Translating Hijra into Transgender: Performance and Pehchān in India’s Trans-Hijra Communities.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(3–4): 412–432.
Roy, Jeff. 2019. “Con/Figuring Transgender-Hījrā Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, eds. Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Santana, M. Myrta Leslie. 2025. Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba. University of Michigan Press.
Velocci, Beans. 2024. “Denaturing Cisness, or, Toward Trans History as Method.” In Feminism Against Cisness, ed. Emma Heaney. Duke University Press.
What Does “Queering” Accomplish?
Allan Zheng
PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology
University of California, Riverside
azhen018@ucr.edu
“Queering” feels like one of those academic buzzwords that signifies a radical approach or reimagining of scholarship and research. After the publishing of Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (2019), I remembered seeing sessions in the SEM national conference program titled “Queering [insert genre, performance practice, or community here]” during 2021 and 2022. It was loud and queer and everything was being queered. More optimistically, it looked like ethnomusicology’s queer turn. Scholars dove into the world of nightlife and queerness, discussing how nightlife spaces, spaces with prominent music and dance, are places of escape, temporary liberation, and fraught with danger (Adeyemi, Khubchandani, Rivera-Servera eds. 2021). These discussions promoted the nascent and ongoing conversations about ethnomusicology’s relationship to queer theory and queer studies at large. As a graduate student doing coursework during the early 2020s, I was excited at the idea of trying to meld together conversations in Southeast Asian Studies, queer studies, and ethnomusicology. What were the connections? What were the missing links? At the same time, I wondered about the utility of queer theory as it related to my work. Certainly the raw potential of queer theory had useful tools for analysis and queer of color critique was incredibly valuable for me in thinking about the intersections of queerness and race. But how does queer studies apply to the Global South? And, when I left for fieldwork, what could it mean for my work in Cambodia?
Because of its popularity, I want to trouble how scholars have taken up “queering” and define what I believe queering necessitates in scholarship. I frame the following discussion of what queering accomplishes in part through Rodrick Ferguson’s (2004, 2005) critique of sociology in which he argues that sociology has constructed a canon grounded in enlightenment ideologies that perpetuate white racial formations and heterosexual patriarchy. Ferguson explained that the canon of queer studies in the early 2000s was subscribed to normative structures surrounding gender, sexuality, and queerness, failing to recognize and properly address nonheteronormative racial formations and the contributions of bodies constrained with these formations to the discipline. I am concerned that ethnomusicology as a discipline, in all its well-intentioned approaches, has not completely overcome issues surrounding race, queerness, and identity formations in the Global South.
With careful consideration of popular discourse around queerness and queer subjectivities, I think of the word “queer” as an umbrella identity term that broadly represents genders and sexualities outside of heteronormative constructs and beyond the gender binary of cis-men and cis-women. Given that queerness implies a vast constellation of identities and approaches to life that concretize and unsettle identity politics and essentialism, I consider queer and queerness as a political orientation aimed at transforming society and deconstructing social norms. I find myself disappointed with how queering has been leveraged to gesture vaguely towards the “not yet here” or some impossibly ephemeral change out in the horizons that will radically transform the world. I am guilty of writing this way too. What exactly does queerness do? Of course, we should take José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) famous framing of queerness and its potential seriously. Yet, since queerness is indeed not yet here, I stress that it requires radical change and on-the-ground critical intervention. Otherwise, it may never arrive. William Cheng provocatively asserts that “if we are intent on verbing queer, then queer needs to pay its dues as an action word. Queer isn’t just liminality, interstitiality, and performativity. Queer is the bottles thrown, the bodies broken, the flesh and the flame, the strategic rationing and renewal of how many fucks we have left to give” (Cheng 2020, 328). Similarly, I claim that if queering is meant to be an action, then it must do, act, and make at minimum. Dismantle, destroy, and provoke whenever possible.
