Queer Ear

"Queer Ear brings together for the first time a collection of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology. To queer musicology, which has often presumed that music theory has nothing valuable to contribute to queer music studies, we demonstrate how music theory can be appropriated for queer ends. We show that queerness is integral to our music-theoretical practice, and can change the field of music theory. Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the "queer ear," a concept which stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and nonnormative listening practices, a queer ear enables us to counter music theory's hoary and continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. What unites the investigation of queer ear and queer soundings is the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. These repurposings contribute to the search for general principles-or a "theory"-of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening instead. But ultimately, the queer ear is an expression of what queers have always had to do, often learning from a young age to collect scraps from our families's heteronormative table, recycling and reusing bits and pieces of an often hostile world to build habitable futures for ourselves. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analyses, we examine a wide variety of sounds from Sun Ra to Cowell, Czernowin, and Henze, as well as Schubert and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and writings from Edward Cone to Edward Prime-Stevenson"--

This book examines queer activism and queer social movements (QSMs) in Indonesia and Malaysia, broadly engaging with these topics on three different levels: macro (global and national discourses), meso (organizational level – activities), and micro (individual – the activist). The micro level perspective allows for moving beyond the “traditional” political movement paradigm by understanding activism in Foucauldian terms as the ethics of the self (Foucault, 1984). In other words, the queer subject is seen as an active agent in taking care of the self by queering/resisting gender norms as well as heteronormative practices and regimes in their social environment through embodiment and actions. This kind of ethical being has the potential to build support and community between and amongst individuals.

God is Queer. In a world of normative paradigms, God will never fit in and nor should we. That twitching and itching for something more will consistently be present until we step out of our closets and into the Queer. The Courage to Be Queer is about the wildness and beauty of an indescribable and uncontainable God. What is the Queer calling us to be? We are to be the ones shouting for justice. We are to be the ones dancing for freedom. We are to be the ones dreaming for hope. We are to be the ones . . . In the midst of the spectacle of it all, there will be those observers who hear the knocking and lean in. Will you open the door?

New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the vast—and increasingly uncharted—intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore. This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing non-normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer classical studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts/queer futures. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly.

The concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics have increasingly gained scholarly attention, particularly in light of today’s urgent and troubling issues that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others, including the migration crisis, rise of populism on a global scale, homonationalist practices, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic ‘others’. This book aims to nuance this conversation by emphasising feminist and queer investments and interventions and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. In this way, we move forward toward envisioning feminist and queer futures that rethink categories such as ‘human’ and ‘subjectivity’ based on classical modern premises. Informed by feminist/queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, and critical posthumanism, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics engages with longstanding questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism, but does so by urging for a more inclusive (and less violent) cosmopolitical framework. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial approach allows for visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice. This book is a significant new contribution to feminist and queer philosophy and politics, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, philosophy, politics, and law. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies.

Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of musical texts -performance, cultural production and sexual meaning - situating music within the broader patterns of culture that it both mirrors and actively reproduces. The collection is divided into four parts: queering borders queer spaces hidden histories queer thoughts, mixed media. Queering the Popular Pitch will appeal to students of popular music, Gay and Lesbian studies. With case studies and essays by leading popular music scholars it provides insightful discourse in a growing field of musicological research.