This paper examines how trans+ drag performers in Bristol (U.K.) use music to articulate forms of trans+ embodiment that challenge dominant crisis narratives. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork – including participant observation, interviews, and performance analysis – I approach drag as a sonic ecology structured through listening, affect, and relationality. In public discourse trans+ bodies are typically framed through crisis frameworks of medicalisation, sexualisation, and moral panic. Music has historically been central in queer responses to this. I situate current trans+ responses by building on Matthew J. Jones’s work on recorded pop and AIDS (2024), Keith C. Ward’s analysis of The AIDS Quilt Songbook (1999), and Gregory Barz’s ethnography of AIDS and performance in East Africa (2006). I trace how amplification, textual clarity, and repetition have become aligned with societal crisis narratives. I term this alignment ‘plague logic:’ a sonic mode privileging legibility, urgency, and didactic address. Through close analysis of drag performances, audience interaction, and backstage musical practices, I show how performers disrupt plague logic by foregrounding mundanity as an affective sonic register. Mundanity emerges through genre promiscuity, songs without symbolic gravitas, and affective warmth and intimacy that resist symbolic overdetermination. Music enables privacy within public space and collective strength without heroic framing. By centring mundanity as an ethnographically grounded performance framework, this paper contributes to trans+ methodologies in ethnomusicology (Garcia-Mispireta, 2023; Heller, 2020; Pennington, 2018), reframing music as a site where trans+ embodiment is sustained through community sonic practice and radical care.

This paper draws on autoethnography and theoretical scholarship on care and disability studies to address how the neoliberal model in contemporary universities in the United States hinders and hampers music scholars experiencing parenthood. Following Audre Lorde’s formulation of anger as a source of energy for progress and change, together with Sarah Ahmed’s use of writing from the own experience to make sense of it, I present what I call a rantflection – the combination of the words ‘rant’ and ‘reflection’ – to present some thoughts originating from my anger and expressing them critically to create a dialogue about the experience of parenthood in relation to the practice of music scholarship. While care and disability studies have increasingly gained scholarly attention in the last decade, the focus of these debates has been centered on practices of self-care and the challenges that the structural hostility of academia poses on scholars with disability. Meanwhile, ongoing discussions about the ethics of fieldwork and the figure of the researcher have been present in ethnomusicology and anthropology, and yet, dialogue about care-related day to day activities and how they shape our experiences and decisions have largely remained in the dark. In this paper I set an invitation to think collectively about how acknowledging our own relations to care and the sociability within it could impact our work in the field, but also what possibilities would it open to shaping our discipline into the future.

Music and the arts are increasingly used in Southern Africa to reduce HIV-related stigma. However, due to lack of evidence underpinning their impact, rarely do the music and the arts become part of policy development or are they formally integrated into healthcare programmes. The objective of our project was to design and pilot a music, dance, and theatre-based intervention combatting HIV-stigma in urban and peri-urban Zimbabwe, and then to conduct a comprehensive, in-depth evaluation of its impact.

With this presentation, we will show a recording of the music/dance/theatre intervention (20-minutes long), followed by a discussion featuring: (1) the research conducted to identify key drivers of HIV-stigma in Zimbabwe; (2) how we used that data to develop the intervention; and (3) how we assessed the impact of the intervention.

The intervention had a significant positive effect on an individual’s support against discriminatory actions or policies towards HIV: respondents who watched the play had reduced levels of fear and judgement towards HIV. This project demonstrates the potential music and the arts can serve in reducing HIV-stigma, findings that could have widespread implications for HIV prevention, treatment, and care.

“I have been told my arms are too fat and I should cover them up… I’ve been advised that I looked thinner in college and should return to that,” says soprano Victoria Erickson. Promulgated in the early 1990s, America’s moral panic over its so-called “obesity epidemic” extended beyond public health and media into the arts, reinforcing fatphobia entangled with white, classed, and westernized ideals of beauty. In classical music, these bodily norms are often framed as neutral, yet they are deeply embedded in professional training and evaluation. Within the opera industry, such norms surface with particular intensity in Young Artist Programs (YAPs), where emerging singers are judged not only on vocal ability but on their capacity to embody cis-heteronormative, fatphobic ideals of believability and marketability.

Over the past three decades, a neoliberal proliferation of “how-to” discourse—ranging from OPERA America audition guidelines to blogs, workshops, self-help literature, and social media—has codified professional audition attire as a visible marker of competence, belonging, and hireability. These gender-binarized prescriptions converge on a standardized audition “uniform,”disciplining singers’ bodies into industry-sanctioned legibility rather than individual expression. Drawing on young artists’ lived experiences through in-depth interviews, American industry praxis, and cultural criticism, I interrogate how fatphobia intersects with racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism to constrain access and govern opportunity under the guise of professionalism. I argue that audition “uniforms” function as technologies of compliance that naturalize systemic exclusion while displacing responsibility onto individual singers, obscuring the structural forces that shape operatic labor and inclusion.