Conference Agenda

This panel considers how by “thinking trans” within music and sound studies we might develop new histories and theories of sound, listening, and embodiment. Thinking trans considers transness as a methodology that can produce and complicate our epistemologies of music and sound. We are not seeking to add a new subject to music and sound studies discourses, nor do we propose that music/sound studies are entering a “transgender turn.” Rather, we are interested in how these disciplines have always already produced discourses of sex, gender, and the body that, by thinking trans, can be pushed forward into new registers of feminist thought and praxis. In this way, this panel puts trans theory into dialogue with foundational and current feminist music/sound thinking in order to promote a renewed political commitment to dismantling patriarchal and cisheterosexist paradigms, ones that even construct the category “trans” as something distinct or exceptional.

Engaging with sound and music, then, allows this panel to focus on ways the body (as another socially constructed category) is attuned to certain epistemological registers of sex and gender—registers that are inherently co-constituted with race. By considering what Third World Feminist writers describe as “theory in the flesh,” transauralities produces its knowledge by embodying trans experiences with sound. Papers in this panel engage the embodied, the corporeal, and the fleshly in a multiplicitous fashion, transcending any identitarian fixity that makes transness legible as a subject of discourse. We are more interested in the potentialities that thinking trans offers for returning to this body with an emergent sense of care; our panel signals both an emergence in music/sound studies for thinking trans as aesthetic critique and simultaneously a hailing to the political emergency of trans bodies that are subject to states of precarity and extreme forms of violence. Following Venus Xtravaganza, a trans woman of color featured in the 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning, transauralities takes seriously “all of this skin,” touching, feeling, and ultimately being vulnerable to the aural by eliding any particular commitment to naming sex, gender, music, or sound.

In this paper, I offer a theoretical conceptualization of the ear in order to expand current debates surrounding embodiment and materiality within 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 body for granted, which I draw from trans of color critique. A shift to the materiality of fleshliness as a theoretical framework for the ear, deconstructing 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 object of analysis is the ear “itself,” whereby I disrupt a teleological impulse within music studies that demands the sensate—which I identify as (h)earing to highlight the ear’s labor in hearing—as it is absorbed in the regime of cognition (listening) tell us something about music or sound. In this way, I am not interested in using the ear to understand music or sound, but rather I consider how the flesh of the ear is often forced to do this work without its consent. We might ask: when was the last time your ear gave its consent to this act of listening we value so highly in our discourse? I respond to this question by thinking trans through ontological potentialities that are always already fractured, differential, fungible, and capacious in order to dismantle flat, “vibratory” ontologies within current materialist debates by returning to a commitment to the trans ear’s flesh and its needs, wants, and desires.

Recent scholarship in musicology has called us to interrogate our listening practices and account for tendencies to name the sources of the sounds that we hear (Revuluri, 2013; Eidsheim, 2019). The process of ascribing identity markers to human voices reflects not the material voices themselves, but also our own listening practices within structures of oppression, including a gender binary. While scholarly discourses continue to push against a gender binary, minimal research has centered the experiences and work of transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. In popular culture, drag performance actively challenges constructions of a gender binary, launching audiences into a social world in which sexes assigned at birth are deemed irrelevant, a world in which performers hold the power to construct their own characters and assert their bodies through gesture, dance, costume, and, in many cases, vocalization. Many drag performers have launched vocal careers and, through their performances, subvert cissexism and bring trans voices that have been writing queer her/theirstory for centuries into the media limelight. I argue that drag vocalists center their bodies in manners that defy gender and (gendered) sex stereotypes and require listeners to hear beyond colonialist, racist, and patriarchal structures of normativity. In this paper, I examine the performances of two transgender vocal artists: Danny Beard’s performance of “I Need A Hero” on the semi-final episode of Britain’s Got Talent in 2016, and Peppermint’s music video “Best Sex” from her album Letters to My Lovers. Drawing upon scholarship in Black feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and vocality studies, particularly the works of Evelynn Hammonds (1994), Kadji Amin (2022), and M. Myrta Leslie Santana (2022), I explore ways in which these performers reclaim autonomy and agency, inviting audiences to experience their voices and bodies as subjects, not objects. This project not only expands conversations about drag vocal performance, but also creates pathways to more trans-inclusive listening practices and dialogue about human voices.

Robin Skinner, known professionally as Cavetown, is a trans British musician who completed a headline tour across western Europe in 2022 on the heels of his newest album, worm food. An artist important to young trans audiences, much of Cavetown’s oeuvre refers lyrically to childhood or is specifically written from the narrative perspective of youth. While this content has led to a fanbase largely composed of adolescents and pre-adolescents, Cavetown’s aesthetic of youth extends beyond his lyrics, music, or listeners. In this paper, I take the largest concert of this tour at the Eventim Apollo in London as a site of performance in which stage movement and audience interactions reveal an ethos of youthful transness built upon embodied interactions of media, textiles, and voice. I analyze three repeated social interactions I observed and recorded as an attendee—audience members responding to images of pride flags and LGBTQ+ media shown to each other; Cavetown’s stage movements that foreground physical pride flags and child-like dancing and sitting; and Cavetown’s encouragement and facilitation of care among audience members—to reveal how the concert is a site in which performances of youthfulness, transness, and reparation become possible. Drawing on writing that addresses youthfulness and queerness by scholars including Will Cheng, Jack Halberstam, and Gayle Salamon, this paper demonstrates how Cavetown’s concert reveals a series of social interactions which, when taken together, point towards the construction of an ethos in which movement and intertextuality are co-constitutive elements of trans youthfulness. Just as Cavetown sings “I’ll figure out a way to get us out of here” in “This Is Home” (2015), his concert experience is one at which participants engaged with performances that foreground trans youthfulness in a care-laden contrast to the transphobia that trans youth face in the United Kingdom and the West. Trans youthfulness becomes a radical epistemological embodiment in which care-based acts of the body yield a political rejection of violence elsewhere through vocalizations of softness and representational multimedia. In this way, thinking trans about this Cavetown concert allows us to consider performances as collective liberatory sites.