Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology 9780190458041, 0190458046

Table of contents :
Cover
Queering the Field
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
1 FOREWORD
1. Queering the Field: A Foreword
2 INTRODUCTION
2. Queering the Field: An Introduction
3 QUEER SILENCES
3. Sounding Out-​Ethnomusicology: Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes and Performance
4. Uncomfortable Positions: Expertise and Vulnerability in Queer Postcolonial Fieldwork
5. Queer in the Field? What Happens When Neither “Queer” Nor “The Field” Is Clearly Defined?
4 OUT/ IN THE FIELD
6. “I Don’t Think We Are Safe around You”: Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology
7. Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography
8. Outing the Methodological No-​No: Translating Queer Space to Field Space
9. Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance: Musical Spaces in Cuba’s Gay Ambiente
5 QUEERNESS IN ACTION
10. Con/​Figuring Transgender-​Hījṛā Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking
11. Queer Hip Hop or Hip-​Hop Queerness? Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies
12. Going through the Motions: Transgender Performance in Topeng Cirebon from North Java, Indonesia
13. Fielding the Field: Belonging, Disciplinarity, and Queer Scholarly Lives
6 INSTITUTIONS AND INTERSECTIONS
14. The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet: Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of “Traditions”
15. “I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”: Assumptions and Limitations of the Normative Queer Gaze in a Panamanian Dance-​Drama
7 WHO’S QUEER (W)HERE?
16. Self and/​as Subject: Respectability, Abjection, and the Alterity of Studying What You Are
17. Straight to the Heart: Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away
18. Coming through Loud and Queer: Ethnomusicological Ethics of Voice and Violence in Real and Virtual Battlegrounds
8 CLUBS, BARS, SCENES
19. The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork
20. Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis: A Queer Look at Sex and Race in Fieldwork
21. “Man Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”: Saluting the Oríchá in a Cuban Gay Bar
22. On Serendipity: Or, Toward a Sensual Ethnography
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Queering the Field

Queering the Field Sounding Out Ethnomusicology Edited by

G R E G O RY BA R Z A N D W I L L IA M   C H E N G

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barz, Gregory F., 1960– | Cheng, William, 1985– Title: Queering the field : sounding out ethnomusicology / edited by Gregory Barz and William Cheng. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005239 | ISBN 9780190458027 (cloth) | ISBN 9780190458034 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780190458065 (oxford scholarship online) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnomusicology. | Homosexuality and music. | Gender identity in music. Classification: LCC ML3798 .Q43 2019 | DDC 780.89—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005239 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

To all silent [silenced] queer voices in our academic discipline—​historic and present. It is our hope that within these pages there might be hope for sounding out ethnomusicology.

Contents Acknowledgments About the Authors

xi xiii

PA RT 1 .   F O R EWO R D 1. Queering the Field: A Foreword Kay Kaufman Shelemay

3

PA RT 2 .   I N T R O D U C T IO N 2. Queering the Field: An Introduction Gregory Barz

7

PA RT 3 .   Q U E E R SI L E N C E S 3. Sounding Out-​Ethnomusicology: Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes and Performance Zoe C. Sherinian

31

4. Uncomfortable Positions: Expertise and Vulnerability in Queer Postcolonial Fieldwork Nicol Hammond

53

5. Queer in the Field? What Happens When Neither “Queer” Nor “The Field” Is Clearly Defined? 67 Gillian M. Rodger PA RT 4 .   O U T / I​ N T H E   F I E L D 6. “I Don’t Think We Are Safe around You”: Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology Gregory Barz 7. Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography Christi-​Anne  Castro

93 106

viii Contents

8. Outing the Methodological No-​No: Translating Queer Space to Field Space Alexander M. Cannon

120

9. Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance: Musical Spaces in Cuba’s Gay Ambiente Moshe Morad

139

PA RT 5 .   Q U E E R N E S S I N   AC T IO N 10. Con/​Figuring Transgender-​Hījṛā Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking 163 Jeff Roy 11. Queer Hip Hop or Hip-​Hop Queerness? Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies Matthew Leslie Santana

185

12. Going through the Motions: Transgender Performance in Topeng Cirebon from North Java, Indonesia Henry Spiller

198

13. Fielding the Field: Belonging, Disciplinarity, and Queer Scholarly Lives Tes Slominski

217

PA RT 6 .   I N S T I T U T IO N S A N D I N T E R SE C T IO N S 14. The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet: Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of “Traditions” 235 Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss 15. “I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”: Assumptions and Limitations of the Normative Queer Gaze in a Panamanian Dance-​Drama Heather J. Paudler

257

PA RT 7 .   W HO’ S QU E E R ( W ) H E R E ? 16. Self and/​as Subject: Respectability, Abjection, and the Alterity of Studying What You Are Amber R. Clifford-​Napoleone

277

17. Straight to the Heart: Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away Kathryn Alexander

291

Contents  ix

18. Coming through Loud and Queer: Ethnomusicological Ethics of Voice and Violence in Real and Virtual Battlegrounds William Cheng

307

PA RT 8 .   C LU B S , BA R S ,   S C E N E S 19. The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork Luis-​Manuel  Garcia 20. Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis: A Queer Look at Sex and Race in Fieldwork Sarah Hankins

335

353

21. “Man Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”: Saluting the Oríchá in a Cuban Gay Bar 364 Cory W. Thorne 22. On Serendipity: Or, Toward a Sensual Ethnography Peter McMurray

380

Works Cited Index

397 429

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Suzanne Ryan Melamed for her marvelous and patient shepherding of this volume from beginning to end; Marcus Pyle and Joseph Matson for expertly copy editing the manuscript; Chet Humphries for providing substantial assistance with the bibliography; and Dylan Kistler for helping compile the index. We are also grateful to those who lent the intellectual, emotional, and moral support that made this book possible, including Tomie Hahn, Deborah Wong, Kay Shelemay, and especially Wil Melchor-​Barz and Chris Schepici. While Queering the Field is in many ways a collective labor of love, it is nevertheless populated with the talent and voices of many strong, passionate individuals. For all who have been our stewards . . . thank you.

About the Authors Kathryn Alexander is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the intersections of music, dance, gender, and sexuality. She is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of Arizona, where she develops and teaches interdisciplinary general education curricula from an ethnomusicological perspective. Her current research examines the embodied and social practices that frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) country western dance and rodeo culture in the United States. In previous research, she applied online ethnographic methods to the practice of historical ethnomusicology and articulated the formation of ethnic whiteness and heterosexuality in Cape Breton’s traditional Scottish social dance communities. Her research has been published in MUSICultures and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. Gregory Barz is Director of the School of Music at Boston University where he serves as Professor of Ethnomusicology. He is currently the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he currently conducts research of drag performance in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was formerly the Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University. His latest book is a co-​edited volume titled The Culture of AIDS in Africa:  Hope and Healing in Music and the Arts (Oxford University Press). His monograph Singing for Life:  HIV/​AIDS and Music in Uganda (Routledge) applies the central tenets of medical ethnomusicology to a study of HIV prevention in East Africa. His book Music in East Africa:  Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture was also published by Oxford University Press. He is co-​editor of two editions of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford) and Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota). He has produced four compact discs and a documentary film and received a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Traditional World Music category for his Smithsonian Folkways CD, Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/​ AIDS in Uganda. Alexander M. Cannon is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of contemporary southern Vietnam and works as Lecturer in Music at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). He holds a BA in music and mathematical economics from Pomona College and an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, where he wrote a dissertation on the changing practices of a genre

xiv  About the Authors of traditional music called đờn ca tài tử under the guidance of Joseph Lam. He has published several articles on southern Vietnamese traditional music, charisma, and creativity studies in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Ethnomusicology. He currently serves as Book Reviews Editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music and as Secretary on the Board of Directors of the Society for Asian Music. Christi-​Anne Castro is an Associate Professor of ethnomusicology in the Musicology Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as well as the director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation, was released in 2011 by Oxford University Press and won the 2012 Global Filipino Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is co-​editor of the journal Music and Politics and on the editorial board of the journal Asian Music. She teaches courses on music, gender, and sexuality, music and the body, and music and community. William Cheng teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019). Amber R. Clifford-​Napoleone (she/​her/​hers) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the McClure Archives and University Museum at the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg. She holds BA and MA degrees in history, an MS degree in museum science, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. She is the author of two books: Queerness in Heavy Metal (Routledge, 2015) and Queering Kansas City Jazz (Nebraska, 2018). Dr. Clifford-​Napoleone is one of the founders of the International Society of Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and a contributor to the nascent field of metal music studies. As a cultural anthropologist with specializations in material culture and ethnographic methods, Dr. Clifford-​Napoleone also specializes in gender, sexuality, and material culture with a focus on textiles. She resides in Missouri with her wife, their dogs, and a large collection of doom metal. Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist based in the Irish World Academy at the University of Limerick where she currently directs the MA program in Irish Music Studies and teaches in the Ethnomusicology MA and Performing Arts BA programs. Her research interests include local/​global Irish musics, protest music, popular music heritages, and urban soundscapes. Aileen is currently writing a

About the Authors  xv monograph on Irish American music, extending her doctoral research at the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Century Fellow. Co-​founder and co-​director of the Popular Music, Popular Culture research cluster at the University of Limerick, Aileen has co-​edited five books to date, including Songs of Social Protest: International Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015). More recently, Aileen spent a semester as an invited professor at the University of Notre Dame and is currently a research fellow at the Department of Music, King’s College, London. From 2019–​2022 she is one of five international partners in a European-​ funded research project on European music festivals, public spaces, and social diversity. Aileen plays flute and piano with the Templeglantine Ceilí Band and has recorded with a variety of musicians in Ireland and the United States. Luis-​Manuel Garcia is a lecturer in ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. He was also a post-​doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where he retains an affiliation as an adjunct researcher. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger-​sociability, dance, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries, and musical migration. He is currently researching “techno-​tourism” in Berlin while also preparing a book manuscript entitled, Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor. Nic Gareiss is a performer, teacher, and researcher of traditional music and dance. His interests include vernacular sound and movement practices from many locations, especially Ireland and its diaspora. Informed by fifteen years of ethnographic study and performance of many percussive dance traditions, Nic’s work reflects his love of improvisation, traditional footwork vocabulary, and musical collaboration. He has concertized for over ten years in fifteen countries with many of the luminaries of traditional Irish music, including Frankie Gavin, Dervish, Buille, Solas, Martin Hayes, Liz Carroll, The Gloaming, and The Chieftains. He has been called “the human epitome of the unbearable lightness of being” by the Irish Times and “the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald. Nic holds a degree in Anthropology from Central Michigan University and an MA in Ethnochoreology from the University of Limerick. His MA thesis, based upon ethnographic work with LGBTQIA+ competitive step dancers, was the first piece of scholarship to query the experience of sexual minorities within Irish dance. Gareiss’s chapter “An Buachaillín Bán: Reflections on One Queer’s Performance within Traditional Irish Music & Dance” appears in the book Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings edited by Clare Croft from Oxford  University  Press. His present research seeks to illuminate

xvi  About the Authors discursive formations of national identity, gender, and sexual orientation via ethnography and embodied practice. Visit his website at www.nicgareiss.com. Nicol Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar specializing in South African music, popular music studies, and feminist and queer music studies. She is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests include music and nationalism, gender and sexuality, queer theory, music and sports, and the voice. She has published on queer performance in the music of Afrikaans rock musician Karen Zoid, South African choral music, and music at the 2010 Soccer World Cup. She is a choral conductor and singer. Sarah Hankins completed the PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard University with a dissertation focusing on musical nightlife and political aesthetics among African transmigrants and Afro-​descendants in urban Israel. She is interested in music and diaspora, nightclub and studio production technologies, queerness, psychoanalysis, and sound studies of trauma and recovery. Her articles appear in Black Music Research Journal, City and Society, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Ethnomusicology Review:  Bring in the Noise, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; she has published review essays in Popular Music and Anthropos. Hankins is the recipient of the SEM Marcia Herndon Award, and the Anna Rabinowitz Fellowship from Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. She serves on the SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce. Her current projects include an article on necropolitical performance among Israeli and Palestinian dissidents and refugees, and research on sonic experience in clinical psychoanalysis. As a member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002 to 2009, she served in Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C., and throughout Latin America, winning Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards from the Department of State for her reporting on the Israeli-​Palestinian conflict. She is a dance music producer and performing DJ. Her remix collection Been in the Storm So Long (2009) was independently produced in consultation with Smithsonian Folkways. Matthew Leslie Santana is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard University. His primary interests involve race, sexuality, and performance in the Americas, and he is currently at work on a project on gender performance in Cuba. Matthew is also an active violinist and has performed as a New Fromm Player at the Tanglewood Music Center, an artist-​in-​residence at the Intimacy of Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a baroque violinist with Apollo’s Fire. As an educator, he has served as a graduate

About the Authors  xvii student instructor at the University of Michigan, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and as resident faculty at the Sphinx Preparatory Academy, a tuition-​ free summer program for young Black and Latinx string players. Prior to starting the PhD, Matthew studied violin, historically informed performance practice, and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Case Western Reserve University. Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist, saxophonist, and media artist. He is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University of Cambridge. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of Islam and sound, including recitation, liturgy, theology, and architecture, and he is currently completing a book and media project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin. He has also published on various aspects of the history of sound recording, especially tape and YouTube music. He is currently researching music and the refugee crisis in contemporary Europe and Turkey as well as intersections of sound, media, and empire in the nineteenth century. His media practice includes extensive non-​ fiction audio and video work. Moshe Morad is a radio broadcaster in Israel, hosting a popular daily world music program. He lectures at Tel Aviv University and at Ono Academic College, where he teaches courses on African music and on gender and queerness in the music of Africa and the Middle East. Moshe completed his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is author of Fiesta de Diez Pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba, winner of the 2015 Alan Merriam Prize honorable mention awarded by SEM and the 2016 Herndon Book Prize awarded by SEM’s Gender and Sexualities Section. He is also the co-​ editor of Mazal Tov Amigos!: Jews and Popular Music in the Americas, winner of the 2018 SEM’s Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize. His career in the media and music industry includes presenting TV and radio shows in Israel, presenting “on location” World Routes programs on BBC Radio 3 in the UK, serving as Managing Director of NMC Music, Global Marketing Director at EMI Music in the UK, and head of EMI’s world music label “Hemisphere.” He has produced and compiled numerous CDs in various genres, including dance music and world music. Heather J. Paudler is a musicologist based in Bergen, Norway with degrees from Florida State University (PhD, 2015, Musicology), Pennsylvania State University (MA, 2010, Musicology with a cognate area of Art and Architecture History), and the University of Wisconsin-​Platteville (BS, 2007, Music). Her dissertation examines the music, text, choreography, and history of Panamanian expressions of los moros y cristianos dance-​dramas. In her dissertation she traces the

xviii  About the Authors movements and intersections of the current expression of la danza Bugabita to build a story in both time and space that portrays the historical continuum from which the contemporary dance-​drama emerges in order to illuminate dynamic meanings that reflect discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity. Gillian M.  Rodger is Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-​ Milwaukee. Rodger’s work has centered on popular theatrical entertainment in the United States, primarily in the mid-​to late-​ nineteenth century. Her first book, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Entertainment in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2010), charted the emergence of variety in pre–​Civil War America and showed the development of the form—​in terms of performance conventions, management styles, and business strategies—​until the mid-​1880s. She has just published a second monograph that focuses on cross-​dressed performance in variety and vaudeville in order to examine working-​class gender construction and shifting class affiliation in the last third of the nineteenth century. Rodger has also completed work on the Scottish popular musician Annie Lennox, and on the persistence of nineteenth-​century moral reform arguments in the reaction to jazz and rock ’n’ roll in the twentieth century. Jeff Roy is a filmmaker, musician, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. Roy holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA and is a Postdoctoral Alumnus of le Centré d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. His work focuses on the politics and performance of queer, transgender and hījṛā identity formations at the intersections of race, class, caste, and religion in South Asia. Roy’s writings appear in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology (awarded SEM’s 2018 Marcia Herndon Prize for exceptional work in gender and sexuality), MUSICultures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (for which he also served as guest editor of a forum on queer South Asian scholarship), and Transgender Studies Quarterly. His award-​winning films have been screened at the Director’s Guild of America, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Godrej India Culture Lab; featured in Out Magazine and Vogue India; and supported through research and production fellowships by Fulbright-​mtvU, Fulbright-​ Hays, and Film Independent. Zoe C.  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 (Indiana University Press 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),

About the Authors  xix and Women and Music (2005). She has also published on soft-​butch gender constructions in k. d. lang’s vocal performance (2001). Sherinian has produced and directed two documentary films: This Is a Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum (2011), on the changing status of Dalit (outcaste) drummers in India, and Sakthi Vibrations (2018), on the use of Tamil folk arts to develop self-​esteem in young Dalit women at the Sakthi Folk Cultural Centre. She is presently writing a book titled Drumming Our Liberation: The Spiritual, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum. Sherinian is also an active musician who performs and conducts trainings in the parai drum. She has extensively studied the mrdangam, the classical drum of South Indian Karnatak music, and performs on the jazz drum set. Tes Slominski is a music/​sound scholar and fiddle player. Her monograph Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music (in press at Wesleyan University Press) connects issues of gender and sexuality in the early twentieth-​century Irish nationalist music scene with more recent developments in Irish music, including the increasing visibility and presence of LGBTQ performers and musicians of color. In addition to her scholarly work, Tes is an active performer who specializes in the regional repertoire and style of Sliabh Luachra, an area at the border of counties Kerry and Cork. She founded the still-​ thriving Blue Ridge Irish Music School in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999, and taught ethnomusicology at Beloit College, where she also founded the North Atlantic Music Ensemble. Henry Spiller (Professor, Department of Music, UC Davis) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia. His books include Gamelan:  The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia (ABC-​CLIO, 2004), Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (University of Chicago, 2010), and Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (University of Hawaii, 2015). His work has been supported by awards from Fulbright (1998–​99 and 2013) and the Balzan Prize Foundation. Notable awards include the Association for Asian Performance Debut Panel Award (1998), the American Harp Society Adams Award for Academic Research (1997), SEM’s Marcia Herndon Prize for exceptional ethnomusicological work in gender and sexuality, an honorable mention for SEM’s Merriam Prize for Erotic Triangles (2011), and SEM’s Bruno Nettl Prize (2016) for Javaphilia. At UC Davis, he teaches world music classes and graduate seminars, and directs the Department of Music’s gamelan ensemble. Cory W.  Thorne is Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is cross-​appointed with Memorial’s School of Music, is a member of the Research Centre for the Study of Music,

xx  About the Authors Media and Place (MMaP), and has served as president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, and convener of the LGBTQ and Allies Section of the American Folklore Society. His primary research interests are in queer and vernacular theory, underground economies, popular culture/​music, critical regionalism, vernacular religion, and material culture. Since 2008, he has been conducting on-​going ethnographic research with a “gay ranch” in Havana province. His past research was focused on Newfoundland expatriate community associations, involving fieldwork in Newfoundland spaces (including folk festivals, social clubs, bars, and restaurants) in Alberta, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

1

F OR EWOR D

1

Queering the Field A Foreword Kay Kaufman Shelemay

It is an honor to write a foreword to such a forward-​looking collection. I offer warm congratulations to co-​editors Gregory Barz and William Cheng, who conceived and organized this landmark volume, and to the many colleagues from across ethnomusicology and allied fields of scholarship who contributed memorable essays. Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology provides deep insights into the too-​long neglected field of queer studies in ethnomusicology. But this volume in fact achieves so much more than one might anticipate. Queering the Field unveils queer studies already underway within the heart of ethnomusicology. It also reveals the compelling theoretical relevance for queer studies within both cross-​cultural musical inquiry at large and other domains of knowledge production across the arts and humanities. Providing an intellectual cartography for new directions, essays in the volume explore multiple queer locations and subjectivities, offering insights into the performance of queerness in the field, within various institutions, and as part of many, often unsuspected, social and musical scenes. The introduction by Gregory Barz provides both a clarification of the rapidly changing terminological challenges of queer studies and an overview of the history of important theoretical concepts. In short, this volume delivers both intellectual support and a moral guide for considering how one can bring wisdom from queer studies into one’s own scholarship. Ethnomusicological research and writing have long been a heavily androcentric and heteronormative domain. Despite the history of women working in a discipline defined primarily by men from early dates—​ and despite ethnomusicology’s acknowledgment and embrace of personal difference within the profession across a full range of sexual preferences and gender identities—​ the field has been remarkably tardy in incorporating more nuanced gender studies and the subject of erotics into its scholarly agenda. Ethnomusicologists began to look closely at dimensions of gendered musical performance only over the course of little more than the last twenty-​five years or so, playing catch up on the manner in which gender differences inflect so many aspects of musical and social life. Yet editor Gregory Barz is surely correct that the normalization of our

4  Kay Kaufman Shelemay core practices in the field and in our written ethnographies follows “a straight set of rules.” Ethnomusicological approaches to gender have been heavily binary, shaped by a habitus of compulsory heterosexuality. With the publication of Queering the Field, we have arrived at a moment when a critical mass of researchers has stepped forward to discuss the importance of queer theory to their own work and lives, and they have proposed promising new pathways for ongoing research for the field at large. A close reading of the following pages provides many important, often revelatory, insights. Ethnomusicology was long stymied in its approach to gender studies in part due to the tension derived from reconciling sensitivity to cross-​cultural differences as well as the presence of often conflicting identities of the fieldworker and research associates. Perhaps ethnomusicology needed to work through a transitional period of attention to gender and music, first carrying out remedial studies necessary to include the presence of women in the androcentric world of cross-​cultural composition and performance. But we have now entered into a new age with more open discussions about varying roles of different gender identities and a range of sexual preferences. This volume is particularly eloquent in spanning the distance between the researcher’s experience and the field of engagement. The reader can also expect to learn that queering the field brings with it great challenges, including a full measure of risks for colleagues who expose their own lives and gender identities in a world still rife with homophobia and other modalities of overt discrimination. For researchers working in many locales worldwide, including North America and Europe, revealing one’s own gender preferences in relation to the field experience can be a precarious act. Queering the Field sounds a wakeup call to ethnomusicology as scholarly practice as well as to each ethnomusicologist, speaking out eloquently against the silencing of queer identities within all fields of endeavor. This collection of essays takes on often contested relationships between gender, sexuality, and race. It explores the boundaries of gender experiences past and present and in live as well as virtual contexts. Essays interrogate the centrality of eroticism, and so much more. This volume will no doubt move queer studies into the center of ethnomusicological discourse—​that is, if it is not already there, as Gregory Barz acknowledges when he writes that “We are all just a bit queer, working within a slightly queered discipline” (94).

2

IN T RODU C TION

2

Queering the Field An Introduction Gregory Barz*

Sadly, Queering the Pitch:  The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (Brett, Wood, and Thomas 1994) represents an important juncture in musicology, but there are no ethnomusicologists in that collection, and in many ways—​eleven years later—​most ethnomusicologists have still not engaged deeply with sexuality studies or queer theory despite the fact that music is often a key performative means for defining the terms for pleasure and desire. –​Deborah Wong (2006:266)

Prelude Ronny Chokron takes a long drag on his cigarette and then asks me to order him another espresso. A waiter in the bustling sidewalk café along Tel Aviv’s trendy Rothschild Boulevard rushes over as Ronny’s well-​manicured hand gesticulates with snapping fingers in the air. The waiter asks if we would like to order food as well. Ronny stops him by blurting out, “‫יוא‬, ‫קתומ‬, ‫שובלל הכירצ ינא‬ ‫[ ”ברעה הדומצ הלמש‬Oh honey, I need to wear a tight dress tonight!]. “I’m Nona Chalant tonight,” Ronny informs us. The waiter smiles and rushes back into the restaurant. Later that evening a cab drops me off at a local art museum. The plaza in front of the museum is already crowded as people queue up to purchase tickets for the gala opening of a new exhibit, with gay icon Nona Chalant as MC. As I enter the museum-​turned-​techno-​performance space, Nona walks flawlessly over to me in impossibly tall heels and announces to the assembled guests in her microphone that “‫יתוברו ייתוריבג‬, ‫ונתאה‬-​‫”ןאכ ומוהה גולוקיזומ‬

* With gratitude, I thank colleagues Zoe Sherinian, Gillian Rodger, Steven Moon, and William Cheng for their close readings of this chapter. Their suggestions allowed the chapter to take a variety of unanticipated twists and turns. I am also grateful to several anonymous readers for their encouragement and support. Any and all omissions, however, remain my own responsibility.

8  Gregory Barz [ladies and gentlemen, the homo ethnomusicologist is here!]. Draped in chiffon with a long silver-​haired wig and perfect makeup, the drag queen (“honey, I’m a fashion artist!”) mingles with the guests throughout the night, dragging me, the intentionally queered ethnomusicologist, behind her. At no point does the performance artist seem out of place, and at no point does anyone not welcome her into their conversation. She is an expected addition to the queered ambient Tel Aviv environment.

What Does It Mean to Queer the Field? The musicians with whom ethnomusicologists are privileged to work typically do not rely on a singular code of ethics that guides their cultural performativity; in fact, the fracturing of such expectations in the field is frequently the rule rather than the exception. And yet, as fieldworkers, ethnomusicologists are frequently bound to institutionalized codes of ethics, beginning at home with the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) of our professional affiliations, and expanding to the expectations of accessing and attaining local research clearance. Do the codes outlined in such institutional documents constrain the practice of ethnomusicology? To normalize the core practice of fieldwork—​making it follow a straight path, a straight set of rules—​seems a violent act given that musical practice frequently involves improvisation, spontaneity, and the release of expectations and reassignment of responsibilities. If a queered identity is conceptualized as one that is non-​normative, how then do prescribed ethical codes affect fieldwork practice? And how can the boundaries of such marked or unmarked deviance be addressed within the practice of researchers and informants in ethnomusicological work? In many ways, these questions mirror those in the opening section of the volume After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory: Does the very distinction between the sexual and nonsexual matter to queer thinking, and if so, when, where, and how? Can work be regarded as queer if it’s not specifically “about” sexuality? This finding oneself “after” queer theory differs—​in terms of desire, location, temporality, loyalty, antagonism, comradeship, or competence—​from finding oneself “after” a traditional academic discipline, critical race theory, a religious orientation, a political conviction, feminism, lesbian and gay studies . . . ? (Halley and Parker 2011:2)

In Queering the Field, as in After Sex?, we aim to move beyond earlier models in which musicality is equated with difference and thus understood as queer (per Philip Brett’s invaluable claim in musicology’s Queering the Pitch [2006(1994)]).

Introduction  9 Rather, in this volume, we propose to expand the critical, social, and behavioral rubrics of musicality to include categories of play, performance, masquerade, expression, subjectivity, interiority (and all the concepts, actions, and habits that inform the production, circulation, and study of music and sound writ large). Concepts of normativity will also need to be understood in relation to institutionalization, discipline, canon, and habitus. Perhaps ethnomusicology’s historically shadowed presence “in the closet” mirrors the reluctance of individual ethnomusicologists and their delayed (if not late) entrance to the queer dance floor, as ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff suggests in a recent interview with Jennifer Kyker: [Kyker]: Are there any ethnographies you particularly value for their portrayal of men as gendered? [Koskoff] Certainly the queer musicology scholarship has really looked at that. However, a lot of that work is about erotic relationships between men. . . . What I find interesting is that most of the people who are coming to that position are either out gay, or women. The non-​out males are more reluctant. (Kyker 2014:8–​9)

This “reluctance” indicates a continued positionality of a perhaps closeted intellectual agenda, mirroring what Sara Ahmed labels as a desire to maintain “straight lines,” since “the forms they elevate into moral and social ideals (such as marriage and family life) will be rejected by those whose bodies can and do ‘line up’ with the straight line, which is not, of course, all straight bodies” (2006:174). Since the 1980s intellectuals have reclaimed “queer” as a marker of identity, and the authors in Queering the Field continue this intellectual cultivation by transforming the concept in several subversive ways for the field of ethnomusicology: the queer rejection of heteronormativity in field research design and implementation, the queer embrace of sound as embodied, the queer critique of gendered binaries, the advocacy for queer-​identified musical individuals and traditions, and the queered rethinking of inherited theoretical models for analyzing and performing global music traditions. There is much at stake for the authors in this volume as they intentionally mark the heretofore unmarked. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman point directly to the privileging afforded to heteronormativity when applied as an unmarked category: By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—​ that is, organized as a sexuality—​but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked

10  Gregory Barz as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—​often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. (1993:548n2)

And as Clare Croft suggests in the introduction to Queer Dance, the queering of performance demands a clear “rejection of normativity” and the ability to be comfortable in the midst of discord: “[Q]‌ueer” arises from a critical entanglement of gender and sexuality within a larger call for resisting normativity. “Queer” function as an umbrella term for LGBTQ people and recognizes non-​normativity more broadly.  .  .  To lay claim to “queer” as one’s identity, as many do in the twenty-​first century, often denotes a non-​normative gender or sexual identity and that one is not invested in more mainstream LGBT policies. This is an example of how a label can take on a queerly performative function, undoing even what we think a label does. (2017:9)

At one time the LGBT(QI+) label invoked by Croft might have been just an acronym of confusing terms. I share a footnote from Horacio Ramírez and Nan Boyd’s introduction to queer oral history in order to establish a shared understanding of the non-​normativity explored by many authors in the present volume: The acronym LGBT (the most pervasive, as well as Anglo-​and Euro-​centric globally) is meant to describe nonheterosexually identified women and men:  lesbian women, gay men, bisexual women and men, and transgender women and men who may be gay, bisexually, or lesbian identified but also heterosexual or straight. The acronym, emerging from conceptual, historical, and political assumptions that these individual identity-​based categories are fixed and static, fails to capture a great deal of queer erotic life and gender expressions, especially when we examine those that existed prior to the identity-​based civil rights era and social movements dependent on a public politicized identity. It also fails to capture many of the identities and expressions emerging in nonwhite communities and non-​ European or European-​ descent nations and populations. “Queer” was meant to respond to some of these conceptual limitations by connoting sexual and gender transgression more broadly, but it carries its own Euro-​centric historical formation. The term (still derogatory to some while liberating for others) was born out of the more in-​your-​face (rather than mainstream and assimilationist) grassroots political struggles in the late 1980s and early 1990s in large urban centers in the United States. (2012:17–​18, n2)

Introduction  11 Ramírez and Boyd continue to unpack the presence of queer politics in the Euro-​ American intellectual academy in this directly addressed footnote and hint at a longstanding critical relationship between queer identity and queer theory.1 Regarding the late entry of queer theory to ethnomusicology, Ramírez and Boyd help us just a bit by suggesting that “historically, academic queer theory followed the grassroots innovations, not the other way around” (Ramírez and Boyd 2012:18, n2). Thus, it is perhaps understandable that the location of queer practice has been identified and situated first within ethnographic work before a queer theory ended up emerging organically within the discipline of ethnomusicology. If Queering the Field leads to an increased awareness and advocacy of queer-​ identified issues and individuals in our discipline, then we have accomplished a significant objective. The authors in this volume provide nuanced case studies for further exploration, and in so doing they have each contributed to the subtitle of this volume: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology.

Anxiety in the Margins—​Queer Pursuits in Musicology So, why has there been a paucity of queer inquiry in ethnomusicology while significant efforts in closely allied disciplines (musicology, anthropology, history, and sociology) have led to innovative and ongoing responses to queer theory? Early efforts in queer musicology from the early 1990s met resistance that resulted in open and perhaps overt homophobia. As Deborah Wong remarks in this Introduction’s epigraph, ethnomusicologists have not been represented in publications focused on queer topics produced in our sister disciplines to date (note that even the part deux-​esque Queering the Popular Pitch [Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, eds. 2006] closets the efforts of those ethnomusicologists included in the volume by labeling such efforts on the back cover as a promise “to establish a new level of discourse in a growing field of musicological research” [emphasis added]). Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, 2006 [1996]) is one of the most visible documents situating the queering of anthropology in praxis, specifically within field research and constructions of ethnographic narrative. While none of the volume’s authors approach the question of whether anthropology is an inherently queered discipline, several authors nevertheless unmask the hegemony of the marked, masculine nature of the discipline. A related 1 For an overview of queer performative identity in American popular culture, see Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A.  Brabon’s essay on “Queer (Post)Feminism” in Postfeminism:  Cultural Texts and Theories (2009).

12  Gregory Barz volume, Out in Theory: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (2002), positions the work of self-​identified queer researchers as “queer,” and in so doing the volume perhaps inadvertently (re)marginalizes such work by labeling and repositioning queer research outside the so-​called mainstream. Within the ever-​increasing catalog of queer studies, there is precious little attention given to music and queer identity; this is odd, especially given the prominent role of the body in music’s reception, perception, and discursive formation. The few musical reflections that involve queer theory are often sidelined and frequently presented by non-​ethnomusicologists with facility in theoretical chops, such as legal scholar Carl Stychin’s recent provocative study of the Eurovision song contest (2014). For ethnomusicologists trained in the 1980s and 1990s, Tony Larry Whitehead and Mary Ellen Conaway’s edited volume, Self, Sex, and Gender in Cross-​Cultural Fieldwork (1986) was an invaluable resource for reflection on the multidisciplinary shift in focus on the transformed self in relation to field research, and yet there is not a single mention in any of the volume’s articles about homosexual identity, let alone an intentional queering of identity. Colin Turnbull’s opening article dances precariously close to the issue of queer identity (1986), but nevertheless leaves the issue unspoken and unnamed (and thus unmarked). Queering the Field thus provides a bold response by providing a foundation for further work in ethnomusicology while filling a void that some did not know existed. The authors in Queering the Field reveal and highlight the work of others in similar disciplines while simultaneously building a platform within ethnomusicology that intentionally relocates queer positions at the very center of our discipline. So where were the ethnomusicologists while anthropology publicly grappled with its queer identity? Well, I suspect that many of us stayed out of the brawl as passive observers of the queer debate—​for a reason. It might be overly clever to suggest that the motivation for reluctant engagement was that ethnomusicology was in a sense already queer (at least relative to music history and music theory), and as such, scholars saw little need for explicit articulations of queerness or queer identity. Perhaps it is the already queered status of ethnomusicology in the academy that has contributed to the anxieties long harbored by ethnomusicologists, encouraging many to disavow queer theories and avoid any direct address of queerness in their work for fear of even further marginalization in the academy (these reflections were first introduced in a 2015 blog posting by Cheng and Barz for Oxford University Press). Perhaps. Or it may be that the varying challenges, affordances, and pressures of scholars’ disparate field sites have impeded harmonious and ethically sound dialogues about queerness “out of concerns about culturally relative currencies of gender and sexuality” (Cheng and Barz 2015).

Introduction  13

Queer? What’s That? Perhaps the most dramatic and historically infamous example of how “queer” has been positioned as a hyper-​internalized figure of speech is the violent use of the term during the infamous Gore Vidal versus William F. Buckley debate of 1968, broadcast as part of ABC’s Chicago Democratic Convention coverage. At one particular moment during the debate, Vidal pushed Buckley to the edge by calling him a “pro-​war crypto Nazi.” Buckley appeared to be flustered as he responded with an emotional retaliation, calling Mr. Vidal “a little queer” on a live television broadcast feed.2 At the time, such a public utterance would have been the ultimate public insult. In this text we deliberately invoke “queer” as a verb, albeit all dolled up as an action verb, “queering.” Queering the field is a deliberate attempt on the part of many authors in this volume to define the act of doing ethnomusicology, specifically engaging in ethnographic field research that is, if not inherently queered, then open to the queer gaze. But, again, what is a “queer”? As a noun, queer functions as either an embraced self-​label for an individual or unwelcomed marker of identity imposed by someone else. The term also contributes to collectivity when representing groups of queer-​identified people, such as “queers of color.” The historical connotation of queer-​as-​aberrant nevertheless persists and is both embraced and disavowed by many today. The historical deviance associated with queer identity is referenced in the University of California, Davis’s “LGBTQIA Resource Center Glossary” published by their Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual Resource Center which I offer here as a baseline for measuring the conceptualization of queer-​as-​aberrance for this volume: Queer:  One definition of queer is abnormal or strange. Historically, queer has been used as an epithet/​slur against people whose gender, gender expression and/​or sexuality do not conform to dominant expectations. Some people have reclaimed the word queer and self-​identify as such. For some, this reclamation is a celebration of not fitting into norms/​being “abnormal.” Manifestations of oppression within gay and lesbian movements such as racism, sizeism, ableism, cissexism, transmisogyny as well as assimilation politics, resulted in many people being marginalized, thus, for some, queer is a

2 While most sources transcribe this fabulous discursive moment with Buckley accusing Vidal of being a “little queer,” I do find it interesting to note that several important recent sources have chosen to transcribe the albeit muddy network audio tape of this historic event by eliminating the diminutive “little,” letting Vidal off the hook as only “a queer” (see Hertzberg 2015 and Vulliamy 2015).

14  Gregory Barz radical and anti-​assimilationist stance that captures multiple aspects of identities (LGBTQIA Resource Center Glossary n.d.).

In this volume, we will quickly introduce a variety of efforts that reclaim queer as a positive term and celebrate the term as an integral aspect of one’s identity or part of the identities of the people with whom we work; reclaiming power to use, position, and document queerness is at the heart of many authors’ contributions in this volume. As a marker of identity, the term is indeed malleable and embraced by those inside the fold (those who self-​identify as queer). Many on the periphery and outside the fold, however, use the term reluctantly. There is certainly a degree of reluctance by the older, more senior members of our academic disciplines who exist within the “queer” fold who steadfastly refuse to embrace the term, espousing the usage of “homosexual” or “gay” as markers of identity instead. Yet these terms, especially “homosexual,” cause more confusion today than ever and produce adverse reactions as complex as “queer” once did. The disinclination by some scholars to embrace queer as a marker of identity can be clearly seen in the penultimate sentence of the following statement: Queer. 1. An umbrella term which embraces a matrix of sexual preferences, orientations, and habits of the not-​exclusively-​heterosexual-​and-​monogamous majority. Queer includes lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transpeople, intersex persons, the radical sex communities, and many other sexually transgressive (underworld) explorers. 2. This term is sometimes used as a sexual orientation label instead of “bisexual” as a way of acknowledging that there are more than two genders to be attracted to, or as a way of stating a non-​heterosexual orientation without having to state who they are attracted to. 3. A reclaimed word that was formerly used solely as a slur but that has been semantically overturned by members of the maligned group, who use it as a term of defiant pride. “Queer” is an example of a word undergoing this process. For decades “queer” was used solely as a derogatory adjective for gays and lesbians, but in the 1980s the term began to be used by gay and lesbian activists as a term of self-​identification. Eventually, it came to be used as an umbrella term that included gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Nevertheless, a sizable percentage of people to whom this term might apply still hold “queer” to be a hateful insult, and its use by heterosexuals is often considered offensive. Similarly, other reclaimed words are usually offensive to the in-​group when used by outsiders, so extreme caution must be taken concerning their use when one is not a member of the group. (University of Southern California’s LGBT Resource Center)

Introduction  15 I offer this institutional definition of this volume’s key term in order to underscore the exclusionary reception of the “queer” in today’s culture. In order to embrace the complicated reception history supporting the loaded term, this volume focuses primarily on queer as a verb—​to queer. By intentionally verbing queer, we can actively pull apart a situation, an act, or a process and explore its boundedness, its limitations, and its biases. By queering ethnomusicology, we redirect our gaze toward the purposeful decisions we make in the field, the assumptions we carry with us, and the habits we form that cause us to make the assessments and evaluations we do. And yet, “to queer” does not mean to throw out categories, but rather to explore elasticity and acknowledge ethnomusicology’s presence in the history of forming such categories. “To queer” also acknowledges the complexity of embracing the existence of two (or more) ways of understanding a given scenario in our field research, a skill effectively valued by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “[T]‌he test of a first-​rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (1945[1936]:69). Additionally, by verbing queer, several of the ethnomusicologists featured in this volume eagerly grab the opportunity to revisit, reexamine, and reinterpret their own experiences in the field, while others still reevaluate (while simultaneously acknowledging the problematic positionality inherent therein) the work of others in the discipline. At the heart of all such efforts at reexamination is the interpretation afforded by new applications of queer theory in ethnomusicology. The resultant implications of the “why this book /​why now” core question will be obvious and recognizable to most; acknowledgment of a queered identity by academics has long been dangerous, punishable, and in fact illegal in many cultures, and in many countries until quite recently. As a child of first-​generation German immigrants to the United States, I am well aware of the roots that informed my early closeted sexual identity. Many of us grew up in times not that far removed from genocidal threats on global homosexuality, as Richard Plant outlines in The Pink Triangle, a study of homosexuality during the Nazi era in Germany: That homosexuals, by a series of laws, were treated as subhumans does not seem in retrospect particularly illogical or even unexpected. After all, their classification as heretical deviants boasted a long lineage. From the viewpoint of Nazi logic, the extermination policy concerning homosexuals had a kind of ideological justification. Himmler’s concept of a National Sexual Budget classified homosexuals as “propagation blanks” and diagnosed them as a health hazard because they spread a so-​called homosexual infection. Eicke’s police needed no such ideological rationale: homosexuals were simply regarded with the hatred characteristic of ancient homophobic superstitions. (1986:185)

16  Gregory Barz By invoking the very real danger that accompanied (and continues to accompany) LGBT(QI+)-​identified field researchers at relatively recent moments in our history, I merely underscore the importance of embracing—​and voicing—​ deep culturally rooted sensitivities when positioning the queering of contemporary identities. As a term—​at the time of writing this Introduction—​“queer” is quickly becoming mainstreamed as a perfectly acceptable cover term to both reference and simultaneously question the rich plurality of non-​heteronormative life and culture around the world, perhaps pushing us all to consider post-​ gay identities. Witness a recent New  York Times headline, “Cape Town’s New Masculinity: In the queer capital of South Africa, young men are defining themselves through dress,” which intentionally uses the term to represent a deviance with a presumed mainstreaming of gay culture: “But even traditional gay clubs are hostile to nonconformity, so alternative queer spaces have begun to emerge” (Mesiani 2018). Having been a resident at one point in my life of the “Mother City,” Cape Town emerges in this perspective as not a “gay” capital, but rather one that is actively and intentionally “queered.”

