What's Queer about Musicology Now?

Abstract

THE THREE ARTICLES FEATURED IN THIS Vibrations special section of Women & initially emerged as a result of an interdisciplinary graduate student conference on music and queer performance held at Cornell University in March 2007. (1) Jointly funded by the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program and the Department of Music, the conference brought together graduate students and faculty working within the fields of musicology, women's and gender studies, theater studies, and performance studies. Vibrations proved to be an exciting event in terms of both the scope and the quality of the papers presented. These ranged from conversations on gay and lesbian historiography and musical reception (Samuel Dorf, Emily Wilbourne, and Tekla Babyak) to representations of queer male sexualities in popular culture and opera (Samuel Dwinell, Jeremy Mikush, and Kevin Schwandt) and from accounts of queer performance in terms of disidentification (Katie Brewer Ball, Tina Majkowski, and Zarko Cvejic) to keynote speeches on David Bowie and Andy Warhol (Judith Peraino) and the use of music as a form of torture at Guantanamo Bay (Suzanne Cusick). The Vibrations conference also served to raise some fundamental questions about the relationship between femininity, transsexuality, and embodiment in the context of both women's music festivals and Third Wave feminism (Elizabeth K. Keenan), in Zarah Ersoff's reading of transsexual subjectivity in the music of Dana Baitz, and in Baitz's own account of queer musicology's fraught relation to transsexual embodiment. In short, I can only use this opportunity to thank all those who participated in the conference--both graduate students and faculty alike--for their commitment to LGBTQ musicology and for helping Vibrations live up to its name. The existence of Vibrations is also strongly indebted to Judith Peraino, without whose presence in the Department of at Cornell a conference devoted to queer musicology would have been scarcely imaginable, let alone possible. Indeed, when Amy Villarejo first invited me to organize a graduate student conference on music and queer identities for the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies Program at Cornell, I was forced to confront the somewhat disturbing (though perhaps not altogether surprising) reality that Vibrations would be only the second queer musicology conference to date. The first queer musicology conference, Anything Goes, which took place in 1992 at the University of California, Berkeley, was also a graduate-run conference. Organized by Judith Peraino, herself a graduate student at the time, Anything Goes featured the keynote speakers Philip Brett and Suzanne Cusick. (2) This initial conference on music and sexuality was enabled by the kind of feminist theorizing that took place both within and outside the field of musicology during the late 1980s. In much the same way that second wave feminist theory and, later, poststructuralist feminism facilitated the emergence of queer theory by challenging the relationship between categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, it was the work of feminist musicologists like Susan McClary and Ruth Solie that paved the way for what we have now come to refer to as LGBTQ musicology. (3) Indeed, many of the articles published in the groundbreaking collection of essays Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology were initially presented at the first Feminist Theory and Music conference in 1991, organized by Lydia Hamessley and Susan McClary. (4) More recent LGBTQ musicology, including book-length studies of music and queer identity by Nadine Hubbs and Judith Peraino, along with the edited collections of essays, Queer Episodes in and Modern Identity and Queering the Popular Pitch, also retains a strong feminist core. (5) In the absence of separate conferences and journals, queer work tends to be presented at feminist musicology conferences like the biannual Feminist Theory and Music and published in journals such as Women & Music. …