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 and Brevard (by the Breakfast Club).

I will start off by using my discussion of Joe Calderone’s performance at the VMAs to illustrate the interrelationships among gender, race, and music that I discuss in the book. Then, I’ll talk about the “shared logic” enlightenment philosophers attributed to gender, race, and music, and how this shared logic facilitates the framing of aesthetic judgments about music in raced and gendered terms. Finally, I will argue that our disgust at pop music is actually disgust at femininity (and not at any objective property of a song or genre), and that we–especially we  NPR listening, indie rock loving white liberals–have an ethical obligation to question our assumptions that pop music is bad, that commercialization is bad, and that only “independent” and/or “difficult” music has aesthetic and/or political value.

It starts at 6pm with a reception; my talk is at 6:30, and there’s another reception after my talk. If you are in Charlotte, I would love to see you there!