Queering the Field
Sounding Out Ethnomusicology
Edited by GREGORY BARZ AND WILLIAM CHENG
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barz, Gregory F., 1960– | Cheng, William, 1985–Title: Queering the field : sounding out ethnomusicology / edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005239 | ISBN 9780190458027 (cloth) | ISBN 9780190458034 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780190458065 (oxford scholarship online)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnomusicology. | Homosexuality and music. | Gender identity in music.
Classification: LCC ML3798 .Q43 2019 | DDC 780.89—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005239
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Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To all silent [silenced] queer voices in our academic discipline—historic and present. It is our hope that within these pages there might be hope for sounding out ethnomusicology.
Acknowledgments xi About the Authors xiii
PART 1. FOREWORD
1. Queering the Field: A Foreword 3 Kay Kaufman Shelemay
PART 2. INTRODUCTION
2. Queering the Field: An Introduction 7 Gregory Barz
PART 3. QUEER SILENCES
3. Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology: Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes and Performance 31 Zoe C. Sherinian
4. Uncomfortable Positions: Expertise and Vulnerability in Queer Postcolonial Fieldwork 53 Nicol Hammond
5. Queer in the Field? What Happens When Neither “Queer” Nor “The Field” Is Clearly Defined? 67 Gillian M. Rodger
PART 4. OUT/ IN THE FIELD
6. “I Don’t Think We Are Safe around You”: Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology 93 Gregory Barz
7. Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography 106 Christi-Anne Castro
8. Outing the Methodological No-No: Translating Queer Space to Field Space 120
Alexander M. Cannon
9. Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance: Musical Spaces in Cuba’s Gay Ambiente 139 Moshe Morad
PART 5. QUEERNESS IN ACTION
10. Con/Figuring Transgender-Hījṛā Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking 163 Jeff Roy
11. Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness? Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies 185
Matthew Leslie Santana
12. Going through the Motions: Transgender Performance in Topeng Cirebon from North Java, Indonesia 198 Henry Spiller
13. Fielding the Field: Belonging, Disciplinarity, and Queer Scholarly Lives 217 Tes Slominski
PART 6. INSTITUTIONS AND INTERSECTIONS
14. The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet: Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of “Traditions” 235 Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss
15. “I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”: Assumptions and Limitations of the Normative Queer Gaze in a Panamanian Dance-Drama 257 Heather J. Paudler
PART 7. WHO’S QUEER (W)HERE?
16. Self and/as Subject: Respectability, Abjection, and the Alterity of Studying What You Are 277 Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone
17. Straight to the Heart: Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away 291 Kathryn Alexander
18. Coming through Loud and Queer: Ethnomusicological Ethics of Voice and Violence in Real and Virtual Battlegrounds 307
William Cheng
PART 8. CLUBS, BARS, SCENES
19. The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork 335
Luis-Manuel Garcia
20. Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis: A Queer Look at Sex and Race in Fieldwork 353
Sarah Hankins
21. “Man Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”: Saluting the Oríchá in a Cuban Gay Bar
Cory W. Thorne
22. On Serendipity: Or, Toward a Sensual Ethnography
Peter McMurray
About the Authors
Kathryn Alexander is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the intersections of music, dance, gender, and sexuality. She is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of Arizona, where she develops and teaches interdisciplinary general education curricula from an ethnomusicological perspective. Her current research examines the embodied and social practices that frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) country western dance and rodeo culture in the United States. In previous research, she applied online ethnographic methods to the practice of historical ethnomusicology and articulated the formation of ethnic whiteness and heterosexuality in Cape Breton’s traditional Scottish social dance communities. Her research has been published in MUSICultures and the Yearbook for Traditional Music.
