Queer Music Theory: Interrogating Notes of Sexuality (AMS/SMT 2014 panel abstract)

Naomi Andre
William Cheng
Amy Cimini
James Currie

Roger Grant
Nadine Hubbs, co-chair
Kevin Korsyn
Gavin Lee, co-chair
Judith Peraino

“Queer music theory” is a fantastically nebulous concept. On the one hand, the academic subfield of music theory has become increasingly interested in queer studies during a time in which queer theorists have had occasion to ask “what’s queer about queer studies now?” (the titular question of a recent Social Text special issue). On the other, the conjunction of queer theory with music theory demands a reinvestigation of what is meant by music theory in the first place. Bringing these two forms of inquiry together, this session aims to generate discussion on music, queerness, and theory, opening up new paths of inquiry at their points of intersection. We hope to provide methods for thinking through the concept, practice, and politics of “queer music theory,” asking how queer theory and music theory might be brought into new productive conversations.

The conundrum of queer music theory is approached first by asking: what is “music theory”? The crux of the issue here relates once again to the hoary problematic of the purely musical. After Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, we are familiar with the marginalization/universalization dialectic that forces otherness into a minute space of irrelevance—for music theory, this arguably means stuffing “queerness” into “musical practice”—and maintaining that closet by unleashing repressing forces when queerness seeps into “music theory.” However expressed, the problematic of queer music theory is not merely one of definition, but also of epistemological policing. The challenge of this panel lies in the questioning of epistemic boundaries: How is musical unity heteronormative? Is formalism queer? What is queer musical temporality and timbre?

A further consideration, informed by Sedgwick, is how queer music theory should negotiate queer studies’ charge of anti-normativity. A queer music theory with general applicability may be attractive for the challenge it poses to varied normativities beyond the sexual. However, this ubiquity also arguably robs queer music theory of its relevance to LGBTQ-identified knowledges, practices, and lives. We address the problematic of the particularity of queer lives versus the broader applicability of queer music theory.

This 3h joint session of alternative format comprises 6 position papers and 2 responses (William Cheng; Kevin Korsyn), each followed by floor discussion.

Nadine historizes the problematic of the broad applicability which stems from queer theory’s anti-normative charge, re-examining the role of dominant American middle-class culture in the success of the LGBTQ rights movement through an analysis of David Allan Coe’s 1978 underground track “Fuck Aneta Briant,” a song of the Outlaw country genre. Beyond the support of White middle-class Americans who love to identify with outsiders and rebels, to the extent that it is no longer clear who is “queer,” working- class people has a long history as sex and gender queers and allies. This study leads to an examination of the definitions of queerness and queer music theory.

Gavin Lee examines musical ambiguity as queer phenomenology. Queer persons are rebuffed by the normative world of people and objects and directed towards alternative forms of personal attachments, experiencing a “wonky” phenomenology of ambiguity through that redirection. The contradiction of musical embodiment in a work about Buddhist disembodiment (the queer composer John Sharpley’s Emptiness) is read as one modality of ambiguity, which is also discerned elsewhere in meter, harmony, and form. With an understanding of ambiguity as queer phenomenology, the resistance to musical ambiguity is read as heteronormative.

James Currie applies a theory of cruising as formalism—a social formation that functions without the participants having to get to know the various realities that constitute the content of the humans they are coming into relationship with—to a re- evaluation of the contemporary pejorative connotation of musical formalism. An examination of the formalism inherent in the social life of cruising affords a re-evaluation of the scripting of musical formalism as resistant to sociality, offering new insights to how musical form was always closer to human social life than anyone had thought.

Roger Mathew Grant examines musical formalism along the lines once coyly suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell—as a practice of “decadent aesthetes” who spend their time reveling in the inexorable complexities of art’s intangible qualities. Drawing on Mitchell and other literary theorists invested in formal analysis, a recontextualization of contemporary American music theory alongside queer practices of decadence and antiquarianism affords a re-evaluation of music theorists as cultural guardians rather than as “pedants” who spend hours measuring phrase lengths and codifying grammars.

Judith Peraino considers music theory’s deferral of live musical time in relation to the urge towards the audio/visual capture of popular music concerts among the “smart phone” generation, drawing in particular on the phenomenological redirection found in queer temporality andthe mediation of time by the technological “actor- network.” Musical time, embodiment, sociality, and text are profoundly altered by the lens of “tiny screens,” through which music is deferred to a time that is both “past” and “future” but never “present.”

