| Sumario: | In this paper, the authors develop a critical dialogue to trans/queerly trouble paradigmatic directions in music studies. Particularly, the authors engage the liberal tendency to celebrate trans/queer interventions as a discipline's progress towards becoming more diverse and inclusive. The article emerges from a recent panel at Feminist Theory and Music 17 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Through wide-ranging engagement with music and sound, we attempt to (re)orient our relationship to music studies and its various interventions, including the (im)possible emergence of trans/queer as a distinct area of study. The authors collectively draw on mutable forms of embodiment to explore trans/queer music studies otherwise—that is, to pursue a relational mode of scholarship that provokes generative and capacious directions in our study. Recognising ourselves within the 'terrible we' of trans scholarship (Awkward-Rich, 2022. The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment. Durham: Duke University Press)—as junior, racialized, (dis)abled, trans/queer scholars—how do our relations on and off the page revel in loudness, noise, and dissonance? Simultaneously, we locate these trans/queer relationships within contemporary material histories, including the regulation of bodies through anti-trans/queer legislation, relational modes of performance and composition, and Brazil's history of slavery. We might imagine this article as a discordant chorus more than a harmonious gesture of calcification, which is to say that the voices in the article indulge in a dialogic cacophony in order to trace (dis)connections between the fractal nodes of trans/queer critical thought in music studies. While it may be comforting to proffer a legible response to recent developments in trans/queer music studies, we instead suggest that a critical hesitancy might better afford an overdue reflexivity for trans/queer music scholars. As such, the essay invites readers into the 'terrible we' in hopes of grounding our work in contemporary material quagmires to open toward possibilities of trans/queerly musicking otherwise.
|
|---|