Beyoncé, Gaga, Race, and Sexuality, or, 1+1 Doesn’t Always Equal 2
[This week I’m going to attempt a few “year-end” type posts. Being on semester break, now’s a god time for me to collect some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head all term, but I haven’t had time…
Artistic Know-How, Aesthetics, and (Anti-)Humanism: Some Thoughts on Alexis Shotwell’s Knowing Otherwise
I’m making my way through Alexis Shotwell’s really well-written Knowing Otherwise, and I must say I generally agree with the project: in addition to being extremely well-written (it easily passes my “Can I read it on an airplane?” test), I…
Thoughts on “Xenomania” (or, Orientialism 2.0)
Earlier this week, Simon Reyonlds published a great little essay on what he calls “xenomania”—i.e., Western hipsters’ internet-enabled digi-crate digging for increasingly exotic-sounding “ethnic” pop and/or dance music. Now, I realize that its publication venue—one of the MTV sites—probably limits…
“Countdown”: Beyoncé’s Feminist Reversal of the “Catalog Song”
In this post I argue that Beyonce’s “Countdown”—both as a song and as a video—critiques a canonical, but quite misogynist, style of song. The “catalog song” is a centuries-old format: a dude ticks off a list of all the women…
Sovereign Harmony and Biopolitical Frequency: Or, what Attali and LMFAO can teach us about neoliberalism
“Every major social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes of music, in its mode of audition, and in its economy” (Attali, Noise 10).[1] So I’ve been thinking more about this idea of “transmission,” and I’ve…
Come to my talk in Charlotte on Tuesday November 8th!
Tuesday November 8th I’ll be giving a talk about my book, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music, as part of UNC Charlotte’s “Personally Speaking” series. It will take place at the new Uptown Campus at 9th…
From Identity to Profile: Superpanopticism, Race as Technology, and hopefully some clarification for my transnational feminism class
For the past two weeks, my transnational feminism class has been working our way through Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this text, and I think many of felt things…
“Gucci Gucci”: Thoughts on “The Biopolitics of Cool”
Shannon Winnubst gave a great paper this past Friday at SPEP. I want to talk about and expand on it here because I take Winnubst and I to be pointing in the same direction, at similar phenomena, but from different…
Video Podcast Introducing Foucault
I teach a lot of texts that presume, use, build on, or critique Foucault’s concepts of juridical, disciplinary, and biopolitical power. So, instead of taking up class time re-hashing the same lecture, I decided to make a video podcast that…
Ada Lovelace Day: Delia Who?
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. In honor of the first person to write what would later be known as a “computer program,” I want to think about women and music technology. Many readers of this blog probably already know who…
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