Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship Symposium
Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship was a symposium held in conjunction with the 2016 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC. The symposium featured keynote presentations by Deborah R. Vargas and Alisha Lola Jones. There was also a concert featuring Teiya Kasahara (voice) and Rachel Iwaasa (piano).
The original program and schedule can be found here.
Select papers from the conference will be published as a special issue of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.
Within the academy—and not least music scholarship—the adjective queer is frequently deployed as a radical modifier: queering history, queering culture, queering the pitch. This usage presupposes an intrinsic alterity. As if queerness necessarily represents the largest measure of difference from the norm. As if queerness—in and of itself—carries with it a discursive perversity, without which “history,” “culture,” and “the pitch” remain neutral categories of knowledge.
One problem with this approach is the assumption of whiteness that it writes onto queerness, history, culture and pitch alike—an error rendered particularly acute in studies of the Western musical canon, though present in scholarship on music more broadly, historical, analytic, and ethnographic alike. The papers of the Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship Project confronted this problem head on. Rather than queering race studies in music scholarship, we aimed to race queer music scholarship, unpacking the structural ellipses and disciplinary violence of our current practice and sketching the outlines of a richer, critically stronger approach to our thinking about music and sound in its relationship with queer bodies.
Conference Participants
Keynote Presenters:
Alisha Lola Jones
Deborah R. Vargas
Concert Performers:
Teiya Kasahara (voice)
Rachel Iwaasa (piano)
Paper Presenters:
Kira Dralle
Kai Finlayson
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher
Eric Hung
Kyle Kaplan
Elìas Krell
Rebekah Lobosco Gilli
Mitchell Morris
Gayle Murchison
Ali Na
Chris Nickell
Stephan Pennington
Yun Emily Wang
Co-conveners: Hedy Law, Stephan Pennington, and Emily Wilbourne.
Program Committee: Emily Wilbourne, Tes Slominski, and Gavin Lee.
Contact: emily.wilbourne@qc.cuny.edu
Watch videos from the symposium on YouTube here.
Watch a video of the concert here.
Sponsored by the LGBTQ Study Group of the AMS, the Queer Resource Group of the SMT, the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce of the SEM, the School of Music of the University of British Columbia, the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC, the Department of Music at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, and Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.