Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity

Beschreibung

This open access book explores the disciplinary and recent interdisciplinary sites, relations, and productions of ethnomusicology and queerness, arguing that both are founded upon a destructive masculinity—indissolubly linked to coloniality and epistemic hegemony—and marked by a monologic, ethnocentric silencing of embodied, same-sex desire.  Ethnomusicology’s fetishization of masculinizing fieldwork; queerness’s functioning as Anglocentric master category; and both spheres’ devaluation of sensuality and experience, concomitant with an adherence to provincial, Western conceptions of knowledge production, are seen as precluding the possibility of an equitable, dialogic pluriversality. Ultimately reimagining the fates of both in relation to negative emotions and intractable affect, and enlisting the sonic as theoretical-material intervention, the disciplines are envisioned as vanquished, replaced by explorations of sound, sex/uality, and experiential somaticity occurring in a protean, postdisciplinary space of material/epistemic equity. This uncompromising and long-overdue critique will be of interest to researchers and students from numerous disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, including music, sound, gender, queer, and postcolonial/decolonial studies.

Stephen Amico is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (2014).

This open access book explores the disciplinary, disciplined, and recent interdisciplinary sites and productions of ethnomusicology and queerness, arguing that both academic realms are founded upon a destructive masculinity—indissolubly linked to coloniality and epistemic hegemony—and marked by a monologic, ethnocentric silencing of embodied, same-sex desire. Ethnomusicology’s fetishization of masculinizing fieldwork; queerness’s functioning as Anglophone master category; and both domains’ devaluation of sensuality and experience, concomitant with an adherence to provincial, Western conceptions of knowledge production, are revealed as precluding the possibilities for equitable, dialogic pluriversality.  Enlisting the sonic as theoretical intervention, the disciplined/disciplining ethno and queer are reimagined in relation to negative emotions and intractable affect, ultimately vanquished, and replaced by explorations of sound, sex/uality, and experiential somaticity within a protean, postdisciplinary space of material/epistemic equity.  This uncompromising, long-overdue critique will be of interest to researchers and students from numerous theoretical backgrounds, including music, sound, gender, queer, and postcolonial/decolonial studies.

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Stephen Amico

Themen in »Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity«

open access ethnomusicology masculinity affect critical race studies non-normative sexualities LGBT AIDS

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“Stephen Amico’s assessment of ethnomusicology arrives at a seismic cultural moment when the entire western academy is experiencing a major reckoning. His book captures a field in crisis, and pushes urgently for change from within. This is a provocative, gripping, deeply personal and impressively knowledgeable polemic that is as wise and compelling as it is convincing.” (Elizabeth L. Wollman, Professor of Music at Baruch College, CUNY, USA)

“'Confrontation’, ‘polemical’, ‘struggle’, ‘vanquishing’, ‘violence’: these are examples of the words contained in Stephen Amico’s tour de force Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity. This is not about fixing the field as it exists—this is about blowing stuff up. Amico confronts both ethnomusicology and queerness as part of our exclusionist colonialist music academy and argues for their demise, opening up ethnomusicology to new equitable possibilities. A must read for anyone committed to making academic music more welcomingfor everyone.” —Philip Ewell, Professor of Music Theory, Hunter College, CUNY, USA 

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