Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity

ISBN-13: 9781138960053 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 198 str.

Gavin S. K. Lee

Opis

In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine how the analytics of sameness and difference combine to produce both gender replication and the ambiguity of gender disruption in popular music. Covering popular music from around the globe, contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, vernacular fundamentalist Christian music, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth century minstrelsy. The authors address questions related to gender replication and disruption: How does heteronormative culture come to be replicated in queer musical scenes? How does the music of gender and sexuality both retain old cultural forms and challenge them? Is it possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically? This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Sound Studies, and Media Studies.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: from difference to ambiguity Gavin Lee 2. When the bearded lady sings: ambiguity aesthetics, queer identity, and the gendering of the presentational voice Mario Rey 3. Détournement and female punk bands of the 1970s Helen L. Reddington 4. Ambiguities of S/M and goth cultures’ sex/gender identity politics Carol Siegel 5. Flower in the mirror and moon in the water: the ambiguity of gender, genre, and politics of Li Yugang Qian Wang 6. What counts as "queer" in an historical context?: cross dressing in nineteenth-century theatre Gillian M. Rodger 7. Funny girls and nowhere boys: reversing the gaze in the popular music biopic Matthew Bannister 8. "I’ma school that bitch": gay rappers defying binaries and expressing fierceness Kirsten Zemke and Jared Mackley-Crump 9. Queer desire is not gay, gender is a fantasy: ways of loving Britney Gavin Lee 10. "Blackness in a white void": dissonance and ambiguity in Isaac Julien’s multi-screen film installations Ellie M. Hisama Afterword: the world only spins forward Paul Attinello

O autorze

Gavin S.K. Lee is Assistant Professor at Soochow University School of Music in China. He completed his doctoral studies at Duke University on avant-garde music in Singapore, and his core research interests include postcolonial theory, affect theory, queer theory, global modernity and modernism, and the Sinophone world. Lee’s research is published in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis (forthcoming), and in a book funded by the Singapore National Arts Council, Scions of the Musical West.