Gregory Barz is Director of the School of Music at Boston University where he serves as Professor of Ethnomusicology. He is currently the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he currently conducts research of drag performance in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was formerly the Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University. His latest book is a co-edited volume titled The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing in Music and the Arts (Oxford University Press). His monograph Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda (Routledge) applies the central tenets of medical ethnomusicology to a study of HIV prevention in East Africa. His book Music in East Africa: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture was also published by Oxford University Press. He is co-editor of two editions of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford) and Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota). He has produced four compact discs and a documentary film and received a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Traditional World Music category for his Smithsonian Folkways CD, Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/ AIDS in Uganda
Alexander M. Cannon is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of contemporary southern Vietnam and works as Lecturer in Music at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). He holds a BA in music and mathematical economics from Pomona College and an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, where he wrote a dissertation on the changing practices of a genre
of traditional music called đơn ca tài tư under the guidance of Joseph Lam. He has published several articles on southern Vietnamese traditional music, charisma, and creativity studies in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Ethnomusicology. He currently serves as Book Reviews Editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music and as Secretary on the Board of Directors of the Society for Asian Music.
Christi-Anne Castro is an Associate Professor of ethnomusicology in the Musicology Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as well as the director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation, was released in 2011 by Oxford University Press and won the 2012 Global Filipino Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is co-editor of the journal Music and Politics and on the editorial board of the journal Asian Music. She teaches courses on music, gender, and sexuality, music and the body, and music and community.
William Cheng teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019).
Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone (she/her/hers) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the McClure Archives and University Museum at the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg. She holds BA and MA degrees in history, an MS degree in museum science, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. She is the author of two books: Queerness in Heavy Metal (Routledge, 2015) and Queering Kansas City Jazz (Nebraska, 2018). Dr. Clifford-Napoleone is one of the founders of the International Society of Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and a contributor to the nascent field of metal music studies. As a cultural anthropologist with specializations in material culture and ethnographic methods, Dr. Clifford-Napoleone also specializes in gender, sexuality, and material culture with a focus on textiles. She resides in Missouri with her wife, their dogs, and a large collection of doom metal.
Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist based in the Irish World Academy at the University of Limerick where she currently directs the MA program in Irish Music Studies and teaches in the Ethnomusicology MA and Performing Arts BA programs. Her research interests include local/global Irish musics, protest music, popular music heritages, and urban soundscapes. Aileen is currently writing a
monograph on Irish American music, extending her doctoral research at the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Century Fellow. Co-founder and co-director of the Popular Music, Popular Culture research cluster at the University of Limerick, Aileen has co-edited five books to date, including Songs of Social Protest: International Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015). More recently, Aileen spent a semester as an invited professor at the University of Notre Dame and is currently a research fellow at the Department of Music, King’s College, London. From 2019–2022 she is one of five international partners in a Europeanfunded research project on European music festivals, public spaces, and social diversity. Aileen plays flute and piano with the Templeglantine Ceilí Band and has recorded with a variety of musicians in Ireland and the United States.
Luis-Manuel Garcia is a lecturer in ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. He was also a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where he retains an affiliation as an adjunct researcher. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger-sociability, dance, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries, and musical migration. He is currently researching “techno-tourism” in Berlin while also preparing a book manuscript entitled, Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor.
Nic Gareiss is a performer, teacher, and researcher of traditional music and dance. His interests include vernacular sound and movement practices from many locations, especially Ireland and its diaspora. Informed by fifteen years of ethnographic study and performance of many percussive dance traditions, Nic’s work reflects his love of improvisation, traditional footwork vocabulary, and musical collaboration. He has concertized for over ten years in fifteen countries with many of the luminaries of traditional Irish music, including Frankie Gavin, Dervish, Buille, Solas, Martin Hayes, Liz Carroll, The Gloaming, and The Chieftains. He has been called “the human epitome of the unbearable lightness of being” by the Irish Times and “the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald. Nic holds a degree in Anthropology from Central Michigan University and an MA in Ethnochoreology from the University of Limerick. His MA thesis, based upon ethnographic work with LGBTQIA+ competitive step dancers, was the first piece of scholarship to query the experience of sexual minorities within Irish dance. Gareiss’s chapter “An Buachaillín Bán: Reflections on One Queer’s Performance within Traditional Irish Music & Dance” appears in the book Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings edited by Clare Croft from Oxford University Press. His present research seeks to illuminate
discursive formations of national identity, gender, and sexual orientation via ethnography and embodied practice. Visit his website at www.nicgareiss.com
Nicol Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar specializing in South African music, popular music studies, and feminist and queer music studies. She is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests include music and nationalism, gender and sexuality, queer theory, music and sports, and the voice. She has published on queer performance in the music of Afrikaans rock musician Karen Zoid, South African choral music, and music at the 2010 Soccer World Cup. She is a choral conductor and singer.
