How people’s conception of difference erases my lived experiences

(updated draft, Oct 31, 2021)

This post is part of my rethinking of difference. I talk about the opportunities and costs of difference—the armor and the crucible—at social and disciplinary margins. The "cost" is about how people’s conception of difference erase my lived experiences.

Armor: The Opportunities of Disciplinary and Social Difference

In a previous post, I wrote about my interdisciplinary outlook, which crisscrosses the music disciplines, as well as other humanities. I do so in order to supplement each individual music discipline's blindspots, allowing historical, theoretical, and ethnographic insights to converge in a way that presents a model of renewal as all of the music disciplines struggle with their exclusionary paradigms. Over the past few years, I've navigated AMS, SMT, and SEM by working with allies who have given me incredible support, and who I continue to rely on in my musical journey.

In my work, I position the music disciplines in a critical way to one another, which can be uncomfortable. For my work on alienation in the Sinophone soundscape, I integrate the historiography of Sinophone modernity with extended music analysis and ethnography; to some readers, this may appear to be a mix of oil and water (but remember that emulsions exist!). My work on queer music theory combines queer theory and music theory in an investigation of queer listening—how listeners have appropriated all kinds of Western and global sounds in queer world-making, regardless of one's ethnic identity.

Part of the reason why I pursue interdisciplinary work is because as a BIPOC and queer person, I see things in a different way than most of my European and US American colleagues—including even my BIPOC and queer colleagues who grew up in the West. Even though we may share the same commitment to countering oppressions, we approach things very differently, because our live experiences have been very different. I've lived in 4 different countries, and race and LGBTQ+ issues look very different from outside the West. For example, it continues to be possible for gay men to be prosecuted under Singapore's penal code, and people in China look at me as an outsider from Singapore who is "not Chinese enough." I think living at social and disciplinary margins necessitates that I, and others like me, learn the alchemist art of spinning an unwelcoming world into a habitable space, making it our own through reinvention. I believe the necessary remaking of the world by the marginalized is what is behind the incessant anti-normative power of queer theory—when you are marginal, you have to somehow repurpose oppressions into opportunities, however challenging that may be. I believe this is the root of my interdisciplinary outlook in which I reconfigure the music disciplines in relation one another, such that musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology end up looking different than they did before.

But working at the margins has come with difficulties that I would like to focus on in this post. I've come across the narrative that marginality is a source of strength and creativity, and my purpose in writing this post is to show that if the marginalized have come out of the crucible of oppression with an armor, this is not a matter of choice, but one of necessity. Marginality is painful, and I want to make an unequivocal statement on that, so that allies can take that extra step to help out your colleagues who may not occupy mainstream positions. Sometimes all it takes is a kind word. This may be a simple conversation to you that you may not register as significant, but I can tell you that I have a vivid memory of all those times when people have made the effort to express support for me and my work. I can recall the occasion, what we talked about, and the simple relief I felt in making that connection in what often seems like an inhospitable space. No words can express how much I value the support from allies and from fellow BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people in this difficult journey, which I will recount below. For others out there who have been working on social and disciplinary margins, I hope that this post shows that we are part of a community that shares similar experiences.

Crucible: The Costs of Difference

I’ve always felt uncomfortable at AMS, SMT, and SEM conferences because the simple demographic fact of being a BIPOC person in a majority white space is enough to be daunting. When I first started going to AMS and SMT around 2010, there weren’t any spaces where East Asian musics were prominently featured. It was only a few years later that I discovered the SMT Analysis of World Music group, but East Asia was just one among many global musical regions, and researchers seemed to prefer the rhythmic and textual complexities more commonly found in other musics. The first time I felt like I had a community was when I co-founded the SMT Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries group and the AMS Global East Asian Music Research Group. There were more BIPOC and global peoples at SEM but I work on Singapore avant-gardism through musicological and music-theoretical methods, and there have been multiple instances when I was regarded with skepticism, made to feel like an outsider, and unintentionally or purposely sidelined. I’ve also served in the leadership of the LGBTQ+ groups of all three societies, working with a majority white demographic. The truth is I have never felt at home in any of the LGBTQ+ groups I have served, in part because of my odd disciplinary position. To musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I’m the suspicious “theorist.” Sometimes, I feel that I’m resented for being in a leadership position, by other people who think it should be them leading the group. When I’ve criticized the way that these groups have operated, I’ve been made to feel like I’m rocking the boat. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of what I’ve experienced stems from assumptions that I’m ignorant about a particular issue because I’m differently construed as “outsider” and "different" in various contexts. I’d like to talk about how in almost all the areas that I conduct research in, there is a significant body of people who directly or indirectly question my competence. These research areas are: Western music, musicology, and music theory; Sinophone soundscapes; critical race theory and queer theory; and, ethnomusicology.

