The Trans Ear/(h)earing

Abstract

In this essay I offer a theoretical conceptualization of the ear in order to expand current debates surrounding embodiment and materiality within the field of sound studies. I am interested in how thinking trans about the ear—that is, understanding the ear as an organ of transition—demands a materialist shift to flesh to critique how the current paradigm of embodied listening promotes the human body as fact. Understanding embodiment only through the body as a recognizable category, which is the byproduct of the paradigm of the “embodied listener,” posits the Western liberal human body (read: white, able-bodied, cisgender) as exceptional, whole, and knowable. I argue that paying particular attention to (h)earing—the sensation of the ear qua flesh prior to entering the regime of cognition—develops a way to think trans about sound by not taking the Human and its body for granted. A shift to the materiality of fleshliness as a theoretical framework for the ear, how the ear has been appropriated as the metaphor par excellence for the human body in the study of sound and music, reveals how racialized, sexed, and embodied corporeality has been produced in our discourses. My offering of the trans ear follows Black feminist critiques of the Human, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, to point to what a sensate of (h)earing might afford.