I wrote some books:
The Breeders, Last Splash, forthcoming Bloomsbury 33 1/3 Series
This book takes The Breeders’ 1993 album Last Splash as the ür-text of 90s alternative rock. The stereotypical narrative of 90s alt rock centers angry white guys with guitars who are often from the Pacific Northwest. Listening closely to each track on the album, this book shows how Last Splash narrates a different story of the 90s, one which foregrounds women, the midwest, and modern rock. Unlike alternative’s demographic and stylistic narrowness, modern rock is defined by its inclusion of genres like reggae, ska, industrial, dance, and country. This take on modern rock was also the signature sound of The Breeders’ hometown radio station, 97X WOXY. Situating the album alongside WOXY playlists and staff interviews, this book shows Last Splash articulates the station’s vision of what modern rock is and who it includes. As such, Last Splash is the perfect focal point for uncovering an overlooked and forgotten alternative to the “alternative” narrative. This new narrative both offers a fresh perspective on the music of the 90s and shows how Last Splash is more than just a quirky mishmash of styles and references.
Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms, and the Politics of Legitimation, forthcoming with Duke
A follow-up to The Sonic Episteme, this book attends to the relationship between biopower’s quantitative and qualitative dimensions. My previous book demonstrated the ways sound, as a frequency, was used to translate statistical normalization, or the measurement of the most frequent frequencies in a population, into qualitative terms. This book argues that phenomenological orientation or horizon has a similar function in contexts such as recommender algorithms and the density models used in contemporary AI and Machine Learning where probability is modeled as something other than a normalized distribution. Phenomenology is uniquely well-suited to theorize these models that as Amoore, Cooper, Joque, and others have argued, blend hard math with subjective intuition, as (per philosophers like Shiloh Whitney), phenomenology, unlike affect theory, rejects the strict separation between what we can very loosely call “mind” and “body” (cognitive content and felt sense). These mathematical models have been vernacularized as “vibes”, which are qualitative categories that everyone from 2020s social media users to music streaming services use to define the same sorts of orientations or tendencies that vectors model mathematically. “Vibes” are a lay term for more or less the same phenomenon philosophers call phenomenological orientations or horizons. Studying late 2010s and early 2020s internet culture and American popular music from the 1970s through today, the book shows how orientations are policed not for their normativity, but for their lineage – or rather, their capacity to carry forward the patriarchal racial capitalist distribution of wealth and personhood into presently-counterfactual realities. Then, in the final chapter, I argue that although my theory and critique of the biopolitics of algorithmic legitimation is grounded in 21st century Anglophone feminist of color phenomenology, the fact of orientation not inherently or necessarily critical of patriarchal racial capitalist power relations—Heidegger’s whole project is oriented towards what he calls “spiritual National Socialism.” In order to orient ourselves otherwise, what matters is to whom we collectively choose to orient ourselves toward, and from whom we orient ourselves away. In this respect, Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology, which frames (re)orientation or (re) “situation” as a matter of choosing some people and some values over (and against) others, is a helpful theoretical model for imagining how we might do phenomenology otherwise.
Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism. Zer0 Books, 2015. Updated and expanded SECOND EDITION forthcoming with University of Michigan Press.
While most people think that the idea “little girls should be seen and not heard” is conservative while a noisy, riotous scream can be revolutionary, that’s not the case anymore. (Cis/Het/White) Girls aren’t supposed to be virginal, passive objects, but Poly-Styrene-like sirens who scream back in spectacularly noisy and transgressive ways as they “Lean In.” Resilience is the new, neoliberal feminine ideal: real women overcome all the objectification and silencing that impeded their foremothers. Resilience discourse incites noisy damage, like screams, so that it can be recycled for a profit. It turns the crises posed by avant-garde noise, feminist critique, and black aesthetics into opportunities for strengthening the vitality of multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy (MRWaSP).
Reading contemporary pop music – Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Calvin Harris – with and against political philosophers like Michel Foucault, feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, and media theorists like Steven Shaviro, /Resilience & Melancholy/ shows how resilience discourse manifests in both pop music and in feminist politics. In particular, it argues that resilient femininity is a post-feminist strategy for producing post-race white supremacy. Resilience discourse allows women to “Lean In” to MRWaSP privilege because their overcoming and leaning-in actively produce blackness as exception, as pathology, as death.
