Tension in the reception of American-Italian film Call Me by Your Name (2017)—as a beautiful film that implicitly condones a problematic narrative—is shaped by its manipulative compilation soundtrack. Already lauded as a timeless masterpiece in cinematography, sensuality, and music, the film also receives steadfast criticism regarding its portrayal of homosexuality and condoning of inter-age desire between Elio, a 17-year-old Italian-French boy, and Oliver, a 24-year-old American man. In this paper, I analyze three musical episodes from the film, including The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan, and Sufjan Stevens’s “Mystery of Love.” In each scene, respectively, I find that aesthetic prioritization, appeal to emotional universality, and false portrayal of Elio as the primary initiator of intimacy all function to dismiss the problematic narrative and Oliver’s irresponsibility. I analyze each work’s lyrics and/or narrative placement. Subsequently, I reveal that these instances perpetuate a subconscious and harmful misrepresentation of modern queerness that is especially self-destructive in the wake of today’s far-right obsession with pedophilia in the LGBTQIA+ community. Acknowledging recent homo/transphobic fearmongering in the guise of “child safety,” I remove the film’s rose-tinted glasses and instead interpret these scenes as tangible inspirations for real-life problems. Finally, I incite musicologist William Cheng’s advocation for reparative work in critical theory fields. Call Me by Your Name’s soundtrack simultaneously beautifies queerness and succumbs to weaponization against queerness; I argue that the film and soundtrack alike can be appreciated for their achievements while guide the work ahead of us.

Since its formation, Queer theory has been involved in criticizing oppressive powers that censure and discipline individuals who live their gender and sexuality freely. Although such critiques are ultimately political, many queer theorists have abstained from proposing transformative political practices for communities or governments. Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke (2022) argues that queer theory should both criticize and improve governance, while political economists Nicola Smith and Donna Lee (2015) have argued that political sciences and practices have not considered queer theory extensively. Thus, I examine how avoiding queerness from political strategies has a profound impact on LGBTIQ+ exclusion. In other words, I posit that the disconnection between queer thought and governance hampers equality in terms of gender and sexuality. I analyze diverse LGBTIQ+ musical practices from the Colombian Caribbean city of Barranquilla to support my argument. Taking the Barranquilla Gay Carnival (also known as the LGBTIQ+ Carnival) as a political group (a collective subject) and, at the same time, as an object to be governed, I posit that the Gay Carnival has moved away from heteronormativity to a homonormativity that privileges cisgender gay men. I show how Gay Carnival’s organizers hire ensembles that perpetuate music as a men-centered practice without acknowledging it or trying to prevent it (nor the governmental sponsors). Finally, I show how the feminist traditional-music ensemble Raras no tan Raras (weirdos not so weirdos) is an alternative that embraces queer theory and feminism to organize themselves through governance centered on care and inclusion.

In this paper, I propose a theory that I call the “body of techno,” a mode of corporeal feeling whose porosity works to fragment the boundedness of the liberal subject. Using the body of techno as a framework, I posit a queer ethnomusicology as the study of musical possibility achieved through forms of embodied knowledge that exceed anthropological truth. Throughout its history of substantiation, the field of ethnomusicology has been authenticated by its genealogical links to anthropology, whose claim to scientific objectivity is predicated on an empirical conception of reality. Specifically, this objectivity has been refracted through the favored formula of “[these people] + [make this music] + [for this reason].” However, this investment in a narrow empiricism reveals epistemological gaps when the underpinnings of a musical practice can only be appraised through a philosophical reading of its speculative character. One such practice is techno (and its broader context of the rave), which I argue entails a series of bodies that overlap, cross-contaminate, and mutate, revealing the possibility of a plural subjectivity that exceeds the normative order of the liberal subject. A queer ethnomusicology, I argue, works outside of empirical reality to ask what we as ethnomusicologists hope for music to do beyond what is readily observable. Based in techniques of minoritarian feeling, a queer ethnomusicology is a decidedly fantastic endeavor that strives to feel out new lifeways beyond the epistemological regimes of "man."

Complex transnational musical spectacles thrive on Drag Race Philippines, an adaptation of the international competition format featuring talented drag performers. The Philippine edition’s debut season in 2022 prominently featured song-and-dance challenges including the staging of variety shows, impersonation musicals of pop artists, girl group showdowns, music videos, and lip-sync battles of Philippine and foreign tracks. This paper analyzes such performance texts as manifestations of novel convergences in aesthetics and codes culled from local and global ideas, owing in part to the nation’s postcolonial history and the mobility of transnational content via digital technologies. Crucially, the program’s musical staging of queer artistry allows for blurring of cultural boundaries as the performers’ own identities, subjectivities, and orientations embody modalities of innovation within mainstream creative industries due to their rupturing and reinvigoration of existing templates. Further, the paper interrogates the transmedia aspects of the program’s production and reception, primarily the show’s release on global streaming platforms and informal consumption (and remixing) across social media. The screen — of the television, the mobile phone, the production cameras, and the monitor where RuPaul Charles communicated virtually with contestants — is reckoned as a queering portal that disrupts mainstream conventions by enabling the art and tradition of drag to render the queer Philippine performer as figurative interface of postcolonial, postmodern expressive cultures. Broadly, the analysis assesses the significance of local, regional, and transnational multimedia scenes conveying their modification and amplification of musical performances, overlaps, and re-codings as evolving technological spaces of difference with flourishing public reach.