Abstract
Music therapy pedagogy has traditionally been defined by rigid roles and structures, including fixed teacher/learner identity categories, systematized hierarchies of knowledge and communication, cultural and musical gatekeeping practices, and standardized musical, clinical, and professional competencies. These structures represent narrowly defined borders, which limit who enters the profession, how we understand human variability, and whose knowledges are acceptable within the field of music therapy.
 This article challenges educational stakeholders to destabilize long-held oppressive categorizations and move into generative liminal spaces as an opportunity to experience radically inclusive relationships. We believe that these relationships are key to the transformative learning process of understanding ourselves, others, and the worlds we inhabit. We engage queer theory literature to establish key tenets of “queering” as an active practice applicable beyond gender and sexuality to include other socially constructed identity categories such as race and disability. We then move beyond identity categories themselves to address systemic educational and institutional practices. We draw from Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands as a generative space of liminality, deconstructing the borders that limit full, authentic access to and within spaces of teaching, learning, practicing, communicating, working, relating, musicking, moving, and living; Maria Lugones’ concept of “world” traveling, loving perception, and playfulness; Luce Irigaray’s concept of wonder; and Carolyn Kenny’s writings on the field of play that illustrate that when we play in music therapy, there is a need for containers and boundaries that are open to multiple, fluid ways of being and ways of being in relationship.
Highlights
This article challenges educational stakeholders to destabilize long-held oppressive categorizations and move into generative liminal spaces as an opportunity to experience radically inclusive relationships
We are all participants in the early years of a Masters in Music Therapy (MMT) program at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania in the USA
Our intentionally destabilized education process in the MMT program serves as a foil to our past educational experiences, highlighting the problematic rigid categories typically imbued within mainstream music therapy education
Summary
We are socially located in multiple spaces: we are African American, Xicanx, white settler/colonizer; we are trans/non-binary, cis women, and cis men; we are queer and nonqueer; we are disabled and nondisabled; we are 25–52 years of age; and we are (previously) unpublished and published. We know one another intimately within a pedagogical environment. Over the past two years, we have repeatedly asked ourselves and one another: Which knowledges are upheld as standard in music therapy pedagogy, and which are understood as auxiliary or unacceptable? Whose ways of knowing does music therapy pedagogy reinforce, and whose are rendered insignificant or incorrect? How do we understand socially constructed identities? How does this impact our understandings of ourselves and those with whom we work? Which identities are inscribed into the pragmatics of auditioning, attending university, interning, and becoming certified as a music therapist in the United States? Using our experience in the SRU MMT program as a foundation, we envision a radically queer music therapy pedagogy that deconstructs binary hierarchies (teacher/student, music therapy/not music therapy, therapist/client, man/woman, cis/trans, enabled3/disabled, white/BIPOC, and so on) and embraces liminality for a more inclusive and just field
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