Queer Theory! What the Heck Is That? If nothing else, queer theory is a field supremely cognizant of the rhetorical significance of marking beginnings and endings. At the start of 2012, when the intellectual pursuit organized by the term “queer theory” was barely old enough to buy itself a beer at the local gay bar, its demise was already being forecast. Michael Warner’s Chronicle Review essay, titled “Queer and Then?” and the ominously subtitled “The End of Queer Theory?” was prompted by the discontinuation of Duke University Press’s important Series Q. . . . He describes the initial emergence of queer theory, when “queer” “was not yet a cable-​ TV synonym for gay; it carried a high-​voltage charge of insult and stigma,” but notes that within four years of the first use of the term, Teresa de Lauretis and others were already worried that it had become a “conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.” Thus, Warner narrates queer theory’s history as containing, from the beginning, a certain anxiety about its own utility and relevance, even as it also proved to be incredibly intellectually stimulating for those who participated in its early proliferation. (Rand 2014:156–​57) As a concept, “queer theory” is used in two ways by authors in Queering the Field. Several contributors use specific attributes of queer theory in order to unpack cultural production marked by individual domains within the LGBT(QI+)

Introduction  17 acronym, referencing specific expressive identities associated with lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and queers. In addition, several authors also rely on the central tenets of queer theory to approach direct social deviation or to question the presence of a presumed normative sexual practice or orientation in a given field research situation. It is the propensity to identify and question the “normative” in ethnomusicology that authors in this volume frequently address, in a practice similar to what Nick Rees-​Roberts suggests in French Queer Cinema: “Queer critique, in short, attempts to undermine all normative or ‘straight’ representations of gender and sexuality, hetero or homo” (2014:5). Regarding ethnomusicology . . . it is about time. By its queer nature, queer theory attempts to avoid strict, bounded definitions of both inclusion and exclusion—​this is queer and that is not. As a theoretical construct, queer theory was first introduced by semiotician Teresa de Lauretis in 1991. As a theory, it was from the start a deliberate intervention for “sounding” out voices that had been historically and, in some cases, politically silenced as de Lauretis suggests: It is already here in the essays’ work to deconstruct the silences of history and our own discursive constructions, in the differently erotic mappings of the body, and in the imaging and enacting of new forms of community by the other-​wise desiring subject of this queer theory. (1991:xvi, emphasis added)

Yet, where was the “theory” in early queer theory? Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello remind us that in its earliest days, the coupling of “queer” with “theory” was considered odd and in their view “provocative” (2014:4). For many, queer theory remains a liminal space of sorts within which scholars can meet, share ideas, and form a “counterpublic,” as Michael Warner intimates in “Queer and Then? The End of Queer Theory?”: Queer theory in this broader sense now has so many branches, and has developed in so many disciplines, that it resists synthesis. The differences have often enough become bitter, sometimes occasioning the kind of queerer-​than-​ thou competitiveness that is the telltale sign of scarcity in resources and recognition. That impulse can be seen, for example, in the title of a special issue of Social Text called “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” And given queer theory’s strong suspicion of any politics of purity, it is ironic that queer theorists can often strike postures of righteous purity in denouncing one another. . . . At its best, queer theory has always also been something else—​something that will be left out of any purely intellectual history of the movement. Like “I want a dyke for president,” it has created a kind of social space. Queer people of various kinds, both inside and outside academe, continue to find their way

18  Gregory Barz to it, and find each other through it. In varying degrees, they share in it as a counterpublic. (Warner 2012)

Queer theory in ethnomusicology? Surrounding any efforts to date, there has been a profound silence; queer theory lives within a deafening absence in the field and fieldwork of ethnomusicology. To date, there has been little effort to address queer topics or to incorporate queer theory in the discipline, either in scholarly publications or in pedagogical matters. And yet the halls of recent meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) are filled with conference attendees running to catch individual papers on queer topics or entire panels devoted to queer identities. In fact, we are at a point of germination in the SEM where recently one contributor in this volume publicly challenged another contributor, stating that his topic was really all about being “gay” and not “queer” (enough). The queering of our intellectual growth and development is clearly grinding the crank shaft as we attempt to make it out of first gear and into second. First gear—​1997. SEM Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh. Queer Theory was a prescribed topic at the 1997 conference with papers and panels offering a variety of queer approaches in ethnomusicology. In practice, ethnomusicology was actively considering and presenting reflections on queer theory. I  remember Zoe Sherinian and Gillian Rodger (both in this volume) presenting on queer topics on a panel with respondent Philip Brett. These were early days for ethnomusicology’s initial dipping of the toes into queer theory. At that time, Rodger suggested caution when applying the term queer to global contexts, fearing a colonization of other cultures by mapping queer identities onto same-​ sex affection. Gillian Rodger’s research and publications were among the first in the early wave of addressing queer identities in ethnomusicology. Her 1998 dissertation cites much of the nineteenth-​century sexology related to sexuality and cross-​dressing that informs her early work. In her early work, she found that the central tenets of queer theory did not always work well when applied to topics in the nineteenth century. An exception was her use of Judith Butler’s work on subversive reiteration (Bodies that Matter [1993]) in that period. In this way, queer-​informed theories helped Rodger re-​consider performances of male impersonators in the nineteenth century, and later in her studies of Annie Lennox (2004) and S/​M as an organizing perspective on performance (2007). SEM’s Gender and Sexualities Taskforce began as a steering committee in 1996 and achieved section status ten years later; the early organizers—​self-​identified as lesbians—​initially charged themselves with creating a queer safe zone before eventually shifting the focus to gender and sexualities as a legitimate area of study within the discipline. Thus, a question that guides this volume might actually be better framed (as contributor Zoe Sherinian has suggested in a personal communication) as “why have gay men been so late to approach the ‘Q’ in LGBT(QI+)?”

Introduction  19 This volume could surely not have emerged if not for the work of so many female ethnomusicologists who laid the groundwork for our present project. Applications of queer theory in ethnomusicology were nurtured within the early efforts of feminist studies in ethnomusicology. The early work by lesbian-​ identified ethnomusicologists and others writing about LGBT(QI+) subjects found a home in the discipline’s prodigious feminist anthologies (Koskoff [1987], Moisala and Diamond, eds. [2000], and Koskoff, ed. [2000]). The first feminist anthology in ethnomusicology (Koskoff 1987)  was in fact published several years before Teresa de Lauretis coined the term Queer Theory in 1990. Ethnomusicologists were actively grappling with issues of gender and sexuality within the discipline. Carolina Robertson (1987), in particular, posed comparative cross-​cultural theoretical questions of the relationship between gender, power, and performance as well as sexuality that were critical to the development of feminism in ethnomusicology (see Robertson’s work on the Hawai’ian Māhū for example [1989] with an emphasis on androgyny). Yet it would still be several decades before the ethnographic embrace of queer theory in ethnomusicology would be fully embraced. In contradistinction, the published scarcity of research output surely does not reflect an absence of LGBT(QI+)-​ identified ethnomusicologists. And I need to posit that queer theory has long been (hyper-​)present in ethnomusicology due to its marked absence. Note, for example, that in Ellen Koskoff ’s recent tour de force, A Feminist Ethnomusicology (2014), in the section devoted to queer theory, there is nothing to mention about ethnomusicology. So, if I pose the question—​why this book, why now—​the answer might seem peculiar. Why actively queer the field of ethnomusicology at a moment in a time when many would say that queer theory is, well, already dead? “[Q]‌ueer theory (and not just its politics) is always already dead, buried, over, finished” (O’Rourke 2011:103). If queer theory has in fact already been proclaimed dead as a theoretical model, why then did ethnomusicology not attend the wake? Or, as William Cheng and I posit in the aforementioned OUP blog, “So why has queer ethnomusicology arrived late to the party? Queer theory has been around for over two decades. For ethnomusicologists to jump on the wagon now might seem akin to wandering into a club at last call, just as everyone else hails taxis home” (Cheng and Barz 2015). But I wonder, is it too late to populate the dance floor at queer theory’s after-​party? Is there still time to contribute a critical and meaningful voice to queer conversations? At the risk of spoiling the rest of this volume, the answer is decidedly yes! As rhetorical theorist Isaac West suggests, the emergence of queer theory both as a concept and an intellectual framework in the early 1990s relied historically on an author’s resistance of gender, sexual, or other binaries, “including the refusal to afford legitimacy to discrete classificatory schema or essentialized

20  Gregory Barz elements of identities” (2018:1). In such a conceptualization, queer theories are porous and changing, and while they frequently defy being wrapped up as bright-​colored packages tied up with string, they nevertheless have roots and historic trajectories that can (and should) be traced. Queer theory’s rich albeit shallow history clearly addresses social hierarchies and the hegemony of the sexual binaries, and this aspect of a theoretical construct clearly relates to the ethnomusicological project. As “a” theory it also attempts to rupture traditional models, as Annamarie Jagose suggests: Queer theory’s debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-​structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer is not always seen, however, as an acceptable elaboration of or shorthand for “lesbian and gay.” (1996:3)

But queer theory has always seemed to me to be about something else, something more politicized. Queer theory (or perhaps better put, queer theorizing) has provided intellectual room for communities historically excluded from disciplinary conversations. Queer theory carves out a sacred intellectual space and provides within that space a nourishing community.

Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on Performing Identity The deliberate queering of categories such as gender (and the expectations that attend cultural understandings and representations of gender) is at the heart of many musical and artistic performances and experiences documented and referenced in this volume. For queer ethnomusicology, reinscribing difference onto queer categories, such as drag, would not be a subversive act, as gender theorist Judith Butler intimates: As much as drag creates a unified picture of “woman” (what its critics often oppose) it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—​as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary. (1990:137–​38, emphasis in the original)

Introduction  21 For Butler and other queer theorists, queer as a category of identity is purposefully porous and frequently amorphic. For any queer analysis to take root and bloom within ethnomusicology, the performance of sound must first be understood from a perspective that takes into account the ability (or lack of ability) of the queer self to transcend binary categories of gender (see also Nick Davis [2013] for a reflection on queer theory and cinema). Isaac West in rhetorical studies, whose work I referenced earlier, suggests that queer theory has finally moved beyond its traditional emphasis along these very straight-​ gay binaries: More recently, the category of queerness has taken on a more ecumenical tone as it has been defined as an umbrella term that exceeds differentiation based on sexuality alone to imagine queerness in more capacious terms to include the shared concerns of trans folk, single persons, people of color, and transnational alliances of oppressed persons. Moreover, a more explicit emphasis on activism and collective action against a broader range of normativities than heteronormativity alone is increasingly prevalent. (2018:3)

For French philosopher Michel Foucault, positing a presumed natural status onto everyday human sexuality was incompatible with theories of sexuality (sex/​ gender) as social constructions, as Lisa Downing suggests: The principal way in which Foucault’s work has been used for contemporary interdisciplinary sexuality and queer studies is via the exploitation of his methodology of analysing the systems of thought that produced knowledge about sexuality. In particular, Foucault’s strategies provide an alternative to the demand to answer the question that had for many years dominated the social and medical sciences’ explorations and theorizations of sexuality:  the question of whether homosexuality (or bisexuality, or perversion, or female passivity/​male activity and so forth) are “innate” or “acquired.” Are these supposed phenomena biological givens or social constructs? Is it nature or nurture that determines who we are? (2012:222–​23)

And it is within the performative elements of the cultural aspects of the nature-​ vs-​nurture divide—​whether conceptualized as innate or acquired—​that the ethnomusicologists in this volume ultimately find their strongest voice. And perhaps this leads us to the most substantial contribution of Queering the Field, namely acknowledging the presence of queer voices in our intellectual community, both in and out of the field. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of the groundbreaking Epistemology of the Closet (1990) suggests, the acts of locating

22  Gregory Barz and identifying the binaries of knowledge and ignorance are best understood as a place of departure: For any modern question of sexuality, knowledge/​ignorance is more than merely one in a metonymic chain of such binarisms. The process, narrowly bordered at first in European culture but sharply broadened and accelerated after the late eighteenth century, by which “knowledge” and “sex” become conceptually inseparable from one another—​so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge: ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion—​was sketched in Volume I of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. (Sedgwick 2003:46)

The Many Voices in Queering the Field Queering the Field began with a Call and as a Call. Several years ago, Will Cheng and I sat down for coffee at a Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting and found ourselves reflecting on the lack of queer voices within the general membership. Where were they? Why was there no significant engagement with queer theory in our ethnographies, in our classes, in our papers and lectures? I remember asserting that I suspected that they were in fact out there, but that without “sounding out” queer identities, the influence of queer culture and queer theories very well might be imperceptible. After issuing a public Call for participating in a publication project, Queering the Field was born out of a response by scholars who were eager to sound out their experiences, reflections, and analyses on queer identity in ethnomusicological field research. The efforts of those authors included in this volume are tremendous, especially given the lack of discipline-​specific theoretical materials on which to ground their case studies. Thus, it should be underscored that the authors in Queering the Field take analytical and rhetorical risks in their attempts to build a foundation upon which further, perhaps full-​length, ethnographies can develop. Throughout Queering the Field, individual authors draw on ethnographic field research and experiences with musical cultures—​much of it deeply personal—​in order to unpack a history of sentiment veiling the treatment of queer music and identity in ethnomusicology. Reflected in the thematic structure of the volume is a deliberate cartography of queer spaces in the discipline—​spaces that are either strongly present due to their absence, marked by direct sonic parameters, or called into question by virtue of their otherness. This collection of essays is the first large-​scale study of ethnomusicology’s queer silences and queer identity politics, and as such, Queering the Field directly addresses the normativities that are currently at play in musical ethnography (fieldwork, analysis, performance,

Introduction  23 transcription) as well as in the practice of musical ethnographers (identification, participation, disclosure, observation, authority). Most chapters in the volume have as their goal a particular queering of a hierarchical sexual binary, and in so doing, the authors in this volume frequently adopt radicalized voices (while rooted in strong narrative convictions) and present rhetorical and syntactical scenarios that challenge us to read in prescient singular ways for future queer writing and queer thought in ethnomusicology. Queer Silences—​contains chapters by Zoe Sherinian, Nicol Hammond, and Gillian Rodger. These authors tackle issues of silence and absence in ethnomusicology, from perspectives of methodology, ethnography, and history. Zoe Sherinian tackles several large-​scale questions on queering fieldwork in India. She asks, “Does the perspective of, or the transference and countertransference of sex, gender, and sexuality matter in fieldwork?” Her rich case studies focus on her time as a young and developing ethnographer and underscore a central tension in this volume—​can the ways in which field research has been conceptualized in ethnomusicology be understood as intrinsically queered when sounded out? In many ways, Sherinian frames the theoretical arguments that form the very core of many contributions in this volume while providing the historical glances necessary for positioning ethnomusicology within the greater disciplinary efforts to draw on queer theory. Nicol Hammond reflects on the pleasure of engaging field research in her chapter, initially likening it to sexual, physical pleasure. Her focus in her chapter is on the fandom surrounding the music culture of South African musician Karen Zoid and the lesbian base that forms the core of Hammond’s research study. Her reflections on heretofore silent, uncomfortable positions beautifully weaves in her own feelings of longing and desire “in the field.” Gillian Rodger’s article focuses on ways to engage ethnographic work in the past, specifically focusing on the question of what we can (and cannot) assume about listening to the silence of same-​sex love in historical contexts. Her article concludes with a fantastic reflection on the role of sexuality and the researcher, revealing the decisions that guided her emergent research project. The section Out/​In the Field includes a group of chapters by Gregory Barz, Alexander Cannon, Christi-​Anne Castro, and Moshe Morad. These chapters propose a positionality for the fieldworker in what is perhaps an inherently queered social space, the field research site. In his chapter, Barz [un]covers the queer identity of the field researcher, suggesting ways in which the expectations of both our academic discipline and our host cultures guide not only the researcher but also the informant in the decisions we make regarding our ability to sound out identity. He explores the concept of being “queer in the field,” and outlines the processes of marking and unmarking queerness in ethnographic research. The purposeful revealing of rather personal details of the queering of one’s field research is at the heart of Alexander Cannon’s chapter. For Cannon, the queering

24  Gregory Barz of fieldwork occurs within transgression and performance. He provides rich scenarios that highlight his state of being—​an “empty vessel”—​when he began field research in Vietnam until he began seeing musical—​like queer—​identities as invisible in plain sight. Adopting queer orientations, Cannon suggests, affords us opportunities to adjust the lenses of our inherited narratives, whether “colonial, racist, sexist, [or] ableist.” Christi-​Anne Castro’s chapter on ethnography shakes us up, forcing us to reconsider inherited models and traditions. Early in her chapter she comes out from the corner with a punch, “Writing is queer inasmuch as I can manipulate words into an ambiguity that bears resemblance with music.” Her case study of the Filipino singer Charice allows the reader to focus directly on the ambiguity of gender identities outside strict North American binary gender constructions. Moshe Morad’s chapter focuses on his fieldwork with gay men in Cuba during the Special Period. He locates what he calls an “emotional space” that music assumes in the lives of gay men, and he uses music to enter into social spaces of Havana’s ambiente, a local term for the gay scene in Havana. Morad’s reflections on fieldwork steer us all toward an understanding of the need for ethnomusicology to queer its methodologies in order to take into account a variety of ethical concerns outlined in his chapter. The section Queerness in Action includes chapters by Jeff Roy, Matthew Leslie Santana, Henry Spiller, and Tes Slominski. The chapters in this section highlight a variety of ways in which queer subjects are studied in ethnomusicology by bringing them into new focus. The trans-​hījṛā community in India serves as the subject matter for Jeff Roy’s chapter on the role of filmmaking in queer identity formation. The camera gave Roy the opportunity to approach the “social scripts” of cultural formation within the trans-​hījṛā community, and he reflects on his adopted positionality within that community and what a queer ethnomusicology can contribute to filmmaking. In his chapter on queer hip-​hop artists, Matthew Leslie Santana underscores the fact that queer hip hop artists have long contributed to a “tradition of non-​heteronormativity in Black cultural production.” Leslie Santana focuses on several young artists in order to underscore the attributes of what a queer-​of-​color ethnomusicology might look like. He steers away from labeling a new, upcoming performance arts genre, “gay rap,” to instead suggest the emergence of a group of young artists who depend on “tough love” as a performative tool. In Henry Spiller’s tour de force, the author explores how the complexity of Indonesian gender ideologies affect the performances of both male and female dalang topeng (masked dancers). In his chapter, Spiller details ways in which we can (and should) avoid constant glances to Indonesia in search of deviant sexual identities. By focusing on the topeng of Cirebon, Spiller challenges the myth of cross-​dressing as a (Western) form of social deviance. The positionality adopted by queer ethnomusicologists is also a significant aspect of the chapter by Tes Slominski. Slominski defines queerness as “the condition of

Introduction  25 finding—​or placing—​oneself outside the symbolic order of everyday life, yet still needing to function within the institutions and practices structured by that symbolic order.” By engaging ethnography and field research, ethnomusicologists are perhaps by Slominski’s definition all queer. And this might be her point, namely that we have perhaps always eschewed the dialectical, the life outside (and within) binaries in our theoretical analyses. The section Institutions and Intersections includes chapters by Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss, and Heather Paudler that cross boundaries of sameness and difference with regard to queer performativity. Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss offer a co-​authored chapter that intentionally queers institutional contexts and practices for studying and performing music traditions in Ireland and its diaspora. In their focus on Irish traditional music and dance, they challenge us to understand the fundamental queer nature of the entire discipline of ethnomusicology by focusing on internal institutional research review boards and by intentionally queering ethnomusicology through dancing bodies. Further, in critiquing the hegemony of North American and British theorizations of queerness within the discipline, they advocate for the inclusion of local understandings (“quareness”) that may in turn offer new perspectives to the ethnomusicological project writ large. In her chapter on the rural Panamanian dance-​drama known as la danza Bugabita, Heather Paudler identifies the ways in which elements of drag are incorporated into the dance performance. She challenges the assumption that male performers of this tradition must be gay/​homosexual, suggesting a deeper canonical acceptance of the historical cross-​dressing tradition deeply embedded in the culture of Panama. The section Who’s Queer (W)Here? includes chapters by Amber Clifford-​ Napoleone, Kathryn Alexander, and William Cheng. In this section, the authors explore the positionality of gay researchers versus gay subjects in a variety of cultural, social, and spatial contexts. Amber Clifford-​Napoleone presents an assortment of conundrums in her chapter, the least of which is her [inauthentic] ethnomusicological voice. Her reflections on queerness in heavy metal music encourage us to approach the value of the native field research for the queer scholar, calling for a re-​examination of the power within the inherited self/​subject dyad. For Kathryn Alexander, the projection of self and gender in her field research in Cape Breton directly affects the perception of gender by her field colleagues, thus affecting her own analysis. Her chapter details a brilliant shift in this perception as she worked through the evaporation of queer identity into a gendered binary during her field research. William Cheng’s chapter focuses on the “loud and queer” ways in which an online game ethnography activates queer ethics. For Cheng, the act or process of queering is a deliberate “call to social justice,” allowing the reader to also desire to play in such a “sandbox of queer optimism.” There is much at stake for us all in this process of queering of the field. As Cheng

26  Gregory Barz says in a loud voice: “Queer isn’t just liminality, interstitiality, and performativity. Queer is the bottles thrown, the bodies broken, the flesh and the flame, the strategic rationing and renewal of how many fucks we have left to give.” The section Clubs, Bars, Scenes offers chapters by Luis-​Manuel Garcia, Sarah Hankins, Cory Thorne, and Peter McMurray. The authors in this section focus on performative spaces of queered communities from a variety of fieldwork-​specific orientations. Luis-​Manuel Garcia outlines the challenges (and hardships) that attend research of musical nightlife and the additional layer of complexity when focusing on queer topics. He notes a dissonance between the academic preparation for field research and the lived practice of the researcher in regard to queer performance culture, noting the active engagement of the fieldworker both forming and informing field sites. In a compelling chapter on relationships and conflict in the field, Sarah Hankins reflects on issues of gender and sexuality and the ways they impact race and racial difference. Her case study of the Rasta Club in south Tel Aviv is a vivid reflection on queer identity within the context of heterosexual interactions, especially violent ones. Cory Thorne details issues related to drag performances involving a specific Cuban religious performance genre. But he steps back from actually queering the event, suggesting that through the gaze of male sex workers in Havana, the practice of Santería enacted within drag performance may present a challenge to dominant codes of masculinity, that is machismoism, but not to religion. In his outline of a sensual ethnography, Peter McMurray attempts to reorient ethnography in his case studies in Gayhane, as he honed his focus on what he calls the “Islamic acoustics of Turkish Berlin.” His sensual recollections are compelling as he dances with elements of his body not normally considered performative. McMurray’s ears, his “recursive archive,” feature prominently in the sonorization of his body. It is within the serendipitous moments of his research that we approach McMurray’s body responding to rich and challenging ethnographic scenarios in Berlin.

Conclusion This volume issues a cautionary note about the need to define queer in culturally appropriate ways that do not colonize other cultures by assuming that queer  =  homosexual as typically defined in Western urban spaces, as Gillian Rodger suggested decades ago. In this Introduction I posit why it might be that Ethnomusicology was slow (and perhaps a bit reluctant) to embrace queer theory and other approaches to gender and sexuality. At the Queer 1997 SEM panel mentioned earlier in this Introduction, Gillian Rodger challenged us to consider that gender and sexuality are typically not a part of everyday discourse and that we are therefore seldom in the position of approaching shared, cross-​cultural

Introduction  27 understandings of expected gendered or queered roles in our field research. We must first approach and appreciate the particularities of queer identities and the attending cultural biases that inform both our work and our interactions with music and musicians around the world. For those new to the queer topics raised in this volume, it will quickly become clear that the authors are taking risks. They each envelop themselves and support their studies with emergent queer theoretical voices. And it is perhaps the bibliographic citations of resources collected in the concluding “Works Cited” section that is one of the most significant contributions the individual authors make in their chapters, establishing experimental (and at times playful) launching pads for further ethnographic research. While it may seem trivial that some would get excited at the opportunity to pore through the authors’ collected references, others will surely understand and benefit from this initial effort to bring together a chorus of backup singers and lip syncers, voices from our disciplinary past and from the sister disciplines with whom we share our queer journey. Yes, the invocation of a launching pad is a timely platform that grounds the conclusion to this Introduction. That many authors in this collected volume take risks in their chapters—​significant theoretical, intellectual, and highly personal risks—​should be acknowledged and celebrated. For the authors, such risks definitely counterbalance the proverbial early “failure to launch” for queer studies in ethnomusicology. It was time. It is time to . . . sound out ethnomusicology!

3

QU E E R SIL E NCE S

3

Sounding Out-​Ethnomusicology Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes and Performance Zoe C. Sherinian

When I conduct ethnomusicological fieldwork in India, do I appear “out” as a “lesbian”? Am I transgressive if I assume a masculine female gender identity? As a musician do I sound “out” when, as a person in a female body, I play the mrdangam drum in a Karnatak music context? Do I sound “out” or transgressive when I engage in parai drumming of the outcastes whose folk music is considered polluted by the upper and middle castes who would never touch this drum? My experience as a soft-​butch lesbian conducting fieldwork in India has taught me that to know if my socio-​musical behaviors and identities are understood as transgressive, or acceptable, or outrageous, I must first assume the likelihood that they are being read as a form of “cultural transference” by people with whom I am engaged in the field from the perspective of their own indigenous sex/​gender/​sexuality (S/​G/​S) categories,1 as opposed to my own “Western” concepts. Consideration of this cultural transference dynamic in the process of interpreting the subject’s culture can provide the ethnomusicologist significant perspectives on local S/​G/​S constructions. I begin this chapter with these questions and this premise in order to “out” my thirty years of experience as a lesbian and gender queer (non-​binary) while doing ethnomusicological fieldwork in India. To explore these questions, I engage with ethnographic writing and shared aesthetic experience on the extremes of the genre continuum from personal details of “queer” relationships that I have kept tucked away in diaries to metatheorizing on ethnomusicology’s fieldwork praxis and how to queer it (bring it kicking and screaming out of the closet).2 I propose to start this sounding out by deconstructing how ethnomusicology’s fieldwork norms, ethics, and procedures uncritically compel LGBTQ scholars

1 See definition of this term adapted from psychoanalysis in the discussion to follow. 2 While to some younger scholars this may seem an outdated metaphor, the fact that this volume on queering ethnomusicology is coming out only now, in the later part of the second decade of the twenty-​first century, shows that it is still apropos.

32  Zoe C. Sherinian into patriarchal heteronormative power structures and field experiences. I recommend we re-​evaluate how our methodological assumptions that the scholar is a straight male, or (more likely in the Society for Ethnomusicology that is 52% female), a straight female and potential mother, permeate our methodology. Based on this premise, then, the implication for LGBTQ scholars, until very recently, was to accept this state of affairs. That is, accept this praxis of straight and hegemonic male positionality, especially in the potentially more conservative non-​ Western world, and go into the closet (erase this part of our subjectivity) while doing fieldwork.

Whose Sex/​Gender/​Sexuality? I begin this challenge theoretically from the premise that uncritically imposing Western S/​G/​S ideology (Butler 1990)  categories on our subjects is antithetical to ethnomusicology. Furthermore, because the Western S/​G/​S ideology system carries the baggage of heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, and binary constructions without conscious deconstruction before packing it in our bags, it inevitably impacts our analysis. At the very least it limits our ability to understand, while its most destructive effect is to erase indigenous phenomena or prevent us from seeing or hearing them. I frame this dialogic analysis of encounters with indigenous S/​G/​S systems as homologous to ethnomusicological “translations” of musical systems cross-​ culturally. That is, the issue is similar to imposing Western musical categories (e.g., scale, 4/​4 meter), terms, or systems on indigenous melodic, metrical, or tuning systems, which ethnomusicologists try hard to avoid. While working in the Indian context, for example, if we transcribe Karnatak rhythmic cyclical (tala) articulations using Western metrical time signatures and notation, we impose on tala the implied accents, downbeats, and values carried by the Western rhythmic system. Instead, scholars have derived graphic systems that use the anga, kriya, and nadai structures of the Karnatak tala as its basis, avoiding many traps of notational translation (Nelson 1991; Sherinian 1991; Paige 2009). Similarly, I suggest that to have a critical discussion of Indian categories of sexuality, gender, and homosocial behavior as well as arranged marriage, pre-​ marriage separation of the sexes, qualities of same-​sex friendships, Western borrowed constructions of politicized queer identity, and class and caste differences that affect S/​G/​S categories, we must take Indian S/​G/​S constructions “on their own terms.” Such a culturally relativist approach subverts the hegemonic universalist use of Western S/​G/​S identity constructions as the only ones through which to understand cultural systems. It challenges ethnomusicologists to use people’s own identity conceptions in our process of representing them or

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  33 allowing them to represent themselves. My attempt here is to apply a basic ethnomusicological method of musical systems representation to cross-​cultural queer studies within ethnomusicology and more broadly. Thus, by preferencing the knowledge of those who are potentially at the cultural margins to define their terms of self-​identification, I  suggest a means to queer ethnomusicology that challenges ethnomusicologists to apply culturally relativist analysis methods to S/​G/​S studies within music. This process would involve the fieldworker (preferably in dialogue with locals) deconstructing the indigenous categories to consciously discern how they are being interpreted and negotiated at all stages of the fieldwork. Indeed, the student might consider entering the field having already studied the indigenous categories through secondary sources in order to determine how to choose and negotiate one’s research subjects/​cultures accordingly (Morcom 2013). Then, when in the field, one can begin to understand these constructions by investigating how music and performance is a means to these S/​G/​S expressions or their subversion. The challenge is to interpret from these constructions without comparing them to those of the West, while still being sensitive to or self-​reflexive about the fieldwork process in which the ethnographer inevitably (at least in India) experiences their own and the local system bumping up against each other. For example, many Americans are shocked the first time they see two young men in India casually strolling down the road holding hands, only to find out that these men are not necessarily “men who have sex with other men,” but that this same-​ sex affection (anbu in Tamil) is normal behavior for all young people. This is especially true in a society dominated by an arranged marriage system. That is, until the Indian worldview in which normative same-​sex affection is integrated into the ethnographer’s consciousness or habitual way of interpreting what she experiences, there will inevitably be a process of comparison. Ironically, for a Western queer ethnographer in many parts of Asia, this process of worldview integration may result in finding a place for their same-​sex expressions to exist in a state of indigenous normativity. Thus, ethnomusicology’s Western-​ defined universalist S/​G/​S identities that were, and in many cases still are, silently imposed upon us as students may also be in conflict with the array of possible local constructions within the particular cultural contexts in which we work.3

3 I argue that this imposition primarily occurs through the absence of discussion of the possibility of local S/​G/​S differences by ethnomusicologists while teaching fieldwork methodology. One of the challenges in this book on outing a queer ethnomusicology is the need to examine how “queer” is defined in Western culture and applied to music. If it is most broadly about transgression of normative S/​G/​S systems, then we should consider how ethnomusicological case studies from other cultures might define “queerness” differently to determine how we might reconstruct it for cross-​cultural theoretical application.

34  Zoe C. Sherinian My three case studies provide a phenomenological experience of fieldwork that disrupts (queers) ethnomusicology’s heteronormative assumptions and dialogues with potential cultural negotiations that a fieldworker might engage regarding how their gender and sexuality is interpreted in cross-​cultural field encounters. I argue that in order to understand the reception of our S/​G/​ S identities in the field, we must analyze indigenous conceptions and how our behaviors and presentations are read from the local worldview. Furthermore, in order to understand if our socio-​musical behaviors and identities are received as transgressive or acceptable, they must be considered dialogically in relation to other people or communities encountered in the field. I discuss my musical experiences crossing the intersections of gender, sexuality, and caste lines in South Asia through vocal and percussion performance and the relationship between my musical encounters and the quality/​experience of homosocial/​sexual relationships possible between women I engaged with or observed in this context. My larger theoretical intent here is to contribute to ethnomusicology a fieldwork methodology focused on interpersonal dynamics in the field and the role of cultural transference4 of S/​G/​S ideologies in the culture contact process. In particular, I  show how music facilitates cultural transference in these field relationships.

Psychoanalysis, Cultural Transference, and Ethnomusicological Methods For my doctoral examinations in 1993, I reviewed the literature on sex/​gender in ethnomusicology, arguing in one of my essays that one should not impose Western S/​G/​S ideology on our field subjects, collaborators, and their culture. Instead, we should approach these cultures on their own terms or the indigenous parameters of their conception, in a similar culturally relativist way that ethnomusicologists engage indigenous musical systems. In my oral exam, one of my examiners responded to this proposed method asking, “Is that like doing [psycho]therapy?” At the time I was thrown by this question, but realize now that my answer could have been, “Yes, I am suggesting a kind of cultural deconstruction of S/​G/​S systems and their application to the fieldworker, which would require conscious self-​analysis: a kind of self-​reflexivity of the role of one’s S/​G/​S in the field dynamic.” That is, one would analyze the S/​G/​S ideology and identities with which they grew up in order to be hyper-​conscious of their unintentional application in the interpretive analysis of local phenomena in the ethnographic 4 I take the concept of transference from Freudian psychoanalysis, while I place it within the ethnomusicological study of culture, and attempt to apply to it a post-​colonial critique.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  35 process.5 For the fieldworker, this would entail a sort of personal cultural identity analysis similar to how a psychoanalyst explores their own internal processes through being in their own psychoanalysis with another therapist, especially while in training. However, pre-​fieldwork self-​reflexivity is not the end point. Secondly, I suggest we apply a methodology from the relational and intersubjective braches of psychoanalysis we might call cultural transference and countertransference (Bonovitz 2005:55).6 The methodological similarities between intersubjectivity and anthropological fieldwork dynamics will be obvious to ethnomusicologists. From a clinical point of view, intersubjectivity is not so much a theory as it is a sensibility. It is an attitude of continuing sensitivity to the inescapable interplay of observer and observed. It assumes that instead of entering and immersing ourselves in the experience of another, we join the other in the intersubjective space. Each participant in the psychoanalytic field brings an organized and organizing emotional history to the process. This means that although the analysis is always for the patient, the emotional history and psychological organization of the patient and analyst are equally important to the understanding of any clinical exchange . . . What we inquire about or interpret or leave alone depends upon who we are. (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997:9)

In psychoanalysis the phenomenon of transference involves a focus on the patient’s reaction to the analyst in order to help the patient make what is unconscious—​psychic internal processes—​conscious. “Transference  .  .  .  is always evoked by some quality or activity of the analyst that lends itself to being interpreted by the patient according to some developmentally preformed organizing principle” (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997:40).7 I suggest that the cultural fieldworker, like the analyst, should observe and gather data about how their identities, S/​G/​S behaviors, and agency (quality or activity of the analyst) are being interpreted through the field subject’s indigenous cultural conceptions (preformed organizing principle or organized emotional history) as a means to interpret the subject’s culture. The intersubjective 5 In the 1960s, the social philosophers Paul Ricœur and Jürgen Habermas developed from psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutic or interpretive practice. This was further applied to South Asian contexts by Gananath Obeyesekere. 6 The application of transference and countertransference was first developed by the analyst and fieldworker Georges Devereux (1968), anticipating the work of reflexive Anthropology and the “crisis of representation” by George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, James Clifford, Paul Rabinow, and Ruth Behar in the 1970s and 1980s (http://​what-​when-​how.com/​social-​and-​cultural-​anthropology/​ psychoanalysis-​anthropology/​The-​Crankshaft Publishing. Retrieved June 13, 2016). 7 It is a common idea that transference is primarily applied to the patient reading the therapist from their own romantic relational models. I intend here to apply this more broadly to all sorts of relationships possible in the field.

36  Zoe C. Sherinian space parallels the field encounter,8 especially when ethnographer and subject are performing/​playing (or studying) music together (Titon 1997).9 The purpose of fieldwork is to understand the meaning of the subject’s music culture (just as therapy is focused on understanding the patient’s internal processes), but also essential to the process is an understanding, through self-​reflexivity, of the fieldworker’s cultural perspective, cultural baggage, and impact. Indeed, understanding how local subjects identify and interpret the fieldworker within their own cultural constructs reveals much about their local culture. Furthermore, intersubjective systems theory proposes that an analyst cannot have a neutral stance in their reactions to the transference of a patient but must be aware of the potential for countertransference (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997:41). Bonovitz argues that the transference-​countertransference dialectic exchange between the psychoanalytic duet includes “aspects of the historical relations between their respective cultures,” and that transference “may also be a manifestation of a patient’s sociocultural roots and family of origin’s cultural heritage including relationships to the dominant group” (2005:55). Thus, extending the transference/​countertransference model to the ethnomusicological fieldwork dialectic necessitates a critical post-​colonial lens that, in the analysis of the field relationships, takes into consideration contemporary and historical socio-​political power relations. Indeed, Anne McClintock proposes, “Psychoanalysis cannot be imposed ahistorically on the colonial context, if only because psychoanalysis emerged in historical relation to imperialism in the first place. Instead, I [McClintock] call for a mutual engagement that would comprise both decolonizing of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalyzing of colonialism” (2013 [1995]:74). Such a dialogical engagement that considers both contemporary and historical stances (or cultural history and organization) of the participants (subjects and fieldworker) is what I propose for a queer ethnomusicology (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997:9). Thus, it is important in this dialect to consider how the identities, self-​ understanding, and behaviors of ethnomusicological fieldworkers are affected by how they are received in the field encounter. Since the 1980s, ethnomusicologists have understood and become conscious of ourselves as self-​reflective agents in the field. Michelle Kisliuk writes that, “though one objective of ethnography is 8 Thanks to psycho-​therapist Jodye Morgan for teaching me about psychoanalysis and clarifying that the intersubjective space is where subjectivities merge and where transference and countertransference happens. That is, where who you are and who I am as well as the forces outside each of us become its own entity. In anthropology, this would be the field relationship in context. 9 Writing in ethnomusicology that shows how fieldwork is inherently transformative for ethnomusicologists as they become active participants in the transmission of the music they research includes Kay Shelemay (in Barz and Cooley 1997). Jeff Titon described the particular process of self-​ reflexivity and transformation for ethnomusicologists as located in the shared experience of playing music together in cross-​cultural relationships (Titon 1997; Sherinian 2005:1).

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  37 to understand others, reflexive fieldworkers realize that we get to know other people by making ourselves known to them, and through them to know ourselves again, in a continuous cycle” (1997:17). In a musical duet with our teachers or musical collaborators in the field, we typically bring Western musical training with us, learn the local system and concepts, and often exchange musical ideas in discussion or performance from that integrated stance, transforming ourselves musically and culturally in the process. I propose we can understand this as a musical transference and countertransference. Finally, the ethnographer’s choice of research subjects/​topics, lines of inquiry, and interpretation will inherently reflect their identity and interests, or “who we are.” At the beginning of psychoanalytic therapy, an analyst typically will not reveal much personal information so that the patient can come to trust them by creating a relationship based on earlier interpersonal patterns (transference) that will then be consciously analyzed.10 In the following cases I show how I realized, at least intuitively, that if I immediately came out as a lesbian to my field collaborators it might create too much cultural dissonance (needless to say, a privileged position). Furthermore, in my work with Indian Christians, I had concerns that if they understood homosexuality as a sin, some may not trust me and thus may not be as forthcoming. A process of building trust in order to negotiate cultural translations is necessary and as my field relationships developed over time I came to see the places of alliance possible or where personal disclosure would contribute to building our relationship, especially where caste politics and queer politics aligned.11 Furthermore, I believe shared feminist values may have facilitated closer relationships. I will apply these ideas further in the following case studies.

Self-​Reflexivity, Dialogical Ethnography, and Context In this chapter, I narrate my experience of carrying and being marked with multiple sexual identities.12 These include the following: 1) identities that I brought 10 The therapist decides when therapeutic disclosure will most benefit the therapy and therapeutic relationship or not, while the benefit would presumably be for the patient. Our field collaborators are certainly not “patients” to us; the power relationship is much different in that way. However, the anthropological fieldwork dynamic of asking questions, the collaborator’s experience and its articulation dominating the data collection process, and the fieldworker listening, while also participating, is very similar to the therapeutic process. 11 See work by Akhil Kang including “Queering Dalit” (2006), https://​www.tanqeed.org/​2016/​ 10/​queering-​dalit-​tq salon/​?fbclid=IwAR0hFYU7io5nZdRT_​w9e8u5r2EIzI819M6AEsQdvYvpLB J4yjMeHy0BIjSc. 12 Ethnomusicologist Rolf Groesbeck first introduced me to the idea of the fieldworker playing multiple roles (usually indigenously defined) in a paper entitled “Social Categories and Ethnomusicological Field Experience in Kerala,” presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in 2001.

38  Zoe C. Sherinian to the field in my Western-​packed baggage such as lesbian, soft butch, drummer/​ musician, student/​teacher; 2)  identities that were imposed or read on my embodied and musical performance via indigenous constructions of the people I encountered in India such as nun, spinster, PhD student who would eventually get married, unmarried aunty, financial patron, big sister, honorary male, respected female of one’s mother’s age, androgynous musician, a woman who could be sexually exploited by a male teacher, a woman who could be sexually exploited by a fellow male student, potential heterosexual partner, and foreign female not to be taken seriously or treated with the same respect as a man; and 3) identities negotiated in a phenomenological dance of playing music together with my friends in India (Titon 1997), intimate friend, masculine gendered drummer, dancer, motorcycle rider, rebel feminist, ally to Dalits (formally called untouchables/​outcastes).

Context: Relationships Between Women in India In the Indian context, I found through observation and secondary sources that close intimacy between female friends, between women in the same family, co-​ wives, and sisters-​in-​law living in the same household are typically acceptable.13 Women often sleep close to each other on the same mat or bed, spend all of their free time together, feed each other by hand, hold hands or link arms in public without anyone questioning their sexuality as not heterosexual. While, if a girl did any of these things with a boy before marriage, or a man who was not her husband after marriage, her reputation would risk being tarnished.14 Indeed there are same-​sex life-​long ritual friendships between women that cross caste divisions in some parts of India (Flueckiger 1996:32; Sherinian forthcoming). If such a same-​sex relationship appeared too intimate, as long as each girl agreed to have an arranged marriage to a man or was still fulfilling her duties as a wife and mother, a significant degree of intimacy would likely be overlooked (Trawick 1990:202). As I will show in the case studies to follow, the opportunity to engage in such behavior is very common in sex-​segregated or all-​female contexts such as college or school dormitories and all-​female educational institutions. Since the nineteenth century, the few exceptions in India to the expectation that a woman will marry (usually arranged) has been the possibility of 13 Indian media that references same-​sex female intimacy or homoeroticism include anthropologist Margaret Trawick’s Notes on Love in the Tamil Family (1990:34–​35 and 202–​3), Deepa Mehta’s film Fire (1996), and Sangam poetry (ca. 300 bce to 300 ce). 14 Indian heterosexual couples rarely express affection in public and until very recently one would not see kissing in a Bollywood film, while in films there is a lot of flirtation and implication that a couple is together, including through singing songs together (Vanita 2002).

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  39 being a nun, a teacher/​professor, or a spinster: tolerated social roles modeled on Western Christian missionaries that today are filled by Indian woman who are highly educated and often administrators of educational institutions.15 What is potentially more problematic than same-​sex intimacy are gender expression transgressions—​that is, a woman appearing masculine. The definition of feminine beauty that still weighs heavily on women in India is long hair and feminine dress. However, expressions of female masculinity do not inherently lead to an assumption of lesbianism in South Asia (a common conflation in the United States) because marriage, particularly arranged marriage and reproduction, is simply expected of all people. Furthermore, it is not expected that an arranged marriage be based on sexual desire between the partners, but more often on liaisons between families of the same caste. It was within such an S/​G/​ S milieu that I first entered the campus of an elite Indian women’s college in the mid-​1980s.

