Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS LGBTQ Study Group

The AMS LGBTQ Study Group panel includes papers featuring queer and trans methods in music scholarship, gender-expansive embodiment and musical practice, queer of color critique in music studies, and performances and practices of queer and trans joy. More specifically, this panel includes presentations on how performance practices can index and even subvert colonial matrices of power; the reorientation of musical canons by deploying a quare-femme gaze; the political import of aggregating a critical mass of queer musical knowledge; and the contours of resistance and joy in queer and trans theories on failure.

The contemporary news cycle seems fixated on young trans people, but with an emphasis on the precarity of their legal access to gender affirming care, and on the isolation these young people must feel. Anecdotally, however, many trans youth and young adults – myself included– instead define their lives through the joys of living as one’s ‘truest self,’ and of being in community with other queer folks. This paper looks to how joy, and more specifically, how child-like play, make-believe, and ‘white lies,’ were important aspects of community building for self-identified genderqueer dykes, butches, and trans masculine punk musicians in the 1990s. Using a specific understanding of joy as resistance from the field of feminist theory, (Ahmed 2013; Stewart 2021), I extend the notion of queer failure (Halberstam 2011), and trans failure (Lehner 2022) to illuminate how intentionally failing is not the only form of resistance, but how tenderness and having fun can be seen as integral components of a trans resistance, as well.

Silas Howard, guitar player of the 1990s San Francisco queercore band Tribe8 is the focus of this paper. Forming a punk band, despite any musical knowledge as an attempt to stay sober with new friend and soon-to-be lead singer, Lynnee Breedlove, Howard found life-saving community through queercore. In another example of not-quite-truths, he and friend Harry Dodge soon opened their own venue and queer meeting spot called “Red Dora’s Bearded Lady,” after a friend helped rig the wiring, allowing them to pirate their electricity for the next seven years. Through a re-telling of Tribe8’s formation, their performance aesthetic and gimmicks I call feminist-dyke-camp, and an analysis of Howard’s 2001 feature film, By Hook or By Crook, (featuring many cameos by the local queer punks) I illuminate how lying, trans joy, and genderqueer friendship work together in powerful ways.

U.S. expatriate author Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942) is best known for his contributions to queer literature—the novel Imre: A Memorandum (1906) and the history of homosexuality The Intersexes (ca. 1909)—both self-published and distributed by the author under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne. Prime-Stevenson was, however, also a prolific music critic and his works rely heavily on musical references. While these allusions take multiple forms depending on the intended media format and likely audience, this paper presentation argues that his main strategies for depicting a particularly queer musical understanding involve pairing collective listening experiences with sharing gossip about certain composers and works. Drawing on theories of musical anecdote and mythmaking (Wiley 2008; Unseld 2014) and histories of queer gossip (Butt 2005; Franseen 2020; Riddell 2022), I focus on a selection of excerpts from across Prime-Stevenson’s writings: the prefatory material on how to curate a phonograph listening party in A Repertory of One Hundred Symphonic Programmes (1932), the depiction of shared queer listening and musical partnership in the short stories “Prince Bedr’s Quest”(1927), “When Art Was Young” (1883/1913), and “Once; But Not Twice” (1891/1913), and the brief discussion of specific works and composers in The Intersexes. In each of these examples, Prime-Stevenson explores the potential of constructing shared musical experiences by creating a highly idiosyncratic canon of queer musical knowledge, one which is particularly conducive to bringing (real and fictional) people together, constructing queer musical biography and counterhistories, and identifying allegedly secret meanings and messages in opera and symphonic music. I conclude with some thoughts on Prime-Stevenson’s evolving use of quasi-scientific terminology and playing with pseudonyms across his sexological, musicological, and literary work, suggesting that he considered both music and sexuality ultimately beyond the limits of easy description and classification.

Although it might seem like the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision on marriage equality (2015) brought an era of reconciliation, safety measures are more important now than ever for the woman-identifying queer community (Human Rights Campaign). The LGBTQ community has experienced many losses of life as a result of hate crimes, from the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando to the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in November 2022. Furthermore, the lesbian community continues to encounter great erasure when it pertains to safe communal spaces, as seen for example in the rapid decline of lesbian bars in the United States (Marloff 2021). Building on E. Patrick Johnson’s notion of quare studies (2020), I propose that the quare canon, or queer-identifying songs specifically resonating with queer people of color, offers a new mode of communication, allowing for a safe cultural exchange between members of queer women communities of color in the twenty-first century. Using canonical discourse by Marcia J. Citron (1993), and queer theory discussed by Fred Maus (2018) and Suzanne Cusick (1994), the purpose of this paper is to 1) critique the exclusive and elitist nature of heteropatriarchal canonical studies; and to 2) highlight the use of a more inclusive canon as a possible form of code-switching amongst the quare-femme community. This cultural exchange will be observed in the discography of quare-femme artists Hayley Kiyoko, Raveena, and Kehlani. By incorporating genre fusion, media studies, and feminist critique, each of these artists transcends gendered and racial structures, resulting in an intersectional and artistic positionality that appeals specifically to the quare-femme gaze.

What does it mean to be a decolonial artist? The Western colonial matrix of power (CMP) has profoundly impacted global arts and culture, benefitting from a hierarchization of artistic epistemologies and suppression of indigenous performance media. The CMP, Western at its core, has rippled outward into subsequent colonization projects including the Japanese colonial empire. These secondary loci of coloniality create what I call stratified coloniality: regionally specific enactments of the CMP which share a common thread of Western cultural hegemony while reacting to respective colonial contexts. Artists who seek to enact decolonial praxis in these cultures face unique experiences of marginalization which have not been adequately explored.

Brooklyn-based Korean American artist eddy kwon presents a unique study in subverting the colonial matrix of power in her performance art piece UMMA-YA. I argue that kwon takes a multivalent approach to enacting decolonial praxis, deftly navigating the complex ramifications of stratified Western and Japanese coloniality. Her performance subverts a binaristic concept of gender, a tool which benefits the colonial state. Herself a transgender woman, she performs UMMA-YA in the character of a transgender boy who discovers he is pregnant. She also confronts the legacy of Japanese colonialism by centering the marginalized Korean mudang tradition of salp’uri dance, and defies the Western separation of performance media by melding vocal and instrumental performance, dance, poetry, costume, and ritual within a solo work. In this respect, I argue that kwon’s work is ideologically aligned with Ben Spatz’s theory of decolonizing embodiment, which challenges the European notion of divisions between theatre, dance, and music.

UMMA-YA exemplifies a powerful artistic subversion of stratified coloniality, confronting the legacies of Japanese and Western colonialism. Her work charts a potential path forward for artists and teachers who wish to enact decolonial praxis in their work.