1. Western music, musicology, and music theory. I’ve played the piano since age 7. When I was at King’s College London and Oxford, there were no ethnomusicologists on the faculty, and all my courses were in Western music. When I was at Duke University, only one ethnomusicologist offered graduate seminars; I took one seminar on anthropology of sound, and almost 10 in Western music. In my publications, I’ve written about tonal music and Schubert. The body of global avant-garde music I examine is in the style of 20C European/US concert music, even if this music was written in Southeast and East Asia. I know Western music.

2. Sinophone soundscapes. I don’t study traditional Chinese music, but I’ve lived in the Sinophone soundscape of Singapore for 27 years, and China for 6 years—this is compared with the cumulative 2 or more years of fieldwork experience of Europeans and US Americans. Yet, when I’ve presented on my work on Sinophone soundscapes, the response has often been dismissive. Sometimes, the response is to cite a published piece of research, without an awareness that what is published in English and European languages represents only a small fraction of what is happening in a particular soundscape. Based on these publications, which are usually limited to specific time periods, say, the interwar years, my responder might make extrapolations to form a composite, sometimes heavily misconstrued mindmap about the soundscape. Another time, my whole framework was called into question, but when I make an argument about the affective dimension of the Sinophone soundscape, this is not just an academic argument—it is based on 33 years of embodied experience as a real live social being. In dinner conversation, some responders assume that I’m just expressing my own prejudices instead of presenting my research. 

3. Critical race theory and queer theory. For my book project in progress, I’m working on self-alienation felt by Sinophone composers who are confronted with a global ecumene saturated with racist Chinese stereotypes like the pentatonic cliché, chopsticks in women’s hair, the Kungfu master, and slitty eyes. This results in composers pulling back from using Chinese musical elements, or having an ambivalent relationship to them. Against this backdrop, the positionality of East Asian scholars who research Western music, such as Schumann scholar Roe Min Kok, becomes complicated. There is the universal expectation that BIPOC people should study BIPOC music and generally behave like BIPOC people—Ellie Hisama revealed in her 2019 plenary paper that she was asked if she knew how to make sushi—at a job interview. 

But it doesn’t stop there, I’ve been directly questioned about whether “I know anything about postcolonialism,” though I was born in a former British colony. I’ve been questioned by someone who presumed to be an expert on race because that responder wrote 1 article on BIPOC music. My concerned about “Chinese privilege” (Chinese oppression of minorities in Singapore and China) have been dismissed because in European/US context, white privilege is a universal, daily affair. 

Being Chinese and being queer is more complicated than people think. When I first started going to queer spaces in the UK at age 18, I quickly discovered that I was wrong to think that this was my community, because as a Chinese person, I fit into the category of rejection that some Grindr users describe as “No Asians.” Being Chinese and queer has always been complex. As has been noted (by E. Patrick Johnson), queer BIPOC people’s oppressive experiences stem from our being BIPOC, rather than being queer. This is the true meaning of intersectionality, i.e. the unpredictable interaction between race and sexuality, rather than hybridity, which is frequently presumed. There are different times when I experience the effect of: 1) being Chinese, 2) being queer, 3) being both Chinese and queer, and 4) when I don’t experience the effect of being either Chinese or queer. I think these phenomenological experiences have to do with different ways of being ostracized and minoritized. I feel Chinese in white spaces like SMT, queer when I’m in straight spaces like high school group chats where everyone is straight and married, both Chinese and queer when I’m in white heteronormative spaces like the Oxford undergraduate common room, and neither Chinese nor queer when I’m hanging out with queer bipoc friends. In other words, the hybridity of Chinese and queer identities happens at points when I feel most oppressed.

As queer bipoc people, we have no choice but to remake oppressions as opportunities for survival. And in music theory scholarship, we have an opportunity to envoice the lives of the marginalized. I believe that as a queer Chinese person, I have a special responsibility to write about Western and global composers, and queer and non-queer issues and composers, in the same breadth. I’ll keep thinking about the line connecting Schubert and Singaporean avant-gardism, and queerness, and if these things don’t seem to go together, this is conceptual baggage from a colonial and cisheteronormative framework we need to discard. These days I’m thinking hard about how to bring a queer perspective to bear on the Chinese pentatonic scale, and to the study of composers like Tan Dun. 

