First published on Musicology Now, blog of the American Musicological Society, September 26, 2018
How should music
research approach different social formations and musical expressions of gender
and sexuality—and the very concept of difference? What are the affordances and
pitfalls of difference? What else should we consider when working with
marginalized communities? The chapters of Rethinking
Difference in Gender, Sexuality and Popular Music offer case studies in
response to these questions. Below is a taste of some of the authors’s work.
In the music video for “The Eyes of the Poor”
by goth band The Cure, the lyrics circulate around a beloved whose
cold-heartedness is a metaphor for the impossibility of being truly united in
love. This unbridgeable distance gives rise to a permanent condition of
emotional pain that shows how central
S/M is to goth aesthetics. In goth aesthetics, pain becomes a central dynamic
which replaces gender binarism as evidenced in the replacement of the female
beloved of the lyrics with cold statues of males
in the music video. But along with gender ambiguity in goth aesthetics and
goths’ personal styling comes the fierce denial by many practicing goths of any
non-normativity in terms of sexuality, a point made by Carol Siegel in her
chapter. Goth presents both difference from and
adherence to mainstream gender and sexuality norms, which should make those
of us who are prone to narratives of minority heroism pause for a second. If,
like me, you’ve seen conference audiences nod in fervent admiration for the protagonist
in a given presentation, a hero who against all odds, seemingly breaking free
of catastrophic social constraints, expresses their social agency through
music—if you’ve felt at all concerned that at these presentations privileged
professors get to feel better about themselves by hearing about minorities who
seem to live up to nothing but the highest
standards of heroism, you might understand my reservations. I’m not suggesting
that there aren’t any minority heroes, many of whom do exhibit a level of
resilience that I know I can never match. I’m suggesting that we need to be
critical of an institution that is in danger of becoming what the character
Michael from Arrested Development
sardonically calls a “feel-goodery” (referring to a new age high school that
facilitates student emotional expression while abolishing grades in Season 3,
Episode 9). A “feel-goodery” represents the diametric opposite of Sarah Ahmed’s
“feminist killjoy” project. For Ahmed,
remaining true to feminism requires us to disrupt heteronormativity, thereby
spoiling the enjoyment of others who may resent us for it: Whoever said
academia should feel good anyway?
My gut feeling is
that Ahmed is right. As a scholar of affect theory, Ahmed is well placed to
recognize the affective fields that condition contemporary reality: the
“feel-good” mantra resonates throughout the mediatized economy of the
twenty-first century. Feel bad? Chicken
Soup for the Soul! Soothing sounds from the Spotify “Deep Sleep” playlist!
Happy endings in Hollywood movies! Because ambiguity gives rise to the
unpleasant feeling of anxiety over uncertainty (I argue), we would much prefer
to idealize heroes than to figure out the complexity of their human frailty. My
edited volume, Rethinking Difference in
Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music, is a corrective to idealizations of
heroes who are portrayed as having forged new paths in gender and sexuality
through popular music. In addition to
recognizing the incredible spirit of music makers and audiences, contributors
to the book provide a comprehensive analysis of ambiguous musical contexts, by
embracing both positive and negative forces and effects that are inevitable in any
political action, thus complicating feed-good heroic narratives premised on
idealized constructions of difference. We examine both difference and similarity from mainstream cultures,
as well as the possibility that undefined but emergent forms of gender and
sexuality may arise.
Of the many other
accounts of ambiguity, Gillian Rodger’s chapter in the book contains a subtle
assessment of two female cross-dressing (trouser role) impersonators on the
nineteenth-century American variety stage, Ella Wesner and Annie Hindle, who
were also life partners. While they subverted gender and sexual norms, their
success stemmed from their comic musical performance, which affirmed their
working class male audience’s view of middle-class men by portraying
stereotypes of the latter. Audiences were generally ignorant of same-sex
attracted male impersonators’s personal, sexual lives, and received their
cross-dressing as a confirmation of
conceptions about masculinity. Looking across the Pacific Ocean to China, Wang
Qian also examines theatrical cross-dressing through the career of Li Yugang,
who specializes in the nan dan
(female impersonator) in Peking opera. At the end of his concerts, Li typically
appears in his everyday male attire, drops his voice by an octave, and talks
about what Wang calls his “mysterious ex-girlfriend.” Li has inspired over 3,000
online video clips of female impersonation in China, even as the online
discourse strictly adheres to heterosexuality. All the above chapters tell us
that we are prone to misrecognize multiple musical contexts if we are fixated
on idealized hero narratives.
Aside from analyzing the ambiguity of musical politics, authors in the
book theorize ambiguity as a condition of existence. Kirsten Zemke and Jared
Mackley-Crump’s chapter examines the proliferation of terms—“fierceness,”
“bitch,” “cunty”—that map out the evolving gender and sexual field of black gay
American rappers such as Cakes da Killa, a field which contextualizes those
terms in particular ways that intersects ambiguously with heteronormativity.
Ellie Hisama examines the multivalent possibilities of walking through the huge
panels that comprise Isaac Julien’s art installations such as True North (about the first successful
expedition to the north pole in 1909), theorizing that this ambiguity is
aligned with Julien’s disruption of masculine polar exploration through the
casting of a black woman, Vanessa Myrie, in the role of Matthew Henson,
Commander Robert Peary’s black companion who reached the north pole ahead of
the Commander. My own chapter argues that the desire of gays can be queered so
that it roams away from male bodies in Andrew Christian underwear music videos
towards pleasurably aestheticized surfaces in Britney Spears’s music videos. By
gesturing towards the real world and inner world complexity of music makers and
listeners, we open a register for recognizing the power of difference while
making room for the ambiguities that have perhaps always been a point of
departure for queer theory.
