Listening, Elsewhere: Enacting Affective Exodus in Gay Azerbaijan

Abstract

For gay men living in Azerbaijan, listening is a primary tactic for identity preservation under a violently heteronormative state. The consumption of music is moved beyond passive entertainment, and becomes a purposeful practice for eliciting specific emotions and affects. Music listening is used alongside dating applications, particularly Hornet and Grindr, as a way of reorienting the body in space, creating a new sonic representation of the city while situating oneself proximal to other gay bodies. One’s perception of space through the physiological body is easily altered, and this directed alteration is a key tool for living a gay life in Azerbaijan. For four young gay men in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, their sense of being is continually constructed through the city, sound, and one another. As they attempt to live gay lives, they look elsewhere in the world for sonic markers of their gay identity, for music with which they most closely identify. This thesis shows how, for some, American music achieves this. Black femininity and white gayness, consumed through genres such as rap and pop, are incorporated into the listeners’ lives and bodies through sound and affective experience. For others, Italian pop music, films, and language act as an affective marker of gay liberation. Sexual orientation, however, is not always taken as identity, negating the need to look elsewhere in the world for freedom. By examining such disidentification from homosexuality, the others’ entanglement in Azerbaijani nationalism and identity politics crystalizes. Turning elsewhere and situating themselves in new sonic environments, the interlocutors introduced here enact what I call affective exodus. Through directed engagement with sounds they identity as comfortable, familiar, or liberating, and reorientation towards bodies identified as gay on dating applications, these men become different situated in space, sonically and sexually knowing the city differently. This serves as their method of differently being and continually becoming. Through affective exodus, they critically engage the space around them to create a gay Azerbaijan.