Case 1: Karnatak Music and a Closeted “Friendship” I was in my early twenties. I had been preparing for the opportunity to travel to India for two years, since I had enticed Jane with my tabla playing at a winter term concert in the college chapel. She was a former fellowship holder returned to the college as a staff member for an organization that sent students to Asia. I was already immersed in Indian music having studied tabla and mrdangam, had taken several ethnomusicology courses, and had played in the Javanese gamelan. My final year of college approached, and I applied. By that time, I was fully “out” (perhaps even perceived as the big dyke) on campus. I was active in the Gay Union, Women’s Center, and student government. So, the question of being closeted in my application was out of the question. Indeed, I believe I was the first person to apply for this fellowship that sounded (and looked and acted) out.16 So it is my understanding that there was some talk in the back room of the fellowship board meeting about the appropriateness and risk of sending an “out” student to India. But I prevailed, and so began my musical, cultural, and personal relationship with India. This fellowship provided me two years of language training and study of Karnatak drumming and vocal music in India before going to graduate school in ethnomusicology. What I did not realize was that it would also give me an opportunity for an intimate phenomenological perspective on 15 See Lillian Faderman (1999) for a common experience of accomplished women remaining single or partnering with another woman in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century America. 16 Besides my friend Jane, I know there were several other people who won this fellowship before 1985 who were, or now identify as, LGBTQ. But, to my knowledge, no one came out in their application.

40  Zoe C. Sherinian possible (and impossible) relationships between women, of which I had little understanding before I arrived. On one of my first nights at the women’s college in India, I went out with some of my new faculty friends to see a Bollywood film. As we sat in the dark theater, I was struck by the apparently “innocent” gesture of holding hands offered to me by one of my new female friends. I remember repeating to myself over and over, while my heart beat faster to the disco rhythms played on tabla in the Bollywood song and dance sequences, “This is not sexual. This is not sexual. This is a different cultural context and two women holding hands means something different (from a lesbian or sexual come-​on).” However, after a few more weeks at the college, I discovered that there were various forms of “friendship” occurring between the female students, between female faculty members, and even between students and faculty. There was one very masculine-​looking student (who also played lead guitar and sang for a rock/​ country band) who clearly had a crush on one of her female teachers. I do not believe it went beyond that, but the emotional closeness between them was palpable and in my state of closetedness and loneliness, I envied it.17 There were two female students with whom I worked on a project: one a Hindu, the other a Christian. They were inseparable and both declared in casual conversation that they did not want to marry (a man). I wrote in my diary that I cried for them secretly wishing they could have the opportunity to escape together. Little did I realize that two years later I would be in love and crying over another Indian woman with whom I wanted to escape. During my fellowship, I was involved with several musical activities inside and outside of the college including private lessons with Karnatak music teachers. Through one of these activities, I met a woman (I will call her F) who was taking Karnatak vocal lessons. Our friendship grew quite intense as we connected over mutual interests in music, politics (such as the AIDS crisis), and a general cosmopolitan awareness of the world. As the emotional intensity and close physical connection between us grew, I struggled with a desire to come out to her as a lesbian, but primarily as a means to verbally articulate my feelings of desire for her. Finally, I communicated this to her in a note. After receiving it, she came to my apartment, sat in the dark with me and cried with confusion. Her first response was to reject me entirely. Perhaps she had culturally understood our closeness as a “normal” possibility between two women, while I was labeling it something foreign—​as potentially lesbian. But, with more talk, sharing, and time we became even closer.



17

Both the teacher and student eventually married men and had children.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  41 F and I spent a great deal of time together. My favorite memory is picking her up at the train station early in the morning after she returned from a trip. I greeted her with a strand of fresh jasmine flowers that she placed delicately in her hair. I came close to her, smelled the flowers and felt deeply enchanted (Trawick 1990:34). I loved driving her home to her apartment on the back of my motorcycle. I sat in front wearing a male style white tunic (jiba), jeans, and sandals with my short-​cropped hair. She sat behind in a freshly starched cotton sari, arms around my waist and singing film songs in my ear. It felt a bit like a fantasy scene from a Bollywood movie. Our time together also included long discussions about interpersonal relationships, the dynamics of class, caste, religious and language groups, learning language, her desire to get married and have children, and both Karnatak and film music. At the end of the year we performed a recital of Karnatak music together. I have a photograph from this event in which I recognize in my eyes the deep love I had for her as my fingers nimbly stroked the head of my mrdangam to accompany her honey voice. When my two-​year fellowship came to an end, I had to leave India. Our separation was agonizing. We wrote letters constantly while there was some possibility that she might eventually come to America. However, already in her late twenties and with an advanced degree, she was under great pressure from her family to marry. I had experienced a version of this pressure while spending time with her family and others who often grilled me about when I would get married. We discussed her impending marriage a great deal before I left, and I endured her going to “bride viewings” to meet potential husbands. She did not reject these attempts to find a suitable match, nor would she ever risk it. Indeed, her primary concern was that she could find a man who would respect her independence and her desire to pursue a PhD. She ultimately found him. I thanked God I did not ruin her life, and even attended the wedding. Yet, I always wondered, if I had been an American man, would we have married and lived happily ever after? But, then, if I had been a man, particularly a foreigner, because of the public segregation of the sexes in India, we would have only known each other from a distance. I do not wish to erase the possible overlay of colonial residue in the ways that my friend F and I “read” each other. Thus, if I take a postcolonial or decolonizing perspective on these cultural encounters and on transference/​countertransference in psychoanalysis in general, I should consider McClintock’s argument that “Colonized peoples were figured as sexual deviants, while gender deviants were figured as racial deviants” (2013:182). If we complicate transference further to consider the post-​1960s reality that foreign white women in India are often read as sexually available, what leftover colonial and post-​colonial residue may have been in the mix in how we interpreted each other? Did I approach F with imperial eyes (Smith 1999:42)? Was she my “exotic other” with whom my unconscious or

42  Zoe C. Sherinian conscious sense of privilege gave me the permission to risk being involved? Or, as a foreigner, did I take advantage of the (ethnographic) privilege of being able to be in India (the field) temporarily and then leave?18 Did the segregation of the sexes in India provide me a same-​sex cultural fantasy: a sort of Indian women’s or women-​identified culture? In turn, did I model for her a future in America or cosmopolitan access? Indeed, others critiqued her for spending too much time with “a foreigner,” as if the only possible desire for the relationship could be one of taking advantage of potential material privileges that may provide. While this relationship crossed national/​ethnic lines, it did not necessitate crossing class lines (as we were both from solidly middle class, educated backgrounds) and by association did not cross upper-​caste lines if my identity, through music, was situated with the classical Brahmanic practices of Karnatak music. However, I did challenge gender constructions, as I presented myself publically as (female) masculine, keeping my hair short, wearing typical clothing of a higher-​class young man, riding my motorcycle and playing the mrdangam drum. This carried over to us presenting ourselves publicly as a (female) masculine/​feminine dyad (she as vocalist and me as drummer), which because of my gender transgressions may have raised some eyebrows leading to people questioning why she was spending so much time with a foreigner. Our tentative expressions of same-​sex affection, however, could be placed on a spectrum of acceptable indigenous behaviors between two pre-​married women. Ultimately, it was a cosmopolitan love that could never be fully sounded because she bound herself to the traditional rules of caste duty, which I did not challenge. It was the 1980s and there was too much to risk, too much to lose.

Case 2: Finding Common Values and Vocabulary with Radical Out-​Castes In 1993, I  finished my doctoral examinations, received two prestigious fellowships, and headed back to India for fourteen months to conduct fieldwork on the indigenization of Christian music. With a strong theoretical understanding of the relationship between music and S/​G/​S systems as well as time to reflect on the dynamics of my previous experience in India, I jumped into work at my field site: a Christian seminary in South India where a variety of indigenous styles and genres of Indian Christian music were produced. At this co-​ed seminary, men and women remained physically separate in formal and dormitory contexts, including worship and classes in the chapel and the choir. As a



18

Note that this friendship occurred before I was trained in the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  43 foreign “graduate student” who was interested in music, I sat on the women’s side of the chapel during services and music class. However, because of my foreign privilege and because my age was older than most of the Bachelor of Theology students and closer to most married graduate students, and perhaps because of my androgynous gender presentation, I easily crossed the sex divide to perform on musical instruments stored and performed on the men’s side of the chapel. At the time I observed no other female student cross this divide, likely for fear that her reputation would be tainted and thus threaten her future arranged marriage. However, I never asked permission to do so, nor did any authority ever question me. I simply assumed, because of the musical nature of my seminary-​approved study and my ability to play these instruments, I could engage with the male musicians.19 I also moved freely in the public areas of the boy’s dormitory and mess and in the women’s dormitory. I also invited members of both sexes to my cottage and met with my male field assistant and male informants there.20 Thus, I had both “honorary male privilege,” especially as a musician, as well as tolerated exemption from the rules of pre-​marriage sex segregation because I was perceived as a “foreign graduate student.” Soon after arriving, the subject of my dissertation narrowed from an interest in Karnatak Christian music to the use of local folk music as a means to the production and transmission of a Dalit theology. Dalit is a twentieth-​century, anti-​ caste term of self-​identification used by politically conscious people placed at the bottom of India’s hierarchical caste system who have rejected the oppressive designation “untouchable,” “outcaste,” or Harijan. Dalit theology is a form of liberation theology focused on freedom from caste oppression as well as class and gender (Sherinian 2014). Through my work with Dalits, particularly many from the small population of middle-​class teachers and pastors, I came to realize how one aspect of internalized untouchability practiced in urban contexts—​a lack of openness and pride in one’s identity—​operated much like being closeted about one’s homosexuality. Many educated Dalits living in urban areas avoid revealing their caste and consciously evade discussions about caste identity or situations that might lead to discrimination and threaten their middle-​class status.21 Thus, 19 I certainly displayed foreigner and perhaps feminist privilege and could have chosen to practice greater contextual gender sensitivity if the nature of my project had been to fully understand the female experience in this context. But, the focus of the study was the indigenization of various Christian styles of music. 20 I assume that if I had entered into a relationship with a male student (or perhaps an unmarried faculty member), I would have had to have been much more cautious about such public and private interactions on campus. Students were prohibited from having heterosexual relationships and most would likely have arranged marriages. Further, future priests were prohibited (by their Diocese) from getting married until they graduated from the Bachelor of Theology program. 21 It is very common upon meeting someone for the first time, on a train for example, to be questioned extensively about one’s native village, or where one’s family is from as well as one’s name as a means to determine someone’s caste.

44  Zoe C. Sherinian I felt an affinity with these “closeted” middle-​class professional Dalits in the constant negotiation of my sexuality, managing questions like “Why aren’t you married? When will you get married?” Besides music being a means to the expression of S/​G/​S ideology in the intersectional Indian context, in my study of Indian Christian music it has been necessary to add the element of musico-​theology. By theology in this Dalit Christian context, I mean a shared relationship with and understanding of God. In the seminary, this manifested as the embodied experience of sharing not only music but also food as a means to building relationships between people and by extension with God. This is expressed in the central tenet of the theology of Rev. James Theophilus Appavoo (1940–​2005), the subject of my book that evolved from this fieldwork. Appavoo wrote songs preaching that a Eucharistic lifestyle (that he called oru olai or one pot) of sharing food produced collectively everyday was a means to the liberation of the poor and outcaste (Sherinian 2014). Jacquie was a second-​year Dalit student at the seminary when I first met her in 1994. Her expressive abilities lie with drama and oration more than with music, and thus my early musical activities at the seminary did not provide an opportunity for us to meet. Yet Jacquie’s philosophy that “if we start with sharing, we never bother with which caste, which gender, which religion or class (the other belongs to)” brought us together. On New Year’s Day, 1994, Jacquie demonstrated her personal and Christian philosophy by reaching out to me, a “foreign student,” to share a celebratory piece of cake. I was so impressed with her kindness, wise intellect, and feminist spunk that I bought an orange Bengali cotton sari for her on my trip to Delhi later that month. As our friendship developed, we shared some important moments of emotional stress including experiencing male sexual harassment on a seminary train trip together, discovering in the process that we also shared similar feminist values and concern for women. Feminist theology is a core aspect of the seminary curriculum and social analysis programs in which Jacquie was steeped. However, the presence of the LGBTQ movement in India had not yet reached the social justice community at the seminary.22 I came out as a lesbian to Jacquie fairly soon after the seminary excursion. Her curiosity about it focused on wanting to understand better how, as a priest or warden, to counsel someone. In the Lutheran girl’s hostel in which she had previously been a warden, a girl involved in a same-​sex relationship had attempted suicide. The other girl had been taken out of the hostel because the relationship 22 Today there is an active LGBTQ movement throughout India and since 2012 there has been a Rainbow Pride March in this small city in India where the seminary is located. There is also an active program with transgendered or Aravani people in the Diocese in which Jacquie works. There is an extensive history of indigenous sexuality/​gender categories and terms, particularly for male-​born men who love men and transgendered, third gendered, or intersexed people in India.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  45 with “her friend” was deemed too intimate. This forced separation resulted in the girl left behind drinking poison because she was so distraught. As our friendship deepened Jacquie and I discussed such issues very openly, often over food. One hot summer night, when the electricity was cut, with only candle light Jacquie made me a simple meal of wheat dosai and tomato chutney. We sat on the roof of the women’s hostel sharing our meal and talking quietly. I felt a sense of total acceptance and non-​sexual affection like I had never before. Soon after, with a few other Dalit friends in the women’s hostel, we formed an oru olai (cooperative eating) subcommunity or breakfast club sharing whatever each of us had. I brought my milk packet for coffee and others brought leftovers from the night before to make a wonderful meal and to strengthen our friendships and commitments to communal and feminist practices. We also prayed and sang our teacher Rev. J. T. Appavoo’s songs such as ammāḍi kuṭṭi poṇṇē that articulate these Christian and feminist values. Ammāḍi kuṭṭi poṇṇē (Oh little girl) Oh little girl, you are always crying. Get up! Rise up! You are the freedom giving sindhu song. Tell who beat you up. Kill that arrogance. You have to become like Mother Mary (bold enough to be a virgin) That male dominance devil, that demon threaten and drive it away, Oh Mother.23 (Rev. J. Theophilus Appavoo)

It was within this intimate community of Dalit women that we refined the application of Appavoo’s theology of sharing food and of women’s and Dalit politics to everyday life. Perhaps I could call this community, this intersubjective space, or this love, “queer” for the transgressive politics that were nurtured within it and because I felt a great sense of home and acceptance for who I am, especially as it contributed to my transformation into a Dalit ally.24 Jacquie loved and spent time with a male student at the seminary whom she planned to marry after graduation. I respected their relationship, while my love for her deepened with every song, prayer, conversation, and meal we shared. I rode a bus for five hours to visit her several times over the three months she was on her internship on the Southern coast working to help organize women

23 Examples of Dalit women’s anger against acts of violence, such as rape, that they commonly face can be seen in my documentary film, Sakthi Vibrations (2019). 24 Our teacher Appavoo’s theological tenet of oru olai community could be seen as a transgressive utopian ideal (Sherinian 2016). Its practice is quite simple and practical if the people are committed to the cooperation necessary as well as the potential risks of retribution from upper caste and upper-​ class members, and men who might be threatened by its potential success and empowerment of the oppressed.

46  Zoe C. Sherinian fisher-​folk while living with three Catholic nuns. As I observed her work, one of my most interesting moments was walking through a 100% Catholic village wearing a light peach-​colored cheridaw and being mistaken for a nun, as nuns wear saris of the same color. In an odd twist on the Bhakti triangle between Lord Krishna, his female devotee/​lover and her friend, I even played a sort of suki (friend) delivering gifts to Jacquie (female Krishna) sent through her boyfriend (here a male devotee) (see Allen 1997). While on her internship, Jacquie and I wrote to each other expressions of sadness about our separation as well as ideas of activism and changing the world. I left India a few months later, but we continued our correspondence. We are the closest of sister-​friends to this day. Her brother named his daughter after me. Jacquie and her husband have a beautiful daughter to whom I am Aunty, and every time I visit India I stay in their home, spending time with their extended families. I facilitated her travel to the United States in 2015 to attend the first Global Conference on Defending Dalit Rights. Our friendship is a Queer-​Dalit relationship of great affection based on sharing, intellectual camaraderie, intersectional politics, and radical action.25 Besides the many discussions and interviews I conducted with our teacher Rev. Appavoo, my intellectual and theological conversations with Jacquie have had a significant impact on my ideas about music as Dalit theology. Furthermore, how Jacquie and her husband implemented Appavoo’s theology of oru olai with their congregations has served as the most successful example of its praxis that I have seen. While I came out to Jacquie early on in my dissertation fieldwork, I did not come out to Rev. Appavoo until almost ten years later. By that point I was in a long-​term relationship with my female partner. It was incredibly hard not to share the details of my personal life with the man about whom I was writing a book on liberation theology, a man who called me his daughter and with whom I  shared radical politics. As I  observed Appavoo’s own Dalit feminist politics through his actions and discourse, I came to trust that our relationship could contain an “indigenous,” perhaps “Dalit” space of acceptance and understanding of my identity. When I finally come out to him in the early 2000s, his transference-​based response was that, if being a lesbian was somehow a critique of the patriarchy, he was fine with it. I graciously accepted what understanding he could offer from his worldview. He eventually visited my partner and me in our home in America and came to care deeply for both her and my father who had visited Appavoo’s family in India.

25 The closest comparison in American history may be the social and political relationships or same-​sex partnerships between female anti-​slavery, peace, and suffrage activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See Lillian Faderman (1999).

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  47 In another example of transference, Appavoo defined me from his personal and worldview as an activist-​academic. Toward the end of my fieldwork he confided that to build trust with me it had been necessary for him to discern that I was not only an academic, but also an activist. He told me, I think real research should create some action. So, if I do some research, that should create some change in what we call the subjects of research. As you have been doing. You are doing that, because you always remind us about the women, . . . you know the women’s perspective. So, this should be research of a person who is committed to humanity in general. All my articles and everything are connected with that kind of thing. It’s not just research for the sake of getting a degree. (Interview with James Theophilus Appavoo, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, July 1, 1994, Sherinian 2005:8)

Appavoo’s construction of himself as an academic who created active social change through his research in turn transformed how I  understood myself, and my work, as an activist ethnomusicologist. This transformation has driven my work on liberation theology through music, the theory of social change through musical action that evolves from it (Sherinian 2015), and my interest in the alliance possible between queers and Dalits in India, especially through performance. I will continue to argue that there is a parallel between being Dalit in India and being Queer in other parts of the world, especially for middle-​class people. We both experience the deep secretive and shameful world of the closet. Indeed, there is also a growing Queer Dalit activist engagement in India led by Akhil Kang, 26 Dhiren Borisa, and Dhrubo Jyoti. In a speech at the 2015 Delhi Pride parade, these Queer Dalits stated, “For us, coming out of the closet is not just about sexuality but caste too . . . We want to remind everyone that a common oppressor subjugates us all—​that LGBTQ individuals can be lower caste too—​that queer and caste aren’t so isolated from each other.”27 While I will never know ontologically what it is to be Dalit, in my engagement with Indian music and culture for the last thirty years, I have known what it is to hide an important part of my identity and relationships with others about whom I care. It is both this experience and my larger commitment to social justice that binds me as an activist ally for the Dalit movement in South Asia. Reflecting on my experience, I believe that for young ethnomusicologists in the process of determining their research focus, it is important to honor one’s personal politics in order to find a topic that will lead to such an experience.

26

See Akhil Kang (2006).

27 See http://​orinam.net/​dalit-​queer-​pride-​at-​delhi-​queer-​pride-​2015/​.

48  Zoe C. Sherinian

Case 3: Female Relationships at a Catholic Administered Folk Art’s Center Since 2012, I have worked closely with two Catholic nuns to make a documentary film on the use of the parai frame drum of the Dalits as a means to build self-​esteem in young Dalit women at a folk arts center in India. Until the nuns at this center began using the drum in 1990, it was exclusively a male and highly masculine performance art. I have been studying the drum since 2008 and share with the Sisters the experience of learning the parai in a rural context from village male teachers. Our project involved not only making a documentary film, but also conducting a participatory video training and film production course with the female students at the center. These two Sisters, one about fifteen years older than the other with a vivacious personality and dominating presence, and the other somewhat quieter and shy, appeared to have a very close emotional relationship in my engagements with them over the four months I lived with them. From my cultural perspective, they engaged with each other like emotional-​life companions as well as work partners in their administration of this organization. If their relationship was at all sexual, I never observed signs that would indicate such. I did, however, observe the younger sister crying because the older was angry with her and their use of an intimate tone of voice in private conversations. I never came out to them, although they knew I was an unmarried professor, which in many ways is a parallel Indian female identity to which they could relate. Two senior students at the center (L and M) also appeared to have a close emotional and possibly physical relationship. However, L had also abused M with her anger and control. I observed them spending a lot of time together, talking and exchanging physical gestures and intimate flirtatious glances, as well as sleeping next to each other on the ground on mats (which many friends do). Through the center’s folk arts program, which engaged students in traditionally masculine activities like parai drumming and dance, stick fighting, taekwondo, and skill development like tailoring, L had become a very strong, confident woman.28 In fact, she emotionally described to us on film her transformative experiences related to anger issues. She had worked on ways to manage her anger that stemmed from being a poor Dalit female (the most oppressed intersectional identity in the society) and from losing her father at a young age. Everyone in the center appeared aware that L and M were very close friends and that L was abusing M verbally and physically. Indeed, there was a community meeting in which this abuse was discussed. Not only the administration but also the whole community 28 At the center they also teach all the girls to cook in a village environment, without a gas stove, and to knit—​traditionally feminine female tasks.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  49 reprimanded L as a form of constructive reconciliation. Indeed, L was asked to do a presentation about her anger and to suggest ways to address it. Within a year after I finished filming my documentary, L married a boy she knew from her village (likely a relative) and left full-​time work with the center. From my standpoint, this surprised me. From an Indian perspective, however, it was completely normal and expected, perhaps even encouraged by her family and the Sisters considering her relationship with M and its abusive dynamics at times. While at the center, I became friends with a very masculine “woman” student I will call N. From an American queer perspective, I felt she appeared butch or possibly intersexed.29 Her voice was quite low for a girl and her physical structure androgynous. The day she arrived, the other students asked as they saw her walk through the gate, “is that a boy or a girl?” I replied, “it is a girl,” while it was very clear to all of us that she stood out as “oddly” masculine for her lower class and caste identity, her choice of dress in sweat pants and polo style shirts, her assertive (but sweet) behavior, and by mid-​year, her martial arts performance (rarely performed by a female). It was hard for the other students to adjust to her at first, but her gregarious nature won them over and she eventually appeared to have a close friendship with at least one other girl at the center. She usually cut her hair short in a boy’s style and always wore pants and a boy’s shirt. Over the course of the first three months the nuns encouraged her to grow her hair longer. They also did not want her to wear her masculine street clothes to performances, as they wanted their audience to see that this was an all-​female program—​that women could perform these folk arts previously associated only with men. To negotiate this, the older Sister and I shopped for an androgynous kurta (long tunic style shirt) worn by many upper-​class women that N could use for these public occasions. She was also required to wear the same semi-​feminine style costumes that the others wore in performance.30 Yet she stood out with her short hair and her individual martial arts demonstrations using a sort of metal whip she twirled around her feet and lower body while jump-​skipping that no other student at the center performed. N and I talked a great deal (in broken English and Tamil, neither of which was her mother tongue). She shared with me that she had a close female friend at 29 There is a significant trans or third gendered (Hijra and Aravani) movement in India among male to female transsexual people and intersexed people considered religiously significant in Hinduism and Islam. See work by Jeff Roy (2018). However, there is not a cultural or religious movement of female to male transgendered/​transsexual people and the use of Hijra or Aravani would not be appropriate for a female to male transgendered person. There is no local terminology for such a person in South India. There is, however, a term for transgendered females to males in Hindi: Sadhin. Further, there are many support groups around the country that are available to and recognize the needs of female to male people or trans-​men in India. See https://​transguys.com/​ref/​India#sources, retrieved June 28, 2016. 30 In performance, the women of this center wear silk saris, but tie the bottom half around their legs so that they are able to perform athletic leg lifts and kicks.

50  Zoe C. Sherinian home who stayed with her family, sleeping over night at their house. They often spoke on the telephone while she was at the center. However, when I tried to discuss whether she wanted to “marry” this friend, the concept did not appear to register culturally or cognitively. However, she never expressed any desire to marry a man. I felt a distinct affinity with N, but wished we were fluent in the same language and cultural conceptions to share our experiences. Or, that I would be able to observe her in her home environment to see more closely how she understood her gender and sexuality.

Conclusion The two research topics described in the case studies here, Indian folk music as a medium of Dalit liberation theology and the use of the parai drum in the Dalit Civil Rights cultural movement, represent resistance to normative South Asian music/​dance research trajectories. Thus, they can be understood as transgressive or possibly “queer” fieldwork topics and processes. That is, I chose not to conduct research within the uncritical, typically non-​dialogical Indian classical milieu under a male or masculinized “guru,” as many of my South Asian ethnomusicology colleagues have chosen.31 I chose instead to work with outcastes/​Dalits who are similarly negotiating coming out of the caste-​closet with a prideful identity, who insisted on a more dialogical exchange of politics and values with me, who brought me into a highly progressive, politicized contexts in which I used participatory activist methods. I worked with Dalit cultural activists like Rev. Appavoo and Rev. Jacquie who write songs and preach about strong Dalit women and with radical Catholic nuns who have contributed to developing Dalit women through appropriating traditionally masculine cultural tools like the parai drum and martial arts in performance. Through descriptive analysis of these three case studies from my fieldwork and pre-​fieldwork experiences studying music in India, I  have tried to queer ethnomusicology’s fieldwork praxis. I have shown how playing music together facilitated cultural transference and countertransference in relation to caste, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and religion in my interpersonal relationships in India. Playing Karnatak music together with F at a women’s college in India where I had a fellowship early in my career represented a cosmopolitan, upper-​ class, and upper-​caste intimate encounter, the extent of which remained closeted to the rest of the community. Through this intimate friendship, marked especially 31 In such a classical music pedagogical system the student cannot easily have a dialogical relationship with the guru in which they ask questions. It would be seen as questioning the guru and his control of knowledge and determination of when the student was ready to learn something.

Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology  51 by our Karnatak music performance, my knowledge about Indian culture, music, and language increased vastly, as many of my ethnomusicology colleagues have experienced through marrying a local. However, I was ultimately thankful that our “relationship” did not “ruin” her life in the eyes of her family and the rest of the community; she was able to maintain her indigenous sex/​gender identities from their cultural perspective and pursue an arranged marriage. At the seminary in South India where I conducted fieldwork on the indigenization of Christian music, I found in Jacquie an intimate Indian friend like I had never imagined. Singing our teacher’s songs about Dalit and women’s liberation in a community of women while sharing a communal eating lifestyle transformed my ability to connect deeply and intimately with another woman in this Indian mode of non-​sexual female affection because I felt complete mutual acceptance of my identity. For Jacquie, our friendships raised her consciousness to the variety of possible indigenous Indian S/​G/​S manifestations and to how she could be an ally, as both a Dalit and a religious leader, to such individuals. While making a participatory documentary film, I shared with two Indian nuns a parallel asexual identity of spinster professor as well as women drummer. We worked as allies actively improving Dalit women’s lives through promotion among them of the traditionally male folk art of parai drumming and dance, thereby building girls’ self-​esteem and pride in Dalit cultural resources. We also lived together in a context that allowed a certain degree of freedom of “queer” expression of sexuality and gender behavior (including a kind a female masculinity in performance) with some of the girls who appeared to have proclivities in these directions. The mutual respect and (primarily unarticulated) understanding between us contributes, like the creation of familial ties, to our mutual goals of Dalit women’s liberation through the folk arts. Fieldwork in ethnomusicology and the negotiation of my queer subjectivity in India over the last thirty years has been a process of moving from a self-​imposed (and discipline-​imposed) closeting for fear of ostracism, to small acts of revelation where I risked rejection, to acceptance within a small local group of those with whom I shared the political values of feminism and socialism, to sharing a parallel identity of working as unmarried women for women’s and Dalit causes and finding common ground between Dalit and Queer activism. All of these stages/​experiences were facilitated by a shared passion for Indian music and dance. The results of these queer musical encounters were personal transformations of my Indian friends/​colleagues and myself, the development of lifelong cross-​cultural relationships that manifest as family, consciousness raising and understanding, as well as concrete impacts on the activist content and direction of my ethnomusicological research. This ethnomusicological queering is not just self-​reflexivity. Instead, it is a dialogically interpretive self-​ scrutiny through cultural transference and

52  Zoe C. Sherinian countertransference of our intersubjective fieldwork encounters with sexuality and gender constructions. Further, I  hope this interpretation can contribute to disrupting ethnomusicology’s lack of engagement in the twenty-​first century with sex/​gender/​sexuality studies in order to show how we can use “music [as a] key performative means for defining the terms for pleasure and desire” (Wong 2006:266). Indeed, I have tried to show how creating an intersubjective space in the field encounter where my S/​G/​S baggage was negotiated with my field subject’s indigenous cultural conceptions resulted in transformed interpersonal understandings and identities for all of us. Further, when that intersubjective space was aesthetic, or the transformative process happened in the context of playing or sharing music together, it was even more powerful. My intent and hope is that these cases can outline a method and model for queering ethnomusicology’s fieldwork praxis. I wonder, now that I have “sounded out” myself and my queer ethnomusicological field experiences, to what degree this will create a filter over the sound of my field recordings, over the reception of my writing and research conclusions. Does the perspective of gender and sexuality systems matter in fieldwork? I believe at least the act of playing music together with our research subjects gives ethnomusicologists a special, perhaps unique, experience and perspective on intimate human field encounters akin to sharing sexual expression—​queering musical relationships. Thus, I hope this chapter will inspire my colleagues to engage with this method of “sounding out” their musical encounters in the field, like making queer love.

4

Uncomfortable Positions Expertise and Vulnerability in Queer Postcolonial Fieldwork Nicol Hammond

Field Note My memory of one particular fieldwork encounter is saturated with blue. My interlocutor and I met in a coffee shop where every surface was painted the same thick, intense shade of blue as the jacaranda flowers printed on the curtains, on the china, and on the many souvenirs and ornaments scattered around the room. I was tired and cranky from jet lag and from the long drive into a city that tweaks all my Zoid-​generation discomfort with its reminders of Pretoria’s apartheid and Afrikaner nationalist history. I was also defensive and uncomfortable about my decision to study white Afrikaans popular music, which has required me to take seriously a musical genre that has little cultural capital and a people widely believed to be on the wrong side of post-​apartheid history. And so I was primed to turn my nose up at the claustrophobic tastelessness of the space, and to distance myself from the people who identified with it. The jacaranda trees weren’t yet in full bloom, but a scattering of blue blossoms in a few particularly sunny corners of the courtyard gave a hint of the riot of buzzing, light-​filtering masses that would soon explode over the city. Katherine Anne had chosen this café because it celebrated the flowers that she described as “the very best thing about Pretoria.” She hoped I might understand something about why she continued to live in Pretoria if I could experience the flowers as she does. “I’m lonely here,” she explained, “but the flowers make me feel better.” Katherine Anne’s loneliness had been a regular theme in our conversations, and was, she explained, the main reason why she was obsessed with Karen Zoid’s music. “When I try to talk to people about other things,” she mused, “I think I must be really weird. I run out of things that interest them. But when I find another Karen Zoid fan, we have that in common, and then we have all these other things too.” Agreeing, I said, “I’m really surprised that when I come out to Karen Zoid fans, so many of them come out to me.”

54  Nicol Hammond Katherine Anne blushed. “That’s uncanny,” she said, and then, really quietly, with an arm crossed protectively over her chest, and her eyes fixed on the jacaranda blue table cloth, Katherine Anne came out to me too.

Sex, Like Fieldwork In this chapter, I argue that doing ethnographic fieldwork is like having sex: relational and intimate, capable of being deeply pleasurable, deeply uncomfortable, and deeply damaging—​sometimes all at the same time. And like sex, fieldwork is implicated in a complex and slippery web of consent, power, pleasure, norms, intentions, responsibilities, vulnerabilities, and desire that need to be examined if we stand any chance of approaching an ethical practice. The question behind this assertion is this: what does my sexuality have to do with my work? And while the impetus behind this question is multivalent, three aspects are particularly important. The first: reading Suzanne Cusick’s “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music” (1994) and hoping to find something that will help me answer the question posed by the second: introducing myself as a queer scholar in the presence of a colleague who interjects, “But you don’t only study sex, right?” I’m prompted to reflect on whether I study sex at all, a question primed by the third: I am unable to answer an interlocutor who asks me, “What is it about (certain) music that makes it sound gay?” My fieldwork is very like sex (I feel compelled to look away when I  think I might write that fieldwork IS sex)1 inasmuch as it is a way I come to know other people intimately, vulnerably, and lovingly. In both sex and fieldwork, I leave an encounter feeling most profoundly satisfied and energized, when I feel like energy and intimacy and pleasure have been circulating: when my interlocutors and I are all invested in the encounter and all get something out of it. Both sex and fieldwork can be deeply uncomfortable to talk about, because both are embedded in value-​laden systems of norms. I am largely on the margins of these 1 Audre Lorde explains that “[t]‌he need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-​american (sic) tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-​ together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—​the abuse of feeling. When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences” (Lorde 2007 [1978]:58–​59). By invoking Lorde here, I invite the reader to consider the tension between the abusive and pornographic ways in which fieldwork is sometimes used as a surrogate for deep feelings, and the uncomfortable positions in which we place both ourselves and our interlocutors by explicitly naming the erotics inherent in fieldwork.

Uncomfortable Positions  55 norms because I am a lesbian, and because I returned to my home country to conduct fieldwork among a community who only partially fit the convention of an “Other” to whom the prefix “ethno” can be applied. By claiming my socio-​ sexual and disciplinary queerness, I make visible some of the ways that I am marginalized. These queernesses are assets because in coming to understand their value, I subject them to continual and careful evaluation; moreover, operating outside the symbolic order requires creativity, bravery, and vigilance. Both sex and fieldwork give me glimpses of my profound interrelatedness with other complex, fascinating human beings who remind me that I am “alive, not dead, and aware of the difference” (Cusick 1994:69). I illustrate my assertion that fieldwork is like sex by drawing from field encounters that took place between 2009 and 2013 as part of my research on Karen Zoid fan communities in South Africa. While conducting research for a coursework essay in 2008 and trying to maintain contact with a South African popular music scene that felt a long way from where I was attending graduate school in New York City, I stumbled across an online fan community for Afrikaans singer Karen Zoid. This community emerged on a Facebook fan page, as well as in the comment sections of linked YouTube videos and newspaper articles, where fans directed comments toward Karen Zoid herself, or asked questions of one another about specific performances, songs, or news reports. I noticed, however, that a number of private or semi-​public interactions between fans explicitly seeking other Karen Zoid fans were occurring in online Afrikaans chat rooms and forums, and I was curious about the ways in which fans were interacting with one another. Every interaction I observed happened between participants who explicitly identified themselves as women, a phenomenon that stood out to me because of its resemblance to online dating conventions in this community. I speak Afrikaans fluently, but as it is my second language, I am less confident in my writing ability, so I was sometimes stilted in online interactions. Nonetheless, I  waded into a few conversations, and was quickly invited to join private chat rooms, sometimes with just one other fan, and sometimes with several at once. While some of these conversations focused exclusively on Karen Zoid and her music, most were more far-​ranging, covering other music, live music events, other social events, other media, and fans’ daily lives. While relatively few included explicit discussions of participants’ sexuality, more than half included discussion of events or cultural artifacts that are coded as queer (including “The L Word,” afterellen.com, Pink Girl Fest, and Pride parades). Most of these conversations resulted in repeated interactions between participants who had met for the first time through these discussions, and later met in person or continued conversations through email, text messages, voice calls, or video calls. And while seeking community was the primary reason for these interactions, my

56  Nicol Hammond interlocutors frequently spoke about the numbers of dates and relationships that originated in these interactions. Katherine Anne is a pseudonym I use for all the Karen Zoid fans I interviewed whose identities need to be disguised. The name comes from the title of a 2007 Karen Zoid song in which Katherine Anne is described as Karen’s “biggest fan.” A disproportionate number of my interlocutors chose this name (referencing the song) as their preferred pseudonym, and while I initially attempted to steer each of them to a unique pseudonym, upon reflection I decided that the use of the same pseudonym did a better job disguising individual identities. I would also argue that the use of the single pseudonym facilitates the storytelling that I use to draw attention to the specificity of the experiences I recount, while also suggesting that the character thus created is a sort of archetype. For most of my interlocutors, discovering that they had experiences in common with other interlocutors was the primary value of participating in my research; thus, by creating a single character whose narrative can be followed by individual readers, I perform through my writing the experience of identification that is so central to my interlocutors’ experience of fandom. For many of my interlocutors, being able to identify themselves in the stories told by others in fan communities, or by Karen Zoid in her songs, helped them imagine livable lives for themselves in a social context saturated with stories that were frequently alienating to women living outside the symbolic order. Simultaneously, however, the single character reminds the reader that there is a uniqueness and specificity to the experiences described. I am not writing in universalist terms about an inherent or generalizable experience with a specific music, but about a contextually contingent and situationally embedded experience. By maintaining tension between specificity and generalizability in this narrative, I aim to highlight the inherent tension between generalizable data and specific data that is inherent in ethnography and queer scholarship. My attempt at storytelling as ethnography is thus at least partly motivated by my desire to create a dialogue between my interlocutors and my scholarly peers. The result moves between two voices reflecting the sometimes energizing, sometimes uncomfortable movement between the worlds of participant and observer that characterized this fieldwork experience for me. I have found no effective way of reconciling these positions, and so instead I choose what feels like the most honest option of attempting to bring both to light here, and allowing the discomforting contrasts to do some of the speaking with me. In the version of fieldwork methodology I learned as a student, it is the encounter with difference—​learning to live with different amenities, to prioritize and value different things, and even to move through the world in different ways—​that generates discomfort, and it is in the examination of that discomfort that we come to understand what we take for granted, how our culture is structured differently from the culture under examination, and how we might

Uncomfortable Positions  57 do things differently now that we have an alternative model. In my own fieldwork, however, this encounter with difference is not an obvious part of my experience because I am not entirely an outside observer, and I am not exactly a native ethnographer either. Although I, like my interlocutors, am a white South African who came of age during South Africa’s transitional decade between the end of apartheid and the early years of the new millennium, I was raised culturally English. I grew up speaking both English and Afrikaans, but my Afrikaans is heavily accented and readily identifiable as the Afrikaans of an English person. And while I  participated in some primarily Afrikaans social and cultural institutions, including the program where I took most of my music lessons and gained most of my early choral singing experience, my immediate family and most of my friends actively distanced themselves from Afrikaans culture, not least through music patronage, as a way of maintaining cultural capital during South Africa’s transition years. I understand some things about the social and cultural setting of my interlocutors that would be hard for an outside researcher to learn, but I do not move comfortably or invisibly through Afrikaner society. I thus do not have all the productive discomforts of an outsider, though I remain somewhat uncomfortable. Sometimes I use my discomfort (perhaps over something as seemingly inconsequential as an aesthetic preference) to confirm to myself that I, my culture, community, and social network are “doing it right” or living better lives. And then, if I am doing ethnography right, I am discomforted by the imperialism of my impulse toward normativity, or my tendency to believe that the choices I make and the way that I live are right for everyone. For example, my initial impulse in the fieldwork encounter described at the beginning of this essay was to dismiss the decor of the coffee shop that Katherine Anne chose for our meeting as “tasteless.” Under the influence of that impulse I was tempted to think of Katherine Anne as the architect of her own unhappiness, because she chose not to move to a place where she might be more easily able to come out and live openly as a lesbian. By not taking Katherine Anne’s aesthetic sensibility seriously, I gave myself permission not to take other more significant choices, including remaining in the closet, as seriously as I needed to. I had to suspend my aesthetic judgement in order to understand why the coffee shop decor was meaningful to Katherine Anne, and thus to understand more fully what her Karen Zoid fandom does for her. Sometimes perhaps it is my discomfort with the norms of my familiar spaces that drives me to the field in search of something different. And then, if I am doing cultural critique right, perhaps the comfort that I find in some other place prompts me to the discomfort of wondering whether I am laboring under the delusions of a confirmation bias. As a queer child, the sense that I did not quite fit in my home culture was one of the things that motivated my study of music

58  Nicol Hammond and my writing. In both practices, I glimpsed the creative world-​making that I needed to believe in a future for myself. And both of those things led me directly into my career as a music scholar. But the urgency I felt to get music “right” by performing high-​prestige music of the Western common-​practice tradition meant that my popular music listening practices were deeply entangled with my experience of being in the closet. Karen Zoid became a household name in South Africa during my senior year of high school, when her controversial “Afrikaners is Plesierig” (Afrikaners are pleasant/​happy) music video began to receive frequent airplay on television. I  initially paid little attention. I  had recently distanced myself from the music of local woman-​led rock band Henry Ate when a school friend pointed out a large group of lesbians among their fans. Though intrigued, I was anxious not to be identified as a lesbian myself, and gender-​role-​ defiant rock women like Karen Zoid and Henry Ate’s Karma-​Ann Swanepoel, who defied traditional gender roles. It was only once I had developed an even stronger discomfort with the imperialism of Western common-​practice music theory in South African music education during my first year in university that I was willing to talk openly about popular music and my own listening practices. I had been living in New York for several months and was preparing to come out as a lesbian to my family, when I began to pay more attention to Karen Zoid’s performance of transformative marginality. I was not yet willing to listen again to Henry Ate but was intrigued by the idea that New Afrikaner rock music like Karen’s might have something to say about the rehabilitation of African whiteness. But I had to let go of the comforting disciplinary bias against popular music to be able to ask these questions. And along with it I had to let go of the comforting belief that I could “get it right” through the solitary rehearsal of Western classical music—​a practice that helped to explain my strangeness to my peers and my family.