The book also considers alternatives to resilience found in the work of Beyonce, Rihanna, and Atari Teenage Riot. Updating Freud, James calls these pathological, diseased iterations of resilience “melancholy.” Melancholy makes resilience unprofitable, that is, incapable of generating enough surplus value to keep MRWaSP capitalism healthy. Investing in the things that resilience discourse renders exceptional, melancholic siren songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” steer us off course, away from resilient “life” and into the death.
The expanded second edition includes a new introduction and a fifth chapter on Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and feminine chill and cool in the era of popular feminism and popular misogyny.
The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence, UNC Press 2023.
In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone‘s “Last Great Independent Radio” stations. The station projected a philosophy that prioritized such independence—the idea that truly progressive, transgressive, futuristic disruptions of the status quo were possible only when practiced with and for other people.
In The Future of Rock and Roll, philosopher Robin James uses WOXY’s story to argue against a corporate vision of independence—in which everyone fends for themselves—and in favor of an alternative way of thinking and relating to one another that disrupts norms but is nevertheless supported by communities. Against the standard retelling of the history of “modern rock,” James looks to the local scenes that made true independence possible by freeing individual artists from the whims of the boardroom. This philosophy of community-rooted independence offers both a counternarrative to the orthodox history of indie rock and an alternative worldview to that of the current corporate mainstream.
The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, & biopolitics. Duke, 2019.
In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme’s marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé’s and Rihanna’s music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.
The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, & the Philosophy of Music. Lexington Books, 2010.
Grounded in continental philosophy, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music uses feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to examine music, race, and gender as discourses that emerge and evolve with one another.. In the first section, author Robin James asks why philosophers commonly use music to explain embodied social identity and inequality. She looks at late twentieth-century postcolonial theory, Rousseau’s early musical writings, and Kristeva’s reading of Mozart and Schoenberg to develop a theory of the “conjectural body,” arguing that this is the notion of embodiment that informs Western conceptions of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies. The second section addresses the ways in which norms about human bodily difference-such as gender and race-continue to ground serious and popular hierarchies well after twentieth and twenty-first century art and philosophy have deconstructed this binary. Reading Adorno’s work on popular music through Irigaray’s critique of commodification, James establishes and explains the feminization of popular music. She then locates this notion of the feminized popular in Nietzsche, and argues that he critiques Wagner by making an argument for the positive aesthetic (and epistemological) value of feminized popular music, such as Bizet and Italian opera. Following from Nietzsche, she argues that feminists ought and need to take “the popular” seriously, both as a domain of artistic and scholarly inquiry as well as a site of legitimate activism. The book concludes with an analysis of philosophy’s continued hostility toward feminism, real-life women, and popular culture. While the study of gender, race, and popular culture has become a fixture in many areas of the academy, philosophy and musicology continue to resist attempts to take these objects as objects of serious academic study.
Here are my scholarly articles, in reverse chronological order:
“Music & Feminism In The 21st Century” in Music Research Annual. V 1 issue 1.
“Sonic Cyberfeminism, Perceptual Coding, & ‘Phonographic’ Compression” in Feminist Review Sonic Cyberfeminisms Special Issue.
“Must Be Love On The Brain?: Feminist responses to the “can we separate artwork from artist” question in the era of #MeToo popular feminisms” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume 32 Issue 4.
“The Gender Politics of ‘Music and the Ineffable’: on the feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Special edition on French Aesthetics edited by Elaine Miller. Volume 5 no. 2: 99-118.
“Philosophies or Phonographies? On the political stakes of theorizing about and through music” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy SPEP Special Edition, Volume 32, no. 3 (2018): 499-513.
“Post-Feminism’s New Sexual Contract & Electronic Dance Music’s Queered Femme Voices” in Dancecult Special Issue on Women In Electronic Dance Music Culture. Vol. 9 No. 1: 28-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.02
“Is the Post- in Post-Identity the Post- in Post-Genre?” in Popular Music 1 January 2017.
“Pop’s Chill Thrills Aren’t So Cheap” in SoundingOut! 1 August 2016.
