Queer Music Practices in the Digital Realm

Abstract

The relevance of music in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexually nonnormative (LGBTQ+) lives and identities has been extensively established and researched. Studies have focused on queer performances, fandom, night life, and other aspects of music to examine the intimate, social, and political relations between music and LGBTQ+ identities. In a time where music culture is produced, distributed, and consumed increasingly in digital spaces, relations between music and LGBTQ+ identities are meaningfully informed by these spaces. As this is a relatively recent development and offline music practices remain profoundly meaningful and relevant, the amount of research on queer digital music practices remains modest. However, a rich body of literature in the fields of popular music studies, queer studies, and new media studies provides an array of inspiring angles and perspectives to shed light on these matters, and this literature can be situated and critically linked. For over half a century, popular music studies have directed their attention to the relations between the social and the musical. Under the impulse of feminist studies, gender identities soon became a prominent focus within popular music studies, and, driven by LGBTQ+ studies, (non-normative) sexual identities soon followed. As popular music studies developed a rich theoretical basis, and feminist and queer studies evolved over the years into more intersectional and queer directions, popular music studies focusing on gender and/or sexuality gradually stepped away from their initial somewhat rigid, binary perspectives in favor of more open, dynamic, and queer perspectives. Following a similar path, early new media studies struggled to avoid simplistic, naïve, or gloomy deterministic analyses of the Internet and new media. As the field evolved, alongside the technologies that form its focus, a more nuanced, mutual, and agency-based approach emerged. Here, too, scholars have introduced queer perspectives and have applied them to research a range of LGBTQ+-related digital phenomena. Today, popular music, sexual identities, and new media have become meaningful aspects of social life, and much more remains to be explored, in particular on the intersection of these fields. A diverse array of queer fan practices, music video practices, and music streaming practices are waiting to be examined. The theory and the tools are there.