Uncomfortable Positions in the Field The uncomfortable positions assumed by ethnographers have been a part of ethnographic lore, if not necessarily ethnographic writing, since before ethnomusicology was constituted as a discipline. The uncomfortable positions in which we place the subjects of our ethnographies, however, have drawn our attention only much more recently. The reflexive turn in ethnography begins with the assertion that the apparent objectivity of the third-​person ethnographic account is an illusion, and requires the ethnographer to reflect on their position, conditioning, assumptions, and agendas to shed a more holistic light on the ethnographic process. Feminist ethnography (an important driving force behind the reflexive turn) and postcolonial critique draw attention to the ways that the

Uncomfortable Positions  59 default white heterosexual male subject position of the ethnographer limits the critical lens available to scholars of ethnography, and reproduces a powerful hierarchy that dampens the free exchange of ideas. And postcolonial ethnography asks us to pay careful attention to our reasons for ventriloquizing the Other, and to take seriously the position of the native ethnographer and domestic ethnography. But while we have been haunted by the idea that our ethnography might be doing harm by reinscribing imperialism, congealing traditions, and reinforcing problematic power structures, ethnography of queerness demands with urgency that we pay careful attention to the damage that our presence and our scholarship can inflict. Katherine Anne and I had interacted online numerous times before our first in-​person meeting in that blue café. We first met in a chat room with several other Karen Zoid fans before I had decided to study the fan community. She was kind when I misspelled a word in Afrikaans and unwittingly sparked a rapid stream of word play that moved too quickly for me to parse. She explained in a side chat, in English, what I had missed so that I could return to the conversation; and in subsequent conversations, she frequently checked in to help me stay in the loop. She was one of the first people with whom I discussed my ideas for my research project, and when I was having a hard time translating my IRB-​approved consent document into Afrikaans, she helped me to approach more closely the balance between informative and unintimidating that I was aiming for. But even though she had seen it multiple times and heard me read it over Skype before our interviews, Katherine Anne looked uncomfortable as we went over the consent form together in person. “Is everything all right?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, “I just feel a bit like I’m at the doctor or something.” Then she smiled and asked whether I can guess what line from a Karen Zoid song she had in her head. I sang a few bars: “I went down to the doctor /​So she could read my head. /​She didn’t give me answers she just asked me how I felt” (Zoid 2005). Katherine Anne’s grin confirmed my guess, and I found the song on my iPod. For the next hour, we shared a single pair of earbuds, both leaning over the table toward one another as we listened together to song fragments, pointing out and speculating about details, and getting excited when we found unexpected agreements in our interpretations. Katherine Anne asked me which of Karen’s songs I was most moved by, and I wavered, trying out the opening bars of a few songs before settling on “In Suid-​Afrika” (2012). Katherine Anne scrunched up her face and nodded her agreement. We put our heads down and moved closer to slacken the earbud cords that ran between us and listened intently. The song begins in Afrikaans with Karen’s personal identification as a South African, and builds progressively in pitch, volume, and sonic density as it moves through an assessment of white responses to the challenges and promises of the New South Africa. The song then returns to its opening motifs and lyrics, this time

60  Nicol Hammond establishing a direct connection between Karen’s identification with her nationality and her entwined sense of freedom and community. The second build-​up exceeds the first climax, and the song continues to build as it quotes a Setswana proverb about the struggles and resilience of women, and a struggle song from the 1956 women’s march to Pretoria’s Union Buildings. This march is celebrated in South Africa as a turning point in women’s anti-​apartheid activism, not least because it demonstrated women’s cross-​racial solidarity against segregationist legislation. Karen Zoid’s quotation of this song thus indexes community and collective action in a way that is supported by the dense sonic texture of the music, including backing and multi-​tracked voices that sound somewhat like a chorus. The song continues to build even past this collective intensity. Karen has moved from her familiar language (Afrikaans) to a language less familiar to her and her primary audiences (Setswana), as though this language of collective action might more nearly approach the excess meaning that gets lost in the illusion of signification implied by her mother tongue. Finally, Karen’s voice slips the grasp of language altogether, and she sings wordlessly, at first melodically at the extremes of her vocal range, and then with a cry that seems to slip over the line between song and shout, fragmenting her vocal tone, and ending with an unexpected burst of energy even after we might have expected her to run out of breath. The effect is orgasmic, and I found myself gasping in the silent moment after the sound ended as though I had been the one singing. I was elated. I looked up expecting to meet Katherine Anne’s gaze, and instead saw her wiping tears from her cheeks. She fiddled with the iPod, avoiding my eyes. “Are you all right?” I asked, knowing already that she was not. She sobbed and I turned off my audio recorder and hunted for a tissue. “In Suid-​Afrika” reminds Katherine Anne both of hope for community that she has found through her fandom, and of the challenges to that community that frequently make it seem impossible. She tells me that she and a woman we know in common had connected over this song. She had asked on a forum for a translation of the Setswana section of the song, and our mutual friend had provided one, along with the history of the quoted proverb and struggle song. She and Katherine Anne began a regular correspondence, and then fell in love and started dating. Katherine Anne’s girlfriend was an activist within a lesbian community organization, and the sole breadwinner in a household that includes her disabled grandmother and several younger siblings. Less than a year into their relationship, her community was rocked by the rape and murder of a lesbian activist from another nearby community, and then by a series of “corrective” rapes in other locations around the country. Corrective rape targets mainly Black women in South Africa and is intended to “cure” a woman who is, or is perceived to be, a lesbian. Katherine Anne’s girlfriend believed that she was likely to become a target due to her activism, and so went back into the closet to protect herself and

Uncomfortable Positions  61 her family. She and Katherine Anne don’t know whether they will see one another again. Katherine Anne’s girlfriend had initially been eager to participate in my research but withdrew along with the few other Black participants in the wake of these attacks. Katherine Anne feels indebted to her girlfriend for her emerging awareness of a transnational LGBTQ community that she believes is helping her recover from internalized homophobia. Katherine Anne, like many Afrikaans lesbians, strongly dislikes the word “lesbian,” or its Afrikaans equivalent “lesbeer.” Early in my Karen Zoid fan forum participation I chose to explicitly and actively identify as a lesbian, as I do in my offline life. The response I encountered was mainly embarrassed amusement, though frequently my self-​disclosure resulted in the abrupt termination of my online interactions. “Only dominees (pastors) with comb-​overs and wagging fingers use that word [lesbeer],” explained Katherine Anne, blushing furiously. In fact, I found that heterosexual Afrikaners frequently used the English word “lesbian” even when they were otherwise speaking Afrikaans, to describe women who they believed were sexually involved with other women, or to describe women who were perceived to be feminists, while Afrikaans women who identified themselves as homosexual generally preferred to call themselves “gay.” The term is not less likely to get a homophobic response, but it does carry what Katherine Anne describes as an aura of “less anger,” which I interpret as less of an explicit activist agenda. Katherine Anne notes that many Black lesbian activists in South Africa use the word lesbian precisely because it carries the weight of political activism, and because it has international currency. Identifying themselves as lesbians allows Black women in South Africa access to Euro/​American political activist community and generates visibility that some activists hope will counteract the invisibility produced by common media narratives of Black African women as victims.

Outsider/​Insider Ethnography While ethnographic fieldwork, particularly that enacted by an outside researcher, is often predicated on the assumption that the researcher does not already understand many of the codes of behavior that structure their interactions, it also takes for granted that the researcher will come to know these codes and will be able to effectively translate them into terms that make sense to the audiences of our ethnographies. Fieldwork, in other words, is predicated on the belief that we can come to know another. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman note, however, that relationality, in particular sexual intercourse, is entangled in a web of identification and incoherence, and by myths of sovereignty and connectedness that are undone by “the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious

62  Nicol Hammond and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity” (Berlant and Edelman 2013:vii–​viii). As a queer person, I have frequently found my sense of self at odds with others’ perceptions of me. I regularly out myself very early in interactions with new acquaintances, even when my sexuality seems to be irrelevant to the situation, because it reduces the often-​disorienting recalibration that an acquaintance is likely to undergo once they do know that I am queer. But the language that I use to come out carries meanings and connections that can be colored by local or individual histories, and that embed or leave out layers of meaning. Neville Hoad notes that the slipperiness of sexual terminology has historically been used to reinforce discourses of otherness and to justify imperialism in Africa (2007). Henriette Gunkel similarly explains that Euro/​American queer activism is sometimes at risk of generating backlash by labeling intimacies that may have been culturally sanctioned before a politically loaded word like “lesbian” is applied to them (2010). My decision to identify as a lesbian in my scholarship and in my fieldwork is embedded in my privileged position of being able to live and work in places where that label caries some cultural currency. And I choose to use the terms “lesbian” and “queer” when writing about my research with female music fans in South Africa because it offers a degree of visibility that my interlocutors have been excited about. Understanding their small social network as part of a larger community was cited by many as an unexpected benefit of participating in my research. Thus, my position as a scholar of queer theory, with an assumed expertise in the discourse of this theory, affords me privilege. But my positioning as an “expert” has also generated some discomfort for me both in the field and within this discipline because as an ethnographer, and a scholar of listening, I am frequently asking my interlocutors to allow me to be their student, even as they are asking me to lend my authority to their interpretations of what they are hearing. Similar to the way a first date might play out in a community where communication around sexual roles is not intentionally undertaken, each of us is thus asking the other to assume an active position in our interactions while maintaining a complicated silence around the role of a third actor in our encounter—​the music. The silence of music in texts that are supposedly about music is a discomfortingly familiar condition for music scholars, including myself. Like the strange silence about pleasure that adheres to so many conversations about sex, our silence about sound in so much music scholarship seems to point toward our concerted effort to make music meaningful within a socio-​economic and cultural system in which (re)productivity IS value. The pleasure that we receive from sex and the pleasure that we receive from listening seem only to be side effects of the marriages and children and scholarship that we produce. A non-​ productive or passive position is disparaged. Suzanne Cusick suggests that if music is sex, then the receptive subject position of the listener (on her back) is

Uncomfortable Positions  63 typically feminine, and that this may be an uncomfortable position for masculine listeners (in Cusick’s text, male students) or feminists invested in undoing gendered conventions (1994:74). Cusick generates a view of this receptive position that is still active, “ask[ing] . . . students to open themselves to the music they hear, to let music ‘do it’ to them, to become more intensely aware (physically, emotionally, intellectually) of what’s being done to them . . . to ask of the music, later, how it achieved that effect . . . rising to meet the offered caresses, and thus interacting in a way analogous to the way one can choose to accept ‘sexual’ caresses or not” (74). Cusick’s mode of listening aims to produce knowledge and presupposes a circulation of power—​an empowerment—​of both the one on top and the one on the bottom, blurring the lines between active and passive. Cusick labels this blurring (or “scrambling”) “lesbian” (73); she notes that the genders of the lovers that she describes are fixed only within a symbolic economy in which the masculine position is presumed active and the feminine position is presumed passive. And in a system in which masculine is active, feminine is passive, and lesbian is unproductive, both the feminine and the lesbian subject positions are devalued or disparaged. And this resistance to receptivity is by no means limited to the academy. The Karen Zoid fans I interacted with while doing this research frequently described Karen’s music as exceptional among other Afrikaans musics, and would compare it to “bad” music in which the lyrical or emotional content was perceived as simplistic, repetitive, or inactive (not socio-​politically motivating or engaging), or in which the music sounded overproduced or mechanical, and hence did not seem to carry the trace of the musician’s labor. My interlocutors pointed to music that sounded like it employed a synthesized backing track as “bad” or “commercial” music. In the South African context, this disavowal of synthesizers and backing tracks implies an intertwined gender and political positioning that needs some explanation. As happened in other places, bands and live music venues in South Africa became male-​dominated spaces that were frequently unsafe for women both physically and socially. Nonetheless, women’s voices remained important to the nationalist music market that was actively promoted by the apartheid-​era ruling National Party in South Africa. Women’s conventional role as the promoters and sustainers of tradition, particularly in ethnonationalist contexts, meant that women singing folk songs or folk-​like popular songs contributed to the image of a coherent and justified national body deserving of defense and needing to be perpetuated. But protecting women’s bodies from the contamination of masculine spaces and masculine technologies in socially and sexually conservative apartheid South Africa meant that women were typically presented as soloists with background or even invisible accompaniment. Thus, for both practical and ideological reasons, pre-​recorded backing track accompaniment was

64  Nicol Hammond frequently used by, and came to be associated with, socially conservative and politically complicit singers, and with women. Furthermore, the government-​ run South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) frequently provided significant financial and practical resources to conservative musicians, allowing some performers to release slick, lushly produced recordings, while resistant or non-​complicit musicians relied more heavily on a DIY aesthetic. Brendan Jury (1996) and Muff Andersson (1981) have written about the extent to which readily available politically conservative or apparently apolitical popular music sustained white complicity with South Africa’s apartheid government into the final decades of apartheid, and Karen Zoid made a name for herself on the South African music scene with a song that implicates this complicit music in the perpetuation of apartheid social and economic inequality into the post-​apartheid period. In “Afrikaners is Plesierig” (Zoid 2001), and in the later “Danville Diva” (2007 [2003]) and “Moerdenaar” (2010), Zoid implicates music and culture that encourages a receptive, unquestioning, or consumerist position in post-​ apartheid violence and segregation. She also employs sonic, literary, and performative codes of Afrikaans resistance or protest music to present herself as a coherent progressive Afrikaner musician, even as many of these codes rely on a scapegoating of the feminine (and of feminine consumerism) to distance their practitioners from complicit Afrikaner culture (Hammond 2014). Thus, when my interlocutors disavow “passive” music or “music that doesn’t mean anything,” they are disavowing complicity with apartheid and identifying with progressive, socially engaged Afrikaans culture. They are also disavowing a version of conventional femininity that is imagined as passive and consuming, and identifying with musicking as active and performative meaning-​making. Their answer to the question I posed (what is wrong with music intended for passive reception?) is that passive reception has helped to sustain a violently unequal and segregated status quo in South Africa.

Assuming the Position of Ethnomusicologist When I came to ethnomusicology as an undergraduate student, it was with an immense sense of relief at finding a discipline that took seriously music that sought to change the status quo. I had been deeply affected by the sudden change in repertoire of my school choir, when the end of apartheid brought about both racial and musical integration. I  was eager to learn more about the folk and popular songs that my formal music education declared “too simplistic” to be worthy of study, but through which I experienced transcendent moments of intimate communality and relationality in my choirs and in my social life. And ethnomusicology offered the tools and the space to do that. Ethnomusicology

Uncomfortable Positions  65 has traditionally had as its object of study musics that are not easily “done” using the tools of analysis developed for Western common-​practice music. Scores, for example, often need to be translated or produced through transcription before they can be analyzed, and the results are frequently frustratingly reductive or uninformative (Ellingson 1992; de Landa 2016; Herndon 1974; and Stanyek 2014). This translation of sound into visual form is frequently undertaken in the interests of accessibility. An audience literate in staff notation can get some sense of an unfamiliar music even when recordings are not readily available, while annotated transcriptions can highlight elements of a piece of music that might otherwise sound opaque to an unfamiliar listener, helping them hear into a recording. The use of staff notation for transcription, however, typically assumes an audience already literate in staff notation, and can therefore prove a barrier to our work for a variety of audiences, including in some cases our field site interlocutors. Staff notation is a language that requires privileged access to specialized education to be understood. Its inclusion in our writing may signal to some readers that we are not writing for them, and hence may limit the reach of our work. During my fieldwork with Karen Zoid fans, my requests for conversations about Karen’s music were frequently met with the disclaimer “oh, but I  don’t read music” from fans and even professional musicians who had already demonstrated their expertise in words or through performances of the music. My education in Western common-​practice music seemed to locate me in a position of authority even over the people who knew with greater intimacy and performed with greater competence the Afrikaans rock music about which I was asking. Like inexperienced lovers, each hoping the other will know what to do, my interlocutors and I would repeatedly defer to one another, on occasion reluctantly taking the lead, but only in the hopes of prompting the other to confidence, trailing off into uncertainty when an assertion felt too assured, and continually seeking reassurance from one another that we were hearing it “right.” I was trying not to put words into their mouths, while they were expecting, and in some cases asking for, a technical language that would validate their experiences of the music. Occasionally I  would manage to convince someone that their descriptions of what they were hearing really did matter to me. Sometimes we would find with delight that Zoid’s description of “the energy right there, where I don’t want it to stop, and it doesn’t” made sense in my language as a “deferred cadence,” and we could feel, even just for a moment, like we were understanding one another—​not speaking the same language, but each learning a little of the other’s language. And frequently I would explain that there is not a way to write “that difference in her voice” or “that change in the sound of her guitar” in staff notation. There is a great joy for me in watching my interlocutor realize that her words of description and explanation really do make sense, and that she really

66  Nicol Hammond does know something significant about the music under discussion. In those moments, our uncomfortable positioning as “expert” and “amateur” would shift, and we would become two people connecting over the music we both care about.

Field Note Katherine Anne and I are sitting in her little blue car outside the now closed blue coffee shop listening to “In Suid Afrika” over her car sound system. I am sure the sound is bleeding into the street, but in this moment, we can imagine that we are in a private space. I am grateful for the illusion as I note Katherine Anne’s tightly closed eyes, arm across her chest, and hand clamped tightly over her mouth. Her posture seems to externalize my own extreme discomfort over the vulnerability that I feel as we listen together. This feels too intimate. Our proximity feels dangerous. I wonder whether anyone in the coffee shop saw us earlier, when we found that moment in the song (at three minutes and thirty seconds), where Karen first seems to lose her words. We recognized it at the same time, saw it in one another’s eyes, and saw our experiences validated in their mirroring. In excitement, we reached for one another. Our hands touched and we both panicked. What if someone saw that intimacy? What if they harmed us? What if it changed our relationship in unwelcome ways? While physical contact, including sexual intimacy, is not uncommon between ethnographers and their interlocutors, this moment of contact between Katherine Anne and me seems to make concrete the unspoken eroticism of our interaction. As long as it remains unspoken and unacted upon, we can choose to deny its existence, and remain closeted, or scholarly, or innocent. It’s a paradox of my field site that a space that becomes meaningful, at least in part through the identification of a shared experience of sexual desire, is also a space in which no physical contact occurs. Women listen together, experiencing a virtual proximity that draws attention to their sexed and desiring bodies, while rarely—​or never—​coming into physical contact with one another. I do not know what to do with those listening experiences. As an observer, I can report on the intimacy and the community that forms between women listening together. I  can describe the ways that listening together substitutes for being together in a situation of risk. And I can translate the worlds that Karen Zoid’s songs make possible for women living outside of the symbolic order. But I do not know what to do with the uncomfortable experience of standing on the edges of that world, listening in. This liminality feels uncomfortably familiar.

5

Queer in the Field? What Happens When Neither “Queer” Nor “The Field” Is Clearly Defined? Gillian M. Rodger

For the last two decades, I have engaged in research that centers on male impersonation in the context of variety entertainment and popular theater of the United States. When I began this research, I was a graduate student who had come to the United States from Australia, expecting to return to Australia or the Pacific region to undertake ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation. My decision to focus on popular culture in nineteenth-​century America was accidental and came about largely due to research conducted for a class project. In the course of that work I came across the picture of a cross-​dressed woman whose appearance was so realistic she could be mistaken for a man. This image contradicted everything I thought I knew about the Victorian era and drove me to dig a bit more. As a result, I became interested in the performing specialty, known as male impersonation, in which women parodied men in their performances of comic song. In the nineteenth century, the majority of comedic roles on the popular stage reinforced the social hierarchy by targeting groups with less prestige. Comedy helped reassure an audience—​comprised primarily of native-​born, white, working-​class men—​that while they were far from the top of the social hierarchy, they were also not at the bottom. Much of the comedy presented on the variety stage relied on “low-​Othering” different social groups based on race and ethnicity, and sometimes even gender. Given that targets of humor in the acts presented by male impersonators were men, I was interested in how and why these apparently subversive women appealed to their audience. I was also secretly hoping that I had found a nineteenth-​century lesbian, or at least a feminist or non-​conforming woman who operated independently of men. This last hope proved to be naïve, despite the fact that my research did identify a small number of women whose primary emotional and sexual attachments were to women. This essay will contemplate both the ways I was informed by my training in ethnomusicology and the ways it shaped my approach to research in the past.

68  Gillian M. Rodger

Figure 5.1  Vest Tilley in military uniform

But I also want to consider the ways my research queered the expectations of the discipline, sought to discover expressions of homosexuality in past performance traditions, and ended up focusing on areas other than sexuality. My primary questions will be: what does it mean to do ethnographic work in the past? How do you gain access to a field site that is gone, or, at least, has been built over or forgotten by subsequent generations? Can we assume anything about same-​ sex love in the past, and the ways people engaged in such relationships viewed themselves? How narrowly or broadly should the idea of queer be defined in early periods? And how did my status as a lesbian researcher inform my understanding of the relationships and behavior I found in the past?

Queer in the Field?  69

What Is the Field When You Work in the Past? My career as an Americanist was a fortunate accident that occurred when research for a term paper grew to unexpected proportions, and, given my training in ethnomusicology rather than historical studies, I found myself approaching this research area as though I were conducting an ethnographic study. One of the first problems I encountered once I decided to further expand the topic into a doctoral project was that there was little existing scholarship on cross-​dressed traditions in the nineteenth century, and even less scholarship on the theatrical forms in which cross-​dressed women had been active. There was a small body of work on female impersonation in blackface minstrelsy and in British pantomime and burlesque (Senelick 1993; Senelick 2000), and also several works on English male impersonators active in British Music Hall in the nineteenth century (Bailey 1998; Bratton 1986). I decided my first task lay in locating and reading everything related to early vaudeville and also in determining, as far as possible, the names of women who had performed as male impersonators in that genre. I found the histories of vaudeville confusing. These works traced the emergence of the form from the mid-​1880s, when the prominent twentieth-​century manager B. F. Keith opened his first theater in Boston. Scholars also agreed that the manager Tony Pastor, who was active decades before Keith entered the scene, was also an important reformer.1 I found this inconsistency in the timeline impossible to reconcile; given that Pastor had been active from the late-​1850s and Keith did not open his first theater until the mid-​1880s, how could Pastor have been active in a form that apparently did not yet exist? Rather than trying to tackle this impossible task, I decided to concentrate on the period between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, a period about which little had been written. Had I  been conducting field research, I  would have needed to observe the performers on the stage and talk with them about their performances. I would also have needed to observe their audience and understand their acts in the context of the theatrical genre, as well as in relation to the broader society. First, I needed to determine how many women had performed as male impersonators in variety and vaudeville, and I got a lucky break when I found a source published in the mid-​twentieth century that allowed me access to the theatrical world of New York City. George Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage, which presents a narrative chronicle of performances at all of the New York theaters for over a

1 Probably the best history of vaudeville is Robert Snyder’s work Voice of the City, 2nd ed. (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). This book focuses narrowly on New York, but it manages to establish a timeline in which earlier forms such as variety and the contributions of early managers, particularly Tony Pastor, are recognized.

70  Gillian M. Rodger century, is a monumental multi-​volume work that is all but incomprehensible without a good working knowledge of the New York theatrical scene and the major stage personalities of the past. But the work is indexed, and this allowed me to find the names of a dozen or more women who had performed as male impersonators in American variety during the nineteenth century, even when I did not fully understand what I was reading. It also allowed me to roughly date those performances and locate them in specific theaters. Armed with this information, I decided to approximate the approach one would take in the field—​to go to the theaters and to observe as much about the working lives of these women as I could. I did this by reading long runs of the theatrical trade newspaper with the best variety coverage to gather whatever information I could about these women and their work lives and context. This approach, which is far from efficient, is one I now highly recommend, even as I understand that the time commitment puts such a project outside the reach of most graduate students. I was able to complete this research only by beginning while I was still completing coursework, and by reading microfilm in every spare moment I had. It took me approximately two years to gather the information needed to write a single chapter of my dissertation, but that process also allowed me to learn the names of the leading performers of this period, to observe the many different kinds of acts that appeared on the variety stage and the ways that these changed over time, and also to get a better sense of the world I was constructing through my research. Over time I learned I should treat every source as though it represented a person, or a particular worldview, and learned to determine which segment of society it represented.2 I realized that the people active in the theater did not share the values and expectation of the people in their audience, although they did understand audience concerns and sympathies. I began to think of the performers living in “theater world,” which was a freer place with fewer restrictions and taboos than the world their audience inhabited. This is not to say that the world of the theater had no rules. Theatrical professionals were bound to each other by obligations and kinship ties and were quick to warn each other about unscrupulous managers who absconded with the payroll, or about habitually drunk or unreliable performers. One of the primary rules of the theater was that off-​stage life should never impact what happened on the stage, but personal infractions that could cause a person to be shunned or ostracized in the wider world might be tolerated in the theatrical profession if they had no impact on staged performance. The case of the equestrienne Ella Zoyara shows the profession’s tolerance of fraud perpetrated against the audience. Zoyara was active from the late-​1850s 2 For an extended discussion of my ethnographic approach to historical research, see Rodger (2007:47–​66).

Queer in the Field?  71 until the 1860s and won acclaim for her acrobatic skills performed while balancing on the back of a galloping horse. By the early 1860s, newspaper reports about Zoyara had begun to raise questions, some claiming that Zoyara was not a woman at all. In April 1861, Zoyara appeared on the same bill at Niblo’s Garden in New York City as another equestrian, Omar Kingsley. Six months later Omar Kingsley eloped with the circus performer Sallie Stickney, and at the same time Ella Zoyara disappeared from the stage. These events caused confusion and commentary in columns dedicated to the circus, and newspapers eventually reported that Kingsley and Zoyara were the same person (Anon. 1861).3 Kingsley had been dressed as a girl when he was a child and apprenticed to the equestrian and circus manager S. Q. Stokes. Stokes understood that audiences expected boys and young men to perform acts of daring but were transfixed when a young girl performed the same act, so he chose to dress Kingsley as a girl. Cross-​dressed boys who performed as girls were not uncommon in the circus world, although Kingsley was somewhat unusual in prolonging his deception into adulthood (Tait 2005:68). As Kingsley matured, his deception was harder to maintain, and it is likely that he was beginning to perform as a man by the early 1860s. After his marriage to Sallie Stickney, Kingsley exploited the continuing questions of his gender, appearing in both male and female garb on the same bill, while acknowledging that his earlier masquerade had been a fraud. Kingsley found a creative way to continue his equestrian career while also being able to live the life of a mature man, marrying, and having a family. Given the close-​knit world of the circus, it is unlikely that circus managers had been unaware that he was male, especially as he entered his teens and underwent puberty, but they had no more interest in exposing the fact that Zoyara was a fraud than did Kingsley because of Zoyara’s popularity with audiences. Nor did they abandon Kingsley once it became impossible for him to maintain the fiction of Zoyara. As a man he was a less remarkable performer, but he was still an extremely skilled equestrian, and his notoriety due to the masquerade drew audiences for the first year or two after he was exposed (Anon. 1862). While victimless crimes such as Kingsley’s were tolerated by the profession and went without comment or were treated with amusement by the trade newspaper, the pages of the New York Clipper reveal that the acting profession viewed defrauding a fellow member of the profession as a more serious crime. The column that carried news and performance reviews from variety halls also carried warnings about managers who ran off with the proceeds, leaving performers unpaid and stranded, or about halls that illegally served alcohol in 3 This brief report of the marriage is written in a tone that shows the amusement of the author, and also reveals that this kind of deceit was not uncommon. It dwells on the inconvenience posed to the theatrical manager rather than the dishonesty of the fraud.

72  Gillian M. Rodger the auditorium, which exposed everyone there to the risk of a police raid. The column also ran occasional letters correcting claims made by other performers, and reports about arrests or trouble caused by performers were also noted so that managers could be warned about unreliable performers. Performers and managers worked cooperatively to improve the lives of performers who had fallen on hard times, and to benefit much loved backstage personnel or the community in general by staging benefit performances that donated the door receipts. Reading through long runs of the Clipper and other trade newspapers allowed me to see the complex kinship that existed in the theater world, as well as the way this world represented itself to its own members.

What about Queer? What about Feminist? Defining Terminology in the Past As I  began to better understand the ways in which the world of variety performers related to the world of the variety audience, I realized I needed to redefine how I  thought about the term “queer” radically. The Oxford English Dictionary defines queer in a number of ways. The term has been used as an adjective denoting something or someone with an odd, eccentric, or doubtful character since the sixteenth century. It was also used in criminal slang to denote someone untrustworthy, and to refer to counterfeit goods or money. Both of these usages carry the sense that the thing or person who bore the marker “queer” went against the norm. This was the most common usage in the nineteenth century, but queer was coming to imply “non-​standard” sexuality by the end of that century. While queer increasingly came to refer to homosexuals in the twentieth century, older meanings of the term hung on through the first third of the century. As the subculture became more visible, activists re-​appropriated what had begun as an insult, and by the late-​twentieth century this word also came to carry associations of resisting social norms and hegemonic power relations. During the nineteenth century, respectable middle-​and upper-​middle-​class Americans viewed everyone engaged in the theatrical profession as resisting social norms and falling outside polite society. This was true of the actors and actresses and opera singers that catered to the aesthetic needs and desires of an elite audience, but performers active in genres that catered to a lower-​class audience, and particularly female performers, were depicted as a threat to social order and morality because of their associations with “low” forms. The working-​class audience that patronized variety entertainment in the 1860s and 1870s was similarly marginalized. In middle-​class writing, working-​class culture was depicted as a pale and imperfect copy of higher-​class culture because it did not always conform to middle-​class standards, and the failure of working-​class populations

Queer in the Field?  73 to accrue wealth confirmed their inferiority. Variety performers understood this conflict, and there were moments in their acts designed to expose the hypocrisy of upper-​and middle-​class culture and to hold it to contempt. These moments can be viewed as queering the values of the social elite or the morally upright by using humor to valorize working-​class standards—​the older meanings of the word queer are certainly broad enough to accommodate this interpretation. Over time I also came to recognize that there was often a conflict between the ways I defined terms and the ways that the same terms were defined in the nineteenth century. Terms such as “lesbian” were meaningless to women whose lives I  was reconstructing from fragmentary evidence found in trade newspapers. When I discovered the term “lesbian,” it was in the National Police Gazette, a newspaper intended for a male audience. This was a necessary reminder that depictions of same-​sex affection between women has a long history in pornography, and that the theatrical world was constructed as the source of sexualized fantasy for men who read this and other lavishly illustrated weeklies.4 The term “feminist” was equally problematic. Some of the associations with the term were familiar to me because they had continued into the twentieth century—​the old maid, the spinster, and the ugly woman who cannot find a man were all stereotypes that I  had encountered growing up. Reading newspaper reporting and histories of both feminism and moral reform movements in the United States, I  came to understand that nineteenth-​century feminists were women who worked to make the world outside the middle-​class home safe for women, which often meant targeting institutions that provided leisure to working-​class men. Nineteenth-​century feminists were firmly associated with the temperance movement, and they sought to eliminate or contain prostitution and theaters that catered to male tastes. This did not endear these women to working-​class men, or to the men and women who worked in the bars and theaters most likely to be targeted by moral reform forces. Understanding these terminological differences forced me to consider the language I employed in my work, and to reconsider my views of what happened on the stage. I had considered the performances by women in variety as feminist 4 During the 1870s, the National Police Gazette had persistently attacked the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson, who was hugely popular with elite audiences in that period, referring to her as the “lyric lesbian” and the “Swedish Sappho,” in order to suggest that upper-​class audiences were so gullible that they found perverted foreign talent preferable to local performers. The use of the terms “lesbian” and “Sappho” suggest familiarity with works such as Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis, which is part of a tradition of literary pornography. Images of women engaged in sexual acts also circulated as part of men’s culture that was available to lower-​class men, and, as Tracy Davis notes, illustrated men’s newspapers such as the National Police Gazette helped strengthen the association between the theatrical world, actresses, and the erotic through regular columns, and lavish illustrations depicting actresses. While none of the images in this newspaper were explicit, they referenced a larger body of more explicit work that also circulated as part of men’s culture, and “the knowing reader of these illustrated weeklies sees more than appears to be represented” (Davis 1989:305).

74  Gillian M. Rodger

Figure 5.2  Anti-​feminist stereoview, ca. 1890s

because they challenged nineteenth-​century, middle-​class ideals for women, but I became convinced that the women on the stage would not have viewed their own acts in that way. As working-​class women, they were not bound by the restrictive middle-​class gender roles, and their presence on the stage meant that a portion of the men in their audience, and certainly moral reformers, saw them as being little different from prostitutes. This is why moral reformers sought to eliminate lower-​ class theaters and viewed the women who worked in them as posing a threat to the public. For this reason, I do not use the terms lesbian and feminist in my work, even when referring to strong, independent, relatively autonomous actresses who sought a domestic, off-​stage life in a partnership with another woman.

Queer in the Field?  75 Given the audience’s hostility to feminists, how were the acts of these actresses understood by their audience? This question made me think seriously about the ways that gender roles were constructed in the nineteenth century, and to begin to look for signs that working-​class gender roles were not the same as those that governed the middle-​and upper-​class. In doing this I looked for moments in performance—​particularly in song texts, as well as in reviews of performances that noted audience reaction—​in which women pleased or angered the men who formed the core of their audience, as along with the reaction of variety reviewers. Variety performers sometimes used cutting, satirical commentary on respectable society and its mores to appeal to portions of their audience, creating a moment in which the people in the theater could bond through their contempt for their social superiors. When I found “queer” moments in which expectations about gender and sexuality were challenged, I began to ask whose interests were served. Given the socially marginal nature of performers in variety and other popular theatrical forms, and their maintenance of separate sub-​cultural community standards, should all variety people be viewed as queer? Or just those who held respectable society in contempt? Or those who challenged respectable constructions of gender or sexuality? And how should we think about the audience, particularly those who did not seek upward mobility?

Female-​to-​Male Cross-​Dressing in U.S. Theater In order to understand male impersonation in American variety, I also needed to gain a broader understanding of how female-​to-​male cross-​dressing worked in theatrical genres as a whole. Female-​to-​male cross-​dressing was widespread in nineteenth-​century theater, although in most genres only a small number of actresses performed in male roles. Leading actresses in serious drama that appealed to the elite audiences sometimes appeared in male roles, particularly at benefit performances. The recipient of the benefit was featured in a lead role, and ambitious actresses who wanted to show their dramatic skills sometimes took male roles because these were the most active roles in drama. The two roles most commonly portrayed by women were Romeo, because he was a teen who had not fully matured, and Hamlet, because, in this period, he was viewed as emotionally and mentally fragile and thus represented a weak or inferior man. Charlotte Cushman, one of the leading American actresses in the nineteenth century, portrayed both of these characters (Mullenix 2000). Some actresses also took male roles that allowed them to engage in acts of daring. As with circus acts featuring female performers, watching women in equestrian dramas provided a thrill to the audience. In 1861, Adah Isaacs

76  Gillian M. Rodger Menken gained notoriety by performing the role of Mazeppa on the stage. Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa centered on a Cossack warrior who was punished for an affair by being stripped naked and strapped to the side of a horse that then galloped through the landscape, coming close to killing him. The staged adaptation of this poem had been performed by actors since the 1830s, and Menken initiated the tradition of women in this role, performing the equestrian scene dressed in a flesh-​colored body stocking that made her appear naked to the audience. By the late-​1860s and 1870s, this role had come to be associated with women, and a number of intrepid actresses who wanted to attract audience attention performed the role. Cross-​dressing in elite theater was not viewed as indecent, in part because so few women engaged in this practice. Charlotte Cushman could be admired for the strength of her performances because she was an oddity and did not pose a serious challenge to casting conventions in nineteenth-​century drama. Even then, reviewers expressed qualms about her acting in male roles and generally preferred her in female roles. On the other hand, Adah Isaacs Menken cultivated an image that relied on her notoriety and willingness to engage in outrageous behavior, and performing daring male roles such as Mazeppa added to that image. This scandalous behavior was only part of the exotic appeal cultivated by Menken, who claimed origins in New Orleans, which carried the association of miscegenation. Menken’s Jewish identity was also part of her appeal. These racialized identities placed Menken outside the expectations of polite society and her performance of shocking or daring roles did not threaten the status quo in any significant way as a result. When Menken moved to Europe, her affairs with literary figures including Alexandre Dumas and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne added to her notoriety and increased her attractiveness to a male audience. Menken enjoyed success as long as she could maintain an image of youth and vigor, but when she fell ill and could no longer perform in her early thirties, her audience moved on to new idols and she died in poverty at the age of thirty-​ three (Mankowitz 1982).5 Burlesque was the genre most associated with cross-​dressed roles, particularly in the late-​1860s. Lydia Thompson and her troupe of British Blondes toured the United States in 1868. Thompson brought a small company from England and hired additional performers in New York. In burlesque, women dominated the stage. The supporting ballet and chorus were composed of women. In addition to the female leads, burlesque casting conventions called for the leading male roles to be performed by cross-​dressed women and the role most likely to be 5 Much about Menken’s early life is uncertain, which has forced biographers to speculate, and they do not all come to the same conclusion. Wolf Mankowitz’s biography asserts that she had Creole heritage.

Queer in the Field?  77

Figure 5.3  Menken as Mazeppa

performed by a male actor was the “dame,” a broadly comic role depicting an ugly or old woman. Thompson’s troupe included one man who specialized in these roles. Lydia Thompson’s style of burlesque mocked middle-​class conventions and polite behavior, and it overturned the conventions of respectable theater. Though the plays they performed had scripts, the performers on the stage were free to interpolate their own comic quips, and they broke the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly, which was something respectable actresses rarely did in this period. The women in male roles were dressed in stylized male dress—​usually breeches or tights and tightly fitting jackets that emphasized their feminine

78  Gillian M. Rodger

Figure 5.4  Lydia Thompson

curves. They strode around the stage, smoking, spitting, swearing, and engaging in male behavior in a way that was shocking to portions of the audience.6 The scandal created by Thompson’s first tour increased the popularity of her troupe and helped her draw huge audiences during her first two tours to the 6 The American author William Deane Howells described burlesque in fascinated and horrified terms and was particularly affected by women in cross-​dressed roles. He described these women as being “creatures of a kind of alien sex,” and he described burlesque actresses as being “a shocking thing to look at . . . with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.” Sections of Howell’s essay “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1869, 635–​44 are quoted in Allen (1991:132–​37).

Queer in the Field?  79 United States. In the long term, however, burlesque lost status and had become a disreputable form that sought to cater to low-​class male tastes by the end of the nineteenth century. As burlesque underwent this change, especially during the 1880s and 1890s, the costumes worn by women in male roles became less and less realistically male and placed greater emphasis on the bodies of the actresses on the stage. Actresses, even those in male roles, began to tighten their corsets to emphasize their waists, and love scenes between women in male roles and those in female roles took on a more prurient quality. During the 1880s, touring troupes of female performers, many of whom began their careers in variety entertainment, began to perform a hybrid entertainment

Figure 5.5  Agnes Evans in a male role, 1880s

80  Gillian M. Rodger known as female minstrelsy that drew on burlesque, blackface minstrelsy, and variety. This form was even more associated with male audiences, and in the early 1900s, as the older style of literary burlesque performed by Thompson was absorbed into early musical comedy and operetta, female minstrelsy came to be referred to as burlesque. Where musical comedy and operetta were designed to appeal to middle-​class audiences and incorporated risqué moments with great care, burlesque reveled in impropriety and became more focused on female bodies in increasing states of undress. All of the roles in burlesque, even those in which women portrayed men, were dedicated to meeting the desires of men by shoring up hegemonic gender construction in which women’s primary role was to please and serve men. This was one point on which working-​and higher-​class men agreed, and it was especially true in the last decades of the nineteenth century as women became more active in public life. The feminist movement regained momentum in the 1880s, and middle-​class women also played a role in moral reform movements, including Temperance Crusades and the Settlement House movement. The last decades of the century saw businesses vying for female customers, and theater matinee performances and department stores with large display windows tempted middle-​class women to venture out into city streets during daylight hours. At the same time, businesses that catered exclusively to men, and particularly those offering entertainment such as burlesque, were increasingly pushed into entertainment districts that were viewed as disreputable, and respectable theaters staged entertainment that was seen as suitable for a mixed audience of men and women. The depiction of women in the most traditional of terms provided some consolation for men who did not view these changes as positive and who resented the marginalization of institutions that catered to their tastes.

Male Impersonation in Variety Male impersonation was distinct from the cross-​dressing that occurred in forms such as burlesque in that the costumes worn by performers obscured rather than emphasized their feminine curves. Male impersonators were often among the highest-​paid variety performers even though their acts relied on making fun of men, but they comprised only a tiny proportion of the women active in variety. The English music hall performer Annie Hindle introduced male impersonation to the United States in 1868, and the novelty of her act, as well as her polished performing skills, brought her immediate success. This specialty allowed experienced performers to remain on the stage as they aged and became less able to perform characters whose appeal lay in appearing pretty and youthful. By the early 1870s, a small number of mature female performers had taken on the

Queer in the Field?  81 specialty, including Ella Wesner and Augusta Lamoureaux, both of whom had worked as ballet dancers before becoming male impersonators. Male impersonators active in the 1870s depicted a broad range of male characters. They depicted young men who were inexperienced and naïve and demonstrated their lack of experience with women, allowing the men in their audience to feel superior to them, while also instructing them in the appropriate ways to court young women. They also depicted older men who addressed their audience as equals, advocating for class cohesion and working-​class values such as taking care of the broader community and sharing scarce resources. The character that was most popular with audiences, however, was a higher-​class man

Figure 5.6  Ella Wesner, 1872

82  Gillian M. Rodger known as the “swell.” Songs featuring this character centered on fine fashion, extravagant leisure, and drinking, and it is tempting to view these songs as merely providing escapist fantasies. They likely did fulfill this function in part, but when songs depicting young men of leisure are considered in the broader context of the full repertoires of male impersonators, and also within the performance context of variety, they take on more complex meanings (Rodger 2010:98–​146; Powers 1991).7 Songs and performances in variety could be interpreted in multiple ways because they needed to appeal to an audience that did not hold a single, unified worldview. Variety halls were commercial spaces open to all people regardless of background. While men may have visited variety halls to be with friends, halls were large enough such that multiple groups could gather. The performers on the stage needed to be able to read the mood of the hall and cater to the points of view represented in the audience. For example, a song that extolled the virtues of alcohol and fine fashion could be viewed as a guide to fine living. But if the male impersonator suggested that the central character could not hold his liquor through stage business, he could be seen as failing to meet the standards for working-​class manhood in which men were expected to drink without showing signs of inebriation. If the performer stressed the fine taste of the upper-​class man by emphasizing the fashion he wore, then men in the audience could hold him to contempt for being too obsessed with feminine pursuits and being little different to a woman in a suit—​indeed, as depicted by male impersonators, he was, quite literally, a woman in a suit. Through interpolated commentary, the male impersonator could reveal that the fancy swell was a fake, a man pretending to be of higher class than he actually was, thus criticizing men who sought upward mobility, even as she warned men who aspired to climb the social ladder how not to get caught. Male impersonators faced the daunting task of reading the audience’s sympathies and emphasizing one or more readings of songs through performance. In many ways, male impersonators were little different from male comic performers active on the variety stage. They performed in a similar manner, delivering songs in heightened speech in an alto or mezzo-​soprano range, and interpolating pun-​ laden comic commentary into songs to reinforce or complicate stage business for additional comic effect. Reviews of the first generation of performers show that part of their appeal lay in the realism with which they depicted male characters, and reviewers often noted that they were indistinguishable from men. But they were billed as women, and the audience confusion about their gender added to the sense that they were performing a kind of magic in their act. 7 Powers (1991) also examines working-​class culture, and particularly leisure rituals and their importance to working-​class masculinity.

Queer in the Field?  83 Male impersonators were not viewed as threatening by their audience, and this was due to the fact that, like Charlotte Cushman and leading actresses who cross-​dressed, they were oddities. Male impersonators were exceptional women who were accepted within the broader profession because of their popularity with audiences, and because they generally did not challenge the hierarchy in the world of variety and entertainment. Most of these women were married, and most of them worked with the guidance and patronage of male performers or managers who promoted their careers because their success benefited the manager and the profession at large. While male impersonators parodied men in their acts, the parody and critique presented in their songs reinforced working-​class manhood and values. One of the ways these women appealed to their audience was by directly attacking men of a higher class, suggesting they were hypocrites, effeminate, and showing the ways in which they failed to meet working-​class standards of manhood (Rodger 2010:134–​35). At the same time, since class mobility was not only possible but also desirable to portions of the American population, male impersonators, and all male comedians whose acts relied on parodying higher-​class men, needed to find ways to mute the critique in their songs if they were met with a hostile reception. This was also true for performers whose acts relied on ethnic stereotypes. The improvisatory nature of songs, and particularly the interpolated comedy, allowed performers to shape songs in performance in a way that emphasized some readings of the content over others. In cases when confronting a potentially hostile audience, male impersonators held an important advantage over their male colleagues who performed the same repertoire; male impersonators performed a kind of magic on the stage, appearing to do the impossible through their realistically male performance. The men in the audience could always engage in detective work, looking for signs to detect the woman inside the suit and finding a sense of superiority in being able to see through the disguise.