In particular, I am interested in how ideas about queerness have circulated for LGBTQIA+ peoples globally. Queer as an identity marker is a globalizing identity. However, it moves unevenly as it is taken up and ported around by NGOs, educators, and other institutions. Thus, I am increasingly cautious with how queer, queerness, queering, and queer studies have been ported in Cambodia and the Global South. During my fieldwork in Cambodia, queerness has taken on a different meaning, though not wholly divorced from its US-European context. It moves into the realm of human rights and social justice, in ways that reproduce homonormativity, homonationalism, and neoliberal inclusion, while seemingly making strides for on-the-ground change and visibility that has (presumably) become the goalposts in the Global South. I consider the celebration of Pride month in Cambodia as one instance of how Euro-American ideas about the LGBTQIA+ movement have superficially transmitted themselves across the world. Indeed, the creation of queer spaces and times serve as invaluable opportunities for social change. And yet, visibility, recognition, and representation have become the central rallying point to which people generally believe that anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination will be “solved.” These aims do not address the continued abjection and violence that LGBTQIA+ people experience, while Pride month serves as this celebratory moment for what Western scholars would frame as neoliberal inclusion. Therefore, the same issues in the United States surrounding the inefficacy of visibility and representation are reproduced, especially if we turn to the elimination of policies related to multiculturalism and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In 2025, it is more obvious to the general public that the reliance on these ideologies, grounded in enlightenment philosophy and American liberal politics, cannot be sustained.
What does “queering” accomplish? From an optimistic viewpoint, I should be asking: what can “queering” accomplish? I do think this is a line of thought worth pursuing. At the same time, I am worried about the radical dimensions of “queering” and its transformative power to pervert, corrupt, and upend normative structures. Where did the acts of dismantling and defilement go? How did “queering” leave behind its powerful acts of dismantling in favor of critique? With the understanding that imperialism installed the heteronormative matrix across Asia while erasing and subsuming plural constructions of gender and sexuality (Patil 2018; Peletz 2006), and presumably the world, will taking up “queering” in former colonies and broadly the Global South reproduce colonialism? How is it being imposed? What is the action and outcome of “queering” beyond the scholarly analysis as it coalesces into text, presentation, and discussion in classrooms and at conferences? For ethnomusicologists, what does queer theory do for our scholarly work? Conversely, what does ethnomusicology do for queer theory?
Queer studies and queer of color critique offer in-roads into how to intervene on an international scale and in our uniquely situated research contexts. M. Santana’s (2019) essay in Queering the Field rightly points to the need for a queer of color music studies that understands sexuality within the wide range of social formations underlying music and performance that generate coalitions across difference, voicing how difference is not singular and independent but multivalent and layered. This conversation about queer of color critique and music studies are certainly underway. There is also much more work and intellectual labor to be done in terms of how we as ethnomusicologists leverage cultural relativism and ethnographic methods to consider the glocal expressions of queerness and relational difference. I am especially impatient in yearning for the crucial and necessary theoretical and political interventions that I imagine to be imminent. Perhaps from here, we can think about the power of “queering.”
REFERENCES
Adeyemi, Kemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramon Rivera-Servera, eds. 2021. Queer Nightlife. University of Michigan Press.
Barz, Gregory F., and William Cheng, eds. 2019. Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press.
Cheng, William. 2020. “Coming through Loud and Queer: Ethnomusicology Ethics of Voice and Violence in Real and Virtual Battlegrounds.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. “Introduction: Queer of Color Critique, Historical Materialism, and Canonical Sociology.” In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2005. “Race-Ing Homonormativity: Citizenship, Sociology, and Gay Identity.” In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G Henderson. Duke University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019 [2009]. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 2nd Edition. New York University Press.
Patil, Vrushali. 2018. “The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect.” Sociological Theory 36 (1): 1–26.
Peletz, Michael G. 2006. “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times.” Current Anthropology 47 (2): 309–40.
Santana, M. Myrta Leslie. 2020. “Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness: Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies.” In Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and William Cheng. Oxford University Press.