Sarah Hankins completed the PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard University with a dissertation focusing on musical nightlife and political aesthetics among African transmigrants and Afro-descendants in urban Israel. She is interested in music and diaspora, nightclub and studio production technologies, queerness, psychoanalysis, and sound studies of trauma and recovery. Her articles appear in Black Music Research Journal, City and Society, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Ethnomusicology Review: Bring in the Noise, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; she has published review essays in Popular Music and Anthropos. Hankins is the recipient of the SEM Marcia Herndon Award, and the Anna Rabinowitz Fellowship from Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. She serves on the SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce. Her current projects include an article on necropolitical performance among Israeli and Palestinian dissidents and refugees, and research on sonic experience in clinical psychoanalysis. As a member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002 to 2009, she served in Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C., and throughout Latin America, winning Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards from the Department of State for her reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is a dance music producer and performing DJ. Her remix collection Been in the Storm So Long (2009) was independently produced in consultation with Smithsonian Folkways.
Matthew Leslie Santana is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard University. His primary interests involve race, sexuality, and performance in the Americas, and he is currently at work on a project on gender performance in Cuba. Matthew is also an active violinist and has performed as a New Fromm Player at the Tanglewood Music Center, an artist-in-residence at the Intimacy of Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a baroque violinist with Apollo’s Fire. As an educator, he has served as a graduate
student instructor at the University of Michigan, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and as resident faculty at the Sphinx Preparatory Academy, a tuitionfree summer program for young Black and Latinx string players. Prior to starting the PhD, Matthew studied violin, historically informed performance practice, and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Case Western Reserve University.
Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist, saxophonist, and media artist. He is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University of Cambridge. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of Islam and sound, including recitation, liturgy, theology, and architecture, and he is currently completing a book and media project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin. He has also published on various aspects of the history of sound recording, especially tape and YouTube music. He is currently researching music and the refugee crisis in contemporary Europe and Turkey as well as intersections of sound, media, and empire in the nineteenth century. His media practice includes extensive nonfiction audio and video work.
Moshe Morad is a radio broadcaster in Israel, hosting a popular daily world music program. He lectures at Tel Aviv University and at Ono Academic College, where he teaches courses on African music and on gender and queerness in the music of Africa and the Middle East. Moshe completed his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is author of Fiesta de Diez Pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba, winner of the 2015 Alan Merriam Prize honorable mention awarded by SEM and the 2016 Herndon Book Prize awarded by SEM’s Gender and Sexualities Section. He is also the coeditor of Mazal Tov Amigos!: Jews and Popular Music in the Americas, winner of the 2018 SEM’s Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize. His career in the media and music industry includes presenting TV and radio shows in Israel, presenting “on location” World Routes programs on BBC Radio 3 in the UK, serving as Managing Director of NMC Music, Global Marketing Director at EMI Music in the UK, and head of EMI’s world music label “Hemisphere.” He has produced and compiled numerous CDs in various genres, including dance music and world music.
Heather J. Paudler is a musicologist based in Bergen, Norway with degrees from Florida State University (PhD, 2015, Musicology), Pennsylvania State University (MA, 2010, Musicology with a cognate area of Art and Architecture History), and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville (BS, 2007, Music). Her dissertation examines the music, text, choreography, and history of Panamanian expressions of los moros y cristianos dance-dramas. In her dissertation she traces the
movements and intersections of the current expression of la danza Bugabita to build a story in both time and space that portrays the historical continuum from which the contemporary dance-drama emerges in order to illuminate dynamic meanings that reflect discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity.