Modifying Expectations and Clinging to Hope This understanding of male impersonation and other theatrical cross-​dressing came to me slowly through years of reading theatrical reporting and reviews in both the trade newspapers and local press, as well as through listening to recordings of performers active in the early twentieth century. Much of my analysis of the performances by male impersonation relies on fragmentary evidence in reviews that resonated with views expressed in popular, independent newspapers that were cheap and catered to working-​class men. This process took a considerable amount of time, and it resulted in disappointment. When I began my research, I had hoped to discover my feminist lesbian forebears who forged a

84  Gillian M. Rodger path for me almost a century before I was born, but I had to let go of my needs for such performers through the research process. I did discover a number of male impersonators whose primary emotional and likely sexual relationships were with women, but they lived at a time in which they had few rights, and they lived a tenuous and uncertain life. I had to accept that their worldview and sympathies were likely antithetical to mine. This did not diminish my admiration for these people. The most important thing I learned from male impersonators, and from variety performers in general, was that the power relations that dominated their lives were based in class rather than sexuality. At the same time, I began to see hints that women in variety found ways to support each other and to work cooperatively so that they could travel and work with a greater degree of safety without having to seek the patronage or protection of men. These fragmentary details suggest that women in variety formed a support network for each other, although proving that these women cooperated with each other is all but impossible given the lack of firm evidence. It took more than fifteen years to accumulate enough data to begin to support this view, and I have only recently begun to explore these cooperative relationships in my writing, focusing on the biography and career of Annie Hindle. Hindle was briefly married to a male variety performer who was an abusive and violent man, and this appears to have made her reluctant to trust men to guide or shape her career. She changed agents frequently during the 1870s, moving to a new agency whenever she felt her interests were not being given high enough priority. During the 1870–​1871 theatrical season, Hindle frequently traveled with a young serio-​comic singer, Blanche Du Vere.8 The two women were represented by the same agent, who may have booked them together, but Hindle and Du Vere also had an intimate relationship and requested bookings together; typically married couples performed together as much as possible, even when both partners performed solo acts. Hindle and Du Vere were married in Washington, D.C., in 1870, with Hindle dressed in her stage costume and giving her name as Charles.9 It is also likely that Hindle provided the songs that allowed Ella Wesner to launch her career as a male impersonator. For much of her first season in variety, Wesner sang songs that had been part of the repertoire of Hindle’s ex-​husband, Charles Vivian, including a number of songs that Vivian claimed to have written himself. It is unlikely that Wesner learned these

8 Blanche Du Vere’s name is spelled inconsistently in the Clipper, and she sometimes appears as Blanche De Vere. Her agent consistently spelled her name Du Vere, which is why I have adhered to this less common spelling. 9 This marriage lasted from November 23, 1870 until January or perhaps February 1871, when Blanche Du Vere left Hindle. Du Vere married the variety manager James Porter in August 1871 and launched her career as a male impersonator, using the name Blanche Selwyn, and Porter represented her as an agent until that marriage dissolved some time in 1872 or early 1873.

Queer in the Field?  85 by watching Vivian perform, because he had not appeared on the eastern side of the country since 1868, and he and Wesner never appeared on the same bill. In addition, Vivian’s songs did not appear in print until the early 1870s, when a San Francisco publisher printed them (Rodger 2010:115). It seems more likely that Hindle had copies of Vivian’s repertoire in her possession, and being unwilling to perform songs associated with her former husband, she passed them onto Ella Wesner when they appeared on the same bill in 1869, the year before Wesner launched her career as a male impersonator. Later, in 1871, Ella Wesner was forced to withdraw from Tony Pastor’s summer tour because she had a long booking in California, and Annie Hindle took her place in the troupe, likely on Wesner’s recommendation. During her career Hindle can be seen operating independently whenever possible. In the mid-​1870s, she briefly managed a variety hall in Ohio reputed to be owned by a woman. In the mid-​1880s Hindle was leading her own touring troupe. In 1886, Hindle caused a scandal by marrying her dresser, Annie Ryan, after she and her troupe had performed in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As was the case with Ella Zoyara, members of Annie Hindle’s variety troupe expressed shock, but the trade newspapers revealed that the troupe continued its tour without interruption.10 In 1892, after the death of her wife, Annie Hindle engaged the female agent Bijou L. Price. Bijou Price had performed in variety during the 1870s, even working briefly as a male impersonator, but she largely disappeared from the theatrical record during the 1880s. Price probably continued to perform in small halls and may have moved into female minstrelsy. By the early 1890s she had branched out into a range of business interests, including opening her own theatrical agency. Price did not try to compete with male agents who booked acts for vaudeville, but rather developed a specialty in supplying female performers for female minstrelsy, a precursor to modern burlesque that emerged in the early twentieth century, and for small, low-​class variety halls. An article in the Brooklyn Eagle noted that she had been managing a low-​class hall at Coney Island, and was arrested for running a “disorderly house,” a euphemism for a brothel, after the police raided the theater (Anon. 1894). This arrest did not put Price out of business, for she continued to run variety halls and bars in New Jersey, opened a theatrical hotel, and assembled choruses of girls for risqué performance (Anon. 1893; Anon. 1897). By the mid-​1890s, Price had attracted the attention of reporters at the Police Gazette, a popular newspaper that catered to male readers, and these reporters 10 A long article in the Grand Rapids Telegram-​Herald (Monday June 7, 1886:4) quotes one female member of Hindle’s troupe, who expresses shock over the marriage. The troupe, however, continued to barnstorm through the Midwest. See, for example, Anon. (1886).

86  Gillian M. Rodger frequently included snippets of gossip about her in their pages. The gossip centered on Price and another woman Annie Hughes, who was referred to as her sister-​in-​law. The pair performed together as the “Bell Sisters” with Price dressed in male clothing, while Hughes performed dressed as a woman. The Police Gazette printed a number of lithographs of the pair, depicting them in their home, with Price dressed in male garb, as though they were a married couple (Anon. 1899). Sometimes gossip about Price and Hughes was delivered with a knowing wink, suggesting that the readers could fill in the missing information about the relationship between these women. The relationship between Bijou Price and Annie Hindle is even more suggestive of a network of female performers that is only barely hinted at in the pages of the theatrical trade newspapers. Indeed, the tongue-​in-​cheek tone of reporting in irreverent scandal sheets like the Police Gazette are more useful for understanding that there was something “irregular” about Price and Hindle, and even Ella Wesner, who was also occasionally targeted by this newspaper and depicted as a human oddity for her ability to realistically portray men. The Police Gazette did not explicitly comment on the relationships between American actresses, reserving accusations of same-​sex affection for foreign performers who were the darlings of elite audiences. During the 1870s, the newspaper had persistently targeted the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson—​as mentioned earlier in this chapter—​referring to her as the “lyric lesbian” and the “Swedish Sappho,” thus suggesting that elite audiences were so gullible that they found perverted foreign talent preferable to local performers. When Annie Hindle married her female dresser in 1886, the Police Gazette declared that she was actually a man and expressed outrage about her defrauding of her audience. The Police Gazette apparently considered Hindle a working-​class American and viewed her marriage as a betrayal of working-​class values. Hindle’s marriage could be seen as expressing a desire for male privilege and being similar in manner to upper-​class feminists who sought to usurp male privilege by acquiring the vote. Despite their cozy domestic arrangements, Price and Hughes seem to have escaped this kind of censure by explaining their relationship in familial terms; they were always referred to as being “sisters in law” although the tone of Police Gazette reporting suggests otherwise.

The Role of Queer Researchers What emerges through the discussion in prior sections is that my own identity as a lesbian was central in driving my research and in informing the questions I pursued. At the same time, I constantly needed to put aside my own expectations of the ways lesbians behaved and thought about themselves. As someone

Queer in the Field?  87 who had grown up in a world hostile to same-​sex relationships and who had known older gays and lesbians who had experienced even more hostility than I had, I knew some of the ways in which homosexual populations in the past had learned to hide in plain sight. I had grown up hearing phrases like “perennial bachelor” or “career woman” or “spinster” with reference to members of my own family whom I came to understand had been homosexual as I matured. These were people who were loved and accepted by the family, but they did not share details of their private lives, hiding the most intimate parts of themselves from polite society in order not to bring shame on themselves or the extended family. I used my connection to these older modes of thinking to inform my work in the nineteenth century. As much as I wanted Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner to share my worldview and sympathies, I knew that my identity was informed by feminist-​lesbianism and the kind of leftist politics cultivated by young, well-​ educated people raised in bourgeois households in the late twentieth century, and that this identity would be incomprehensible to them. Just as I would have had to put my identity aside in order to conduct fieldwork in another culture, I also needed to learn to put my needs and expectations of the past aside and learn to describe this past in its own terms. My ability to do this was aided by the fact that I was not working in a past to which I had any direct connection. I was born and raised in Australia, I had no emotional connection to nineteenth-​ century America when I began this work, and I had only a superficial connection to the United States, having lived in the country for two years. There was much about the country I did not yet understand, and I was drawn to the past because I saw it as a way of better understanding the United States in the present. In many ways, my own sexuality was just one of a number of factors that informed my work. I  drew on both family knowledge and direct experience of British music hall performance, which underwent a revival during the 1970s. I learned about working-​class experience by listening to my mother talk about growing up in a working-​class family during the depression, and my understanding of middle-​class moral reform efforts was informed by the logic that prevailed in my father’s family that was securely middle-​class and actively engaged in service to a Protestant denomination. My own status as the queer, non-​ conforming female of the family drove me to look for my forebears in the past, but all of those different parts of my own personal history and identity were tempered by my academic training in ethnomusicology and anthropology, and by my fundamental curiosity about the new culture in which I found myself. In retrospect, this process can seem simple and unproblematic, particularly because I succeeded in my endeavors, but I retain clear memories of the desperation I felt as I read through theatrical trade newspapers, column inch by column inch, hour after hour, day after day, not seeing the slightest glimpse of the performers in whom I was interested. Despite my fears, I could not give

Years Active

1835–​1875

1870–​1880

1879–​1904

1864–​1904

1890s?

1867–​1875

1850s–​1909

1840s–​1867

1860–​1885?

1875, 1891–​1900?

Name

Charlotte Cushman (1816–​1876)

Blanche Du Vere/​Selwyn (d. 1880)

Agnes Evans

Annie Hindle (1850?–​190?)

Annie Hughes

Augusta Lamoureaux (d. 1875)

Benjamin Franklin Keith (1846–​1914)

Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–​1868)

Christine Nilsson (1843–​1921)

Bijou L. Price

Table 5.1  Cast of Characters

American

Swedish

American

American

American

American

English/​ American

American

American

American

Nationality

Performed as a serio-​comic & male impersonator in 1875, became a theatrical agent in 1891, represented Annie Hindle in the early 1890s

Opera singer who performed in Europe and the United States

Danced as a child at the French Opera House, New Orleans. Moved into drama 1857

Worked in circus and museums, opened his own theater in Boston in 1883, moved into vaudeville management and became the dominant manager in this form by the early 20th century

From a New Orleans family of dancers, debuted as a dancer in variety 1867, debuted as a male impersonator 1871

Life and business partner with Bijou L. Price. Performed as a serio-​ comic in variety

Began career in British Music hall in 1864, moved to the United States in 1868, active in variety until 1904. Birth and death dates unknown

Performed in burlesque, musical comedy, operetta, and variety entertainment. Birth and death dates unknown

Performed as a serio-​comic in variety 1870–​71, debuted as a male impersonator 1872 under the name Blanche Selwyn, and performed until her death in 1880

Dramatic actress

Notes

1846–​1908

1840s–​1872

1830s–​1888

1853–​1899

1867–​1920

1864–​1880

1850–​1908

1847–​1879

Tony Pastor (1837–​1908)

Sallie Stickney (1835?–​1886)

Spencer Q. Stokes (1819–​1888)

Lydia Thompson (1838–​1908)

Vesta Tilley (1864–​1952)

Charles Vivian (1842–​1880)

Ella Wesner (1841–​1917)

Ella Zoyara/​Omar Kingsley (1840?–​1879)

American

American

English/​ American

English

English

American

American

American

Active as a ballet dancer, 1850–​1869; active in drama, 1869–​1870; debuted as a male impersonator in 1871. The most successful and influential American male impersonator Trained by Spencer Q. Stokes as a child, Kingsley was dressed as a girl and performed as an equestrienne into his early 20s. After repeated scandals related to his gender, he assumed his real name and continued as an equestrian in circus until his death

Son of a pastor, began in amateur theatricals in 1864, moved into music hall as a character singer. Emigrated to the US in 1867, where he performed in variety and Gilbert & Sullivan. A founding member of the B. P. O. Elks. Married briefly to Annie Hindle in 1868

Daughter of a music hall performer, began as a child performing male and female characters, the most prominent English male impersonator

Ballet dancer, burlesque performer, credited with helping transform literary burlesque into a sexualized theatrical form

Horse trainer and showman, responsible for Omar Kingsley’s career as Ella Zoyara

Circus equestrienne, part of a large family of circus performers

Variety manager, began as a circus performer, became a comic singer in variety in the 1860s, entered management in the late-​1860s

90  Gillian M. Rodger up because I  had no other dissertation topic to fall back on, and the fear of failing kept me at the microfilm reader. And this project was marked by so many failures at its outset, all of which honed my ability to practice lateral thinking, and to find alternative sources of information. The failures also made me a better researcher, making my identity as an archival researcher as important to me as my queer identity.

4

OU T /​IN T HE F I E LD

6

“I Don’t Think We Are Safe around You” Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology Gregory Barz

On the Tarmac . . . Hot steam rises off the early evening tarmac as I arrive at the Entebbe airport for a planned month-​long research trip. After slipping my Ugandan SIM card into my mobile phone, I immediately receive a text message informing me that the good friend and colleague who I anticipated would be meeting me at the airport would not, in fact, be arriving to take me to his house, and that I should expect to be met by a friend of this colleague. After exiting customs and emerging outside into the evening air, I am greeted by a young man who nervously shakes my hand. Ushering me off to the side car park, he quickly explains that “the doctor,” my friend and colleague, sent him in order to explain to me that not only could the doctor not greet me, but that the clinic sponsoring my research program will not be “in a position” to welcome me either. Confused, since I had worked with this particular doctor for over ten years, I ramble on about needing to contact my local colleagues about the matter. I can sense a growing distress in the young man in front of me until he finally blurts out, “I don’t think we are safe around you, professor.” And it all made sense. Deep breath. I paused, exhausted from the trip, and asked for clarification. “We have not sought renewal of your research clearance, professor.” I  later wrote this phrase down in my notebook because I wanted to document for myself that I had not been “denied” clearance to conduct research in Uganda, but rather my colleagues had collectively decided not to support a regular renewal of such clearance for me. At the time this difference provided me with the only solace I could muster. Tired and alone, I took a cab to the downtown bus depot in Kampala, a thirty-​minute ride from the airport, and waited with my bags for an early morning bus to take me to neighboring Rwanda. Did I need to “flee” or escape Uganda? No. Did I want to leave Uganda? Yes. And as I sat eating a packet of Marie biscuits purchased from a late-​night kiosk, I reflected on the threat my

94  Gregory Barz presence as an out gay researcher posed to the lives of my colleagues—​and to their clinics and NGOs, their friends and families.

From Unmarked Category to Marked (Although Sous Rature) Category I began this chapter by stepping purposefully onto the tarmac at the Entebbe airport several years ago. The frame I  craft for this opening mise-​en-​scène envelops a violent and deliberate uncovering of the self. I intentionally crafted this opening vignette, this rather personal tale of a crisis in the field, in only the vaguest of details in order to protect and preserve the integrity of those for whom the issues remain very real, given that many of my colleagues live in Uganda (and in other countries and regions) in highly politicized and sometimes dangerous professional and personal worlds. That several elements of the tale must obfuscate certain details must be understood and honored in order to preserve my ongoing respect and admiration for colleagues who today find themselves living in and working under what I (and others) perceive to be culturally oppressive regimes. From the time of my arrival on the tarmac in Uganda to making my way to the bus depot to finding myself in neighboring Rwanda’s capital—​during those moments I remember thinking that in an odd way, the foregrounding of my professional queer identity that was all of a sudden so much of an issue in Uganda was of little or no consequence in Rwanda, or so I thought at that time. In the years since that curious incident at the Entebbe Airport, it has been relatively easy for me to let go of turbulent emotions. Yet, as I reflect today on the research opportunities that have been perhaps closed off to me in my professional career, I now must admit that I have actively suppressed conflict, deliberately censored details and information, and embraced the clouding of details within a highly politicized queer situation in which surely many queer researchers have found themselves. Or do they? Where are the researchers who have had the queer label thrust at their life’s work in such a violent way? But, as ethnomusicologists, we are all just a bit queer, working within a slightly queered discipline. And, we all cover. We all don masks in our encounters with unfamiliar traditions and “exotic” or foreign musics. Markers of identity for ethnomusicologists are typically based on individual or institutional perception, whether assigned according to prescribed criteria (perceived visual difference) or by historical means (based on arbitrary or assigned ethnicity). An understanding of the ethnomusicological self in relationship to the assumed Other is at the heart of the creation of categories, of boxes within which we assess and create order and not only form our understanding of Others but also mold our

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  95 understanding of ourselves in the very process of Othering. Gender, race, ethnicity, and age become general markers of separation from some perceived non-​ gendered, non-​racialized center. Unmarked categories reinforce a particular hegemony of deliberate marking, especially in ethnomusicology where “ethnomusicologist” as an unmarked category has on occasion become code for “male” ethnomusicologist, while women are frequently assigned to a marked category, labeled as a “female ethnomusicologist.” German ethnomusicologist Edda Brandes was among the first scholars to publish a work featuring (and subtly reinforcing) such a labeled category: “The Role of the Female Ethnomusicologist in the Field” (1991) (see also Sadoh 2012, The Saga of a Nigerian Female Ethnomusicologist). In numerous works, such overt category marking creates in its wake an unmarked category. Margaret Sarkissian’s description of Judith Vander as a “noted female ethnomusicologist” (1999), for example, never labels other ethnomusicologists as “male”; such labeling practice (and exclusions from such labels) became common practice in the early stages of the introduction of feminist theories in ethnomusicology. Dement and Rossen’s description of the fictional lead character in the film Songcatcher as a “female ethnomusicologist documenting the traditional music of rural Appalachia in the early 1900s” (2001:8) does not seem unfamiliar, since they are also pointing to the presumed oddity of a historical ethnomusicologist as a female. In a similar historical perspective, George Dor’s review of materials related to Laura Boulton’s participation in the 1934 Straus recording expedition to West Africa marks the ethnomusicologist’s gender as a differentiating marker of identity: “It also celebrates a distinguished female ethnomusicologist and her significant contribution to the field” (Dor 2003:115). Perhaps the most interesting marking in this regard is the intentional bracketing of Sean Williams’s gender at the worldwizzy.com website:  “Sean Williams is a (female) ethnomusicologist.” Williams herself would chuckle if she were to see, for example, a marker of identity on worldwizzy.com such as “Bruno Nettl is a (male) ethnomusicologist.” In a very different way, in Lonán Ó Briain’s dissertation, female ethnomusicologists share a gendered adjective:  “[Amy] Catlin was soon followed by another female ethnomusicologist, Catherine Falk” (2012:15). Yet, it should be noted that in this case, Ó Briain may very well be marking such a distinction to indicate that historically most studies of Hmong music have been conducted by women and that certain Hmong cultural norms are more easily accessed based on the sex of the ethnographer. Early in his dissertation he unpacks such marking of gender distinction as reflecting a clear division in male and female roles in Hmong society that have repercussions for the researcher’s fieldwork and outcomes (2012:14 n.21). Ó Briain’s intentional gendering of the ethnographic category allows us to pivot this discussion of marked

96  Gregory Barz identities away from gender and move more toward access to musical or other traditions via perceptions of biological sex. The unmarked category—​typically straight white cis male—​is thus frequently marked by the absence of marking. The codes, while often unspoken, are typically understood and subtle (even if unknowingly by the author her or himself) in these marked and unmarked categories: dedications to “long-​suffering wives” and “ever-​supportive husbands” along with pictures of children accompanying field excursions are frequent traces of gender identities. The examples offered earlier in this section make it clear that while gender identity is typically perceived when reading scholarship (even when unmarked), identity issues related to the sexuality of the author (and by extension, one’s queer identity) are frequently and perhaps intentionally not made visible. A proclivity for heteronormativity in ethnography is clearly a reflection of a historic attitude of a normal or “natural” sexual identity that is present in the practice of field research (which I will unpack later in this chapter). I use the term “heteronormative” here and elsewhere in this chapter to reference that which is typically characterized as a default, unmarked category in ethnographic writing—​that is, a category in which “straight” or heterosexual identity is considered normative and therefore not needing an external identifier. The presumption of heteronormative identity and behavior in the field frequently attends the privilege that accompanies straight culture as well as evoking the notion of a preferred or perhaps even (gasp) normal sexual identity adopted within field research. In ways strikingly similar to the gender marking/​unmarking detailed in the preceding paragraphs, once heteronormative labels are applied to ethnomusicological categories, an implied system of codes is revealed—​again, frequently unmarked and unspoken—​that attain the performance of straight as normative not only in ethnography but more importantly also in the discipline’s field methodologies. Such codes are typically made explicit and solidified in the acknowledgements sections of published ethnographic monographs where one’s heterosexual partner or spouse is publicly thanked in addition to indicating their inclusion in and contribution to a given ethnomusicologist’s fieldwork. Acknowledgements are carefully crafted sections that not only trace authorial epistemology and the debt of gratitude to the guidance of others, but perhaps more interestingly, also function as the section of an ethnographic monograph that typically humanizes (and by extension normalizes) the ethnomusicologist for the reader. The language adopted in the acknowledgements section is rarely interrogated, hence the importance of raising it here but for reasons besides understanding some viewpoint of the author. Yes, readers can obtain much information about an author, but for the purposes of this work, I challenge the adoption in our acknowledgement sections that frame our ethnographies of coded language.

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  97 The insertion of heteronormativity in the framing device of disciplinary rhetoric is historically valued and frequently replicated (whether intentionally or unintentionally). The inclusion of representative random samples later in this paragraph excerpted from Acknowledgement sections is not meant to intentionally “out” the researchers as straight, but rather to serve as examples that underscore the position of authority in regard to any claims for the heteronormativity present in mainstream ethnography in ethnomusicology: “To my wife Elise, whose art inspired the title of this book, and who has been a collaborator in more ways than I  can possibly put into words.” (Friedson 2009:xii) “My wife Amy’s questions and gentle comments completed the consensus for shaping the penultimate draft[.]‌” (Turino 2008:xvii) “Eran Fraenkel, my former husband, is present in many of the pages of this study . . . I extend my most sincere thanks for his many contributions.” (Sugarman 1997:xviii)

These expressions of gratitude are extracted from simply the first three books I pulled down from my bookshelf when I decided to act on my hunch that the projection of marked “straight” identity was in fact true and not merely something I had imagined. Such sections that acknowledge the presence and contributions of others in our work also function as a fulcrum supporting both the process of engaging field research and the writing up of those experience as ethnography. The acknowledgements reside in both worlds: the experience and the reflection. With a rhetorical framing device frequented by such heteronormative expression, one might reasonably expect that the same or similar markers of queer identity would pertain to ethnographic rhetorical devices in acknowledgement sections by gay and lesbian scholars in the ethnomusicological literature, but despite my efforts, I have not been able to locate such “outing” of queer sexual identity in the works of known gay and lesbian colleagues on the same bookshelf, for what I fully realize must be obvious reasons.1 (A notable exception is, of course, the picture of Chris Schepici, William Cheng’s husband, wearing a hospital mask on the first page of Will’s book Just Vibrations [2016].) According to Alexander Cannon (whose work is featured elsewhere in this volume), younger readers of our work frequently decode our acknowledgements sections, searching for clues as to whether a particular author is a “member of the family” (personal communication). According to Cannon, there are only a few options available 1 Despite the appearance to be duplicitous, I purposefully refrain from pointing to ethnographies by known queer ethnomusicologists in order to respect their choices to remain publicly unmarked in their published work.

98  Gregory Barz to younger students and scholars to ascertain whether the field of ethnomusicology is indeed queer friendly; the acknowledgements sections is just one of those options. As Cannon was getting closer to finishing his own monograph, he expressed to me the very real concern he had regarding his personal responsibility to out himself to the reader. The inscription of queer identity within an institutionally accepted rhetorical framing device (such as an Acknowledgements section) can be revealed in its absence, sous rature (or “under erasure”). Scratching the surface and reading what lies close to the surface, albeit underneath a text, is a way of revealing text that is intentionally not written. Such deliberate erasure is an extension of Derrida’s suggestion (borrowed and extended from Heidegger) that the meaning of text can be revealed or exposed despite the fact that the text has been deliberately excised or crossed out before we have access to seeing or reading it. The French phrase sous rature is often translated simply as “under erasure,” but is perhaps better understood as “putting under erasure” (see Spivak’s translation in Derrida 1997[1967]:320, fn.54, my emphasis). In similar ways, queer identity in ethnomusicology is bracketed off from heteronormative behavior by its deliberate absence. According to Derrida, “[t]‌he distinction is simple: The gesture of bracketing implies ‘not this but that’, preserving a bipolarity as well as a hierarchy of empirical impurity and phenomenological purity; the gesture of sous rature implies ‘both this and that’ as well as ‘neither this nor that’ undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased” (1997[1967]:320, n.54). The meaning of that-​which-​is-​not-​written is ultimately revealed in its absence. Through its absence in ethnomusicological thought, queer identity can therefore be understood as revealed and present in our texts and by extension, reflecting back on the field research that informs our queered scholarship. The revelation of sexual identity under erasure within the context of accepted rhetorical framing devices is by no means meant to judge or place value on the “purity” of either the intentional or implied outing of one’s self in ethnography. Rather, my reductionist goal is to uncover an individual ethnomusicologist’s specific and perhaps only option available for intentional queering of sexual identity in an academic rhetorical mode. If we take it as a given that queer identity is indeed present in ethnomusicology (which it surely is), then how can we identify the trace of the implied—​but never labeled—​queer identity which has a heightened presence only in its absence? In Derridean thought, the marking of ethnomusicological identity in the field can reasonably be understood to leave tracks (perhaps a better and clearer translation of Derrida’s usage of the French term “trace,” which is most frequently translated in English as just “trace”), and the frame of an Acknowledgements section provides just such a tool in the tracks it affords us.

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  99

The Unmarking of Marked Categories Queer identities can be (and historically have been) intentionally masked or purposefully disguised in attempts to pass as being situated within an unmarked category. Engaging such processes of non-​disclosure has long been an integral aspect of identity formation within the queer engagement of field research. Such deliberate masking can be a response to (or result of) the fear—​whether conscious or unconscious—​of the stigma assigned to being marked as anything other than straight, especially in a host culture. A feeling of loss of control when one is not “at home” frequently forces field researchers to adopt what are presumed to be safe identities for fear of cross-​cultural misunderstandings, loss of respect, biases, or worse, rejection and alienation. In interviews with academic colleagues in a variety of field-​based sister disciplines (anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sociology), I have noted a variety of fears in regard to the ability of queer identities to taint relationships, information, and data. The queer gaze is thought to pollute information and data, and the objectivity of the ethnomusicologist is at risk when information or music is admitted to having been filtered through the perceptions of others as queer-​ received. But, the replacement of the queer veil with an absence of veils confirms that all relationships in the field, all information collection, all songs performed are already filtered for us, as if they were as Derrida might suggest, “always already” veiled. As an openly gay ethnomusicologist “out” in both my academic home community and within my academic society, I expect that my personal positionality “outside” the heteronormative box is both known and noted and in fact increasingly open for scrutiny in a variety of the field contexts within which I work. I have been told by colleagues, for example, that a quick Google search of my name reveals clues: mentions of my husband, references to a hyphenated legal married name, and a co-​editor of a book on queer ethnomusicology. From the comfort of a university environment in Boston, Massachusetts, where I do not assume I put people at risk, I am clearly marked and potentially not of risk to communities that I care deeply about.2 I am fully aware, however, as my opening vignette details, that the perception of being involved with an openly gay researcher can put local straight (and certainly queer) informants, collaborators, interlocutors, and researchers at risk, and by extension, their families. Queer identities and relations can be dangerous.

2 Despite any attempt at personal protestation of not wanting to be labeled as a “Gay Professor,” but rather desiring to be considered as a “professor who happens to be gay,” I fully realize that I cannot escape any gaze that attempts to position my identity squarely within the queer box/​category.

100  Gregory Barz

Can There Be a Queer Ethnomusicology? No, we must reverse the terms: “other” is the name, “other” is the meaning of this unthinkable unity of light and night. What “other” means is phenomenality as disappearance. Is it a question, here, of a “third route excluded by these contradictory ones” (revelation and dissimulation, The Trace of the Other)? But this route cannot appear, cannot be stated as tertiary. If it is called “trace,” the word can emerge only as a metaphor whose philosophical elucidation will ceaselessly call upon “contradictions.” Without which its originality—​ that which distinguishes it from the Sign (the word conventionally chosen by Levinas)—​would not appear. For it must be made to appear. And the phenomenon supposes original contamination by the sign. (Derrida 1978:129) The queer voice—​the queer ethnomusicological voice—​must be made to appear. It must be “othered” in order for it to have presence. The queer voice does not have the luxury or privilege of remaining “unmarked” as is true for the typically heteronormative voice that dominates ethnomusicology. It might seem odd at this point in the chapter to not explore the historically present queer voice in ethnomusicology by adopting the Derridean notion of “the trace.” Surely queer ethnomusicologists were present in the Society for Ethnomusicology from the beginning, as is true in a variety of international forums (although none labeled themselves as such for obvious political and societal reasons). I  use the term “queer” here in its broadest sense, fully realizing that retrofitting contemporary labels, especially regarding sexual identity, to apply to historical figures is highly problematic (as Gillian Rodger suggests eloquently elsewhere in this volume). Labeling a nineteenth-​century folklorist as gay or a collector of folksongs as a lesbian, for example, makes little sense since what it meant to be gay at that time resembles little what it means to be gay in today’s cultures. I will, however, lay the seeds for a future study that will draw on Freud’s concept of Erinnerungsspur (a memory-​trace) to unpack the historic gaze and voice of the queered historical writings that surely undergird our discipline. If there are aspects of one’s identity that need to be suppressed within the context of field research, should one reveal those issues within ethnography? Does purposeful (or even passive) suppression affect how we receive information? I end this section with a question that might have been posed at the beginning of the chapter: Should it be required to reveal one’s queer gaze? I am conflicted. More productive might be to question: can there be a queer ethnomusicology? On one hand, I want to respond, “no.” On the other hand, I recognize that that which we typically suppress (or are taught and encouraged to suppress) informs the

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  101 ways we listen, perceive, and receive. Are queer ethnographers more empathic listeners? Ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson alludes to this in examining her unique positionality with regards to the musical traditions she studies: Yet the suffering of African Americans at the hands of racism has always seemed to me of deeper significance in the quest for a just society than some of the problems I have endured as a woman or a lesbian. Indeed, my own path through these intersections has taught me that the quest for freedom as a gendered human being or person of alternative sexuality will be ultimately shallow without a deeper understanding of the way race, power, economic privilege, and access to health care shape and limit the possibilities for personal fulfillment around the world. (2008:268)

Given their marginalized status, queer-​identified scholars are often assumed to exhibit greater empathy for other minority groups and for “othered” communities and have perhaps more significant access to marginalized communities. Given that the central tenets of ethnomusicology are the ethnographic method—​ typically understood as intensive experiences with a participant-​observation method—​one might expect that a queer ethnomusicology, dependent on an understanding of the very corporeality of the ethnographic encounter, does and should exist. In Dwight Conquergood’s article “Rethinking Ethnography,” the (queer) body of the ethnographer could be described in direct contrast with the mind: Ethnography’s distinctive research method, participant-​observation fieldwork, privileges the body as a site of knowing. In contrast, most academic disciplines, following Augustine and the Church Fathers, have constructed a Mind/​ Body hierarchy of knowledge corresponding to the Spirit/​Flesh opposition so that mental abstractions and rational thought are taken as both epistemologically and morally superior to sensual experience, bodily sensations, and the passions. Indeed, the body and the flesh are linked with the irrational, unruly, and dangerous—​certainly an inferior realm of experience to be controlled by the higher powers of reason and logic. Further, patriarchal constructions that align women with the body, and men with mental faculties, help keep the mind-​ body, reason-​emotion, objective-​subjective, as well as masculine-​feminine hierarchies stable. (1991:180)

If the body of the ethnographer is central to the practice of fieldwork, then so should a Queer Ethnography (and by extension, Queer Ethnomusicology) identify the qualities of the queer researcher in regard to the presumed characteristics of a typical queer researcher, just as the development of a Feminist Ethnography

102  Gregory Barz depended on an acceptance of empathy and interpersonal relationships (see Stacey 1988). Early feminist responses to the role of ethnography within feminism focused on the skillsets of marginalized women within the social sciences. A  goal was to uncover and represent more intentional relationships between scholar and informant, observer and observed: [T]‌here are as many different feminist research projects as there are feminisms, there is still a consensus that feminist research differs from traditional social science in several key ways: (1) Feminist social science attempts to create equal and democratic relationships between the researcher and the researched, (2)  feminist researchers acknowledge and validate participants’ own knowledge, and (3) feminist social science has an agenda for political change—​to eliminate or reduce social inequalities based on gender. (Armstead 1995:628)

So can there be a queer ethnomusicology? It would be clever to respond, absolutely not! If there could be such a queered disciplinary approach, then by extension it would immediately label all other historical forms of ethnomusicology as “straight.”

Covering as Assimilation in Fieldwork Covering seems a more complex form of assimilation than conversion or passing. At the most basic level, it raises thornier issues of classification. I’m sometimes asked, for instance, whether I consider same-​sex marriage to be an act of covering or flaunting. I think it is both. Along the axis of affiliation, marriage is an act of covering, as marriage has historically been associated with straight culture. (Yoshino 2007:91)

It is 2013, and on my flight back from Africa I look down at my left hand, at a wedding ring that does not seem to confuse anyone around me. I am no different than the W.H.O. worker seated next to me drinking endless gin and tonics. Yet, I woke up in bed the following day next to Wil, my husband. The ring on my finger and its symbolism confirmed for me in that moment the depth of covering we all engage—​whether consciously or otherwise. Yoshino’s suggestion that we all cover now makes sense to me. “Covering,” a term that lawyer-​scholar Kenji Yoshino uses to describe a form of gay assimilation, is borrowed from a concept first introduced by sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on Stigma (1963). As an aside, Kenji Yoshino heroically attempts to adopt a positionality that embraces the markers of the multiple selves he inhabits in the world (interpersonal, professional, academic). Yet, the reader

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  103 of Yoshino’s text will find it ironic to read the Library of Congress’s cataloguing information for Covering found on the book’s copyright page: 1. Yoshino, Kenji. 2.  Gay lawyers—​United States—​Biography. 3.  Japanese American lawyers—​United States—​Biography. 4. Gay rights—​United States. 5. Civil rights—​United States. 6. Assimilation (Sociology)—​United States

Yoshino’s sexuality is decisively situated before his ethnicity and even before the actual theme of the book, civil rights. In its adjectival position, the author’s sexuality is intentionally uncovered, and guides us not only in regards of what we read, but how we read it. As an act of masking cultural identity, covering should be understood as significantly different from that of “passing.” Passing is an action that makes intentionality visible. Covering, on the other hand, is an action that suppresses the obtrusiveness of identity by making a marker of identity invisible: [Goffman] relates how Franklin Roosevelt always stationed himself behind a table before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, downplaying his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities. (Yoshino 2007:18)

One “passes” for different reasons than one might consider “covering.” This is perhaps a more complex understanding of intentionality than the phenomenon of “the closet” outlined by sociologist Steven Seidman (2002). The binary model represented by the closet—​one is either “in” or one is “out”—​does not address the intentional process adopted by field researchers over time when engaging cross-​cultural topics and communities. Have ethnomusicologists historically “covered,” or have they been “closeted”? Do contemporary ethnomusicologists continue to engage the act of “covering” when engaging field research? If so, is covering a unique aspect of queer identity in ethnomusicology? Is covering an inherent aspect of engagement of cross-​cultural field research and of queer identity politics in general?

Covering in the Academy Ownership of the term “queer” seems to be a central issue. I remember taking a class at Brown University on “Music and Postmodernism” with the cutting-​edge critical theorist and musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnik. On the very first day of class—​comprised of both undergraduate and graduate students prepared to

104  Gregory Barz hang on to every word of the professor—​Subotnik opened by discussing the need in such a class for respect in regard to nomenclature as well as careful observance of the language we apply to our ideas within the group since many of us would be grappling with the postmodernists for the first time. I do not quite remember how it came up, but Subotnik raised the term “queer” as an example of a term and concept that we would approach carefully and with respect in our reading of Foucault. As if on cue, an eager young undergraduate interrupted by blurting out that it was okay with him for Subotnik to use the term in class: “I’m queer, and I don’t want us to avoid using the term.” Subotnik took a deep breath before responding and then said that it was not “okay.” She went on to explain that while it was certainly “okay” for the young man to reference himself as queer, it was not within her purview or privilege to use such a term in class to apply to him. She likened it to insider/​outsider embrace and repulsion of the N-​word in Black and non-​Black communities. At that time in the 1990s, I noted that the ownership and usage of Queer as a term was complicated by a legacy in the academy, a legacy muted by attempts to perhaps protect the Queer community with a veneer of political correctness that dictated that “outsiders” must reference respect for that which they do not own. That the voice of the academy had historically positioned itself “outside” of queer identity—​either by choice or otherwise—​ reinforced a long-​standing mainstream non-​Queer stance that has been adopted by academic music scholarship to this day.

Queering Identity in the Field—​Open the Closet Door, Close the Front Door I have not written about personal dilemmas in the field. I have not talked openly about personal dilemmas in the field. Until now. And there are valid political, institutional, personal, and emotional issues that collectively contribute to the years of intentional effort to construct around me and my work a marked and discernible silence. There are certainly others in the academic discipline of ethnomusicology who have held (and continue to hold) back from giving voice to dilemmas such as revealing one’s queer identity in the field. And now finally there are ethnomusicologists eager to create a racket of sound in these heretofore silent spheres. But back to a question I posed earlier: do I cover (have I covered) in my field research? It is really not a very interesting question, especially when I reflect on the widely varied contexts within which I find myself these days. At this point in time, a more productive way of (re-​)framing the question is: do I “uncover” in different and perhaps curious ways depending on the research scenario, and if so, in what intentional or unintentional ways? When I meet with Israeli drag queens in Tel Aviv for coffee or visit a club in Jerusalem to work with performers,

Queering Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology  105 I perhaps uncover just a bit more than I have with other research projects. (To be brutally honest, it is only when my empathy is valued and appreciated by others that I begin to feel safe in my queer identity.) And I am increasingly aware that the covering/​uncovering one experiences within field-​research is part of a dynamic transaction in which the ethnomusicologist is revealed as an empowered cultural agent. In conclusion, I openly disclose that I am a queer ethnomusicologist, and yet I fear, as is true for other colleagues, that wallowing in autobiography, that engaging in overly reflexive writing raises many of the same issues and concerns ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson notes in her article “Fitting the Part” (2008). “I” should not be the center of my work, of my study. And yet . . . The act of “covering” can easily be understood as not only “my” expectation, or an expectation imposed on me by the many communities in which I live and work, but also as a self-​determined expectation. For me, the act of “being queer” in the field is different from when I am actively and purposefully “queered” by others. There is much at stake in a world where violent acts inhabit our social interactions in and out of the field. So while there are certainly issues related to queer identity that are really all about me, I find the implications of whether there will be a disciplinary response more intriguing. Will there be a queer ethnomusicology? Or, perhaps more importantly, will there be queer ethnomusicologists? I humbly respond—​yes.

7

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography Christi-​Anne  Castro

Failure is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well. –​Jack Halberstam (2011:3) Music embodies and exploits an essential ambiguity, and in this respect, language and music may be at complementary poles of a communicative medium. –​Ian Cross and Iain Morley (2009:69)

Can failing at normative ethnographic writing also succeed in conveying queer subjectivity? To me, queerness is a fragmented subjectivity in which various levels of outness play a role in the episodes of my personal, musical, and professional life. Further, and with apologies to Roland Barthes (1977), the grain of the queer voice in my writing is pleasurable ambiguity—​an intersection of doing fieldwork and writing that aestheticizes the knowing/​ unknowing dialectic. For instance, my queer voice in ethnography might be found in an optimistic failure to convey straightforward meaning, instead favoring a felicitous flow of phrases, at the end of which one experiences a sensation of knowing. To explore this possibility and avoid becoming a game of metaphors, the queer stance must extend beyond window dressing and into the space of meaning production across realms of experience—​for instance, how we might recognize queerness in people, music, and words. A truly queer ethnography would, I think, convulse the etiquette of reflexivity in ethnomusicological works to defy the authority of the genre altogether; it would write against itself and render the author both adamant and impotent. But queer writing within ethnography may instead hide in the open, much as a queer ethnographer can obfuscate attractionality while in the field (or the academy, for that matter).1 1 Attractionality, rather than sexuality in LGBT literature, puts the emphasis on desire rather than sex.

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  107 Whether queerness hides or is simply waiting for recognition may be for the observer or reader to decide, but there are occasions for obvious display. For example, Freya Jarman-​Ivens describes a sense of queerness arising from the misrecognition between a visual source and a heard voice (2011), a salient characteristic of castrati, countertenors, and contraltos. Likewise, queer writing may burst from an unlikely author (ethnographer), not simply rupturing conventions of style, but also conveying profligacy through wordiness, discomfiting confessions, or inappropriate bliss. Perhaps disappointingly, in ethnomusicology, ethnography is rarely presentationally queer. After all, a queer ethnographer does not organically produce queer text; nor is queer text indicative of a queer author. Further, both scenarios are as inexplicit as the various definitions of queer, a struggle over which leaves us with a range of possibilities from perverse to anti-​normative to destabilizing (Taylor 2012:14). As a result, in pulling together a chapter on being queer in the field, I felt the imperative to interrogate my own queerness and how or if it matters to my profession and my writing. My gender identity presentation in the world—​in the field—​is not particularly enigmatic, though the nature of my attractionality likely is. The ontological case fails at the point I would claim to be a queer, though I  might reasonably be queerish by doing queer—​that is, performing actions conventionally thought to be queer. And rare is the day that I would perform attractionality rather than artlessly experience it. So, where does a structurally sound queer aesthetic begin and end in the absence of intention? If I were a piece of music, I might display what William Thomson decades ago referred to as functional ambiguity—​a condition in which “a music event, whether small of large, projects equivocation, implying no clear syntactic meaning or two or more potential meanings” (1983:3).2 This seems to me (and to Thomson) not a flaw—​ neither indecision nor abdication—​but instead a manner of negotiation. Since writing involves strategic presentation too, there is always the possibility of an intentional queer aesthetic through the pleasures of expression. Writing is queer inasmuch as I can manipulate words into an ambiguity that bears resemblance with music. So, let’s say the performative revelation of my doing queer in written narrative is found in the intersection of meaning and the phenomenology of language. Queer finds expression in episodes of prose—​in the rhetorical imposture achieved through citing fragments of someone else’s voice; authority derailed by myriad instances of unknowing between the lines; scholarly pretension masked by reflexive vulnerability (or the other way around?); intermittent

2 Despite my attention to it in this chapter, ambiguity as an analytical category for music is not universally accepted. While Peter H. Smith finds it effective for passages by Brahms, he also notes that scholars such as Carl Schachter and Kofi Agawu argue that possible meanings are rarely equal, and that hierarchy provides clarity (Smith 2006:2–​3).