4. Ethnomusicology. As a global BIPOC person written about in ethnomusicology, I have thoughts about ethnomusicological constructs and institutions. But some responders assume that I don’t have even the most basic knowledge about the methodological tenets of the discipline, though I’ve convened and chaired panels at SEM for 7 out of the past 8 years. When I point out certain trends, such as researchers’s alterity to the researched <1>, I’m referred to another subsection of ethnomusicological research (ethnomusicology at home) and told that I’m out of touch, when it’s clearly the case that European/US research on foreign musics constitutes at least half of all ethnomusicological research. I’m told that I’m mischaracterizing ethnomusicology in this straw man accusation and it is implied that the trend which I’m referring to doesn’t exist. Am I crazy to point out that European/US researchers continue to work on foreign musics? What I’ve concluded is this—straw man accusations are ostrich defenses where you have to blinker your view to only the model of ethnomusicology considered to be justifiable within a specific discursive context, and ignore the rest. 

 

<1> I have not analyzed the 2021 SEM membership survey report, which was released after I had completed the following analysis in 2020. SEM's 2014 membership survey report suggests that around half of SEM research involves cultural alterity of scholars who are not people of color. According to the membership survey, ethnomusicologists self-report as having (on average) 2-3 areas of speciality, and the percentages for those researching Europe and North America come close to half or more than half. What does this mean overall? The membership survey shows that 3/4 are US citizens; of the US citizens, 3/4 are "Euro-American" (using the terminology in the survey). Of the 1/4 international members, 7 of the 9 countries with most members are European/Australasian (the other two are Japan and South Korea), which suggests that about 3/4 of the international members are European/Australasian. This suggests that overall, SEM membership is about 25% people of color. In contrast, the percentage of members conducting research in areas where people of color live are: Africa (35%), Latin America (41%), Asia (73%). (Recall that members may choose several research areas.) If you add up the total percentages for all research areas, this comes to 268.6% (because you can choose more than one area). The numbers for Africa, Latin America, and Asia alone add up to 150.1%, more than half of 268.6%--without including 63.8% for US, of which a huge chunk of research is focused on minority musics. This percentage rises to 182% (out of 268.6%) of research on the music of people of color, if one assumes that at least half of the research in North America is on minorities. Converted to 100%, the percentage of research in the music of people of color stands at c. 67% (or 182/268.6). Assuming that half of the 25% people of color study non-European, non-North American, or minority musics (i.e. 12.5%), a significant chunk--around 50% (67%-12.5%)--of SEM research involves cultural alterity of the European or Euro-American scholar. (Cultural alterity of the scholar is not reflected in the membership survey data, so I had to put several figures together, and make "50%" assumptions about how much of the North American research is on people of color, and what proportion of people of color are "native" researchers. In the absence of actual data, I don't feel comfortable gauging percentages based on my own observations.) This is not to say that most ethnomusicologists do not engage in counter-alterity research, defined in terms of the relationality between people of color versus Europeans/Euro-Americans, but that around half of ethnomusicological research involves alterity of the European/Euro-American scholar to the music being researched.

Queering "The Chair": An Improbable 100% Straight, 100% Tenured/Tenure Track Faculty.

As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change. In my preferred version of the The Chair, McKay (a black woman going up for tenure) would have an affair with Kim (the Asian American chairwoman); this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc. 

I did enjoy binge-watching all six half-hour episodes of The Chair on Saturday morning though. Throughout the intrigues familiar to faculty members (wrestling over invited guest lecturers, tenure review, asymmetrical faculty power, pressure to grow class enrollment etc.), it is two narrative threads which provide the necessary dramatic tension to tie the entire story together: 1) the romance between the chair, Kim, and Dobson, and relatedly, 2) Dobson’s mock Hitler salute during a lecture, which devolves into a social media fiasco, student protests, Kim’s attempts to navigate the controversy both as chair and as Dobson’s partner, and Dobson’s eventual firing. The multiple plot elements are satisfactorily complex and sympathetic—Kim’s struggles as a single parent of an adopted child Ju-Hee who experiences anxiety over cultural identity; Dobson’s depression and struggle over the recent death of his wife; and most of all, Kim’s seemingly futile attempts to make any headway as chair, constrained by the Dean, senior faculty members, and the force of social media. I heard once that chairing a department means that everyone wants something, nobody gets anything, and everyone hates you. Sounds about right. 

