Conference Agenda

By emphasizing inclusive religious themes and the historical origins of music, queer singers in New England take ownership of the Sacred Harp tradition to celebrate aspects of American history erased by white Christian Nationalist sentiments. Although Northern singings have been a safe space for queer expression since the music’s revival in the 1970s, scholarship thus far has ignored this connection to marginalized communities and only offered critiques of Northern singers as insufficiently authentic to the Southern tradition. Building on Tes Slominski’s framework for understanding how nationalistic expectations of genre limit the expression of queer folk musicians in The Oxford Book of Queerness and Music and John Bealle’s innovative characterization of the Sacred Harp community as an open religious group without dogmatic belief structures, my fieldwork indicates that revival singers in New England were specifically drawn to this religious openness and reclaimed their American identity through singing the Revolutionary-era music. The music’s religious sentiments of transcendence and everlasting love mirror the aspirations of the fight for marriage equality and women’s liberation. Its unusual performance practice of vocal doubling at the octave are used by transgender and non-binary singers to experiment with developing registers of their voice during hormone therapy. And the formal musical structure of the fuging tune enacts the themes of social cohesion and reconciliation many activists longed for.

Whether made hypervisible or sublimated through metaphor, trans characters are often written to explain and justify trans existence, particularly to a non-trans public (Morse 2018; Steinbock 2018). In their 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun subverts these typical grammars of trans representation (Tourmaline et al., 2017), prioritizing their trans audience’s embodied, affective experience over pandering to a non-trans audience. Schoenbrun also expresses a desire that their film act as a “sad song,” recognizing the transformative, relational potential of negative affect in music. How does Schoenbrun's film demonstrate a mode of t4t (trans for trans) feeling, mobilizing negative affect to encourage real-world transformation and connection for their trans audience?

I argue that Schoenbrun builds a “t4t affective world” through the complex interplay between the film’s narrative and visual landscape, and its distinctive original soundtrack, which centers “sad songs” as vehicles of trans relationality. I engage with recent work theorizing t4t in literary and media criticism (Awkward-Rich 2020; Dunn 2024; Lundy-Harris 2022), and negative affect in post-2000s feminist indie-rock (DiPiero 2023) in order to perform close-readings of musical scenes which foreground the direct relationship between film and audience. Through a multidisciplinary method of musical, narrative, and media analysis, I bring together intra- and extra-filmic worlds. Ultimately I suggest that bringing t4t care ethics to our artistic and critical practices pulls our attention toward the electrified spaces between bodies (of work, of flesh) that have the potential to repel one another, or to stick like television static.

In this paper, I discuss present-day archiving projects of show travesti (a transfeminine genre of lip-sync and live theatre performance) by community-based art collectives in Latin America. Situating research conducted at the Museo de Arte Transfeminino, Archivo de la Memoria Trans, Acervo Bajubá, and the Museo Transgênero de História e Arte, the paper articulates how trans women in the Americas work to reclaim memory and knowledge of late 20th-Century transfeminine nightlife performance. Much of the archival materials consist of photographs, personal items, and oral history; thus, I posit fabulatory loudness as a musical strategy to recuperate discarded, forgotten, and destroyed memories in the wake of the colonial, racial, and sexual history of transfemicide through sound’s excessive and affective remnants. Fabulatory loudness, then, offers a theoretical maneuver to accommodate musical archives that may not exist as is normatively understood by musicologists. This paper argues that the hemispheric transfeminine category of show travesti produces alternative histories of nightlife economies closely tied to transsexuality, sex work, blackness, and class disparity. Building upon recent calls in trans studies to perturb the category trans through hemispheric analysis such as "Trans in Las Américas" (TSQ 2019), Translocas (LaFountain-Stokes 2021), and Transformismo (Leslie Santana 2025), I suggest that the archival memories afforded to transfemininity–through fabulatory loudness–demand a recalibration of trans/queer music studies through a dialectic of material history and aesthetic speculation. By considering transfemininity capaciously, and alongside the contemporary resonances of show travesti, this paper documents the intersections of community knowledge, mutual aid, and creative practice.

Over twenty-five years ago, Waksman (1999) theorized the electric guitar as a “technophallus,” a prop in cisgender male, heteronormative performances of sexual conquest. Today, scholarship and public discourse continues to assert the instrument’s essentially masculine orientation. Even its standard construction privileges tall, strong-shouldered, and flat-chested bodies (Fitzpatrick 2025, Vesey 2020). But in my twenty years as a queer, female guitarist, I have come to see the instrument as expressive tool for a more capacious kind of erotics; and its exclusionary material composition, while frustrating, has also been a source of unique creative inspiration (Hochman 2016).

Prompted by Cusick’s (2006) groundbreaking contributions to the study of music and queerness and Paradigm-Smalls and Goldin-Perschbacher’s (2020) explorations of how queer artists make space for themselves in hegemonically alienating genres, my manuscript, Resonant Bodies: Queer Female Materiality and the Electric Guitar, takes an autoethnographic and practice-based approach to analyzing how queer, female guitarists unsettle and negotiate with the instrument’s alienating cultural and material legacies. I argue for a queered critical organology that asks not only what an instrument means, but also how it feels, proposing a set of interpretive methodologies which attend to the intimate and sometimes difficult interactions between body and instrument, where endless expressive possibilities arise. By centering a diverse range of queer, female performance innovations and reading practices, I unravel the instrument’s contingency, both as a sexually charged signifier and an object, and reorient discourse about the electric guitar away from the heteronormative, masculinist tropes that have tended to define it.