108  Christi-Anne Castro overabundance; and consequential failures.3 I think my queer voice was singing in a particular sentence that one reviewer first described as beautifully written but then asked, “What does it mean?” There were a few other sentences like that in my book. I straightened up most for publication, but one or two I could not bear to unbraid. Comprising varying measures of subjectivity and presentation, my ethnographic queerness seems to me unprecarious in its liminality and its unintelligibility without abjection.4 Indeed, while subjectivity is illusory and changeable, identity presentations are multiple but as stable as the codes that the act of code-​switching implies. This all leads me to suggest that the queer code of my professional life manifests as a purposeful ambiguity and fragmented subjectivity that I  can experiment with in this writing. The typical scholarly essay in ethnomusicology climaxes at the start with a virile thesis and follows in the afterglow with flashbacks showing how we got there through fieldwork, analysis, and theory. This contrasts with the typical nineteenth-​century symphonic work that Susan McClary described in various ways as reliant upon musical mechanisms of thwarted tension leading to climactic gratification, a metaphoric parallel with masculine sexuality (1991).5 My inclination is to push back against both forms, while still finding a way to talk about how I came to understand different aspects of queerness over time and how these perspectives have affected my work as an ethnographer in the field and on the page. In this chapter I present a failure of thesis with the hope of achieving queer expression—​a profusion of enveloping rather than pointed words whose murmuring reverberations sound the merits of queering ethnomusicology. Blame it all on the habitus—​on a childhood in which non-​heterosexuality among cis women had no categorical purchase (the interrelated varieties of sexuality and gender identity had yet to arrive on the scene).6 The family way was not so much to conceal these relationships in the community as to reimagine them in conversation without innuendo or reproach. The gender binary that structured our understanding did not have the complexities of cis and trans, and masculinity and femininity shaped not only presentation but also notions of sexuality. I figured out that failure by women coupled together to pass heteronormative muster was not treated as a social failure. Rather, Filipina women in a domestic dyad were legible as exceptionally close friends and roommates; 3 As with so many others, I invoke performativity as presented by Judith Butler (1990). 4 For unintelligibility as a kind of local, political autonomy, see James C. Scott (1999), and for the relationship between queerness and abjection, see Julia Kristeva (1982). 5 In the same volume, the examination of “Live to Tell” by Madonna is relevant here. The narrative McClary derives from her musical analysis is one of constant fluctuation and lack of closure—​a resistance to choosing between a secure identity defined through masculine subjectivity and that of an Other (1991:159–​61). 6 While I gloss over habitus, I am borrowing its meaning from the oft-​cited Outline of the Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu (1977).

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  109 they were understood-​but-​not-​realized, rather than renamed with a knowing wink or rejected outright from the community. When they danced ballroom style together at a FilAm community group’s gala, we accepted that as something all women could do, even though no other women in assumed heterosexual relationships were doing it just that way.7 The ambiguity of their relationship allowed these women-​understood-​as-​women in a couple to dance together in a way that a man with another man could not. More importantly, the nature of the public secret meant that it would have been bad form for anyone to remark on their dancing/​being together, for speaking aloud might make real something better kept hushed.8 Despite times having changed—​and with them the visibility of woman-​ woman couples—​it should be no wonder that I think it is the way one knows and does not know a thing that distinguishes the framework I grew up with as locally intelligible. In my diasporic community, we practiced a flexible refusal to know rather than a rigid inclination to hide. The Filipino epistemology of the closet and invisibility of lesbians has its own qualities that are unintelligible to those who see only political backwardness rather than a localized negotiation of binary structures.9 If I have since neglected a strategy of ambiguity in my personal life, that does not mean I do not recognize its usefulness in the field, particularly in places like the Philippines. By way of example, it is illuminating to consider the gender and sexuality arc outlined over several years by Jake Zyrus—​formerly known as Charice Pempengco—​ a celebrity very much in the global media mainstream who brought attention first to lesbians and later to trans men in the Philippines. Zyrus, who became internationally known as Charice, was a child prodigy, ballad belter, global star of internet and television, and pride of the Philippines.10 Charice emerged as a star who slotted easily into contemporary Western categories already conceived of as heteronormative. As a child, Charice was not marketed on U.S. television programs such as Ellen and The Oprah Winfrey Show 7 Later, though, when many Filipino Americans became engaged with formal ballroom dancing, I periodically saw women whom I knew were married to men couples-​dancing with one another if their husbands were resting or not present. This showed skill on the part of the woman who had to change her steps in order to lead. Both participants in this scenario, however, were always in long gowns, distinguishing them from the same-​sex female couple of my childhood—​one of whom invariably wore formal slacks to the gala. 8 The suspension of strict gender roles in performance took place when we were children, as girls often took the role of boys in Filipino folk dance. Since there were never enough boys in the classes, the only criterion used for choosing girls to dance as boys was height. Instead of having girls dance with other girls in similar dresses, the taller girls playing boys customarily wore boy clothing for performances but also applied makeup in the same style as the girls playing girls. 9 See Eve Sedgwick (1990), J. Neil Garcia (1997), and Pineda (2008). 10 Because “Charice” was the name that Zyrus became internationally famous for and has its own measure of power as commodity and misidentifying gender marker, I respectfully include it at the start of the narrative on Zyrus.

110  Christi-Anne Castro as a sexualized object; however, the booming love ballads that served as vehicles for musical virtuosity extolled romantic love and trumpeted heteronormativity. Charice excelled in the popular hits of singers like Whitney Houston and Celine Dion that conferred a precocious femininity commensurate with long hair, dresses, and makeup. A few years into stardom, however, Zyrus’ gender presentation gradually altered with the increased adoption of masculine clothing, the acquisition of tattoos, and progressively shorter haircuts. Some fans construed these transformations as desire for an edgier image, but the dissolution of visual markers related to cis womanhood and heterosexuality produced anxiety in the media. The ambiguity of an evolving presentation toward conventional masculinity coupled with a still hyper-​feminine singing voice—​the basis of stardom, in other words—​created confusion. Eventually, Zyrus came out twice on television to fanfare and consternation.11 The first time occurred in 2013 on the Philippine program The Buzz with Boy Abunda, where Zyrus confessed, “Opo, tomboy po ako” (Yes, I am a tomboy). The following year, the scene repeated itself on U.S. television with Oprah Winfrey as moderator and mediator for an international audience. Oprah casually but solemnly used the word “gay.” Zyrus followed suit. Something, as they say, was lost in translation, enough that the very label “tomboy” warrants further examination to see how Filipino audiences and non-​Filipino audiences would have understood the two instances of coming out somewhat differently. In this case, queerness as ambiguity is inherent in a single word. For non-​ Filipinos, tomboy is often translated into English as lesbian, but in the Philippines, the conceptualizations are not exactly the same.12 To begin with, translating an apparently English word into U.S. English is by its nature peculiar, and tomboy is not actually the equivalent of lesbian, gay, or queer. Rather, tomboy refers to what in the United States would be viewed as a particular subset of homosexual women. Significantly, there is no commonly used indigenous label for the masculine-​presenting lesbian, despite there being one for the effeminate male homosexual (Garcia 2008:103).13 Further, while tomboy in English and tomboy in Filipino have some overlap, the sexuality distinction and local conceptions of each are crucial, and so I designate one with italics and the other without. 11 In stark contrast, the other global celebrity of the Philippines, boxer Manny Pacquiao, declared about same-​sex marriage (in Filipino) that animals are better than homosexuals, because animals distinguish between males and females. It was widely covered in international media, so much so that he apologized for speaking his mind in public but not for the belief itself. 12 Anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood encountered a similar issue in West Sumatra, Indonesia during her fieldwork. Tomboi in West Sumatra is also a derivation from the English word, but it does not map directly onto either lesbian or butch. To complicate matters, at the time of this writing, the word “lesbian” is itself under scrutiny as gender exclusive, but it is commonly found in academic literature cited herein and also was used by my Filipina consultants. 13 The common term for an effeminate-​presenting, homosexual male is bakla, and there exists much more literature on the topic than on queer females (see Tan 2001 and Garcia 2008).

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  111 Growing up in the United States, I received the label of tomboy at a young age, when I was marked by an athletic nature, an affinity for pants over dresses, and an enjoyment of action figures as much as stuffed animals. Like many other girls of my generation, I did not identify with the label and understood it to be negative, especially since much of my behavior could be explained away by having three older brothers as primary playmates. Intersectionality explains a lot about this tight familial bond, as we grew up feeling somewhat under siege in our predominantly white, working-​to-​lower-​middle class neighborhood in which the other children took to bullying with racial epithets. At a young age, we learned that difference could be a liability, but also that seamlessly fitting in was not possible within racially demarcated parameters. Perhaps as a result of these learning situations, I combined my own translation of Filipino fatalism (this yet another trait extensively covered by scholarly literature) with New England industriousness to get by. As such, while I was uncomfortable with being called a tomboy, I felt I did not need to change my behavior or dress to counteract that perception. If my gender presentation as a child seemed ambiguous to some, I accepted it about myself. It came as a pleasant surprise years later for me to hear the English word tomboy recouped from insult through heterosexual cis-​presenting females proudly recalling being tomboys in their youth.14 In the Philippines, tomboy has to do with locally based gender and sexuality categorization, but, as Evelyn Blackwood notes, it is more profitably considered as a subjective experience of gender (1998:492). Twenty years ago, Malu Marin defined tomboys as women who shake off ascribed feminine qualities such as modesty and passivity . . . young women who sport masculine attire and mannerisms; women working in nontraditional jobs such as bus conductors, drivers, security guards and policewomen; and even a middle-​aged unmarried woman who is seen in the constant company of another woman. (1996:37)15

The conflation between sexed bodies and gender expression has resulted in an overlap between tomboy and transgender, leading scholars like Michael Tan to comment that “the tomboy is constructed as a man trapped in a woman’s body” (2001:122). This differs from the perspective of advocates in the Philippines and 14 Alongside this is the coalescence of the trope in which a girl grows out of her tomboy stage into adult femininity, a parallel to notions of childhood sexlessness transforming through adolescence to womanhood. 15 Marin also explains that the labels are generational. “In the 1970s and up to the early 1980s, the terms t-​bird, tomboy, tibo, and third sex were the designated terms for the butch lesbian. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more contemporary terms have evolved, such as mars (femme) and pars (butch), girl (femme) and magic (butch) . . . Through the years, the most enduring term used to refer to lesbians is tomboy” (Marin 1996:37).

112  Christi-Anne Castro among many masculine-​presenting queer females in the United States (e.g., those who prefer the label and adjective “butch”) who identify as lesbian.16 Either way, the hammering persistence of the gender binary shapes comprehension of sexuality, such that the masculine presentation of the tomboy is stereotyped to go along with a romantic and sexual attraction to feminine-​presenting females rather than to men, one another, or transgender persons. Tomboy remains a popularly used word, and little has changed in the last fifteen years before this chapter regarding how Filipinos deploy the label.17 Echoing Tan’s assessment, Robert Diaz wrote that tomboy “in the Philippine context vacillates between lesbian and transgender male identity” (2015:722). Tomboy is also a classed term, associated with the lower socioeconomic demographic. In Diaz’s reading, Zyrus’ coming out as a tomboy after attaining fame was not just a statement about gender and sexuality; it was also one that grounded Zyrus as one of the people, so to speak, rather than an international and cosmopolitan success story. He writes, “[Zyrus’] first local revelation will always serve as a corruptive palimpsest, reminding us that in this body of a star lies the soul of a palaboy who insists on living in Cabuyao and who resists narratives of upward mobility in order to achieve fame” (2015:739). Importantly, Filipino (the national language) already has a gender-​ neutral third person pronoun, but common English does not, forcefully putting on display not only an outdated gender binary but also the influence of language in maintaining it.18 Zyrus’ coming out story encapsulates much of the complexity I have laid out. To Oprah’s question, “Were you thinking about transitioning to become a male?” Zyrus replied, “Not exactly transitioning to, like, a male. Basically, my soul is male, but I’m not gonna go through that stage where I’m gonna change, you know, everything . . . not change my body. I would change this look, like cut my hair, and wear boy clothes and everything, but that’s all.” Beyond the question of pronoun use, fans were left to discuss whether Zyrus’ masculine presentation was to be understood literally or contingently as the persistence of the butch-​femme paradigm found among many same-​sex women couples in the Philippines. In his case, the question of gender identification and pronouns was answered a few years later with an appearance on the June 2016 cover of the Philippine men’s magazine Mega Man (a groundbreaking moment for LGBTQA+ people in the Philippines) and his transition. Yet, this eventual clarity is misleading, 16 Recently, the word “lesbian” has become associated with cis women attracted to cis women with the possible implication of transphobia, but there is not space in this chapter to address the controversial topic. 17 The currency of English language labels that describe gender ambiguity—​such as genderqueer or nonbinary—​are still gaining traction in the United States and are not commonly known or used in the Philippines at the time of this writing. 18 Gender-​neutral pronouns in English like “ze” and “hir” are not widely agreed upon, and many find the substitution of “they” for “he” or “she” awkward, despite its use becoming more common.

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  113 for it papers over the power of binary-​normative strictures that disallow gender ambiguity. Struggling with the dominance of binary conventions is, indeed, what makes ambiguity a strategy more than an ontological state. Giney Villar has observed that, in practice, some tomboys prefer masculine nomenclature among themselves but not in public (2016). As such, for some tomboys, the gender question remains comfortably unresolved; the queering of gender and sexuality goes beyond a simple binary and embraces ambiguity in body, presentation, and self-​ knowledge. Queerness is not always blatantly anti-​normative. Queerness nudges the public secret, can present but not declare, and may welcome the incertitude that results from a social world in which binaries are paramount but ill-​fitting. This brings me back to the idea that while ambiguity can cause confusion and discomfort, there is also pleasure in it.19 While this observation is likely a result of my upbringing in which the unknowing approach to queerness was a palatable alternative to the social rejection that would occur if certainty were forced, there is more to it. I experience an analogous feeling when turning on the radio in the middle of a song and in the middle of a measure with a syncopated rhythm, so that for a suspended, dynamic moment I have misplaced the downbeat and hear the song dislocated, in-​sync with the wrong metrical cycle. I know what is happening, but I resist hearing straight for as long as I can until convention organizes the sounds as intended. It’s not the snapping into place or the fulfillment of expectation that feels good. It’s the queering of the beat. Or the way it was that night out in one of the provinces at an outdoor town fiesta, the damp heat unwavering enough to merit a local sundress (its significance lying in the association between dress and femme). There was one tomboy there, watching from a table with companions not far from where I settled in with family members a generation above my own. The stranger—​she, I thought unthinkingly from a glance despite a fresh haircut and ironed button down—​ requested a dance. It is convention that a man would ask a woman to dance at a fiesta, take hold of her in the expected couples’ position without fumbling, and escort her back to her seat at the song’s paling. The execution with convention synced, except that it was somewhere in the middle of the measure. My aunt, in a bid to be helpful, explained to me that I had danced with a tomboy, and then, because my lack of reaction indicated that surely I had missed the significance of the word, that a tomboy is maybe really a woman but most certainly not a man. I shrugged with a smile, appreciative of her assistance in the way that one should 19 I say this in contrast with Leonard Meyer’s observation about ambiguity in music. In his well-​ known treatise on affect, he wrote, “Ambiguity is important because it gives rise to particularly strong tensions and powerful expectations. For the human mind, ever searching for the certainty and control which comes with the ability to envisage and predict, avoids and abhors such doubtful and confused states and expects subsequent clarification” (1956:51).

114  Christi-Anne Castro be in social interactions but committing in expression neither to knowing nor to surprise. The rest of my party offered no comment on it that night or ever again, did not exchange amused glances, and appeared uninterested in what had transpired, allowing the experience to dull into an ordinary invisibility. The negotiations of gender presentation and the mutual impingements of attractionality, race, and class are all part of daily practice. While it appears that these structuring dispositions maneuver sexuality into the comfortable gender binary and, to some degree, exculpate queers from queerness, the tomboy of the Philippines is not accepted fully as a man (and may not even desire to be). As such, tomboys remain marked by society but still occupy an ambiguous gender space. Simultaneously, attitudes among LGBTQA+ advocates about the restrictive and patriarchal nature of the gender binary as reflected in butch-​femme pairings also mark the tomboy, albeit in different ways relating to economic class, generation, and other factors. But though times change, and the gender binary continues to break down in lesbian relationships and in society at large (Cantor 2016; Villar 2016),20 the shadow of the tomboy phenomenon has cast a metaphoric invisibility over lesbians and queer women who do not conform to that stereotype. Feminine-​presenting cis women are accepted in the mainstream as heterosexual by default, passing or being misread in accordance with societal gender norms. Of course, individuals participate in their own passing and gain advantages in being able to do so, but this is not to say that achievement is always positive. Passing is a fraught and complicated topic and means a variety of things, but here I  am concerned with presenting oneself visibly or through language (spoken and written) as fitting into advantageous labels. Closely related to identity presentation, passing implies a liminal or ambiguous identity, because it is falsehood and truth. One simultaneously is and is not what one passes as and can be read by degrees of success. The topic has been discussed extensively in many sources (mostly as it applies to race and transgender politics), so I will limit my comments to passing as an approach for ethnographers and queer people that is itself queer rather than only a possible strategy for queer people. Analyzing a queer strategy shows how that perspective can illuminate certain experiences of being in the field. I rely here on Susan Talburt’s provocative question, “What if we . . . say that outing is complicit with a political economy of visibility, the construction of categories, and the very structure of the closet? What if we were to say that passing refuses the terms of identity, the terms of visibility, the terms of the closet?” (2000:5). Insisting that passing is a resistant and therefore queer 20 Natty Manauat’s observation that taking on a strictly masculine or feminine role in the Philippines is much less of a norm among lesbians than it used to be twenty years ago (1998) is itself almost twenty years old, but the butch-​femme pairing in the Philippines is still common.

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  115 strategy makes sense in the context of the insider-​outsider ethnographer who must strategize passing as both, sometimes concurrently. In a world of binaries, passing as two opposites should not be possible, but I have already shown how communities of people can cultivate a suspension of recognition in order to serve social needs.21 Further, self-​awareness in deploying passing tactics serves as another example of the phenomenology of queerness in the field; that is, I sense the shades of gradation between outsider and insider shifting from one utterance to another. This is what “the closet” has felt like to me: a moment-​to-​moment negotiation of passing and a familiar dance with a stranger. The insider-​outsider in fieldwork both recognizes herself in and dis-​identifies with her subjects and consultants. It is a knotty personal and professional position commonly addressed within dissertations, ethnographies, and theoretical works about ethnography (for my own convenience, this chapter assumes the reader is acquainted with the norms of fieldwork and the tangles of ethics and interventions that invariably occur). Having read about the successes and failures of others, is it queer to think I was taught the conventions of how to do ethnography but instead proceeded with insights on how to pass as an ethnographer? While there is not a single correct way to do ethnography, all of us do end up performing one way or another in front of our consultants and in the academy for our colleagues. It follows that if ever we have experienced that most common of afflictions, imposter syndrome, then the conceit of passing as an ethnographer or scholar has increased plausibility. I benefit by acting under the shelter of labels such as scholar, musical performer, or insider/​outsider, and because each typifies only fragments of how I view myself, I suspect I wear the characterizations rather than internalize them. Tellingly, despite the evident advantages insiders have over outsiders as far as knowing goes, I have a queer tendency to welcome the role of accepted outsider.22 The role of interloper resonates more with me in general, I suppose, because queerness prevails outside the norm. Having been born in the United States, I can never be a true insider in the Philippines, despite enjoying a sensible intimacy with shared experiences that have historically drifted across borders in diaspora. There are convenient parallels between arbitrating queerness in society and negotiating fieldwork. For example, the field for an insider-​outsider is both ordinary and foreign, and silence and disengagement in an ethnographic context 21 Tomie Hahn eloquently connects her experiences of multiple identities as they flow through fieldwork, dancing Japanese nihon buyo, and daily life in different situations, writing, “Curiously, learning to enact multiple identities in dance has leveled the polarity of my biracial ‘halves’ and redeployed ‘doubleness’ as a viable presence to project. By orienting within plurality I understand that embodiment allows for a cohabitation and enactment of multiple identities” (2007:170). 22 As an example, a cis woman friend of mine had access to men-​only social groups, an exception many ethnographers have experienced in the field by virtue of not being a community member subject to local norms.

116  Christi-Anne Castro can be as profitable as staying in the closet. Scholarly detachment, in particular, is easily excused in a visiting researcher and can be erected as a standing excuse to avoid dating consultants. But silence, too, is a virtue of a good listener—​one who nods appreciatively, takes notes, and prods with questions only intermittently—​ and of a musician training in a local tradition. A closeted queer person is already keenly aware of how to prosper, in however a limited way, through silence. Another fieldwork guideline has to do with recognizing one’s place and the importance of positive relationships with consultants and the community at large. This is acute in places like the Philippines, where psychologists and theorists have long analyzed local conceptions of interpersonal harmony over individuality or individual gain.23 It is for this reason that among Filipinos, coming out may be the target of consternation even more than being secretly queer.24 The nuances of omission—​of accepting the aunts who live and travel for decades with their best friends—​are the intimacies of the public secret I alluded to earlier. In my experience, within the family itself, we are spared the gossip about our spinster aunts and their best friends. The Catholic Church, ever a prominent and pervasive voice in the Philippines, is clear in its stance, but at the family level, people often prefer to instantiate more acceptable scenarios and ignore actions that queer the norm. The ethnographer should be sensitive to introducing the “dis-​ease” (Graham 2014:134) that comes with a sense of cultural superiority, in this case as it pertains to questions of individuality and human rights in line with LGBTQA+ politics.25 To go along with others, to be empathetic with their concerns and needs, but to also value oneself in the process are all part of the mediating tactics we learn as ethnographers. Alison Rooke asserts that the affective work we do in the field requires “a degree of emotional competence, and an ability to convey genuine interest, express care and respond appropriately if the desired outcome of establishing feelings of trust is to be achieved. This is sometimes glibly described as ‘establishing rapport’ in classic anthropology texts” (2010:32). To effectively gain trust, one should present as one who can be trusted and then behave accordingly; that is to say, among strangers, especially women, a queer woman-​presenting ethnographer should be aware that to come out or be out is 23 This is a common tenet in the field of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, along with the intense feeling of personal debt (utang na loob) and other characteristics thought to be significant in the psychology of Filipinos. 24 “Lesbians who come out are seen as being confrontational about their self-​identity, an attitude that is met with resistance by a culture that invests so much in establishing ‘harmonious’ relationships . . . Such reaction springs from a notion that coming out is a Western concept that does not fit Philippine realities” (Marin 1996:38). 25 The full quote from Graham is as follows: “All anthropologists enter the field with a body that is organized in a culturally sensible and ordinary way and an implicit body full of echoes and potential singularities capable of springing surprises under the impact of events, of causing a dis-​ease that can shock, challenge, stymie, or inspire” (2014:133–​34, emphasis mine).

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  117 to announce the threat of possibility that could cause discomfort.26 Homosocial environments under a heteronormative regime ostensibly eliminate the potentiality of erotic attention and shape relations between same-​sex actors as sororal or platonic. For most queer people in the Philippines and the United States, coming out is a smaller and usually private affair, though circumstances may determine whether it is a choice or not. The outness of the queer ethnographer has implications beyond the safety of the fieldworker or the impact it may have on access and rapport. Once in the field, the ethnographer who is an insider-​outsider also carries obligations to others, including family and consultants. In the Philippines (and elsewhere, of course) families may accept LGBTQA+ children but only conditionally, demanding that they not talk about it with extended family or in the local community for fear of embarrassment, even if they are already out among friends. In other cases, it may be difficult for consultants with concerns over their own reputations to deal with guilt by association in non-​accepting communities. These scenarios illustrate that the ethnographer never enters the field a blank slate, and that there is sometimes grievous pressure to cover up the slate altogether. As far as I can tell, then, ethnographers could be excused for concluding that professional passing is successful methodology for the fieldworker. For all that, the rite of passage into the heart of a field site is an ethnographic trope that perseveres as one of our most effective narratives, paralleled by the arc of the insider-​outsider self-​consciously drawn to consummation with a metaphoric and/​or real home—​a return or passage to oneself, as it were. One must pass through. For some, like transgender people in dangerous contexts, passing is a matter of life or death. For others, it is a privilege or a convenience that comes closer to Kenji Yoshino’s invocation of Erving Goffman (1963), both of whom use the term “covering” to describe playing down a stigmatized attribute rather than attempting to hide it (see also Barz in this volume). In the safest contexts, such as those I find myself in, passing can be a choice and degrees of failure in passing therefore commonplace.27 In other words, I may cover my queer attractionality or my unscholarly glee with superficial delights while in a professional context. These unregulated fissures in presentation allow observers to discern a kind of identity subtext. Who is at fault for the story that is not told but that fascinates nonetheless, and is there such a thing as a strategy of purposeful not-​quite-​ passing? In a text, television program, or movie, a series of almost revelations held together by a desire to see a subtext establishes with each small unveiling an increasing pleasure in almost knowing the inexplicit. In fan culture, imagining

26 27

The arousal even of mere curiosity can be uncomfortable for some. Liz Goodman writes insightfully about her choice to pass during fieldwork (1988).

118  Christi-Anne Castro character pairings (including same-​sex ones) that are not in the main text shows how the ambiguity of a shadow story can be more attractive than what is actually portrayed. While some fans call for greater LGBTQA+ representation, other fans claim pleasure in hearing the intentional or unintentional whisper of subtext. The subtext is transgressive of the surface text, but together they are polyvalent. Similarly, Mario Rey describes music reception in the following way: “The promise of double readings, or multilayered interpretive possibilities, surfaces as the listeners construct meaning out of a text in different ways, according to their individual needs and experiences. This reading of an alternate discourse is akin to the rewriting that gay men and lesbians engage in when consuming music” (2006:125). Even closer to (my) home, Suzanne Cusick captured something of a lesbian musicality when she remarked, “I remember the first time I fell in love . . . staring up at a radio on top of the fridge, fascinated by the sound of a woman’s voice coming from it . . . memorizing the song, somehow . . . loving it, racing to the kitchen whenever it was there, standing beneath it transfixed” (2006:75, emphases in original). We can read and hear queerly as much as we can perform, pass, cover, and write queerly, and that if we desire to do any of these things, we can also derive pleasure from achieving even small measures of success in the acts of doing. Pleasure is more than the self-​indulgent variety. Graham, for instance, invokes Foucault to insist that pleasures “are like events that open the body to the intrusion of the unexpected, singularities that dislocate previous understandings. Under propitious circumstances they can cause a mismatch between the conceptual grid through which we comprehend our bodies and the feelings and affects of embodiment that move us to forge new concepts and make sense anew” (Graham 2014:134). Here is an articulation of queer theory that can be applied to ethnography and fieldwork, and one that promises new insights. Not only can we be open to possible pleasures in the field, we can admit to them in our writing. We can confess that theorizing to stimulate our intellects feels good, and that our own salvation may be in writing as writers as much as ethnographers. Queer writing gives us permission. As with other experimental ethnographic writing that adopts forms from poetry to dialogue, queer ethnography is both a critique of orthodoxy and an exploration of what more can be known and articulated.28 Other fields may be ahead of ethnomusicology in this respect, but our devotion to music provides access to an embodied and holistic way of knowing that could play a role in writing. And if, as Taylor suggests, there are “striking parallels between the experiences of queerness and music” (Taylor 2012:46), then to be queer in the field may provide insights for ethnomusicological scholarship. I see 28 For an example on ethnography and poetry, see Kent Maynard and Melisa Cahnmann-​Taylor (2010).

Queerness, Ambiguity, Ethnography  119 my writing experiment within this context but concede there are other strategies with more broad utility. The politics of queerness that value visibility and wholeness, for instance, have procured immense gains, and an analogous framework would lead naturally to a writing approach that emphasizes confessional outness.29 At any rate, whatever our vantage point, as ethnographers we share the experiences of being out in the field in one form or another. While there are relatively few professional contexts in which the rewards of outness have outweighed the risks, this anthology provides for the confessions, incautious wordplay, experimentation, and other anti-​normative strategies that galvanize queerness in the constitution of knowledge, leaving our work hopeful and unfinished.

29 In LGBTQA+ communities, coming out is currency and mutual intelligibility, while in the academy being out may validate the perspective of the queer scholar on queer topics over the unmarked scholar of queerness.

8

Outing the Methodological No-​No Translating Queer Space to Field Space Alexander M. Cannon

Nam turned in his chair and asked me to turn up the volume of the song I played from my laptop. I looked at him quizzically and wondered why he had an interest in “Hồng Hồng Tuyết Tuyết,” a tune of vocal music from northern Vietnam called ca trù (Anisensel 2009; Norton 2005). I had tried on a few occasions since we started dating to engage him in conversations about my doctoral work on đờn ca tài tử, a kind of “music for diversion” in southern Vietnam. He feigned interest in the improvised instrumental and vocal tunes I studied for only a few moments before asking to talk about something else. This interest in the esoteric poetry sung by women vocalists typical of ca trù therefore intrigued me. I minimized the field notes I had been writing and turned to watch him mimic the pose of the vocalist as she sang and played the phách, a wooden instrument struck with two short bamboo sticks. He then walked over to the computer, hit the pause button, and continued the vocal line. He sang the highly ornamented melodies typical of ca trù, showing off his vocal dexterity for several minutes. He seemed to delight in annunciating the erudite poetry in the crisp northern Vietnamese dialect as a contrast to the colloquial language and dialect he used in conversation. When he concluded his performance, he explained that he and his other gay friends sang this particular song, one of the most famous ca trù songs, for fun while hanging out in the evening. The genre proved exotic to them, since it has a historical association with wealthy northern Vietnamese and courtesan culture. Evoking the power that women had over their male listeners in performance therefore served as a tactic to undermine heteronormativity of contemporary Vietnam. These performances acted as part of their queer place-​making in the enclave where they lived on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, and crafted a new sense of home for these men who grew up in different parts of Vietnam. Fieldwork yields the unexpected but also requires unexpected encounters to remain vibrant. When I arrived in Vietnam in 2008, I simply intended to take zither and lute lessons with musicians more than twice or three times my age to understand the role of charismatic musicianship in the preservation of traditional music (Cannon 2011). I did not intend to pursue an intimate relationship;

Outing the Methodological No-No  121 indeed, my graduate training had characterized this as a methodological “no-​no” that might distract from my real fieldwork, or worse, might “out” me to research interlocutors who might then refuse to teach me further. Following a period of stagnant research where my interviews were repetitive and directionless, I dispensed with this methodological constraint. Navigating a same-​sex relationship in Vietnam was not something covered in any of my Vietnamese language classes, so it was time consuming but worthwhile. Engaging with our research interlocutors is a learning experience. As Joshua D. Pilzer argues in his poignant ethnography of “comfort women,” one should not aim to “help” them. Interlocutors instead guide ethnographers to understandings that assist the discipline—​as well as other survivors of trauma in Pilzer’s work—​ in deeply meaningful ways (2015:482). By interacting with new social situations and pursuing new relationships, we become new or, at the very least, augmented versions of our previous selves. We make mistakes, deploying power dynamics when we should not; we get taken for rides—​literally and metaphorically—​with those who deploy tactical agency against our strategic assertions of power. We develop and become different; we continually are marked by difference and attempt to recoup some of that difference to better understand how the communities with which we interact undertake similar processes. The knowledge ultimately gleaned about queer communities in Ho Chi Minh City—​including the indirect communication used; fluid identities of queer individuals; strong local support networks; and the existence of protected living enclaves—​soon informed the ways I understood the intricate subtleties of expression in other spheres of contemporary Vietnam. I started asking new questions of musicians who, like members of the queer community, seemed ostracized from a society that values public upward mobility. These musicians reveled in producing a sound in private spaces for knowledgeable listeners. Those who knew how to interpret these sounds did so and responded; those who did not listened unaware of the music’s fluid and alternate meanings. These musicians hid in plain sight, speaking a language only known to them but frustrated by society’s one-​dimensional understanding of them. In other words, I queered my fieldwork perspective to better understand contemporary Vietnamese life. To queer one’s fieldwork means to embrace fluidity and step outside the binaries—​male and female; dominant and subordinate; homosexual and heterosexual; emic and etic—​imposed on the individual in the field. One adapts to experience, navigating barriers to entry and, since entry was not always available through pure force of will, managing failure (Halberstam 2011). Akin to John L.  Jackson’s method of “thin description,” this approach embraces “a nonknowing that disentangles the ethnographer’s will to know everything from an interconnected will to disclose everything” (2013:153; emphasis removed). Jackson foregrounds dialogue here in the pursuit of knowledge

122  Alexander M. Cannon through relationship building and the omnipresent messiness of always never fully knowing. The relationships developed by queering one’s perspective are not necessarily romantic and physical, but they are intimate. One draws on the “nonknowing” of intimacy to understand how friends operate outside of binaries, react to new situations and scenarios, and ultimately make community. Francesca T. Royster makes this observation in her book Sounding Like a No-​No—​a title that invokes Grace Jones’s “no-​no” from the 1981 hit “Walking in the Rain.” “A figure of excess,” Royster writes, “Jones moves between the known and unknowable,” generating excitement, curiosity and even resistance. “Feeling like a woman /​Walking like a man,” Jones sings of “sounding like a no-​no” (2013:165)—​a concept that initially invokes taboo but quickly gives way to a reclamation of power. Inhabiting the “no-​no” appellation made Jones a powerful queer icon: her sound in particular solidified communities of queer expression (2013:144). Ethnomusicologists would do well to understand how the unknowable builds and maintains the intimacy of sounding communities that we spend years studying. Intimacy shapes this narrative, and I  show that a desire oriented towards me—​and ultimately reciprocated by me—​also impacted my identity both as a fieldworker and as a gay man. This narrative does not replicate stories of heterosexual desire in the field. Tackling queer desire is fundamentally different and involves a different set of reflections and tools. Michelle Kisliuk argues that fieldwork researchers need to “continually re-​express [their] identities” in the field (2008:187); however, queer ethnographers have legitimate grounds for hiding certain parts of their identities to protect themselves and others. Coming out in the field—​even partially—​takes time and care. Following Jyoti Puri’s evaluation of identity, gender, and sexuality in post-​ colonial India, I do not want to “reinforce stereotypes” of the submissive romantic partner of the foreign researcher in my descriptions of learning. Furthermore, I  do not want to “reinforce categories” of identity in contemporary Vietnam (1999:1). I draw from the models of ethnomusicologists such as Michelle Kisliuk (1998) and Katherine Hagedorn (2001) who write openly and honestly about their dispositions in and approaches to the field and place myself at the center of this piece. It equally is about Nam and his burgeoning identity as a queer man in a growing cosmopolitan center. He used his identity as productive agent to move in the world, and in the process of rejecting stereotypes and categories of homosexuality, he guided me towards a more nuanced understanding of identity in Vietnam and, indeed, of myself. This article recommends new methods to bring queer phenomenology into the center of ethnomusicology. I propose working with queer interlocutors and drawing on personal queer orientations to open a greater number of points of entry into the fieldwork experience. These additional points of entry enable the

Outing the Methodological No-No  123 ethnomusicologist to interrogate place and the boundaries that produce it; explore new narratives that complement or replace persistent narratives of music practice found in ethnomusicology or the area studies realms in which many ethnomusicologists also operate; and point to new sideward and outward mobilities of musicians that imitate and work alongside queer orientations in the cultural sphere. To pursue these conclusions, I reflect on my experiences operating in queer realms in graduate school and consider how a relationship in the field emboldened me to revisit these experiences, draw strength from them, and ultimately view the relationship as helping generate stronger conclusions in my long-​term ethnographic investigation of southern Vietnamese traditional music.

Queer Phenomenology Ethnomusicologists live at the center of their fieldwork studies to generate more vibrant conclusions concerning musical practice. It bears repeating that one cannot and should not strive for ethnomusicology at arm’s length (Merriam [1967] 2011:43). As Timothy Rice asks in Shadows in the Field: “[C]‌ould theory and method, which take for granted a fixed and timeless ontological distinction between insider and outsider, be reordered within an ontology that understands both researching and researched selves as potentially interchangeable and as capable of change through time, during the dialogues that typify the fieldwork experience?” (1997:106) For ethnomusicologists, answering this question in the affirmative often involves pursuing some form of phenomenological approach to fieldwork and analysis. Jeff Todd Titon, for example, advocates the practice of “phenomenological epistemology” during fieldwork. “If we believe that knowledge is experiential and the intersubjective product of our social interactions, then what we can know arises out of our relations with others, both in the field and among our colleagues where we live and work, and these relations have an ineluctably personal aspect to them” (1997:95). Such an approach, Harris M.  Berger argues, enables the ethnomusicologist to more effectively draw conclusions about the makeup of larger society from lived experiences of observing and taking part in music practice (1999:19–​28). For queer ethnomusicologists, Sara Ahmed’s description of “queer phenomenology” serves as an approach to the fieldwork space—​or, perhaps, the field as queer space. Ahmed’s phenomenology focuses on “the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-​to-​hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 2006:2). This phenomenology attends to the ways in which humans use sexuality to direct ourselves toward particular bodies and objects and “extend through our bodies into the world” (68). We live in a world of straight lines, where things “line up”

124  Alexander M. Cannon and are “in line”—​or made “normal” (bình thường in Vietnamese)—​so as not to seem abnormal or queer. Queer communities and the ethnomusicologists who inhabit them deploy and exploit their out-​of-​alignment to live in the same space as others but live off the straight lines of others. The “queer orientation might not simply be directed toward the ‘same sex,’ but would be seen as not following the straight line” (70). In this sense, a queer phenomenology observes the curves of everyday living, where humans bypass (or bi-​pass), peer over and under, find new connections, and occasionally embrace misalignment as empowered nonknowing. A queer phenomenology of music closely observes these orientations in space and time. Orientation is “a powerful technology insofar as it constructs desire as a magnetic field: it can imply that we are drawn to certain objects and others as if by a force of nature” (Ahmed 2006:85). Importantly, desire is not an end in and of itself; “other things follow” from desire (100, emphasis removed): musicians are “brought into line” or aligned (83) and push other sounds aside to enable this directedness (37). Musicians re-​orient or turn during the listening experience and ultimately impact the ways that they and others perceive space (15, 25–​27; see also Stokes 1994). These emergent communities repeat sounds and actions to generate or solidify histories and memories attached to orientation (Ahmed 2006:56). Orientation, therefore, reminds subjects of the past and assists in the reflection of the passage of time (Ahmed 2006:20; see also Amico 2014:131). Drawing on the power of orientation, I understand the queer in ethnomusicology as the intersection of personhood, oppression, transgression, performance, and fieldwork. Evaluating this intersection widens ethnographers’ understandings of the dynamism of the field site in which they operate. Here, I  add to ethnomusicological work extending Ahmed’s conclusions (Amico 2014:122; Hawkins 2016:8; Leibetseder 2012:1). In personhood, queer scholars and interlocutors find their ways, make community, and generate comfort by gathering sound and bodies and attending to the objects that “arrive” (Ahmed 2006:37). This occurs in spheres of oppression, where interlocutors react to the forces that prevent expression, draw boundaries, and restrict community. Scholarship on gay nightclubs often points most clearly to the reactions to oppression:  “In gay clubs, which have long been spaces to escape straight surveillance,” Sarah Thornton argues, “the celebratory expression of one’s ‘true’ sexuality often overrides other authenticities” (1996:30; see also Buckland 2002). Identities become contested in these environments; nonetheless, queer scholars cannot lose sight of intersectionality in the investigation of expression. Shana Goldin-​Perschbacher has evaluated the oeuvre of singer Meshell Ndegeocello, who blurs boundaries in performance and proposes, for example, alternate masculinities for queer women musicians (2013:473; see also Mitchell 2011; M. R. Smith 2014). In this transgression, queer generates a productive stance as

Outing the Methodological No-No  125 proactive, eliminating boundaries by moving across them (Pennell 2016:321–​ 22). Liberation emerges here as a cliché of transgression; certainly, however, performance establishes identity and makes it mobile. Gibson Ncube’s evaluation of South African musician Nakhane Touré describes how he creates “a space that attempts to exit out of its own intangible closet and impose itself on the tangible world of everyday life” (Ncube 2015:42). Touré uses music to generate a sphere of self-​reflexivity for himself, LGBT individuals, and the South African nation. As ethnomusicologists, then, sometimes we study the queer; sometimes we bring the queer. In fieldwork, we must learn to do both to perform our conclusions as viable and mobile.

Early Fieldwork: From Queering to Querying Fieldwork mobilizes the queer phenomenology needed to craft effective methods of evaluation and analysis. The descriptions in this section plot the history of my engagement with personhood, oppression, transgression, and performance when I conducted fieldwork on “Gay Night” at a local nightclub as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I moved with other gay men from one dance floor to another, crafting place within the sonic, visual, and social environments of the club. I also conducted interviews with participants, including one individual whom I will call Adam. Ethnomusicologists define fieldwork through space and place, which have specific meanings for expression, whether queer or not. Yi-​Fu Tuan describes space as free and open, but also as threatening (Tuan 1977:6; also see Buckland 2002:7). The Michigan nightclub serves multiple local constituencies on different evenings, including a College Night and a Goth Night. On Gay Night, two dance-​ floor spaces—​the main dance floor, described by Adam as “techno-​serious,” and a dance-​floor in the basement, described as “pop-​y” or involving Top-​40 popular music—​emerge at the intersection of certain kinds of fashion, mannerisms, and music (interview with the author, October 16, 2007; see also Amico 2006). Dancers construct place here through interaction with others to minimize the threat of the space; these places are secure, stable, and endowed with value (Tuan 1977:7). As dancers move, they stabilize queer identities through bodies and movement for later use (Buckland 2002:3). Ultimately, this place-​making sustains transgression for participants. For Adam, attending the nightclub with friends simply allows the dancer to feel “sexy” outside of the glaring observations of the spaces of everyday life outside of the club. My performance through the various dance spaces generated significant understanding of the diverse place making in the various dance floors situated with the space of the club. As a fieldworker who tested these boundaries to understand

126  Alexander M. Cannon them better, fellow dancers scrutinized and responded to my actions (Burnim 1985:442). On more than one occasion, I danced in such a manner that led another man to pivot and dance with me, which generated a sense of place between us before I continued moving. On another occasion, while looking for a friend, I danced carelessly into a formation of women; as a result, they stopped dancing, glared at me, and some left the dance floor. I soon understood the importance of these social units to the construction of a pleasant experience at Gay Night. By crossing the boundary into their unit, I had destroyed their fun.1 I learned through these interactions that different music tracks encourage movement in different ways depending upon the piece of music played, the context in which it is played, and the biography of the dancer. This intersection of music and the body ultimately helps the dancer learn what the queer community in the space values.2 Some songs arouse little response, as the dancers cannot enjoyably juxtapose their lives or collective memories with the songs, while other songs generate great enthusiasm. Well-​known club songs, new songs that have recognizably enjoyable beat and bass patterns, well-​crafted songs with extensive juxtapositions of tension and release, and well-​constructed links between songs create an atmosphere for dancing. As Adam notes, “when we kept hearing good songs after the other, we’re like ‘okay, we’ll leave after the next song’ but then another song comes back on, and we’re like ‘no, we’ll stay more’ and we keep dancing until a bad song comes on, and then we’ll probably go outside and just relax out on the patio or whatever” (interview with the author, October 16, 2007). A song like the Village People’s “YMCA” elicits very strong bodily and listening responses on Gay Night, which tend to direct the dancers’ attention inward. This intensity usually does not last for more than a couple of songs as dancers become tired, and new songs do not meet the expanding expectations of the dancers. The degree of engagement with sound fluctuates, often revealing fractures in place where the uncertain and oppressive nature of space reappears. What may seem liberating at one moment changes to exclusion at another. Stephen Amico (2001:364–​65) notes how classifications of the idealized masculine gay male found outside of clubs—​namely “no pecs, no sex” found at a New York City gym, and “no fats, no fems” often found in personal ads—​also are found inside clubs. In the Michigan club, Adam reflects on the scrutiny of the club in the following way:

1 This type of experience is not unique, as Fiona Buckland has documented a similar interruption whereby a male striptease disrupted the place construction of a group of lesbian women (2002:111–​12). 2 Steven Feld writes of similar musical practices in his discussion of a listener’s “interpretive moves” ([1994] 2005:86).