I was happy to see women of color centered in The Chair. Kim’s and McKay’s struggles ring true to me as a scholar of color who works within the ambit of US academic discourse, though I am geographically located elsewhere. On the one hand, there is an emerging awareness that the work of people of color is critical to the next chapter in the development of many disciplines. On the other hand, people of color are assessed within the confines of institutions that have historically been dominated by white, male, cisheteronormative voices, necessitating a complex dance of pushing the envelope in a way that is ultimately addressed to those who wield institutional power. Thus a tenure track faculty member is likely, like McKay, to be forced at some point to propagate the discourse of a senior faculty member—McKay does this literally when she distributes Rentz’s lecture notes, though she confronts both Rentz and Kim on other occasions. The usually unseen labor of women, especially women of color, is brought to the forefront. McKay’s high enrollment section is combined with Rentz’s poorly attended one to “save” the latter; a large part of Kim’s struggle lies in the responsibility of caring for her daughter as a single mother. 

There is some distance between women of color in The Chair and in reality, which should be noted: most single mothers are not tenured faculty, and black women faculty are disproportionately represented among adjunct instructors (as opposed to ladder faculty). Against this backdrop, McKay’s positionality as tenure track faculty requires some consideration. McKay’s success on the tenure track not only represents many black women's forefront research. Her success in the show also quietly suggests that The Chair is shaped by the romance and fantasy of tenure at an elite institution. There are of course some prominent women of color at elite institutions such as Yale, which prizes McKay in the show, but this is unrepresentative of the disproportionate number of adjunct women of color in academia. If McKay does join Yale, she is likely to join the ranks of multiple brilliant women of color in Ivy League universities who have been unfairly denied tenure. The show presents a positive image of McKay as the "cream of the crop," but this could be read in terms of the neoliberal narrative of competition and scarcity; this narrative is particularly insidious given that the show hides the reality of accumulation under racial/racist capitalism in US universities, built on the backs of adjunct women of color. On that note, where are any of the adjunct instructors in the show? 100% tenured professors is a Harvard fantasy (from where one of the show's writers Annie Wyman graduated with a PhD) that doesn't pan out even at Harvard. With a 100% tenured faculty, the neoliberal decimation of tenure is itself completely blotted out. 

In centering women of color, The Chair makes an encouraging step towards inclusion. However, in the wake of hit shows such as Orange Is The New Black, Glee, and Tales of the City, I believe audience’s expectations have been raised. These hit shows, which also feature women of color, are notable for the significant presence of queer-LGBTQ themes, and other recent shows have also included important queer narrative threads (The Politician, Hollywood, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). I find it highly improbable that the English department faculty in The Chair is presented as 100% straight. In my preferred version of the show, Rentz would be a closeted gay man who finds liberation through McKay’s course “Sex and the Novel.” And McKay would have an affair with Kim; this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc. Dobson would be a single gay parent with a crush on David Duchovny. 

As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change. 

The Chair’s central plotline of faculty and student response to Dobson’s mock Hitler salute requires some concluding notes. It's clear that the show's portrayal of so-called "cancel culture" is written from the perspective of the professoriate rather than students. Firstly, for a show centered on the Holocaust, where are the Jewish characters? The Jewish students? Especially without their presence, without individual stories, the students may come across as a mob. Yet the show does strike a point about the discursive truncation of social media, including the selective editing of video (to show just Dobson’s mock Hitler salute, extracting it from the context of a lecture on facism/absurdism), which is precisely the same method used in fake news. Clearly, the student protests and fake news are not the Same, but they are both structured by the materialities of social media platforms. 1) Truncation: extended thoughts that require more than 140 characters to express are atomized and fall into the collective unconscious. 2) Research shows that posts that go viral tend to evoke strong affect, which means that social media-driven ethics is shaped by affect rather than actual ethical analysis; this is shown in the university's truncated disciplinary process, regardless of whether you agree with the outcome (Dobson was fired not because the ethics committee found his actions to be wrong, but because they wanted the student protests to end; as an outcome-directed, teleological rationale in an ethics-framework, this circular logic is itself fundamentally wrong). Ultimately, what I personally like most about the show is two things: 1) it’s centering of people of color (albeit in a somewhat unrepresentative, romanticized way), and 2) the mirror it positions in front of the structure of social media, asking pointed questions about the critical processes by which we come to decide issues of ethics and morality.