The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness

by Maus, Fred Everett; Whiteley, Sheila; Nyong'o, Tavia; Sherinian, Zoe

• ISBN13: 9780199793525
• ISBN10: 0199793522
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-02-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.

Author Biography

Fred Everett Maus is Director of Undergraduate Programs for Music and Associate Professor at the University of Virginia. He has written on music and narrative, gender and sexuality in relation to discourse about music, popular music, embodiment, music therapy, and other subjects. He was a founding
member of the editorial board of the journal Women and Music. He served as the first Chair of the Queer Resource Group of the Society for Music Theory. Recent essays include "Listening and Possessing" (forthcoming), "Sexuality, Trauma, and Dissociated Expression" (2015), "Berlin Postcards" (2015),
"Classical Concert Music and Queer Listening" (2013), and "Narrative and Identity in Three Songs about AIDS" (2013).

Sheila Whiteley was Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Salford. She wrote, edited, or co-edited several books, including Women and Popular Music: Popular Music and Gender (2000), Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Identity (2005), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender
(1996), Music Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity (2002), and Queering the Popular Pitch (2006).

Tavia Nyong'o is Chair and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. Nyong'o's first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) won the Errol Hill award for the best
book in black theater and performance studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018) won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies.

Zoe Sherinian is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Division Chair at the University of Oklahoma. She has published the book Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology (2014), articles on the Dalit parai frame drum in the journal Interpretation (2017), and articles on the indigenization of
Christianity in Ethnomusicology (2007), The World of Music (2005), and Women and Music (2005). She has also produced and directed two documentary films: This is A Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum (2011) and Sakthi Vibrations (2018).