Outing the Methodological No-No  127 I remember thinking, like, at the club: we can’t be openly gay as much outside but I never thought how much, kind of, freedom we have [in the club] . . . but still . . . you still have social pressures [in terms of] what [a]‌gay guy has to be like, you know? And if you don’t really fulfill those, people might look at you differently. Even at the club, like, if they don’t like how you look or something, they might, kind of, judge you, and I think that’s an emotional safety kind of thing. . . . Like, do you feel secure? . . . I’ve had moments when I don’t. And that brings down my mood. (Interview with the author, October 16, 2007; emphasis verbalized)

The intense sense-​of-​place diminishes in these “moments,” opening up physical space on the dance-​floor as peripheral areas or areas just outside of the constructed boundary of the dance floor. These peripheral areas are liminal, creating spatial manifestations of oppression outside the places on the dance floor. Members of this peripheral area, who were typically alone, come to the nightclub to express their identities, but their expressions are not welcome. As participants dance on the main dance-​floor, onlookers often look longingly, as if they wished to enter the dance floor, but the policing glares, as well as the inhibitions of the onlooker, prevent the traversal of the boundary. These stares do not always lead to departure from the club, as some people seem to stand in the peripheral area for most of the evening, only entering the dance-​floor when the policing stares are at a minimum. These fieldwork experiences built a corpus of knowledge and methods that better prepared me for long-​term fieldwork. With a better sense of my own personhood, I  understood the oppression that directed queer individuals to this space, as well as the oppression that waxed and waned over the course of an evening; the transgression that sustained place and made the experience meaningful and fun; and finally, the performances that moved participants within and through the space. This fieldwork therefore made me more attuned to the mobility that created and destroyed place, and the narratives that emerged from these performances. Queer phenomenology, then, should have served me well when I traveled to Vietnam.

Queering the Field Site The process of acclimating to the field is a jarring one, even following extensive preparation. Without thorough self-​reflection before, during, and after fieldwork, the ethnographer follows a straight line into the field unaware of the narratives carried. Despite understandings gathered in my Gay Night fieldwork exercise, I resolved to forget this lived experience when I traveled to Vietnam to conduct

128  Alexander M. Cannon my doctoral research. I later turned back to the queer when I realized the knowledge and observations I missed by only toeing the “line” (Ahmed 2006:17). The critical lens that accompanies queer phenomenology further protected the communities and music I studied. Even though none of the musicians mentioned here professed queer identities, I would have misinterpreted their music practice had I simply driven “straight” into a community of traditional musicians. Entering Ho Chi Minh City in June 2008, as an empty vessel without paying attention to personhood, I inadvertently adopted certain residues of colonization and Westernization to play it straight. When I arrived, I initially found community with an expatriate crowd. Most had unidirectional lives in the cosmopolitan center of the city: they often did not learn Vietnamese, saw Vietnam as an opportunity for easy riches, and took weekend trips to the Mũi Né beaches to tan and drink cheap beer. Many of them oriented toward Asia as an object of desire, and in so doing, they remained “orientated ‘around’ the Occident” (Ahmed 2006:116).3 As Ahmed further explains in her discussion of the binds between the straight, white, and colonial, they maintained an orientalist discourse to generate knowledge about the West through not simply gazing toward the East but actively taking part in the affairs of the East (115). This process generates boundaries and domesticates, where some objects become “reachable” and others are kept at a distance (117).4 In “find[ing] its way,” the West orders ways of knowing and ways of being the world over. It is no exaggeration, then, to advocate this as “world making” that constitutes a continual process of “circulating whiteness” (129) to make it easier for the expatriates of northern European stock to live, work, and travel wherever they wished. My first research experiences in this environment proved one-​dimensional. I initially tried to understand the nature and use of traditional music by asking musicians, consumers, and even friends of mine how they understood traditional music and its place in southern Vietnam. Most indicated that they did not know or did not care; a few even indicated that I should travel to Hanoi in northern Vietnam to ask academics how they understood southern Vietnamese music. In my frustration, I concentrated on lessons with Nhạc sư (master musician) Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo, one of the foremost masters of đờn ca tài tử who was, at that time, ninety-​one years old. In my initial months of lessons, we had many 3 In the first years on the tenure track at my previous academic institution, a rumor circulated among my colleagues that I  traveled to Vietnam so often because I  had a lover there; evidently, conducting research on and writing about Vietnam was not convincing enough to warrant frequent travel. As if I needed any reminder of the historical gaze toward Asia, my colleagues oriented me toward a lover in Asia while orienting themselves around a common “Western” assumption that Asia is first a place for love-​making; studying cultural production is secondary. 4 A. J. Racy (2016:198) writes about the process of “domesticating otherness” where musicians “appropriate . . . a theme [such as the belly dancer or snake charmer], symbolically load it, or reload it, and make it part of [their] own expressive repertoire.”

Outing the Methodological No-No  129 conversations about preservation. In one, he imparted the importance of not imitating in performance. Vietnamese traditional music is improvised music where one musician draws on modal structures and associated ornamentation to express emotions and states of mind at a particular moment in time and space. Ensembles should have a handful of musicians improvising together, and each should play a different version of the melody associated with a tune. To remove the ornamentation attached to the mode and to play in large ensembles of twenty musicians “kills the Vietnamese traditional music” (interview with the author, October 3, 2008). I understood this as another way of indicating how he understood traditional music better than others. As our lessons continued, Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo seemed to repeat these same conclusions, and my research stagnated. I became increasingly uncertain of the goals of my research, so I spent longer periods of time in cafés reading books and writing notes to myself. Meeting Nam threw into stark relief the worldview I continued to propagate by affiliating with this expatriate crowd and ultimately allowed me to understand the communities made by him and by the musicians with whom I studied.5 My first interactions with Nam took place at a café in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City in which I found respite during the midday heat to write up field notes. He worked as a barista, and when bringing a coffee to me, he struck up conversations initially in English and later in Vietnamese. He once asked me if I might help him improve his English, but I responded that I simply did not have the time. He left visibly sad, and for days after, I reflected on my curt response but on also why he would ask me this—​I was no English teacher but a research student who studied traditional music. I considered that helping improve one’s English might be a euphemism for going on a date or, possibly, for sex. He later mentioned that my study of traditional music suggested a queer identity. I ultimately agreed to meet Nam and to broaden my understanding of queer expression. When we met at another café in an adjacent district, the conversation we had was perhaps the most eye-​opening discussion of identity I had in Vietnam. We spent the first forty-​five minutes using various roundabout ways to ask if the other was gay. At one point, he said, “mình không thể lấy vợ” (I cannot marry a woman). I responded with “tôi cũng vậy” (me neither). Here, I elected a formal pronoun, “tôi,” used in situations where individuals do not yet know each other well. As we continued this complicated dance, we learned more about one another—​my research goals and his wish to travel outside of Vietnam—​and started referring to one another by pronouns used between family members,

5 Adopting a queer perspective eliminates neither my whiteness, nor my comparatively greater disposable income. Both generate considerable power disparities as the white man meets a Vietnamese partner who holds the knowledge that the white man seeks. Similar stories have been explored elsewhere, including Carol Oja’s (1990) investigation of Colin McPhee (1946).

130  Alexander M. Cannon certain close friends, and lovers. This language, where he was “em,” meaning younger sibling, a woman in a heterosexual relationship, or the younger man of a same-​sex relationship, and I was “anh,” meaning older brother, a man in a heterosexual relationship, or the older man of a same-​sex relationship, established some consistency in the conversation. At a certain point, we had reached a level of certainty that the other was queer. He finally offered an anecdote about liking the company of men, and I said softly that I was “đồng tính” (gay, literally “same sex”), a term I understood to be shorthand for đồng tính luyến ái (literally “same-​ sex love” or “same-​sex romance”). He smiled and said, “I guessed that.” In this conversation, Nam taught me about the comfort that familiar places bring members of the gay community. At times, he appeared anxious sitting in the brightly lit space of the international coffee chain. I thought at the time that the discomfort stemmed from our conversation. He told me later that he did not view the space as being marked as queer-​friendly; indeed, its marble interior was oppressive, since conversations resonated and could be heard easily by other patrons. Many of his co-​workers at the café where he worked, and even the manager there, were queer. They were invisible in plain sight, transgressing in the restrictive space of contemporary Vietnam to provide a close-​knit network of support. Many also lived in a ward of an outlying district alongside other queer individuals. Living and working with other members of the queer community generates new forms of stability and mobility in the crowded space of Ho Chi Minh City. In her work on the lesbian community (cộng đồng les) in Ho Chi Minh City, Natalie Newton argues that “invisibility . . . [is] a productive force, rather than . . . a negative consequence of social inequality” (2015:112). Being visible is potentially dangerous and oftentimes unproductive; “strategic invisibility” generates greater resistance to the various hegemonic structures of Vietnamese social and political norms (114). This invisibility also enables space to take on a moveable quality, from online les (lesbian) forums to specific outdoor cafés to karaoke bars, rather than a bounded physical location (116). Noisy outdoor spaces, for example, blur the distinction between public and private, allowing les to meet and speak without being heard by non-​les in close physical proximity (122–​23). Newton’s work aligns with recent studies of Vietnam from political science and anthropology that interpret the impact of the rapid economic and cultural development in Vietnamese urban spaces (Leshkowich 2014; Schwenkel 2012; Truitt 2008); emergent notions of self (Tran 2015); and life on the outskirts of the mainstream (Harms 2011; Nguyễn-​võ 2008; Taylor 2007, 2014). Those who live and work inside the cosmopolitan and increasingly globalized urban structures of contemporary Vietnam—​including les as described by Newton; members of the Ho Chi Minh City gay community I met; musicians of traditional music; and others—​seek to craft de-​territorialized and invisible spaces within which they

Outing the Methodological No-No  131 propose alternative ways of becoming. Like Newton, I do not study enclaves of musicians or queer individuals—​something Newton sees in the literature on “gay men’s spaces” rather than the spaces she studies among the les community (Newton 2015:115–​16)—​but instead study the space-​and place-​making strategies of marginalized groups. The relationship between queer identity and Vietnamese music making has received little examination except for Barley Norton’s brief and brilliant mention of the increasingly public expression of queer identities among male spirit mediums in northern Vietnam. As part of the lên đồng ritual associated with the Mother Goddess religion, male and female mediums facilitate the communication between a vast spiritual pantheon and the community in attendance. Conducting research in the 1990s, Norton found that many of the male mediums (đồng cô) professed having private relationships with men. Although considered separate from performing the function of spirit medium, the ritual provides a space for the recognition—​although not outright expression—​of queer identities even when media outlets condemned homosexuality (2006:71–​72). By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-​first century, media described gay male mediums as “obsessed with sex, money, and the latest fashions” (2009:184). These descriptions draw heavily from perceptions of “Western homosexual identities”—​a linkage that serves to “externaliz[e]‌ . . . homosexuality as an identity” and “subject . . . homoeroticism to new forms of control” (Norton 2009:186). Norton views both the đồng cô and “modern gay identities” (identified as “gay” or “homo” in Vietnamese) as existing alongside one another in contemporary Vietnamese space (187). Being queer in Vietnam intersects public and private space, as well as local and cosmopolitan methods of being-​in-​the-​world. At this complex intersection, queer individuals learn to craft poignant agency. A practiced agent, Nam took the lead in encouraging our relationship and directed us to places with which I was not always comfortable. He remained the most confident of the two of us in public and was the first to speak of love in private. When he asked if I loved him, I hesitated and said, “not yet.” He was not pleased with this response, but I suggested that although we spoke in Vietnamese, the term for love, yêu, had a different meaning than the English word “love”—​a concept I only had experienced in English. He accepted this but argued that my understanding of Vietnamese concepts should catch up with my facility with the language. Nam deployed his imagination to maintain this agency, which occasionally led to tensions. He imagined the process of enrapturing a male patron in a ca trù parlor; a trip to the Korea he saw in the Korean dramas he watched with friends; and a career outside of Vietnam. The latter became apparent when he told me that he looked forward to moving to the United States with me and attaining US citizenship. But in 2008, same-​sex partners of US citizens could gain neither citizenship nor a green card. As I explained this to him, he became disappointed,

132  Alexander M. Cannon and I  began to doubt the reasons why he wanted to be in this relationship. Compounded by my own twenty-​something insecurities concerning my own value, I considered whether he might be using me towards his own ends. He deployed his agency—​an agency I admired greatly—​to achieve goals not easily achieved by gay men in Vietnam. He overturned the stereotypes and categories persistently imposed on him and sought a new life where he could prosper. In that moment, however, I felt like the empty vessel again, and not long after, I ended the relationship. For days afterward, he called me wanting to know what he had done wrong. “We’re not compatible,” I suggested; “please don’t call me anymore,” I pleaded. We were both hurt: he caused me to question my self-​worth, and I  had seriously derailed a goal to which he had been patiently working. Developing agency always brings growing pains; however, as the rest of this chapter suggests, both he and I recovered and prospered.

Orientations in Southern Vietnamese Traditional Music Following Nam’s model of agency became an effective way to re-​orient myself away from the narratives and histories embodied by the expatriate community, and my perspective on contemporary Vietnamese everyday life grew considerably. My reactivated queer identity served as a lens through which I interrogated the ways that musicians constructed personhood through music and the oppressive narratives and histories they faced every day. “If anthropologists acknowledge . . . that their sexuality is problematic and negotiable in interactions with field partners,” Fran Markowitz advocates, “their ethnographic representations will be more balanced, richer, and more authentic if perhaps less objective” (1999:172). I understood how the musicians with whom I worked tweaked their narratives to transgress the horizon of possibilities dictated by global, neoliberal, and governmental narratives. Understanding the performance of unspoken language, gesture, and ultimately music best resulted from multiple simultaneous orientations that emerge from a queer phenomenology. Through a queered lens, I realized that I listened to what Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo said in our lessons, but I did not hear him. I did not understand how he made place, re-​positioned common narratives, and became mobile through practice. When he repeated himself from one lesson to another, he indicated in subtle terms that my questions and budding performance abilities did not embody the ideas that he imparted. To kill traditional music meant to keep music stationary. Performances of twenty zithers playing the same tune generated singular meanings. When musicians replicated these performances verbatim over space and time, these singular meanings circulated, preventing variation, improvisation, and engagement with the audience.

Outing the Methodological No-No  133 My interactions with Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo became more vibrant, and I finally seemed to understand him. In one lesson in January 2009, for example, we covered ground about expression through Vietnamese music and what practice imparts about identity. In this interview about the improvised prelude or rao, we spoke in English and Vietnamese; therefore, some excerpts of this transcript have been translated into English for ease of reading. AMC: I’m curious about . . . I’m still trying to understand what is “Vietnamese” about this . . . Do you think it is considered Vietnamese because of the intricate nature of it . . . because you’re almost exploring emotions and sentiments by manipulating the string in different ways? Is that one of the reasons why it is Vietnamese?    NVB: My prelude is something like a conversation. . . . When you enter into a conversation [with a friend], you have the first phrase. . . . You first introduce your wife, and after that, your children—​the first son, the second son. And then you explain to him about your [life] situation. Sometimes you get angry, sometimes you apologize; [each time], you express your sentiments. The prelude therefore serves as a method of communicating one’s current state-​ of-​being to a listener or to another individual in the ensemble. I then attempted to draw on a technique that he frequently employed, that of connecting a topic of conversation to another language—​in this case French, which we occasionally spoke. Like my moves on the dance floor, I adopted certain strategies of my interlocutors to learn how they worked. My attempt did not work perfectly in this example, but the practice generated a new topic of conversation and, interestingly, caused him to include some words in French: AMC: Oh I see. So like in English, I would say, “Hello, my name is Alex. It’s nice to meet you. How are you doing today?” Or, but in French, [I say], “Bonjour, je m’appelle Alex . . .” NVB: It depends on the circumstance or the situation. Sometimes when [someone] comes to see you, you get angry. Sometimes you say something that plais [or] makes him unhappy; other times, you apologize. And sometimes in your apology, it includes a piece of criticisme or includes a joke. Something like that. AMC: Oh, okay I see. NVB: You know, the majority of musicians . . . don’t like me. They do not do the same things [that I do]. They play automatically. When you ask someone why he plays this phrase first and this phrase after, he cannot explain it you. [He simply states:] “I play the first phrase after the second, [then] the third, and [finally] I come to end the piece.” That is all.

134  Alexander M. Cannon By adopting one of his techniques, we synchronized our discourse and established a momentary sense of place. Our conversation became fluid, and as I asked further questions, he provided lengthier answers. Over the course of this conversation, I developed a better understanding of expression through musical communication of đờn ca tài tử performers. Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo indicated, for instance, the importance of improvising to create a unique musical conversation based on the individuals present and the current disposition of the performer. His practice, he continued, fosters a release of concern, anger, and worry: When you get tired, you play a piece of music and you feel very happy. [When] you are angry, [it] goes away . . . Sometimes, I get vertigo . . . and [when] I play music . . . the vertigo goes away, flies away. Music is . . . like medicine! (Interview with the author, January 15, 2009)

He iterated here a different kind of narrative for performance. Instead of communicating one concept, such as affirming the nation (Cannon 2013), performers acclimate and respond to new conditions. These conversations ultimately allowed me to study how musicians of đờn ca tài tử craft senses of place through musical practice. As I have argued elsewhere, musicians do this by gathering various performance forces, including new instruments, melodies, and individuals to craft effective performance (Cannon 2012; 2013; 2016a; 2016b). In the late nineteenth century, these gatherings served to create a distinctive southern Vietnamese sound that drew on religious music, folksongs, and court music that had moved into the region as the Việt (or Kinh) people migrated into the Mekong Delta. Of the many gatherings of the twentieth century, wealthy dilettantes in the urban spaces of Chợ Lớn and Sài Gòn hosted performances in the 1960s and early 1970s to make đờn ca tài tử a high-​art form of entertainment. Following the “Liberation of Saigon” (Sài Gòn giải phóng) in April 1975—​also known by many in the Vietnamese diaspora as the “Fall of Saigon” (Sài Gòn thất thủ)—​musicians and consumers of traditional music worked to re-​establish music for survival purposes. One friend, the late Phạm Ngọc Lanh, once told me that Vietnamese musicians often did not have enough to eat following the end of the war in Vietnam and therefore could not muster the energy to hold performances of full works (interview with the author, March 8, 2009). He also had experienced hunger when he was interred for two-​and-​a-​half years at a re-​education camp for being an English-​language teacher in South Vietnam (interview with the author, January 27, 2009). Until the end of his life, he listened to traditional music to connect to the past, to recall pleasant memories of

Outing the Methodological No-No  135 individuals who attended past performances with him, and to reflect on the new resources he provided to his family. With increasing ease of international communication, musicians in Vietnam now collaborate with musicians in diaspora to disseminate knowledge about traditional music and communicate in new ways. Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo related, for example, that he performed very little after 1975 because the music he created did not align with state narratives concerning the appropriate “development” of socialist realist musical culture (Cannon 2012:130; 2016b). Only when a group of Vietnamese living in diaspora encouraged him to teach online did he begin to perform with greater earnestness (Cannon 2012:131–​33). These musicians either understood the communication that takes place through đờn ca tài tử improvisation or expressed a great willingness to put in the labor required to learn. Music, ultimately, generates a sense of intimacy between musicians. During a later conversation, Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo focused on the ways instruments enable this sense. Not all traditional musicians . . . understand . . . how to use music to commit the intimate confidence [into] . . . the music. They . . . play music to enjoy [themselves and] enjoy others. That is all. For me, sometimes at night, I go to bed very late—​one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning. At that time, I . . . commit my intimate confidence into my đàn tranh [sixteen-​or seventeen-​stringed zither]. I play with it. I make it talk on my behalf, [say] what I am feeling. And after that, I feel . . . free [and] go to bed. I have a very good sleep! I look at my đàn tranh, I find it my good friend. He shares my sorrow, my unhappiness. That is music. (Interview with the author, March 26, 2009)

In this comment, he personified the instrument as a male friend through which he communicates ideas. Like everyday conversation through which one might articulate one’s arguments, hopes, and desires, he uses the instrument as an interlocutor through which he negotiates his concerns. These conversations not only allowed me to understand the dynamics of musical communication in performance, but also pinpointed the importance of gender in đờn ca tài tử. A queer phenomenology encourages the ethnomusicologist to play in, around, and through concepts observed in the field. I therefore began taking note of gendered performance in the field as well as ultimately performing these different genders myself. My Vietnamese language instructor once argued, for example, that I appeared demure and yếu đuối, meaning weak or effeminate. During another lesson, she indicated that my choice of musical instrument, the đàn tranh, “seemed emotive of the feminine” (có vẻ nữ tính). Many musicians also described the sound of the đàn tranh as akin to a woman’s voice (Cannon 2016a:149). Some

136  Alexander M. Cannon musicians with whom I worked propagated this perception for performative effect; indeed, during my research with the Sounds of the Homeland Ensemble (Cannon 2013), the director Phạm Thúy Hoan often coached female students on how to move gracefully while playing the đàn tranh, arguing that it was designed to show off feminine grace. Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo once argued that this was gimmicky, but when I imitated these gestures to him and his daughter, they laughed harder than I had ever seen. After this, they often asked me to replicate these movements for others when I visited them. Playing a “feminine grace” indicated not only that I understood this stereotype, but also that I rejected it to some degree. The performance of gender often emerged in male homosocial environments in which I observed performance. In these spaces, men used depictions of great melancholy possible with the đàn tranh to commiserate with one another. The meaning of the music was not “straight” in the sense that the meaning is clear; the music was “off the line,” communicating deep sorrow, personal anguish, and even social commentary that only the other men in the scene understood. These men sat close and remained tactile by placing their arms around one another or placing their hands on each other’s legs. This did not imply a queer sexual orientation per se but indicated a common method of socialization and emotional support nurtured by music and homosocial environments. My queer identity helped me perceive the negotiation of the masculine in performance, oftentimes when men started performing overt heterosexuality in performance practice. As I  have argued elsewhere (2016a:150–​51), đờn ca tài tử performances in the Mekong Delta often involve the presence of a single female singer who serves as silent interlocutor through which men craft their masculinity. These male gazes were a point of discomfort for me. I felt badly for these women and debated with myself how I might intervene and support their voices. When these men encouraged waitresses in short skirts to drink from their beer glasses and asked me to comment on the beauty of the waitresses, I too felt silenced. In a moment of desperation, I wrote in a field note in January 2015: “This is a male space, certainly, that requires women [for men to express] their camaraderie and manliness. I’m not sure how much longer I can stand to be here.” When my identity and sense of decorum clashed in this way, I learned a great deal about the operations of the performance space. My early departure soon followed, however, with a hope that the musicians saw the connection between their behavior and my exit.

Conclusion Ethnomusicology desperately needs queer orientations. Conducting fieldwork is not akin to attending summer camp, where we have “great fun” having new

Outing the Methodological No-No  137 experiences and learning things (Saunders 2001:88). Ethnomusicologists produce knowledge and understanding through grueling work, often confronting personal biases, painful histories, and conflicting narratives. Deploying queer orientations and queer theory brings us “out of line” with the colonial, racist, sexist, ableist, and other narratives in which we receive our educations; it enables us to interrogate our orientations and understand better what our fieldwork consultants describe to us. Scholarship in queer studies or on queer music-​ making provides tools for studying, gathering, and deploying musical forces by musicians of popular, traditional, and other musics. Importantly, one does not need to identify as queer or constantly be on the lookout for a lover while in the field. Leaving one’s attention to queer theory or one’s queer orientation at passport control, as I did, does a great disservice to ethnographic practice. My understanding of the ways musicians orient themselves to objects—​including sexualized ones—​ only emerged after I  had re-​ oriented myself to queer perspectives by dating and learning from a man in Ho Chi Minh City. During my fieldwork, I paid attention to making personhood in peripheral spaces of Ho Chi Minh City; the oppression faced by these musicians; the transgressions they undertook towards expression; the performances that disseminated knowledge to communities in southern Vietnam and in diaspora. These orientations pointed me to the ways that musicians communicate history and generate traditional music in the crowded and shifting space of southern Vietnam.

Postlude In October 2016, I spent one week in southern and central Vietnam visiting universities as part of a university delegation. After completing meetings in Nha Trang, my colleagues boarded a flight to Hanoi while I waited for a flight to Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam’s tourism industry has grown faster than airports have been planned and built so while my colleagues boarded a sleek jet bridge, I took a bus to a remote gate to board the plane. Squashed against a window of the new Korean-​made bus, I considered the history of the airport and counted the planes on the tarmac. The members of the United States military who had built the airport during the American War certainly would not have imagined the national airline of the former Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) parked next to the planes of two Vietnamese low-​cost carriers ready to take passengers to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Other Cold War–​ era adversaries also had a presence at the airport: an Air China flight on its way to Chongqing taxied out to the runway, and four jets belonging to a Russian charter airline sat parked at the far end of the airport. Those American engineers certainly would have called this scene queer.

138  Alexander M. Cannon I jumped out of the bus onto the hot tarmac, climbed the stairs, and quickly entered the air-​conditioned interior. Turning into the aisle, I stopped to find Nam helping a passenger put her bag in an overhead bin. Nam had become a flight attendant, it seemed, and eight years after our messy breakup, we were reunited in a space with no usable exit. My first instinct was to turn around, feign illness, and get back on the bus to the terminal. This was unrealistic, however, and feeling a push from the passengers behind me, I walked toward my seat. As I looked directly at him and met his gaze, his eyes grew wide and he mouthed, “Oh my god!” We exchanged brief pleasantries, but feeling another push from behind, I quickly sought my seat. Again, cursing the lack of a chapter on relationships in any of my Vietnamese-​language textbooks, I started to prepare responses to questions he might ask me: Why did you really break up with me? Do you have a new boyfriend? Do you want to get back together? The situation became worse after that. I found my seat and started to put my bag in the overhead compartment, but the shrill voice of a child sitting in the seat next to mine interrupted my racing thoughts with the words, spoken in English, “You’re really fat! You’re not going to fit into the seat because you’re too fat!” I looked down, and only mustered a meek, “No, I’m not.” His mother quickly admonished him in Vietnamese that he was being rude, but he continued the taunts. I momentarily considered that this child had somehow channeled my inner demons that often spoke on entry into nightclubs—​“You’re so fat! You’re not going to fit!”—​but quickly decided to repeat in Vietnamese what his mother had told him. I then sat and considered why I had not taken the train. The flight was uneventful after that. Nam treated me kindly, bringing me free snacks and coffee and making chitchat when he was able. When the hour was up, we wished each other well but do not remain in touch. We have changed significantly since we dated, but we drew on the relationship ultimately to ground ourselves and achieve our life goals discussed during our first date: he undertook new career opportunities that ultimately allowed him to travel outside of Vietnam, and I conducted better research. Music serves the same purpose. Two musicians may not speak to one another after a performance, but both have new tools for communication and new methods of expression to pursue after it ends. They too inflict pain on one another but simultaneously experience growth. I only really accessed an understanding of traditional music by embracing the queer I was (and am), and by embracing the ethnomusicologist I wanted to be.

9

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance Musical Spaces in Cuba’s Gay Ambiente Moshe Morad*

Introduction My first visit to Cuba in 1994 was at the height of the economic crisis. There were few incoming flights to Havana’s old airport, and food and basic goods were scarce. The first two friends I made in Cuba, Yunier and Raúl1, both students at the University of Havana, admitted when I invited them for dinner that they had not eaten meat for weeks (and they were not vegetarian). Milk, at the time, was supplied only by rations and only to households with children under the age of seven. One evening, walking outside my hotel, while being followed by the suspecting eyes of the hotel’s security guard, who was not accustomed to sole tourists walking alone outside the hotel at night,2 I ventured into a dark park at the entrance to Habana Vieja (Old Havana). I sat on a bench, and soon my eyes met a pair of piercing eyes glittering in the dark. Smiles were exchanged, and since that time Alejandro became my guide to Havana’s ambiente (“the ambience,” a discreet gay term for “gay scene”). What started as a holiday romance turned into a passionate research project (excuse the double entendre), and Alejandro became one of my main informants and a friend for life. When I asked him to come out of the park so that we could sit in the café of the nearby Hotel Inglaterra and chat, he replied: I can’t. Cubans are not allowed to enter the hotels or even walk the streets with foreigners [tourists]. If they see me with you outside this [dark] park, the police will immediately ask for my papers and I might get in trouble. Tomorrow I’ll come back dressed differently [he was wearing shorts and a vest at the time] and * This chapter is based on and includes excerpts from my book Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (2014). 1 In order to protect my informants’ anonymity, I use pseudonyms. 2 At that time, most tourists were expected to leave the hotel in organized groups or with authorized local guides and not go solo.

140  Moshe Morad the hotel’s security guard will take me for a tourist so I can sit with you in the café without being harassed.

The plot worked. The next evening, Alejandro appeared, exactly at 8:00 p.m., as we had arranged, dressed up in long trousers and a well-​ironed buttoned shirt. The hotel’s security guard watched him approach me, so Alejandro immediately shook my hand formally while shooting me a furtive wink, and we both sat down in the café, ordering two mojitos, and clapping hands to the band singing the Havana café’s signature tune, “Hasta Siempre Commandante,” hailing “the commander,” Che Guevara. “Because I am White, short and stocky, many Cubans take me for a Mexican tourist,” whispered Alejandro smiling. However, about ten minutes later he began to look slightly nervous and impatient. I noticed that the security guard was watching our table with increasing scrutiny. “Let’s go,” he said abruptly. I paid the bill and we set off along the Paseo del Prado towards the seaside promenade, the Malecón. The poorly lit avenue was heaving with people, hanging around and chatting loudly. Alejandro felt more secure talking freely with me “en la calle” (“on the street,” a popular expression indicating outdoors which I kept hearing from Alejandro whenever I suggested we meet and talk). Indeed, most habaneros meet and socialize “en la calle.” Here his speech changed from a low-​voiced, unaccented Spanish to the typical Cuban sing-​song, rolling his rs charmingly and laughing fool-​heartedly. Still, every time Alejandro sensed a policeman nearby (and he had an uncanny way of detecting them even if they were hiding in some dark corner), he immediately kept away from me. There was a certain section of the avenue, more brightly lit with several policemen in sight, where he insisted that we walk on separate sides of the street, only to reunite when the area was darker and “safe” enough to resume our conversation. When we approached the Malecón, I heard a familiar Cuban dance music tune from an open window and started whistling. Alejandro’s face suddenly lit up. “You like Cuban music? Let’s go to dance tonight, me and you!” he said with a wink. I was perplexed. We cannot talk freely in a café or out on the street, but we can dance together? “Where?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you have gay discos here . . .” “No way!” he laughed loudly. “We’ll go to the fiesta—​the ‘fiesta de diez pesos!’ ” His subdued expression and eyes roving in all directions for policemen gave way to an enthusiastic, vital expression as he realized that I needed some explanation: Listen, Moché,3 the situation is mierdas [shit] here, especially for us [gays], but when we are in the fiesta it all changes for one night. . . . I told you that some 3 My first name is pronounced Moshé, but Cubans do not pronounce “sh.” As a result, my name changes to Moché when pronounced by Cubans. One of my informants even used to call me jokingly “Moché Guevara.”

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  141 days I don’t even have one proper meal, but when I am in the fiesta with the music, I don’t feel hungry, or humiliated, or like a frightened maricón [faggot] running away from the police . . . I feel myself. I feel free. I feel happy.

I wondered where one could possibly find a gay party in a city without a single gay bar, where gay gatherings are not allowed and police are present everywhere. “Don’t worry,” he replied with wry confidence. “It’s Friday night. Let’s go further down the Malecón, and then to the Yara cinema—​the taxi drivers there will know where tonight’s fiesta is.” In Havana, taxi drivers seem to know a great deal more than most people. I was confused but intrigued as we set off in the dark along the promenade’s wall, with hardly any cars on the wide road. After a few miles on foot, we finally reached a section bustling with people—​some standing, others sitting on the embankment wall, everyone busily chatting. To my amazement, a few travesti (a local term used for cross-​dressers and transgender people) were walking up and down in tight glittering mini-​dresses and high-​heeled shoes. Alejandro had just led me into a scenario I would have never imagined existing here in Cuba. From this moment, my long journey of exploration and discovery of the island had begun. This spot along the Malecón was the gate to Havana’s ambiente and its unique musical spaces, a place to which I would return on different trips over the next twelve years. The underground scene I  discovered, the ambiente, was full of emotions, turbulence, paradoxes, and conflicts, a world full of light which survives and thrives “in the dark,” metaphorically and literally—​in fact, during my fieldwork, I experienced dozens of blackouts due to power-​cuts (a frequent occurrence in the mid-​1990s in Havana), sometimes oddly enough only in the “gay” area, the corner of Malecón and Avenida 23. Many of my gay informants claimed these were initiated by the authorities, especially in times when there were visiting dignitaries staying at the nearby Hotel Nacional, “like when the Pope was visiting [1998], the lights were off most of the time. He [Fidel] doesn’t want his guests to see locas [“crazy women,” a Hispanic gay term for “screaming queens”] in the streets when he takes them for a night ride” (Yasnie, age 23, personal communication 2000). This chapter describes the oddities, challenges, and strategies used during my longitudinal fieldwork (1995–​2007) in an underground and fragmented “gay scene” in a society in crisis during the so-​called Special Period of economic depression and radical social and cultural changes. I have discovered a society where the attitude and perception towards gay men is traditionally multifaceted and ambiguous, fluid, transformative, and even paradoxical—​or in one word: queer. The fieldwork challenge has required a similarly “queer” approach—​ queer fieldwork in a queer field.

142  Moshe Morad The main approach and agenda of my research was to understand gay culture in Cuba in a way which “exposes [its] normalness without reducing [its] particularity,” as per Geertz’s words in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973:14). Many a reader of drafts and of related articles that I published, who had previously visited Cuba and returned baffled by the confusing experience, said to me: “Now I understand.” This is especially true when it comes to interpreting “deviant” behavioral patterns and social conventions that I describe and analyze in relation to jineterismo (an indigenous form of sex work or hustling), tourist/​local relations, and even Afro-​Cuban santería religious practice. Interpretation is indeed a core term here, and it occurs at different levels. The most obvious one is my own interpretation as ethnographer and analyst, but even more important is the role of interpretation used by the subjects of this research. My goal was to discover and uncover not only physical spaces but also the appropriated musical “emotional spaces” formed and codified by queer interpretations and appropriations of heterosexist genres, such as Latin dance music and bolero. My study was not about music per se, but rather about music as—​music as space and as social glue, as an anchor and as an agent for framing a certain “gay identity” in an unstable environment and under constant surveillance. I identified a variety of genres and musical scenes, from dance music, to sentimental bolero, drag shows, ballet performances, and Afro-​Cuban ritual music, all of which were distinctly “queer spaces.” What I investigated was not the music itself, but the music’s role as a mediator and unifying factor, and the construction of expressive space via music.4

Musical Spaces: Research Objective and Findings I conducted my research as both observer and participant, from hanging out for hours with local friends along the Malecón and other gay gathering places, to attending clandestine parties, rumbas, private parties, drag-​show bars, and even taking part in various Afro-​Cuban religious ceremonies. I have identified various types of “musical space.” In addition to physical meeting places involving music, I considered the concept of “space” in a wider sense, examining musical genres as emotional and conceptual spaces. The five spheres I finally defined as “music spaces” and decided to concentrate on were as follows: fiestas de diez pesos—​the underground weekend parties in changing locations—​drag shows, bolero music, ballet performances, and 4 My PhD dissertation was turned into a book: Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (2014). The book won an honorable mention for the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Alan Merriam Prize in 2015, and the Marcia Herndon Book Prize (Gender and Sexuality Section, SEM) in 2016.

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  143

Figure 9.1  Police harassment: policeman stopping two young gay men after they were having a conversation with two gay touristsa aAll Figure in this chapter are taken by the author. Some are pixelated in order to protect the persons

photographed.

Afro-​Cuban religious ceremonies involving spirit possession. All these “music spaces” differ from one another in terms of musical style, and in their historical and cultural backgrounds. I first encountered a certain skepticism, especially among Cuban scholars, when I suggested the hypothesis of a common “queer appeal” denominator linking popular dance music, bolero, ballet, drag-​shows, and Afro-​Cuban religion santería. However, my research validated this hypothesis and has revealed deeper roots and linkages to this association, as discussed in my book and as will be demonstrated in the following pages. The first such sphere I investigated and the most popular kind of event taking place in the ambiente—​is the “fiesta de diez pesos,”5 informal parties held in changing locations around Havana, such as private houses, car-​parks, derelict buildings, or parks. These fiestas are not only the most popular “space” in Havana’s gay scene, but crucial to my analysis of how music plays a central role in the gay ambiente. Within the physical space provided by each fiesta, I identified emotional and conceptual spaces fostered by the musical genres that were 5 “Ten peso party” refers to the entry fee for locals in Cuban pesos (CUP) in the mid-​1990s. Foreigners would pay (and still do) a much higher entry fee, in USD at the time, and since 2004 when the Cuban government withdrew the USD from circulation, in CUC (Cuban convertible peso). Cuba has a dual currency: 1 CUC = 25 CUP. In the first fiestas I attended, in the mid-​1990s, there were very few foreigners, but since the late-​1990s, there are more and more tourists attending these parties (usually escorted by local Cuban friends who know where the parties take place).

Figures 9.2 and 9.3  The “gay area” at the Malecón

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  145

Figure 9.4  At the Malecón, getting ready to catch rides to the “fiesta de diez pesos”

played, a mixture of international and local (house, salsa, timba, and, since the turn of the century, also reggaetón). While house music originated in gay clubs in the United States, the local musical genres that were played at the gay fiestas are regarded as essentially “heterosexual,” and even sexist in nature. Yet they have been reinterpreted by Cuban gay people and given new levels of meaning via interpretation and appropriation of the lyrics, the dance movements, and so on, as will be described later in this chapter. Musically, the featured genres share the common characteristics of intense, high-​speed tempos, and multiple climaxes. In my book, I argue that these factors, corroborated by previous research into Anglo-​American “gay music,” are characteristic of post-​1980s gay dance music, and as such may contribute to the argument of a transcultural “gay sensibility” and provide another layer of identity and a psychological/​aesthetic space (see Morad 2014:57–​93). I then investigated musical scenes in which performers and audience were involved. For example, the performance aspect was a vital part of the creation of the queer space in drag shows, ballet shows, and even in santería religious practice. In two of the scenes so different from one another, drag shows and santería spirit possession, the “performance” is strongly connected to gender “performativity” in the Butlerian sense, whereas gender is performed rather than biological. The

146  Moshe Morad connection of drag and cross-​dressing to gender performativity is obvious and was extensively discussed. The less-​obvious relevance to spirit possession will be discussed and demonstrated in the following pages. However, most relevant to my study and the space provided by these performance/​audience scenes is the queer space created among the audience, via the music, as described in Gill Valentine’s work about the music of k.d. lang (1995:474). The creation of a queer musical space requires the use of imagination, flexibility, and “gay discourse.” The discourse has a system of codification as “the meanings and identities attributed to different artists and their music in this way are not fixed but fluid imaginings which are continually reworked, elaborated on, and renegotiated” (475). My study illustrated how this codification and “queer appropriation” takes places creating a “space within a space,” though sometimes only observed by its members. Examples of these phenomena in the context of my fieldwork will be given later in this chapter. When investigating these three performance spheres, so different from each other, I used Richard Schechner’s performance theory concept of “integral audience” ([1988] 2003:218–​22). Whereas the integrality of the audience is clear in the context of the santería ceremony (audience = worshippers), elements of “integral audience” behavior can also be found in the drag shows and even among the gay audience members in the ballet. The audience at these events not only becomes part of a community but also is highly engaged in interaction both with the performers (in the case of drag shows), and off-​stage within its members, including eye-​contact, “gaydar” activity,6 changing mannerisms, and body language. These activities make the gay segment of the audience in these events “integral.” Schechner rightly claims that within an integral audience, “changes in the audience occur during performances as well as from one performance to another” (219). In our case, changes may occur when the audience members not only enjoy the performance but also identify with it and feel it represents or defines a certain identity to which they belong, and engage in a “gaydar” and eye-​contact activity, not only in search of potential partners but also in seeking complicity and sharing the covert identity experience. Drag shows are associated with gay culture and have been extensively investigated as such. However, in the specific context of Havana’s ambiente, they acquire a particular role of “space making.” They are performed in various places and contexts, including, paradoxically, in workers’ unions and communist party events. However, their main locations are drag fiestas at private homes, and the only semi-​“official” permanent “gay” venue operating in Havana during 6 By “gaydar” (a portmanteau of gay and radar) I am not referring to the once popular dating website, but to the “colloquialism describing the intuitive ability of a [gay] person to assess others’ sexual orientations as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual” (https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Gaydar).