Naomi Andre examines the conjunction of vocal timbre with gender, skin color, and historical narrative. The changing expression of masculinity from castrati to women’s operatic voices in the early nineteenth century is elucidated as a site of queer analysis. Further, the intersection of race with gender and sexuality, as expressed in vocal timbre, affords an examination of how new non-minstrel portrayals in operas composed since the 1980s provoke a re-examination of the “folk” as evinced in Gershwin’s conception of Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera.”

Queering Musical Form (SMT 2015 panel abstract)

Marion Gook
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Fred Maus

2014’s “Queer Music Theory” special session discussed what is or can be specifically queer about music theory. With its traditional concern for musical form (broadly construed as the subject of music theory), music theory may provoke debate about how form mediates cultural “content”; a capacious notion of “content” can comprise sexuality, other types of identity, the dissolution of cultural categories themselves, and the very emergence of new conceptions of form. This broad cultural vista lends itself to a far-reaching investigation of the “meta” level at which musical form operates—on the level of mediation and epistemology; it is at this meta level that we investigate the queering of musical form.

At the inception of what we might recognize as queer music theory, musical form was brought together with sexuality content, most famously in the work of Susan McClary (1991) and Philip Brett (1997). This content was broadly narratological in that it commented on the nature of gender and sexuality as manifest in musical form. In so far as this work can be seen as addressing the content “in” form, as if form were a chalice for content, it unwittingly supports the conceptual separation of musical form from sexuality. One way to approach the hoary issue of form versus content is to address the notion of form as content, and to do so not merely on the level of producing empirical cultural content through hermeneutics, but by analyzing how form mediates sexuality-cultural content. What is it about the nature of musical form that avails it of content? How does the analysis of form mediate content?

Aside from the mediation of sexuality content, the queering of musical form takes place also on the level of rethinking the conceptual frame of what cultural content comprises—the very content which is mediated by form. This issue is of critical importance in that the outcome of form’s mediation depends crucially on what we think is being mediated. A key factor in this reconceptualization of cultural content has to do with cultural perspectives. We are familiar with the import of cultural “difference,” but difference is not as obvious as it may seem—perhaps “difference” itself can be queered? The cultural content called “difference” can be further parsed through: the cultural totality that cultural differences form, the emergence or production of difference, and the dissolution of difference. Musical form does not contain this difference, so much as form is predicated on an epistemology of cultural difference.

Ethnomusicology and Affect Theory: Disciplinary Implications (SEM 2015 panel abstract)

Katie Graber
Luis Manuel-Garcia
Ali Collen Neff
Gavin Lee, chair
Ian MacMillen
Matthew Sumera

The emergence of affect theory in the social sciences and humanities signals a shift in scholarship, one principally defined by a downgrading of the importance of language and signification, and the rise of material “force” and bodily consequences. This roundtable brings affect theory (as practiced by Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Laurent Berlant, and others) to bear on longstanding ethnomusicological assumptions, in particular, conceptions of identity, embodiment, and agency. Among the various critical approaches to affect theory which we will present, two threads of thought stand out. First, the process-ontology of force implies change and the potential for a radical re-orientation of power dynamics, which problematizes the concepts of identity (being “identical” to one’s unchanging self) and resistance (what if inequality were no more?)—both key concerns in ethnomusicological fieldwork and writing. Affect theory articulates the capacity for connection and change through networks of media, music, sound, performance, listening, feeling, perception, and bodies. Second, Massumi’s controversial proposition that affect involves unmediated force in relation to the body is read against theories of cultural embodiment. Roundtable participants engage a range of investigations, including: audiovisual representations of war; voice, affect, and historical texts; identity and hybridity as mediated through musical sensation; the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, affective citizenship, and musical scenes; and, participant-observational approaches to racialized sensations of musical danger and aggression. Through our work, we address the broader methodological question: What are the promises, challenges and limitations of affect theory in relation to ethnomusicology, and vice versa?

Reassembling the Bird’s Eye View in Musicology (AMS 2019 panel abstract)

Daniel Chua
James Currie
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Martin Scherzinger
Gary Tomlinson

In the 90s, many scholars criticized the undertone of universality in musicology, understood to be manifest in a focus on Western music, with clandestine Eurocentric values embodied in ostensibly neutral, empirically-oriented accounts of canonic works. Universality was also diagnosed in a range of epistemologies—from 19^th-century musical aesthetics to pre-World War II comparative musicology which abstracted the world’s musical cultures into pitch systems.