Responses
As mentioned in the introduction, each author could choose to write brief responses to another author’s piece. Each response teases out the generative elements of each other’s works and beautifully engages with the core ideas and interventions. Some of us ask each other wonderfully insightful questions, in some ways, challenging each other. At the same time, we don’t continue the conversation. Constrained by asynchronous written communication, we envision the following responses as the humble beginnings of a dialogue that invites further discussion about the relationships between music, queer, and trans studies. We look forward to the conversations that emerge beyond this document in the seminar room, conference hallways, zoom meetings, and future publications.
Groesbeck’s Response to Kaniuka:
Throughout the twentieth century, anglophone music researchers have often concerned themselves with the study of sonic formalisms (Agawu 2004), “pure music” which could be framed as apolitical given its lack of semantic meaning. This Cartesian disembodiment, in addition to forestalling important conversations on race and music (Ewell 2020), has likely contributed to a relative lack of engagement with the body in ethnomusicology, with its significant inheritances from historical and comparative musicologies. Even in recent decades, as ethnomusicologists seek to re-embody music, studies have often focused on the body as it relates to cognition (Becker 2004), closer to the “mind” side of the mind-body split, though there has been an increasing attention to the important roles dance, movement, and gesture play in musicking (Gaunt 2006). Kaniuka’s call is thus a timely encouragement for ethnomusicologists to engage more robustly with ethnochoreology, dance anthropology, and critical dance studies literature. Ethnomusicologists have frequently noted the challenges we face not only in being cited outside our field, but even by each other (Rice 2010). Such discussions should give pause about the possibility of replicating such oversights in our own citational practice. Ethnomusicology might remain an underdog field in many music departments (Wong 2006), but even so retains a comparatively larger academic footprint than dance studies. As members of a field with a long history of reading across disciplinary lines, ethnomusicologists should take this call as an opportunity to reevaluate our sources for methodological and theoretical inspiration, with a greater eye to the significant contributions of scholars in dance.
REFERENCES
Agawu, Kofi. 2004. “How We Got out of Analysis, and How We Can Get Back in Again.” Music Analysis 23 (2/3): 267-286.
Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Indiana University Press.
Ewell, Philip A. 2020. "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame." Music Theory Online 26 (2).
Gaunt, Kyra D. 2006. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York University Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2010. “Disciplining Ethnomusicology: A Call for a New Approach.” Ethnomusicology 54 (2): 318-325.
Wong, Deborah. 2006. "Ethnomusicology and Difference." Ethnomusicology 50 (2): 259-279.
Zheng’s Response to Groesbeck:
I appreciate how Groesbeck connects failure and vulnerability. He reminds me about the challenges of building relationships while conducting field research and how positionality plays a role in these relationships. Groesbeck grounds how he approaches his interlocutors in a way that, to me, emphasizes humility and shared experiences. Thus, the vulnerability to share what gets coded as failure creates this transparency that highlights the applicability of queer studies frameworks in ethnographic work. Another underlying part of his essay is the issue of authority; authority to make artistic decisions, create, write, ask questions, conduct research, interview, etc. Vulnerability and acknowledgement of failure or personal shortcomings continue to deconstruct authoritative practices in both composition and ethnographic research.
Relative to some of my interlocutors in Cambodia, I am fairly young and definitely inexperienced with life in Cambodia having grown up and spent my life in the United States. Despite being Cambodian American, my interlocutors question my cultural competency and language proficiency; they absolutely should! How much do I understand about what’s going on around me? To clarify my position, I attempt to write as an unreliable narrator because I am one person making sense of the world around me. In this sense, framing our ethnographies around failure and personal vulnerabilities reveal the limits of scholarly authority, narrative, and critique.