Gillian M. Rodger is Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rodger’s work has centered on popular theatrical entertainment in the United States, primarily in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Her first book, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Entertainment in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2010), charted the emergence of variety in pre–Civil War America and showed the development of the form—in terms of performance conventions, management styles, and business strategies—until the mid-1880s. She has just published a second monograph that focuses on cross-dressed performance in variety and vaudeville in order to examine working-class gender construction and shifting class affiliation in the last third of the nineteenth century. Rodger has also completed work on the Scottish popular musician Annie Lennox, and on the persistence of nineteenth-century moral reform arguments in the reaction to jazz and rock ’n’ roll in the twentieth century.
Jeff Roy is a filmmaker, musician, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. Roy holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA and is a Postdoctoral Alumnus of le Centré d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. His work focuses on the politics and performance of queer, transgender and hījṛā identity formations at the intersections of race, class, caste, and religion in South Asia. Roy’s writings appear in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology (awarded SEM’s 2018 Marcia Herndon Prize for exceptional work in gender and sexuality), MUSICultures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (for which he also served as guest editor of a forum on queer South Asian scholarship), and Transgender Studies Quarterly. His award-winning films have been screened at the Director’s Guild of America, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Godrej India Culture Lab; featured in Out Magazine and Vogue India; and supported through research and production fellowships by Fulbright-mtvU, FulbrightHays, and Film Independent.
Zoe C. Sherinian is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Division Chair at the University of Oklahoma. She has published the book Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology (Indiana University Press 2014), articles on the Dalit parai frame drum in the journal Interpretation (2017), and articles on the indigenization of Christianity in Ethnomusicology (2007), The World of Music (2005),
and Women and Music (2005). She has also published on soft-butch gender constructions in k. d. lang’s vocal performance (2001). Sherinian has produced and directed two documentary films: This Is a Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum (2011), on the changing status of Dalit (outcaste) drummers in India, and Sakthi Vibrations (2018), on the use of Tamil folk arts to develop self-esteem in young Dalit women at the Sakthi Folk Cultural Centre. She is presently writing a book titled Drumming Our Liberation: The Spiritual, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum. Sherinian is also an active musician who performs and conducts trainings in the parai drum. She has extensively studied the mrdangam, the classical drum of South Indian Karnatak music, and performs on the jazz drum set.
Tes Slominski is a music/sound scholar and fiddle player. Her monograph Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music (in press at Wesleyan University Press) connects issues of gender and sexuality in the early twentieth-century Irish nationalist music scene with more recent developments in Irish music, including the increasing visibility and presence of LGBTQ performers and musicians of color. In addition to her scholarly work, Tes is an active performer who specializes in the regional repertoire and style of Sliabh Luachra, an area at the border of counties Kerry and Cork. She founded the stillthriving Blue Ridge Irish Music School in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999, and taught ethnomusicology at Beloit College, where she also founded the North Atlantic Music Ensemble.
Henry Spiller (Professor, Department of Music, UC Davis) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia. His books include Gamelan: The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (University of Chicago, 2010), and Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (University of Hawaii, 2015). His work has been supported by awards from Fulbright (1998–99 and 2013) and the Balzan Prize Foundation. Notable awards include the Association for Asian Performance Debut Panel Award (1998), the American Harp Society Adams Award for Academic Research (1997), SEM’s Marcia Herndon Prize for exceptional ethnomusicological work in gender and sexuality, an honorable mention for SEM’s Merriam Prize for Erotic Triangles (2011), and SEM’s Bruno Nettl Prize (2016) for Javaphilia. At UC Davis, he teaches world music classes and graduate seminars, and directs the Department of Music’s gamelan ensemble.
Cory W. Thorne is Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is cross-appointed with Memorial’s School of Music, is a member of the Research Centre for the Study of Music,
Media and Place (MMaP), and has served as president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, and convener of the LGBTQ and Allies Section of the American Folklore Society. His primary research interests are in queer and vernacular theory, underground economies, popular culture/music, critical regionalism, vernacular religion, and material culture. Since 2008, he has been conducting on-going ethnographic research with a “gay ranch” in Havana province. His past research was focused on Newfoundland expatriate community associations, involving fieldwork in Newfoundland spaces (including folk festivals, social clubs, bars, and restaurants) in Alberta, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
