Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:55am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Opera Displaced Session Chair: Peng Liu | |
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Hearing Song Liling: Listening Against Intersectional Expectation in Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly (2022) University of Texas at Austin Huang Ruo’s operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play M. Butterfly reconfigures the moment long treated as revelatory in the original drama. Hwang’s play unfolds along two intertwined axes: a real-life espionage scandal between French diplomat René Gallimard and Chinese opera singer Song Liling—who, after a twenty-year affair, is revealed to be biologically male and a spy for the People’s Republic of China—and a sustained deconstruction of the imperialist fantasy embedded in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In the play, Song’s exposure secures visual and vocal alignment, stabilizing meaning through bodily confirmation. In the opera, however, Song’s countertenor voice persists beyond bodily exposure, prolonging dissonance between voice, gender, and identity. Only in the final moments—when Song returns after Gallimard’s suicide and utters “Butterfly!” in baritone—do body and voice coincide. Even then, the alignment reoccupies Puccini’s Orientalist codes rather than resolving ambiguity. This paper argues that M. Butterfly does not fail to deliver intersectional representation; rather, it exposes how intersectionality has come to function as a normative listening framework. Premiering in 2022 amid heightened anti-Asian violence and intensified public discourse surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, the opera was primed to be heard as a site of intersectional legibility. Critical responses reveal dissatisfaction not with what the opera represents, but with its refusal to clarify Song’s sexuality or stabilize identity. Drawing on Nina Eidsheim’s account of voice as a site of projection and Carolyn Abbate’s concept of drastic listening, I suggest that ambiguity operates not as thematic vagueness but as a listening structure. Through close analysis of three musical moments—Song’s performance of Puccini’s “Un bel dì,” the aria “Awoke as a Butterfly,” and the final baritone “Butterfly!”—alongside countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim’s performance and interviews, I show how the opera, as an Asian American work, organizes and frustrates interpretive expectation. By sustaining instability between voice, body, and fantasy, Huang’s opera reframes intersectionality not as an identity endpoint but as a politics of perception—one that the work both activates and unsettles. | |