CFP: Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship: A Symposium in conjunction with the 2016 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC

Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship: A Symposium in conjunction with the 2016 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC
CFP Deadline: 15 Feb 2016

Within the academy—and not least music scholarship—the adjective queer is frequently deployed as a radical modifier: queering history, queering culture, queering the pitch. This usage presupposes an intrinsic alterity. As if queerness necessarily represents the largest measure of difference from the norm. As if queerness—in and of itself—carries with it a discursive perversity, without which
“history,” “culture,” and “the pitch” remain neutral categories of knowledge.

One problem with this approach is the assumption of whiteness that it writes onto queerness, history, culture and pitch alike—an error rendered particularly acute in studies of the Western musical canon though present in scholarship on music more broadly, historical, analytic, and ethnographic alike. This panel calls for papers that confront this problem head on. Rather than queering race studies in music scholarship, we aim to race queer music scholarship, unpacking the structural ellipses and disciplinary violence of our current practice and sketching the outlines of a richer, critically stronger approach to our thinking about music and sound in its relationship with queer bodies.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the chair of the program committee, Emily Wilbourne, by Monday 15 February, at emily.wilbourne -at- qc.cuny.edu. Please include your name, affiliation, contact details, and the title of your paper in the body of the email; the abstract should be free of identifying materials.

Funding will be available for graduate student and independent scholar presenters.

Papers given at the symposium will be considered for publication in a special issue of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

Co-conveners: Hedy Law, Stephan Pennington, and Emily Wilbourne.
Program Committee: Emily Wilbourne, Tes Slominski, and Gavin Lee.
Contact: emily.wilbourne -at- qc.cuny.edu