Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Committee on Women and Gender.

This roundtable session seeks to support and give dedicated safe space for the experiences, needs, and work of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive musicologists. The ongoing attacks on the transgender community by the current U.S. administration, the use of fearmongering around transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny by many advocacy groups and politicians, and the scapegoating of research and initiatives pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, and disability at publicly funded universities impact us all.

At this critical moment we seek to acknowledge and celebrate how transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive scholars in both musicology (Krell 2015, Baitz 2018, Pennington 2019, Santana 2022, and Medina, Bates, and Chávez 2023) and cultural history (Heyam 2022, Schillace 2025) provide significant and crucial interventions in our ongoing interrogations of gender constructions and cisheteropatriarchy. Yet, since many of our own academic institutions and wider community settings have not yet recognized the unique needs of those existing under the trans* umbrella, this panel seeks to raise awareness of these issues and celebrate our shared commitments to inclusion and a resilient vision for a brighter future.

This roundtable, embracing voices from across the scholarly musical and gender spectra, affords us an opportunity to reflect on the problematic role of cisnormativity in our discipline’s history, acknowledge the lived experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive scholars in musicology and wider sound studies, reassess our roles in shaping this field within and beyond academia, and strategize for a more equitable and inclusive future.

Participants: Morgan Bates, UCLA PhD candidate; Christi Jay Wells, ASU

Invited participants: Stephan Pennington, Tufts