Music Theory, Feminism, the Body: Mediation’s Plural Work

Abstract

This essay returns to early 1990s work on feminist music theory to query the concepts of mediation that underlie it. Efforts to bring music analysis closer to performance drag the historicity of the body along with them. They need to show how bodies are always already mediated, and to include a concern for the mutual mediation of body and social processes; not just the microsocialities of performance but also translocal formations of gender, race and class as they get into performance, conservatory and university music departments, and other music professions. By retrieving notions of the body developed by feminist epistemology and cultural studies of science, this essay suggests that a feminist music theory might be less a music theory than a much further-reaching theory of musical mediation. This means including epistemic standpoints that we might not recognise first as properly musical, instead prioritising their power-differentiation via distinctions between creative work and reproductive labour.