The Other Important Musical Release in 1991, or, McClary’s Feminine Endings is 20 years old, but there’s still no feminist philosophy of music
Feminist musicology as we know it is only 20 years old. Susan McClary’s landmark book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality was released in 1991—the same year that Nirvana broke on pop radio. While the latter release is being widely…
Transmission: Sound, Affect, and Joy Division/New Order
This post is a very, very initial attempt to sketch a theory of “transmission.” I develop this idea of transmission in conversation with Jasbir Puar, Joy Division, and Bauhaus. Transmission is an sound-based concept, an attempt to theorize from “the…
Melismas Like Jagger: on the race/gender politics of Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger”
Consistent readers of this blog know that I’ve been somewhat interested in the politics of melisma in contemporary pop music. I have a piece on Avril Levigne’s use of melisma to signify both “blackness” and sexual availability you can read…
The Gender Difference That Race Makes, The Race Difference That Gender Makes, And The Race/Gender Difference That Music Makes: Joe Calderone, take 2
This post is significantly revised from the 30 August version. After Lady Gaga’s drag king performance at the 2011 MTV VMAs, many people are talking about the gender politics of her performance, its queerness (or not), and especially Britney Spears’…
Outside the Government, Beyond the Police: On the Queerness of Torchwood
Much is often made of the queerness of the (Dr) Who-niverse’s Captain Jack Harkness. Sure, he’s played by an openly gay actor, been in same-sex and inter-species relationships, and in the new Starz/BBC collaboration the character is allowed to have…
Schenker and “The Soar”: Modifying tonal conventions for not-really-tonal music
“Rhythm” and “Harmony” are often offered as contrasting, if not opposed, ways of organizing pieces of music. As the famous diagram attests, Western music uses harmony (chords) as its way of organizing pieces of music: all you need to start…
Foucault and Feminist Art — or, how to subvert the biopolitical administration of populations
As you know, I’ve been thinking—not primarily, but sort of in the background—about how we subvert or resist Foucaultian “biopower.” I’m not talking about the “disciplinary” aspect—I think Butler gives us a good account of how to subvert discipline (i.e.,…
Shannon Sullivan on White Affect—Approaching White Hipness
Now, it’s been a month or so since the conference, but I did take some decent notes. I’m going on these notes, so any and all errors are the fault of my secretarial skills and poor memory. Shannon completely re-thought…
Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 2011 #3: Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Repetition
Elaine Miller gave a super-interesting paper on repetition in Nietzsche and Beauvoir. She finds in both a contrast between inauthentic, lazy conceptions of repetition (I’ll call this lazy repetition), and rigorous, accurate accounts of repetition (I’ll call this real repetition)….
Freedom Sounds and The Conjectural Body: Some (more) intersections between my work and Ingrid Monson’s
I am a huge admirer of Ingrid Monson’s work, and find it hugely influential on my own work (see, for example, my article on hipness in Contemporary Aesthetics). I recently completed Freedom Sounds, her book on the racial politics of…
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