Conference Agenda

Queer hyperpop artist Dorian Electra’s 2020 album My Agenda is a work of musical drag parody, primarily targeting the gender and sexuality politics of online incel (involuntary celibate) communities and conservative pundits. Throughout the album, Electra portrays an internet archetype of an incel gamer who is deeply resentful about his lack of access to sex. Fantasy and video game medievalisms consume this character, who idealizes chivalric code and “studying the blade.” Accordingly, the album and its music videos are full of medievalist images and sounds. A knight in shining armor stands atop a pile of bones while a hooded monk sits alone surrounded by candles. Lyrics reference crowns, crusaders, and chainmail. The track Gentleman opens with synthesized recorder and lute, harmonized with distinctive parallel fourths in the remix. Monk Mode features pseudo-chant monophonic scalar movement around a finalis overlaid with spoken Latin. Surprisingly, the album also features contrapuntal figures on a synthesized harpsichord. This early modern influence is reinforced in the Johann Sebastian Bach remix of the track Edgelord.

This paper analyzes the presence of these varied sonic signifiers of “old” music as not just part of Electra’s parody of incel communities’ fascination with the medieval and American conservatives’ dedication to the “greats” of European history, but as shaping the broader practices of queer listening the album encourages. My Agenda’s transhistorical impulse juxtaposes moments of counterpoint, harmonic sequences, and modal monophony with electronic riff and loop-based structures, moving between radically different modes of organizing musical pitch and time. This creates moments of what Gavin Lee, following Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, might call dis- or re-orientation. I ultimately argue that these frequent sonic and historical shifts do not primarily function as individual changes in orientation within a linear listening narrative. Instead, their chaotic combination is a core structuring principle of the album which suggests a different mode of queer listening, focused not on individual changes in orientation but instead on their multiplicity, coexistence, and fluidity. This listening practice mirrors the album’s conceptual layering and blending of real and fictional places, times, and characters, adding an affective dimension to Electra’s queer politics.

Feminist scholarship has shown that modernism across several art forms was shaped by misogynistic philosophies and anti-feminist reactions to the educated, independent woman brought about by the first wave of feminism (DeKoven 1991, 1999; Gilbert and Gubar 1988; Scott 1990). In music, male ultra-modernist composers, such as Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Charles Seeger, viewed tonal Western art music as “emasculated” and overly emotional (Straus 1999, 222). In response, they turned to dissonance as a more intellectual way of composing that they thought was beyond the capabilities of women, to reassure themselves of the masculinity of their artistic pursuits. In light of this gendered divide, Smith (1994), Straus (1999), and Hisama (2001), have assigned masculine and feminine characteristics to consonance and dissonance in opposing ways: while Smith and Straus view dissonance as a masculine-gendered quality, Hisama proposes that a reversal of the stereotypical gender roles can be viewed as an act of feminist agency in the music of female ultra-modernist composers.

In this paper, I propose a new gendering of consonance and dissonance in the music of Johanna Beyer (1888–1944) rooted in queer theory, which views gender as extending beyond the binary of sex and subject to change (Butler 1990; Ahmed 2006). In analyses of three movements from the Clarinet Suites (1932), I argue that consonance and dissonance transcend a binary system, which problematizes the typical feminine/masculine binary often ascribed to them. At many moments throughout these movements, dissonance in one parameter is simultaneously contrasted by consonance in another. These moments containing both “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics are problematic and disorientating, creating a “queer effect” (Ahmed 2006). The overarching musical narrative of these movements features initial dissonant melodies gradually morphing into more consonant final lines. Unlike previous interpretations of modernist music, which operate under the assumption that consonance and dissonance are discrete variables, I propose that consonance and dissonance are continuous, allowing for some moments to be more dissonant than others. Ultimately, I argue that mixing consonance and dissonance and transcending the binary could be seen as Beyer asserting her independence and her feminist agency within her misogynistic environment.