This panel responds to the current musicological landscape, structured by many views which are not aligned under a hoary Eurocentric ideology. Poststructuralist musicological approaches to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability have disrupted the univocal Eurocentric voice, making space for a “global music history” that looks beyond the West. But a new set of epistemological problems have arisen around the ethical precept of difference (Bloechl et. al. eds. 2015) that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Most disturbing is the universalist demand for difference as embodied in disconnected parcels of “contextual politics” (Currie 2009)—in musicology, many forms of the bird’s eye view are conventionally understood to be misleading or oppressive. This has led in part to a scenario where there is little sense of an overarching frame of reference for approaching methodological contradictions which have emerged: e.g. identity as deeply held belief and as deconstructed, narratives of agency versus those of oppression. Furthermore, contextual politics have contributed to a misunderstanding of legitimate scholarship which operates at a (by now) unfamiliar epistemological register of large-scale forces, long time frames, and a global view, often performing systemic analyses that are incompatible with a cultural outlook premised on a human viewpoint. The concept of a heterogeneous “totality” advanced in this panel responds to an emerging consciousness that something other than “difference” may be needed to fully grasp a range of catastrophic forces that spell impending humanitarian disasters in the twenty-first century: global capitalism, neocolonialism, climate change, and technological disruption. Much is at stake in assembling, under a new dispensation, a musicological bird’s eye view.

Experts in this panel speak to the register of “totality” from various perspectives including: a revisionist Marxist view of Romantic transcendentalism as a defense against encroaching industrialism (James Currie); the colonial and neocolonial resonance of the epistemology of cultural relativism embraced in music research (Martin Scherzinger); issues in music historiography on a global scale (Thomas Irvine); the explanatory power of biocultural evolution for human nature as well as human difference (Gary Tomlinson); the ethical force of the notion of an “alien” musical otherness which compels us to articulate what a post-humanist musicology might entail (Daniel Chua); a musical work as itself a model of the heterogeneous totality termed “assemblage” by Deleuze and Guattari (Judith Lochhead); and, a methodology of contradictions within the totality, premised on Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the “parallax view” (Gavin Lee, chair). Through rigorous interrogation of received musicological wisdom, we discern misconceptions about and articulate the value of a reconstructed totality. This session of two hours comprises 10-minute position papers and ample time for floor discussion.

Provincializing Music Theory: Epistemic Frameworks for the New Comparativism (SMT 2020 panel abstract)

Amy Bauer
Gavin Lee, chair
John Roeder
Martin Scherzinger

Music theory today is structured by the legacy of European and North American epistemologies, deeply interwoven with a history of colonialism. This panel proposes new comparative frameworks that attempt to depart from these epistemologies.

A new kind of global comparativism is clearly emerging across the music disciplines today, including global music history (Strohm 2019) and comparative ethnomusicology (Wood 2018a, 2018b). In music theory, comparativism can be said to have taken place in the emergence of world music analysis, including the deployment of Western music-theoretical approaches to world music (Tenzer and Roeder 2011), a continued interest in interculturalism (Everett), and explicitly comparative frameworks used to discover universals or commonalities across musics and cultural sites (Margulis). While the new diversity is encouraging in some respects, the panel attempts to supplement these developments with new ethical and epistemological frameworks.

Following the postcolonial theory of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), “provincializing” music theory as it is practiced (originally in Europe, but now globally) means destabilizing Eurocentric musical epistemology. This does not translate to a reflex turn to difference, however, as the latter term has been problematized as a function of commodification and colonial governance (Currie 2009, Scherzinger 2019). An anti-hegemonic and/or non-hierarchical comparativism would have to navigate similarity—and indeed universality—as well as difference, against the unstable ground of shifting but particularized epistemic contexts. This 180-min panel comprises four papers which adopt different angles in parsing comparativism in music theory. The four paper segments are followed by a response and floor discussion (the six segments are all 30-min in length).

The first paper (Martin Scherzinger) inverts the universalization of the Newtonian, unilinear conception of musical temporality (formalized in the 18^th century) that is persistently privileged, even as the relative temporality of other musics is articulated in music theory. In this epistemic context, this paper argues that the only option is to universalize the temporality of the cultural (African) other.

The second paper (Gavin Lee) regards sonic objects (such as the pentatonic scale) as a multiplicity that is found across history and around the world. A “global sonic genealogy” is premised on an ontology of circulation that counters the conception of cultural siloes and discrete cultural identities that emerged in the 16^th century (Sykes 2019).