“How Not To Listen To Lemonade: Music Criticism & Epistemic Violence” in SoundingOut! 16 May 2016.
“Women’s Resilience and Post-Feminist Sexism” in Prindle Post 3 May 2016.
“Listening to Sounds in Post-Feminist Pop” in SoundingOut! 15 February 2016
“Hello From The Same Side” in The New Inquiry 28 December 2015.
“Resilience, an ideal that hurts more than it helps” in Prindle Post 6 October 2015.
“Gendered Voices & Social Harmony” in SoundingOut! 9 March 2015.
“Acousmatic Surveillance & Big Data” in SoundingOut! 20 October 2014.
“‘Cremation of Senses in Friendly Fire’: on sound & biopolitics (via KMFDM & World War Z)” in SoundingOut! 1 September 2014.
“Incandescence, Melancholy, and Feminist Bad Vibes: A Response to Ewa Ziarek” in differences: a
journal of feminist cultural studies. Forthcoming 2014.
“Contort Yourself: No Wave Music, Whiteness, and the Politics of Disorientation.” In
How Does It Feel To Be A (White) Problem? ed. George Yancy, Forthcoming. (In Press)
“Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault, and the Biopolitics of Uncool” in Culture, Theory, &
Critique special issue on “Music & Neoliberalism.”
“From ‘No Future’ to “Delete Yourself (You Have No Chance To Win)”: Death,
Queerness, and the Sound of Neoliberalism” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies Special Issue:
Trans/Queer, Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2013. pp. 504-536.
“Feminist Aesthetics, Popular Music, and the Politics of the Mainstream” in Feminist
Aesthetics, ed. L. Ryan Musgrave. Springer Press.
“Sonic Pleasure and Post-Cinematic Affect” on the International Association for Popular Music
Studies-US website, 3 July 2013.
“On Race and the Feminized Popular in Nietzsche and Beyond” in Hypatia. Volume
28, Issue 4, Fall 2013. pp. 749-766.
“Oppression, Privilege, and Aesthetics” in Philosophy Compass. Volume 8, Issue 3
(February 2013): 101-116.
“Affective Resonance: On the Uses and Abuses of Music In Philosophy” in PhaenEx:
A Journal of Phenomenological and Existential Theory & Culture. Vol 7, No 2 (2012)
“On Intersectionality and Cultural Appropriation: The Case of Postmillenial Black
Hipness.” Journal of Black Masculinity. Volume 1 Number 2 (2011).
“These Are The Breaks: Rethinking Disagreement Through Hip Hop” in
Transformations special issue on “Ranciere: Politics, Art, and Sense.” Issue 19, 2011.
“From Receptivity to Transformation: on the intersection of race, gender and the
aesthetic in contemporary continental philosophy” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental
Philosophy, eds. Maria Davidson, Donna-Dale Marcano, Kantryn Gines. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
“Robo-Diva R&B: politics, aesthetics, and images of black female robots in
contemporary US pop culture” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies V. 20, No.4, 2008. pp
402-423.
“In but not of, of but not in: On taste, hipness, and white embodiment” in
Contemporary Aesthetics Special Volume 2 (2009), “Aesthetics and Race,” ed. Monique Roelofs.
“Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar” in Hypatia Vol 24 No 4 (October-December 2009). pp. 77-100.
“Deconstruction, Fetishism, and the Racial Contract: on the politics of “faking it” in
music”, CR: The New Centennial Review. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007, pp. 45–80.
“The Musical Semiotic: Kristeva, Don Giovanni and Feminist Revolt”. Philosophy
Today SPEP Supplement. 2002. pp. 113-119.
Here are my more mainstream publications:
“Resilience” in The Prindle Post.
“Cloudy Logic” in The New Inquiry.
“All Your B/Ass Are Belong To Us” in Noisey 18 August 2014.
“Wound Down Inside” in The New Inquiry’s “Ms. America” supplement, pp. 15-17.
“Melancholic Damage” in The New Inquiry, 30 May 2013.
“Loving the Alien” in The New Inquiry, October 2012.
Here is a link to all my philosophy papers on PhilPapers. However, because not all my work is ‘philosophy’ per se, this isn’t a comprehensive bank of my publications.