Kaniuka’s Response to Brown:
Your exhortation for a queer creolité is urgent for those of us invested in queer ethnomusicology and beyond. To once again pull from outside of music studies, your call to resist the commodification of Black queer aesthetics reminds me of performance studies scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild’s use of the term “invisibilize” to describe the process by which the Africanist presence in American culture has “suffered from sins of commission and omission” (1996, 2). Similarly, your warning that collapsing diverse queer experiences under a homogenized umbrella of “queer studies” buries doubly-marginalized voices speaks to the invisibilization of queer of color cultural labor in music studies. Gottschild argues that Euro-American culture is not only influenced by, but dependent on African diasporic culture; I would build on your evidence to suggest that Euro-American queer culture is not just influenced by but depends upon Black and Latinx contributions—I think of disco, house, voguing, and drag, to name a few. In the American context, queer history is largely Black queer history. As we engage a queer ethnomusicology, your proposal for a queer creolité offers a lens to not only study experiences of those outside of the dominant “queer” narrative, but also to search for resonances of their histories in all queer music practices and resist perpetuating the process of invisibilization in our scholarship.
REFERENCES
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Praeger Publishers.
Brown’s Response to Blackburn:
I appreciate this query you raise – in many ways, you bring up timely differences between the two subfields of queerness and transness as they have gained more prominence within music studies. Your suggestion of a trans method as informing non-trans issues resonates with the creolité of Bernabé et. al., but from a different vantage point than my essay offers. As ever-adapting as queer studies ought to be, it is imperative to be “permanently questioning, always familiar with the most complex ambiguities, outside all forms of reduction” (Bernabe et. al., 88). I agree that the essentialist ideologies of radicalism currently synonymous with queer ethnomusicology limit the discipline to viewing queer non-conformism as political insurgency. At its core, “queerness” represents a Black and brown movement of radicalism—a “critical and political identity that challenged normative ideas about sexuality and gender”—that are found within the everyday, within the mundane (Jones 2023). Sara Ahmed reminds us that our orientations to our environment—our lived experiences—have an endless number of possibilities “facing at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home” (10). It should be encouraged to embrace the mundane and the everyday alongside the radical; it should be noted that the opposite of cis-het conventionalism is not necessarily radicalism, and we should work towards a theoretical framework that supports both as well as the in-between. Trans ethnomusicology indeed can offer us such possibilities.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Constant. 1993 [1989]. Eloge de la Créolité. Gallimard.
Jones, Timothy W. 2023. “Reviled, Reclaimed and Respected: The History of the Word ‘Queer.’” https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2023/opinion/the-history-of-the-word-queer.
Blackburn’s Response to Zheng:
I share your desire to interrogate the political and conceptual utility of “queering,” particularly as it circulates globally through the uneven terrains of academia, NGOs, and policy. Your salutary piece rightly signals the limits of queering as a rhetorical flourish – an “impossibly ephemeral change out on the horizons,” as you phrase it. Like you, I’ve watched as “queering” proliferates in conference programs, special issues, and ethnographic writing, often gesturing toward disruption without specifying what is effectively being disrupted—or by whom. Your questions are vital, and I share your concern for how queerness globalizes unevenly through liberal frameworks of recognition and inclusion.
At the same time, I want to pause on your call, via Cheng, for queering to return to “the bottles thrown, the bodies broken, the flesh and the flame.” I wonder, that is, whether the call for queering to “do, act, and make at minimum” may inadvertently reinscribe the very romanticism which gives rise to your hesitations. While powerful, this rhetoric risks repeating the very fantasy of queer radicalism that so many scholars, myself included, remain so affectively tethered to. Does queering fail because it is not radical enough—or radically figured enough, as with Ferguson’s briefly utilized figure in the opening to his foundational book which you cite—or because we have become attached to its promise of radicalism in the first place? My concern is less that queerness has lost its edge and more that the search for that edge—in its subversive potential, its deconstructive promise—may now function as a regulatory ideal at odds with either ethnographic method or the work of political philosophy.
Though writing from different fields, we both share a fear that ethnomusicology risks writing toward an imagined queer horizon that flattens and overlooks the actual musical lives of the people we work with—especially when those lives cannot be explained away and academically exploited with queerness or anti-normativity. Visibility, inclusion, and recognition may be compromised goals, but so too is the chase for the radical-as-such. What if, instead of asking what queering can accomplish, we asked what our interlocutors already accomplish without or, at times, against queerness? What if queerness isn’t the horizon that they, or we, need? What might ethnomusicology become when it listens more carefully to what queerness does not, and cannot, do?