The third paper (John Roeder) conducts a historically-grounded, cross-cultural comparative analysis of works of Chinese and German modernism. The personal interaction between two composers provides the justification for a spectrographic analysis of the flow of musical “energy” (qì in Taoist philosophy) in both Jia Daqun’s Whispers of a Gentle Wind and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto.

The fourth paper (Amy Bauer) recognizes the global dissemination of post-tonal compositional techniques, as seen in the work of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. Global modernists circulate within a cosmopolitan musical space that privileges musics and musical languages of Western origin, and their complex output is often mischaracterized by an insistence on cultural difference.

Through “reverse” universality, circulation, and contextualization, these papers rethink “difference” and propose a series of epistemic correctives—unique to music theory—against unqualified applications and blanket condemnations of comparativism.

Waiting for Aspiring Progressives

First published on Sound Matters, blog of the Society for Ethnomusicology, August 15, 2018

I recently decided to revisit the issue of teaching opera in prison again with colleagues. Despite insightful responses by William Cheng and Bonnie Gordon to the widely condemned post “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison” by Pierpaolo Polzonetti (all on the Musicology Now blog, published by the American Musicological Society), it seems that musicologists as a community has not developed a deeper understanding of the issues related to racial dynamics in the US as expressed through music and musical institutions.

The reaction of many in the musicological community reflected a progressive commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism as anchored in the concept of cultural difference. Accordingly, many regard it as unacceptable for a professor who is “white” in the contemporary US contex to impose his music on students who are drawn from a prison population which is majority people of color. “Colonialism” is a term I’ve heard in discussion with colleagues which was used to describe Polzonetti’s educational endeavor. Implied in “colonialism” is the power differential between the educator and students, and the cultural mismatch between the “white” music and the target audience consisting primarily of people of color. Many read Polzonetti’s post through discursive lenses: Polzonetti’s portrayal of a black male student protesting Donna Elvira’s shoddy treatment (by the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni) was interpreted as an instantiation of the racist stereotype of the violent black man; Polzonetti’s self-described attempt to get his students to “chill out” by focusing on the music analysis of emotion was interpreted as a discourse of the civilizing force of white opera on a black man.

More much needs to be said about opera and Western empire, including opera’s racism and orientalism, and the contemporary globalized reverence for Western art music. Here, I’ll focus on the reception of Polzonetti’s post and suggest alternative strategies for the progressive movement in musicology, which is unavoidably contextualized by heightened racial tensions in the US: recall that Polzonetti’s post appeared in February 2016 as Trump was emerging as a presidential candidate and running a campaign characterized by abhorrent racist discourses. What if, instead of assuming the worst about Polzonetti, we had given him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that educators who volunteer in prison have good intentions? Can we regard Polzonetti’s work in prison, crossing racial and class lines, as progressive to some extent? I wonder what the effect of the “calling out” of Polzonetti through public denouncement on social media has been on him as a scholar, educator, and individual. And I wonder if Ngọc Loan Trần, who has critiqued call-out culture for alienating instead of engaging those deemed to be offenders, would approve of calling “in” Polzonetti, which means inviting him to join an even more progressive agenda by developing conceptual and pedagogical frames together with him. Is there a way in which we could have acknowledged Polzonetti’s effort to reach across the aisles of race and class—albeit in a highly problematic way—and persuade him to revise his position and adopt what progressives would accept as a more ethical way of relating to racial others?

This is a question that has been bothering me, and not just because of the “reparative” view that seeks to acknowledge at least some traces of good intention, versus a “paranoid” view that Polzonetti’s efforts were made in the name of naked oppression. The question bothers me because call-out culture is fragmenting progressive communities at large (which aim for social, cultural, and legal reform) through policing in public platforms and a tendency to shame and cast outside those aspiring progressives who are deemed not progressive enough. The more pressure that is applied on race in the Trump era, the more aggressive call outs are likely to be, and the less patient progressives are likely to be with one another. The result is that instead of coalition building, parts of the progressive movement seem to aim to become more and more progressive by slicing off other unwanted portions of itself. This revolutionary avant-garde mentality that insists on the purity of resistance seems a little paranoid—“You are not progressive enough, and so you must be here to destroy the progressive movement by watering it down.” Sedgwick appropriately describes the stylistics of paranoid readings as that of “minimalist elegance and conceptual economy”—sounds like call-out culture?

There are of course inherent problems with certain practices of pedagogy which focus on the transmission of knowledge from expert to novice, problems exacerbated in prison context; Polzonetti’s account seems to suggest that he opted to convey specialized knowledge (the musical analysis of emotion) as a response to the emergent feminist narrative of the student protesting Donna Elvira’s treatment. In doing so, Polzonetti appears to have missed an opportunity to create a community of learning where students collaborate in the making of musical knowledge—this is particularly disappointing given the dire need for avenues for negotiating the personal and social spaces of a harsh carceral environment (Harbert’s research is instructive in this regard). Teaching is a relational activity where race relations are often unavoidable and can even be instructive. A unit on opera as part of a larger course can become a chance for everyone in the classroom to participate in a discussion of the history of the adoption of Western art music, including opera, by the white majority in the US, and from there move on to the general racialization of music. This could lead to further discussion of issues like the acquiring of cultural capital (through opera courses) as well as sheer musical enjoyment, and the complicated ways in which race, history, social status, and musical joy intersect. Most often, however, many of my colleagues attach a “racist” label to teaching opera in prison and stop there; and many of them, including opera specialists, have yet to develop a conceptual frame for thinking about the racial dynamics of the teaching of opera. This does not necessarily mean that they hold beliefs about the superiority or inferiority of races; it means that musicology as a whole is lagging behind other disciplines in its racial reckoning. In the context of institutional racism, individuals may unwittingly perpetuate a racist system or “formation” by maintaining conventions (such as doctoral translation exams in the key operatic languages of German, French, and Italian). They may even be aware of personal culpability within a racist system without knowing how to walk out of it. It is a mistake to lump together those opera scholars with no interest in reaching beyond racial lines, with opera scholars who teach in prisons with good intentions and might even want to develop a pedagogical framework that addresses race in a responsible way—if only we had waited. In the age of online social media, literally waiting in terms of quantitative time is improbable as we rush to comment. But what I mean is waiting in the sense of withholding judgement, and opting instead to sow the seeds of change in others’ minds. Is it possible that this less radical approach might be able to achieve something that fiery critiques can’t? 

         In the age of Trump, it is important that we examine how racial critique has had to suffer the additional burden of speaking ever more loudly against power. Lived racial lives and race as a concept and symbol have had to carry the heavy responsibility of serving as vanguards of the resistance against Trump, which must surely have had the effect of sharpening progressives’ racial awareness. But racisms within and without AMS are not one-of-a-kind necessarily—they exist on a continuum of the capacity for physical and social harm, have different genealogies, and call for different responses. Where there are good but misguided intentions, where there are willing interlocutors, we might create room for patient conversation. To recognize when and where “calling in” might be appropriate, we have to differentiate: the institutional racism of AMS that musicologists today inevitably and perhaps unwillingly inherited is not necessarily the same as the kind of racism wrought alongside political and economic forces in global hyper-mediatized neoliberal context. It is not necessarily of a kind with racism wrought in the heteronormative imaginaries of reproductivity and the organic body. We need to think in terms of radical intersectionality between racial scapegoating and off-shoring of jobs in the US, between race and its symbolic reproduction, between organic and inorganic racial bodies, and between anti-racisms that limit rather than expand agency and participation—that is to say, we need to think of race as part of a much larger material “assemblage” (after Gilles Deleuze) or “queer assemblage” (after Jasbir Puar) of different components that continuously change in terms of relationality to another, relative visibility, and impact on racial lives. Racism is real. It relies on, has a complex relation with, and can sometimes even distract us from the equally devastating effects of poverty, capitalist exploitation, psychological manipulation, and environmental degradation. Because racism is rampant and is deadly, we can become impatient—in light of that simple truth—for scholars undertaking European-focused musicological or music theory studies to develop a critical awareness of race. In not waiting for that, we risk closing our ears to any anti-racist voice that is not already amped up to the highest volume. “No aspiring progressives allowed!”

Particularly in a moment of impending, intertwined ecological, economic and social disasters brought on by global predatory capitalism that has been practiced by appointees of the Trump administration (drawn from Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil etc.), it is more important than ever that progressives find strength in one another and work to broaden their base of support. We must apply innovative approaches to address the rise of racial and other forms of social reactionism, and understand the alignment between reactionary politics and ideologically coherent, profit-driven practices (job offshoring, weakening unions, climate change denial etc.) that have created a fertile ground of white poverty for hate to fester in. It is against this background that we must ask, How should those of us who are in relatively less precarious situations develop a strategy for the complexities and ambiguities of confronting and working through our national legacy of institutionalized racism and the current neoliberal racial regime, so that we all are given a chance to evolve and build a stronger movement together?

Book Preview: Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music

Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity, edited by Gavin Lee (Feb 2018, Routledge)

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.