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  147 the Special Period, the Bar de Las Estrellas (bar of the stars). The scene, the impersonations, and the lip-​synced songs create a space that provides an outlet for group identity, social interaction, and much needed escapism. Furthermore, the drag scene provides an outlet for expressing resistance and social criticism through mimicry, music, and humor in a society that does not normally allow it. One example was a drag performance I attended of “La Gasolina” (the gasoline), a popular reggaetón song written by Daddy Yankee and Eddie Dee (2004). The song’s refrain: “Shake it mambo so that my ‘cat’ [babe] can turn on the engine,” and “She likes gasoline (give me more gasoline!),” is obviously sexual innuendo. However, in Cuba, the lyrics acquire an economic innuendo as well. The financial crisis and shortages in essentials like fuel have given the word “gasoline” the meaning of a rare commodity, a luxury even. “I like gasoline” therefore stands for “I like the good things this regime cannot give me.” The drag queen mimed the song, repeatedly begging, “Papi (daddy), give it to me,” while making sexual gestures towards a German tourist in the audience pointing at his crotch, referring to his penis as a “petrol pump,” mocking the stereotype of the Cuban sex-​hungry loca begging to be “pumped” by a man, preferably a foreigner. At some point, while saying “give it to me,” she turned the gesture from indicating sex (pointing at her backside) to money, by rubbing her fingers together. So “La Gasolina” is an example of a song which received a distinctly queer slant in the gay ambiente, acquiring three layers of appropriated meaning: social, financial, and sexual. The Bar de Las Estrellas was located in a remote and dilapidated residential block in what is supposedly licensed as a paladar, a private restaurant operated as a small family-​run business.7 The geographical and conceptual distance from this “semi-​legal” drag show bar to the city’s most luxurious venue, the Gran Teatro de la Habana, home of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba may seem huge; however, emotionally and conceptually both venues provided a similar experience and environment for gay socializing, interaction, and escapism. Paradoxically, as ballet is sponsored by the government, it is cheaper and more affordable for Cubans to attend the performances of one of the world’s most respected ballet companies than to attend a drag show in an illegal venue. The ballet provides 7 In 1990, due to the crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro declared that Cuba was in a “periodo especial en tiempo de paz” (special period in time of peace), indicating “war time” austerity measures without being engaged in an actual war. Those measures included new rationing schedule, a severe cut of fuel supplies, closure of some industrial plants and factories and reduction of weekly work hours in many others. The Special Period, however, also brought about some relaxation of the regulations in the island, easing the tight control of the government over people’s daily lives, allowing farmers to sell their goods in markets, and individuals to open private restaurants (paladar) and rent rooms in their houses to tourists (casa particular). There was also a change of policy regarding tourism: previously discouraged, it became, according to Castro in his early ’90s speeches, a “necessary evil” and encouraged as an essential source of income.

148  Moshe Morad a non-​commercial space for gay people to consume and identify with music and dance as members of the audience. I identified two levels of performance unfolding in these spheres: one on-​stage and the other in and among the many gay men in the audience, openly chatting with each other, “giving the eye,” and using homoerotic, campy, and effeminate body language. Another musical space I identified and examined was a virtual space, private rather than public: bolero, a slow-​tempo, nostalgic genre that Cuban gay persons use as a vehicle to express what they see as quintessentially romantic, seductive, dramatic, and tragic feelings. Bolero provides an emotional space for many gay men in Havana, mostly the older generation. It is consumed either in complete privacy—​listening to music cassettes and miming the lyrics and expressions at home, alone or with a group of friends; or in small private bolero soireés, where gay afecionados of the melodramatic genre meet, listen to bolero, and “perform” while miming the songs, often in drag. An important characteristic of bolero lyrics that makes it “queer-​friendly” is its gender/​sexual ambiguity. Most boleros are sung in second person and not addressed to a specific named person. In Spanish (as in English), a conjugated verb is genderless and so is the second person “you” (tú, usted), which can refer to either male or female. For example, one of the most famous boleros, and a favorite of Cuban gay bolero aficionados, is “Tú me acostumbraste” (You got me accustomed to), written by Frank Domínguez. The lyrics are not only “gender ambiguous,” but are also open to various queer interpretations. The song is sung to an ambiguous tú (you) and, as in many bolero songs, the performer is the “weak” one in the relationship (the betrayed, the heartbroken). It starts with the line “You got me accustomed to all these things, and you taught me how wonderful they are,” which can be interpreted as a coded reference, as in “these things that we don’t talk about.” It goes on to say, “You subtly came into my life,” which can be interpreted as “in a secret relationship.” The next line, “I did not understand how to love in your ‘rare’ world, and I learned thanks to you,” can easily fit into a homoerotic narrative. That is, “I was inexperienced, and you taught me the secret of homosexual love.” The expression raro (rare) was used in old-​fashioned gay discourse to indicate “homosexual” in code. In a private drag fiesta I saw a drag queen miming to the song. She extended her lips (as if shushing), put her finger on her mouth indicating a secret, and when miming “in your ‘rare’ world” pointed at her backside referring to anal intercourse. The identification of older generation gay Cubans with this song led to the rumor that it was written by Frank Domínguez to another man. Perhaps more than any other Cuban musical genre, bolero lyrics and the genre’s musical, lyrical, and performative characteristics appeal to and resonate with Cuban gay culture—​with its camp overtones and inherent diva-​ism, to the

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  149 melancholia, hysteria, liminality, glamour, and sense of tragedy expressed in it and associated with it (Morad 2014:185–​218). The most potentially controversial space described in my study is the African-​Cuban religion santería and its practices, in which music (drumming and chanting) and spirit possession play an essential role. During many santería events I attended, the majority of participants, especially in the spirit possession, were women and effeminate men, unlike the sacred batá drummers who provide the drumming in the ceremony, who must be, by strict religious taboo, male and heterosexual. The bataleros are professional drummers hired for the ceremony, and their role is to provide the accurate polyrhythmic drumming which initiates the possession. This means the bataleros do not and should not go into a state of trance. Many times they come from outside the specific santería house, and are not part of the “integral” audience (recall the discussion of “integral” earlier in this chapter), worshippers and those who dance and get possessed. When interviewing C., a White Catholic Cuban anthropologist researching Afro-​Cuban heritage, he kept referring to santería religion derogatorily as “primitive” and “immoral.” When I asked him to explain “what is wrong with santería,” I discovered that the religion’s “immorality” is related to its tolerance of and popularity among homosexuals, which he found “revolting and blasphemous.” C.’s bigotry, the tolerance and acceptance he described, and the attraction of homosexuals to this religion made me curious about it and motivated my research (Morad 2008; 2014:151–​84). Although the “femininity” of santería and the presence of homosexuals in santería worship have been mentioned in literature from as early as the 1940s (Landes 1940, [1947] 1994), I  delved into a deeper investigation into what makes this long-​standing connection so important for the gay men who participate in it, and how this bond became stronger and more significant during the Special Period. As for the terminology, the use of the term “homosexuals” by many researchers in the context of gender/​sexuality within santería, and its Brazilian sister religion candomblé, is inaccurate, inadequate, and misleading. They describe “possessed” males as “homosexuals” when they, in fact, refer specifically to effeminate and sexually passive homosexuals. Even Ruth Landes’s terminology “passive homosexuals” (1947:434) is inaccurate as it simply implies a sexual behavior and preference, but ignores the feminine mannerisms, which play an important role in the practice. In Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions, Randy P. Conner and David Hatfield Sparks describe the difficulty of applying “Western” terms when writing about homosexuality in Afro-​Diasporic religion, and uses a range of terms in different contexts, such as gay, bisexual, transgender, same-​sex intimacy, queer, gender diverse, and so forth. Inspired by Edgar Morin’s

150  Moshe Morad “complexity theory,” Conner and Sparks uses “sexual complexity” and “gender complexity” as umbrella terms (Conner and Sparks 2004:21–​30). What is the term used by local practitioners and researchers? In candomblé discourse, the term adé (derived from adodi, the Yoruba term for “homosexuals”) defines a “male who desires other males [and] also performs a spiritual function or fulfills a sacred role” (Conner and Sparks 2004:101). The absence of such a term in santería discourse leads to terminological confusion and inaccuracy. Many use the term afeminados, effeminate males (Dianteill 2000), which reflects the behavioral perspective, and relates to the feminine aspect of the religion (Morad 1994:163), but ignores sexuality and the passive (penetrated) homosexual tendency of the worshippers, which, as I argue, is part of the push-​and-​ pull factors systemic in this case. Trying to avoid getting entangled in multiple terms, or risking inaccuracy and insufficiency by simply using “gay,” “homosexual,” or “effeminate man,” I have chosen to use in my study the abbreviation EPH to specifically indicate “effeminate penetrated homosexual,” as these characteristics (behavioral, sexual, and social) were common among the subjects of my research and furthermore were manifested in the ritual performances described herein, and the discourse used by the practitioners, referring to the possessed as being “mounted” by the orisha (deity) and even “being inseminated” by it.8 Interestingly, queer elements can also be found in santería mythology in relation to its deities, the orishas. Some of the different dimensions/​avatars of certain orishas (caminos, paths, as they are called in santería discourse) bear different genders, human attributes, and weaknesses, which make their sexuality and gender, as well as their behavior, as varied and as mischievous as those of humans. The same orisha can have some male caminos and some female caminos. Numerous orishas are associated with gender complexity (including androgyny), bisexuality, pansexuality, and homoeroticism (Conner and Sparks 2004:65). Obatalá, for example, the orisha known as the Sky Father and the creator of human bodies is usually represented as male, but sometimes as female and sometimes androgynous or hermaphrodite, allowing cross-​identifications by male, female, and transgender worshippers (Strongman 2002:185). Many of my transgender informants described Obatalá as “the guardian of trans people.” Another example: one famous patakí (oral myth) narrates that Changó, the most macho and virile orisha, the deity of thunder and war, and favorite of 8 An interesting concept in French anthropologist Dianteill’s theory, one I embraced for the purpose of my investigation, is that of “social sex” (sexe social), different from biological sex, in which women and afeminados (EPH) belong to the same “feminine” category, and men and masculine lesbians belong to the “masculine” category. According to Dianteill’s statistics, santería practice is 62% feminine in biological sex and 74% in social sex, indicating that 12% of all practitioners and 32% of male practitioners are EPH (2000:74).

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  151 many gay worshippers, once dressed as a woman (Oya) and imitated her walk to avoid being captured by his enemies. (Núñez [1992] 1999:55; also mentioned in Cabrera [1954] 1975:233). According to Lorand Matory, via the identification process, effeminate homosexuals and transgender people can feel “natural” within a natural system of female divinities and sex-​changing gods (Matory 2003:418). According to Dianteill, the process of identification provides a coexistence of the human spirit with the orisha in the corporeal envelope, enabling the homosexual santeros to interject a feminine principal in the initiation process, and in the possession process, the possibility to exteriorize it (Dianteill 2000:97). The “gay friendliness,” or rather queer essence, of santería is reflected in its worship discourse and the terminology used by worshippers for those who are possessed by the orishas—​the Yoruba term is Elégùn (the mounted one). The term gùn in Yorùbá is also used for a brutal sexual act (male to female) and for what a god, especially Changó, does to his initiates. The Cuban-​Spanish term montado (the mounted one) also refers to those men who are physically being “mounted” by other males. The verb montar encodes three references:  sexual penetration, horse-​riding, and spirit possession (Matory 2003:422). In my conversations with gay santeros and initiates, I have repeatedly been told that EPHs are considered the most suitable males to be “mounted” by the orishas, as the possession process emulates a sexual penetration. In any such union between human and orisha, discounting the original gender of each, the human (male or female) always takes the feminine role, and the god takes the male one, thus making the possession process a simulation of a “sexual” act where the orisha (even if it is a female orisha) penetrates the possessed. The essence of the initiation process is that the orisha enters the iyawó (bride’s) body where he/​she leaves some of his/​her substance, just like a man leaves his semen inside the woman or the penetrated passive man. Even those male initiates identifying with masculine orishas (78% in Dianteill’s survey) stated that they had been “penetrated” and “inseminated” by the orishas, and therefore take a “feminine” role during the initiation (Dianteill 2000).

Methodology and Positioning: Fieldwork Challenges In a way, my methodology in the field was queer/​hybrid/​interchangeable/​ multi-​faceted, like the field itself. Generally speaking, it was based on Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory model, a “theory forming” framework/​concept adopted from social sciences that generates theory from data, working in contradistinction to the traditional hypothesis-​first scientific method (Lewis and Ross 1995:230). Grounded theory reflects the “evolution of the research project,

152  Moshe Morad including the researchers’ experience (in the field and interview sessions), accumulative knowledge and skills, combined with theoretical assumptions and hypotheses” (Lewis and Ross 1995:230). Intuition played a major role in my fieldwork experience, especially since I was often led to a scene by people I met, rumors, hints, and whispers, and at times only sounds (drumming, music emerging from windows, and so on). Transgressing logical and verbal descriptions, cultural boundaries, and “intuitive understanding” was essential for the decoding and deciphering work necessary for this investigation, especially as it concerns a clandestine scene created and populated by marginalized and oppressed individuals whose communication/​interaction system was historically based on codes and double meanings (Madero 2004, 2006). The challenge for me was to put this “intuitive understanding” into a written analytical form. As for my own positioning in the field, I found myself repeatedly oscillating back and forth between being a participating-​observer (an outsider observing but also participating in some of the social activities), to an observing-​participant (an insider, part of the scene I describe, who also observes his group’s activities and analyses them). I am not Cuban, but I am gay. On several occasions I sensed, and was told by my informants, that they felt more willing to share information relating to their sexuality with me than they would have been with a straight Cuban researcher. While observing the scene I had a clear advantage in understanding and decoding transcultural gay codes such as subtle nuances, non-​ verbal signals, body-​language, eye-​contact, mannerisms, “gaydar,” and camp—​a decoding process which constitutes an important part of the discourse analysis throughout my work. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that even global gay codes and behaviors have local variations, especially when it comes to verbal expressions, a local “dialect” I had to learn during my fieldwork.9 What indeed is the field in this study? And to what extent was I an insider? The answer is complex. On the ground level, it seems quite obvious—​the field is the gay ambiente in Havana, with both its acknowledged and less-​known meeting places. On another level the field is imaginary, involving feelings and associations, appropriations and identity-​formation, feeling gay, and acquiring a gay identity via music. The field is fluid and multi-​layered, therefore requiring different layers of examination and interpretation. Furthermore, gay tourists (or extranjeros, “foreigners,” as they are called by locals, an expression reminiscent of the era when Cubans saw more Soviet “foreign workers” and official visitors than “tourists”) are an important component of the ambiente and contribute to its character and evolution. As a gay extranjero, 9 For example, expressions like Yuma (foreigner/​tourist), “ayuda” (help), and “regalo” (present) are used in the context of payment for sex, while avoiding the obvious (and illegal) sex work connotation.

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  153 I belonged to the ambiente. On an emotional level, in many cases I shared many of the feelings, associations, and perspectives with the group I  investigated. Contemporary ethnomusicology, according to Slobin, encourages investigating “the ethnographer’s self as the field” (Slobin 1993:3), which is partially what I was doing. However, a trap I tried to avoid is what Hannerz describes as a tendency of participant-​observer anthropologists, especially in marginalized groups, towards encapsulation “as a mode of field existence” (1980:312). Thus, throughout my fieldwork trips I  tried to avoid being “encapsulated” in small groups and networks and even in the ambiente as a whole. I met, socialized with, and interviewed over two hundred individuals/​informants who belong to different milieus within and outside the gay community. While in the field, I faced two methodological challenges typical to fieldwork in an urban environment: finding the timing and locations of the activities (not an easy task when they are clandestine), and multitasking. The activities investigated are not on-​going, but only take place at certain times. Moreover, different “scenes” may take place simultaneously in different parts of town. Certain aspects and activities of the ambiente only apply in certain times, such as the weekend fiestas, drag shows, the ballet season, and the santería saint-​days. A diachronic approach is part of the long and segmented fieldwork process. I found myself at times rushing from one fiesta to another, and sometimes even to a santería ceremony in between. Another challenge I  faced was the multiplicity of information and events, many times occurring simultaneously. There were occasions, for example, when a santéria ceremony was taking place in someone’s home, while a “fiesta de diez pesos” was going on a few blocks away, and on many weekends, I found myself running back and forth between the sacred and the extremely secular—​I needed to constantly multitask. As each period in the field only lasted three to six weeks, I found myself at any given period engulfed in all aspects of fieldwork, including acquiring information, cross-​examining, expanding the social network, documenting, analyzing, and testing the results. Research segments overlapped, and I found myself performing a variety of roles, sometimes simultaneously. I was constantly engaged in improvising ways of either coding or hiding “problematic” data, in order to avoid having it on my laptop in case of a police raid or an airport supervision when leaving Cuba, or in case it was stolen, which happened a couple of times. I used to meet with my informants in casas particulares (rented rooms in private homes), which is where I was once robbed of my voice-​recorder and video-​camera (that included many hours of interviews and important data). I  often emailed data to myself via slow and expensive internet connections, trying to avoid “spying eyes” at hotel internet desks. Another time-​consuming activity during my fieldwork was communicating with my informants or with new contacts using Cuba’s inefficient telephone system, which involved—​at

154  Moshe Morad least in the first years of my fieldwork, before mobile phones became available to locals—​spending hours at public phones (when they operated properly), hoping that my amigo on the other side was indeed within reach of the telephone, or that the privileged neighbor who had the nearest phone would be kind enough to fetch him.10 Due to the nature of my research, interviews and data-​collecting were mostly carried out during the evenings and nighttime (sometimes very late at night/​early morning, after fiestas), while daytime was used for transcribing, writing, correcting, rewriting, and planning. Using a grounded theory approach meant I needed to quickly digest and analyze the findings once “in the field” and plan the next steps according to this analysis. I did not have the luxury of some traditional researchers who use fieldwork only to gather data, which they decipher and analyze once they return home. In my case, fieldwork also involved allowing plenty of time for observation, which offered “the opportunity for serendipity, that is the emergence of significant unanticipated discoveries . . . in [a]‌previously unresearched area” (Lewis and Ross 1995:216). Observing and analyzing behavior patterns was an important tool for gathering and verifying information. Interpreting and analyzing behavioral patterns, sorting “winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones” as per Geertz’s famous analogy (1973:16), raised another challenge, which I overcame by way of testing and verifying my own interpretations with those of other informants. I chose, most of the time, to stay at modest casas particulares (private homes), which became safe havens for in-​depth conversations with my informants, given that hotels were out of the question (until 2008, Cubans were not allowed to enter hotels), and public places were under constant watch by the vigilant eyes of the police, who at best intimidated my informants, and at worst openly harassed them. Most of the casas particulares where I stayed belonged to gays, a fact that made my invited informants feel at ease, and also provided a further source of information, enhancing my network of informants. From a rapidly expanding social network, I had a selection of a handful of informants and close allies with whom I  spent many hours socializing, communicating, and observing. In some cases, I applied a classic shadowing technique, whereby I followed and observed (with permission) an informant for up to twelve hours, from his home to the street and back, in various gathering spots, and stuck close by him on the Malecón so I could follow his conversations with other gay locals and tourists; or I would follow him into one of the musical spaces investigated (fiestas, drag shows, santería rituals, and so on), and then back 10 Mobile phones and internet were non-​existent in the first years of my fieldwork, and later on, towards the late 1990s, when they supposedly became available, they were very expensive to use but were only accessible by the very privileged (and the sponsored).

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  155

Figure 9.5  “Fiesta de diez pesos,” 1995.

home. On many occasions, I also used a “fly on the wall” approach, eavesdropping on conversations, in which case I used the information heard when needed, but never as direct quotes.

Ethics in the Field: From Exposure to Erotic Involvement The clandestine nature of gay life in Havana during the Special Period raised some important ethical issues regarding the ways I collected, processed, and presented information. In order to avoid complications with the authorities, I  chose to work outside the parameters of the system. Before entering the country, I did not apply for a research visa. Doing so, if at all approved, would have put me under the scrutiny of the authorities, which would have undermined my research activities. Any official monitoring of my activities would have prevented many potential informants from collaborating with me and would have put those who did so at risk. It is also important to note that all my research was carried out independently; I have never been sponsored or supported by the Cuban authorities, Cuban solidarity groups, nor by dissident groups or gay rights organizations. I will try to clarify how open I was with my informants, regarding the purpose of my probing questions. Whenever I engaged in a personal conversation that was longer than a passing comment or a quick informal chat, I always disclosed the purpose of my questions, sometimes at the beginning of the conversation, but more often in the middle or at the end of it. Sometimes, in cases when I  spoke with organizations, party organizers, and so forth, my initial contact started by using my other roles as a journalist and a music-​industry

156  Moshe Morad

Figure 9.6  “Fiesta de diez pesos,” 2005.

executive. However, at the end of the conversation, I always made it clear that I was working on a research project about gay life in Cuba, and that some of the information they were giving me might be used. None of my respondents objected. A major concern of fieldwork was to take special precaution not to put informants at risk and to respect their desire for discretion and anonymity. It was essential for me, therefore, not to either embarrass anyone or put anyone in any risky situation with the police or the authorities during the course of my research. The daily reality is that surveillance is ever-​present, both from the police and from local neighborhood organizations (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, Committees for the defense of the revolution, or CDR), and the ambiente itself lives with constant surveillance. During my early trips to Cuba (between 1994 and 1999), locals were reluctant to walk with foreigners on the streets of certain areas, as I described in the introduction to this chapter; and there were incidents when my Cuban informant and I had to walk separately so as not to attract police attention or raise suspicion, and carry the conversation in a hidden location. In order not to upset foreign-​currency providers, policemen tend to avoid

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Figure 9.7  A “neighborhood” drag show in a private home in old Havana.

stopping locals to check their papers when they are with a tourist, but as soon as they see the tourist and the local part company, they invariably stop the latter for questioning (see Figure 9.1). One of the low points during my fieldwork was an incident that took place in July 1998. I was having a conversation with a gay informant, introduced to me by another informant, at an outdoor café. I noticed that he was slightly nervous and uncomfortable about sitting outside, but mistakenly thought that this was due to still being “in the closet” and embarrassed about being seen in male company. After we concluded our conversation, my informant set off up the street while I remained at the café. I later found out from a friend of his that once he had left the area and I was out of sight, he was stopped by two policemen who had spotted us having a conversation and asked for his documents. They found out he was an off-​duty police officer from Santiago de Cuba. At that time, high-​ ranking police officers were not allowed to have social contacts with foreigners, even when off-​duty. He was arrested and later dismissed from his job. Since that incident, I was keen on taking exceptional care not to put my informants in any kind of trouble or risk. Another important ethical issue is the researcher’s personal involvement with informants during fieldwork, beyond simple empathy. In Cuba, a clinical stance

158  Moshe Morad or apparent standoffishness can be misconstrued as indifference and can be perceived by some as a personal slight or even cause offence, thereby obstructing the flow of further communication. Hence, personal involvement, including that of an erotic nature, can at times be a natural development between the researcher and the informant, as it establishes an intimacy that fosters the kind of trust that is mutually beneficial at a personal level, and furthers the research itself. Sexual contact between researcher and research subjects was once considered taboo, and celibacy was encouraged in the field, both for ethical reasons and to protect the researcher’s “identity maintenance” (Dubisch 1995:35). Erotic involvement during fieldwork carries a stigma of professional impropriety, and Malinowski, for example, was a great advocate of celibacy in the field. But contemporary researchers contest this taboo, and some even point to the academic benefits of sexual interaction in the field (Caplan 1993:23; Kulick 1995:23; and Dubisch 1995:31). Ralph Bolton claims that “sex is the most prominent and symbolically significant domain in gay culture. Same-​sex erotic desire is what undergirds gay identity and community” (1995:142). He therefore advocates that sexual relations in the field “may lead to wisdom through a reduction in the hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding one of the most important domains of human life and pleasure” (160). Furthermore, he claims that sexual involvement “may produce greater knowledge through a reduction in the imaginary and artificial barriers of Otherness which are sustained by rules of sexual exclusion” (160). I believe that when researchers admit to erotic involvement in the field, it reflects the sincerity, openness, and transparency of their work. When it comes to candor and transparency, Bolton wrote about the “double standard” of past ethnographical approaches: I can clearly recall the recommendation that the ethnographer keep two sets of notes, one, field notes proper which contain observations, interviews, and so forth, and two, a diary in which one records one’s thoughts and experiences. I  have never been able to follow that advice.  .  .  . What I  am seeing, feeling, hearing, and thinking all affect how I, as the data-​processing instrument, interpret the world I’m experiencing. (1995:148)

Like Bolton, in my fieldwork, I  used a single “notebook” that included my physical, cognitive, and emotional accounts, and strongly believe that this approach is the key to a more sincere research. As for emotional involvement with informants, this could not be avoided, and indeed the physical and emotional contacts I  had with some of my informants has enriched my understanding, without otherwise affecting the handling of the data gathered for this research.

Queer Fieldwork in a Queer Field under Surveillance  159

Conclusion: Queer Field, Queer Fieldwork In his introduction to Ethnicity, Identity and Music, Martin Stokes claims that music “provides means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them” (1994:5). In a society where music and dance are a way of life, they are also the primary medium in which gay people from all levels of society can express themselves, interact, and crystallize a social identity. My research objective was to identify and analyze the mental, physical, and spiritual space that music provided for gay people within the restrictions, paradoxes, and challenges of Cuba’s Special Period. In this chapter, I introduced my fieldwork among gay men in Cuba during the Special Period, in search of the role of music as social and emotional space in their life, and focused on aspects of my fieldwork methodology, including specific ethical challenges I faced and how I dealt with them. If queer means breaking conventions, opposing normativity and dichotomies, and “anything goes,” then my fieldwork experience and methodology were definitely queer—​ from deep analysis of Cuban concepts of homosexuality (or “homosexualities”), to casual chats in the Malecón and in the fiestas, and holding “into the night” conversations in private rooms with friends, friends of friends, sexual partners, drag queens, ballet dancers, male and trans prostitutes after (or in between) work, and Afro-​Cuban santería priests. Interpretation was the core principle and the main subject of my study, which was concerned less with the “objective” and “scientific,” and more with the way music and other cultural, and even religious phenomena are interpreted by Cuban gays during the Special Period in a way which makes them find “space” in it. In this sense, the study is based on queer and even camp principles: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’. To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-​ as-​Playing-​a-​Role” (Sontag 1964:4). In the ambiente Cuban was “Cuban”—​locals playing a certain role expected by the tourists—​whether wearing a Che Guevara T-​shirt, singing “Chan Chan,” or dancing sensually in the fiesta.11 Woman was “woman” or rather a wild “loca” (crazy woman, “raving queen”), and tolerance was “tolerance.” Going back to Sontag’s examples, throughout my fieldwork and analysis, from the fiestas to the santería ceremonies, I look at the concept of “woman” not only in its biological sense but also in its cultural sense, as per Dinateill’s “social sex” category, which also includes effeminate gay men. “Being-​as-​Playing-​a-​Role” is another principle reiterated in this study. Furthermore, I was not concerned with 11 See more in the section “The ‘Gay Cuban Dancing Body’ and the Eroticization of the Dance Floor” in Morad (2014:101–​5).

160  Moshe Morad the actual practice, the sexual behavior, or political aspect of homosexuality—​ but with its behavioral and interpretive “identity” aspects, in relation to music. In an article I wrote for Attitude magazine (Morad 2007) about the gay scene in Cuba, I quoted a gay Cuban who told me: “We have a saying here: In Cuba always try to enjoy yourself, never try to understand” (56–​60). This is the way most outsiders experience Cuba’s gay scene. My personal mission was to understand. In order to dive deeper into the secrets of Cuban paradoxical gay life, restricted and harassed, yet flourishing, and to understand it, I had to employ an open-​minded approach to fieldwork, investigation, and analysis, and break many conventions—​queer fieldwork in a queer field under constant surveillance.

5

QU E E R N E SS IN AC T ION

10

Con/​Figuring Transgender-​Hījṛā Music and Dance through Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking Jeff Roy

Say that you are a queer ethnomusicologist from the United States interested in the music of India’s transgender and hījṛā communities.1 You are aware of the potential crises of representation that a white, gay male studying a historically exploited gender nonconforming community might produce, and you want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. You are not interested in the surreptitious—​or closeted—​collection of music repertoires, but in openly revealing and critically examining the multiple truths about your encounters with transgender and hījṛā (hereafter referred to as trans-​hījṛā) performers in trans-​ hījṛā spaces.2 In doing so, you seek to rewrite the routine narratives that continue to silence the many voices of the community. 1 The word hījṛā is conventionally employed throughout South Asia to represent the subcontinent’s vast and culturally complex communities of individuals who usually identify as “neither male nor female,” third gender, and/​or transgender. The word also signifies one’s belonging to a specific gharānā—​a word employed in Hindustani (North Indian) music culture that refers to a family tradition or a “stylistic school and/​or members of that school” (Neuman 1990:272)—​no matter one’s assigned gender, sexual, racial, class, caste, or religious identity. Hījṛās—​whose population has been estimated to be around 500 thousand, with the probability of it being significantly higher, in India alone—​reside in rural and urban locales in the countries of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, and possess a variety of cultural belief systems and structures. 2 Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy (2014) have argued that the universalization of transgender as an umbrella term within India’s nongovernmental organizations and their international financial sponsors imposes transnational taxonomies of gender and sexual variance onto South Asian bodies and expressions of gender nonconformity, thereby reinforcing the (post)colonial hierarchies of scale between transnational, regional, and local levels of discourse and praxis. Elsewhere, I have shown how the term transgender is also being utilized by community members increasingly as an identity in middle-​class (and usually transnational, Anglophone) queer and trans-​hījṛā circles to emphasize a person’s individuality and self-​understanding as distinct from, but not necessarily in conflict with, his or her hījṛā social identity. Different uses of the term have expanded alongside the availability of gender confirmation surgery in Indian hospitals, the April 2014 decision by the Indian Supreme Court to grant legal recognition to the transgender community, and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, which passed the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament) in December 2018 and continues to undergo revisions as it progresses to the Rajya Sabha (Upper House). I therefore adopt the hyphenated term trans-​hījṛā to accommodate for the shifting uses and meanings of transgender in India.

164  Jeff Roy Then, fast forward two or three years. On the insistence of your field participants, you pick up a camera to document their music. You provide them with the footage, and, because of this arrangement, the camera provides you with opportunities to engage with the community beyond being a participant-​ observer. The community makes you their resident documentarian and helps you develop a film that reaches the eyes and ears of diverse, international audiences, thereby increasing the work’s impact and potential for social change. Two years later, as you draft an article for a publication in the field of ethnomusicology, you reflect on the value of following such a path. An essay by Sherrie Tucker, titled “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” (2002), compels you to write in a new way, using first-​and second-​person voices to implicate yourself and your readers in the scene. You reflect on some of the ways documentary filmmaking challenged the boundaries between your experience and its representation, confronted the “ungendered researcher,” and uncovered your subjective “truth” framed by identity (Kisliuk 2008:184; Rice 2008:18; Babiracki 2008:169). But, in so doing, it gets discovered that the camera left traces of truths behind. Your films configured the field in some cases by focusing too much on the authenticity and viability of what got represented and too little on how music got you there in the first place. The truthiness of your experience begins to unsettle you and multiple crises of representation impede your productivity. How do you proceed? Working in the field for over seven years with trans-​hījṛā communities in Mumbai, documentary filmmaking granted me the privilege of becoming a co-​performative witness to the musical processes and social scripts facilitating trans-​hījṛā cultural formation.3 It allowed me to engage in the production of the very performances in which I  was invested, move across disparate social positions and registers of knowledge production, facilitate my communities’ desire for greater visibility, and create opportunities to reach wider audiences. But by lending my labor to these processes, filmmaking also left me with a false sense of security to the representation of trans-​hījṛā music-​making. In some cases, it seemed to reinforce the colonially established epistemologies and narratives structuring the study of minoritarian subjects, which I had hoped to evade in the first place. I also found that while my documentary practice seemingly unsettled conventional boundaries of identity and belonging between my collaborators and myself, it sustained, and in some cases exacerbated, conventional limitations

3 Dwight Conquergood’s critical ethnographic approach known as co-​performative witnessing concerns the ways the ethnographer and subject of research may engage as co-​actors in the production of performances in which they are invested socially, culturally, and politically (2002:149). As E. Patrick Johnson observes, co-​performative witnessing involves the act of “paying attention” in a way that engages the bodily presence of the researcher and researched in the moment of the narrative event, and as such, “disavows a static representation of the Other of the self, as both journey on a collaboration toward making meaning of the social and cultural world around them” (2009:59–​60).

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  165 of understanding for the academic, student, and general audiences we had aspired to reach. In this chapter, I reflect on several reasons for this, addressing the conceptual and pragmatic issues that arose from using a camera in the field. I do so while using my own positionality as a gay, fireng (foreign) ethnomusicologist representative of the American transnational queer trade, yet who has been embraced by several hījṛā gharānās (families, or houses) in the Mumbai and Lucknow areas of India. I offer these reflections not to navel gaze, but specifically to enact what performance studies scholar D. Soyini Madison calls, “the labor of reflexivity” (Madison 2011)—​a difficult labor in which the scholar is beholden not only to portray their research subjects with honesty and clarity, but also to acknowledge their own transformations as a process of coming to and coming through the work of ethnographic research. Then, expounding on what I term a critically queer approach to ethnomusicological filmmaking—​or more pertinently, “queer ethnomusicological filmmaking”—​I show how embracing performative and participatory elements in the filmmaking process can relieve filmmaking of the need for representational authenticity. I register my relationship with my trans-​hījṛā sisters and our filmmaking process as queerly sincere and sincerely queer,4 which is to say that it accounts for the deep and persistent ways in which musics can be felt and sensed by us in the process of our collaborative work, how certain histories of queer and trans-​hījṛā culture make it into or are erased from the scholarly narrative, and how at times it resists conventional hierarchies of authority and authenticity that continue to frame our transnational academic praxis. I suggest that queer ethnomusicological filmmaking has the potential to problematize the ideological premise of filming trans-​hījṛā performance by taking on the actual labor of affirmation and critique on which these communities depend for cultural perseverance and prosperity. Embedded in this argument is an implicit acknowledgement of my collaborators as performative agents rather than merely performers, and in an approach to performance not just as an object of study but also as method.

An Erotics of the Field My initial foray into trans-​ hījṛā performance culture arose from previous commitments that I  had both to the study of violin and transgender-​queer

4 This is in partial reference to John L. Jackson Jr.’s examination of the differences among racial authenticity and racial sincerity in his book Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005). The dialectic between authenticity and sincerity in ethnographic practice is further addressed in his article “On Ethnographic Sincerity” (2010).

166  Jeff Roy

Figure 10.1  The author interviewing founding members of the Dancing Queens. Photo by Varsha Yeshwant, May 3, 2013

advocacy. As an openly queer musician of bi-​cultural lesbian heritage, I naïvely conceptualized myself to be “within and a product of ” the subculture that I was interested in studying and hoped that my fieldwork would provide me opportunities to engage in the production of knowledge in which I was invested socially, culturally, and politically (Conquergood 2002:149). Yet at the onset, my fieldwork often left me on the outside looking in. I attribute this to at least two uncontrollable circumstances: My undisguised foreignness (signaling privilege, otherness, and in some cases eroticism) and my frame of reference as a music scholar from the Western academic tradition (signaling a different point of view from practitioners in the field). Upon my arrival to Mumbai in 2010, I found myself becoming part of a vibrant sexual economy in the queer nightlife of the city. However, my privileged visibility as a white, cisgender gay male produced sexual attention that interfered with the arms-​length intimacy that I sought to establish with my fieldwork collaborators. In this racialized, postcolonial queer nightlife, I  could not help but be reminded of what Margaret Jolly and Lenore Manderson have described as .  .  .  the deep histories of sexual contact and erotic entanglement between Europeans and ‘others’ [ . . . ] exchanges in meanings and fantasies as well as the erotic liaisons of bodies [ . . . ] sites of desire formed by confluences of cultures, be they the tidal waves of European colonialism or the smaller eddies of sexual contacts and erotic imaginings created between cultures. (1997:1)

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  167 My sensitivity towards the confluences of desire on the dance floor, and unwillingness to disturb them, created a physical distance between me and those around me. This deliberate vantage point set me apart, while granting me a certain “scopographic power” of insight and control (McCune 2008:13). But my adopted positionality did not last long. As time went on, I became the receptor of negative energy due to a perceived reluctance or inability to engage fully with the community to which I was supposed to belong. My tendency to avoid this kind of interaction—​a detachment that was often read as an affectation of haute status—​swept me further into the cross-​currents of class and race driven by our assumed shared sexuality. It was not long before I found respite in the trans-​hījṛā community, a community that, while ubiquitous for its visibility in public spaces, conducts its covert affairs in spaces that few outsiders—​queer, non-​queer, local or foreign alike—​have been invited to enter. Hījṛās organize their culture into gharānās (household, literally “of the house”), a protected familial kinship system based on the bonds between mothers and their daughters into what is known as the guru-​chelā (teacher-​disciple) relationship. Becoming part of a gharānā usually involves acquiescing to the guru’s governance by undergoing certain rites and rituals, learning the gharānā’s cherished religious practices, passively yet earnestly absorbing other aspects of hījṛā livelihood, and contributing to the economic vitality of the community through various forms of labor. This generally encompasses singing and dancing in badhāī troupes (small acoustic music ensembles that perform for newborns, newly married couples, business openings, or other auspicious occasions involving pecuniary milestones), organized begging, or in extreme cases, sex work (Roy 2015). All three kinds of work are considered precarious: the British colonial government outlawed badhāīs in 1871 through the Criminal Tribes Act; begging (in some states) and public forms of prostitution are illegal; and the community was subject to potential targeting under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, until its application to sex between consenting adults was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of India in September 2018—​thus warranting the community’s protective measures. My interest in hījṛā badhāī music was initially met with skepticism. For many, I was not the first academic they had encountered. Academic intervention in the community stems from a long history of colonial Orientalist-​oriented research, contemporary NGO HIV activism, and a peculiar Western anthropological fascination surrounding hījṛās’ “third-​gender” status, spiritual associations, ritualistic practices, and illicit socio-​economic practices. Accompanying the rise of feminist and early queer theories in the 1990s, media and scholarship on hījṛās multiplied.5 5 Gayatri Reddy compiles a list of hījṛā-​focused literatures and media in her book With Respect to Sex (2005:3). From 1990 to 2010, the following works on hījṛās were produced: at least six book-​sized

168  Jeff Roy Some of these representations reflect an interest to “document, help, or save” them (Khubchandani 2014:520), while others perpetuate “the (post)colonial legacy to homogenize an otherwise pluralistic community through sensationalized depictions of bodily alterations and procedures” (Roy 2015:25). In contemporary Indian cinema, when not depicted as “charismatic film-​stealing villains” (Waugh 2001:126), the ubiquitous dancing hījṛā indexes the community’s shamelessness, working-​class vulgarity, deviance and/​or lack of legitimate education or trade. The recent profusion of independent queer films and scholarship in India pushes back on some of these tropes through intersectional feminist and queer lenses. Nevertheless, the fascination with hījṛā eroticism in mainstream discourse drags on. Following an initial period of appropriate wary distancing from the white researcher, the parts of my identity that had once limited my critical, conceptual, and literal movements became assets in the field. For one, my own uninhibited queerness allowed me to activate familial bonds with gurus and chelās (disciples, or daughters): as I came to know the community better, I became someone’s figurative “foreign chelā” and her daughters’ gora guru-​bhai (brother or sister of the same guru, who is white). Their embrace of me was somewhat facilitated by my interest in performing music. A cherished and vital aspect of the gharānās socio-​economic vivacity, music is frequently performed at semi-​private gatherings such as jalsās (literally “meetings” or “celebrations”), coming out rituals for nirvāṇ (initiated, literally “liberated”) hījṛās, badhāīs, and in other public contexts (Roy 2016, 2017). My ability to perform music based on my training in Hindustani violin, but more importantly, my willingness to play the cinematic role they set forth in their private and publicly staged performances, enabled me to assume a new social positioning as a uniquely, opportunely foreign chelā. I was recently made aware of this while spending time with members of a dance troupe known as the Dancing Queens at the “Mujre ki Rāt” (“Night of North Indian Dance”) event organized in Mumbai’s Bandra neighborhood by a local LGBTQIA+ activist group. Following the evening’s performances, about forty audience members joined the performers on the dance floor. The DJ began to play the song “Chittiyān Kalaiyān” (“White Wrists”) from the

ethnographies (Nanda 1990; Jaffrey 1998; Balaji and Malloy 1997; Ahmed and Singh 2001; Reddy 2005; Revathi 2009), four articles (Cohen 1995; Goldman 1993; Lal 1999; Nanda 1994), two chapters in an essay collection (Cohen 2002; Sweet 2002), two dissertations (Hall 1995; Reddy 2000), four works of fiction (Mann 1992; Sinha 1993; Forbes 1998; Kotak 2000), seven prominent documentary films (Kalliat 1990; Prasad and Yorke 1991; Cooper 1999; Shiva, MacDonald, and Gucovsky 2001; Wartmann 2005; Thomas 2005; Gill 2009), three narrative films (Lajmi 1997; Bharadwaj 2005; Patil 2009), and one interview special (BBC 2007).

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  169 movie Roy (2015) and three dancers elbowed the more casual participants in our immediate vicinity to create a space on the dance floor. They shoved me into the middle of the space and began gesticulating to the chorus lyrics while performing variyān (blessings using any number of rupee bills) over my head: Mann jā ve, mainu shopping kara de Please take me shopping, Mann jā ve, romantic picture dikha de Please show me a romantic movie, [ . . . ] Chittiyān kalaiyān ve White wrists, Oh baby meri chittiyān kalaiyān ve Oh baby, I have white wrists

The Hindi number eroticized fair skin and the wealth associated with fairness, as many songs in the global film industry so often do. But, this somewhat satirical reinterpretation of heteronormative ritual attraction staged by my trans-​hījṛā sisters neither repudiated nor fetishized my white body outside of its contribution to the music number. Whereas my failure to authenticate my privileged, sexualized role on the gay male melting pot of the dance floor ousted me from phenotypical belonging, this imperfect-​yet-​sincere performance of otherness with my trans-​hījṛā sisters granted me a new social positioning as an insider. With exposed wrists, a thrust of the hip, eyebrows raised, and tongue in cheek, I became activated in their scene as the pardesi (foreigner) who is otherwise in on the joke and part of the family, where he belonged. In addition to musicality, my partial proficiency in camera holding and button pressing provided me a sense of utility, of which my sisters took full advantage. It was not long before our musical engagements snowballed into filmmaking and a new role was written for me as the resident “foreign photo chelā.” I willingly accepted this position because it generated excitement about music-​based research as my trans-​hījṛā sisters sought out new platforms to showcase their performances. I began producing footage, engaging in the editing of short films, and exhibiting some of these films to community members, academic conference attendees, and film festivals. While these fruitful engagements allowed me to move across different registers of knowledge production in the field, the freedom and privilege that documentary filmmaking as a white-​wristed, foreign photo chelā provided me also yielded problematic representations of trans-​hījṛā music-​making processes. My indoctrinated attachment to Western conventions of cinéma vérité, and in particular, my search for the “truth” of the ethnographic encounter, produced an all-​too-​“productive distanciation” (Rice 2008:58) on my critical exploration of trans-​hījṛā music and dance within the context of our relationship as sisters—​a process that unsettled the intimacy and integrity of our sincerely queer bonds.

170  Jeff Roy

Re-​presenting Performance (in Invisible Goddesses [2011]) In documentary filmmaking, the act of observing (capturing footage) becomes inseparable from representing (producing footage). Yet if we consider methodology as a camera lens, “no one would expect two different lenses to produce the same visual representation of the object” (Schroder 1999:51). My first film, Invisible Goddesses (2011), resulted from my preliminary experimentations with a Sony HD Handycam while under the roofs of several hījṛā gurus and their chelās. Blissfully unaware of my methodology at the time, the camera playfully captures a variety of musical subjects in different ways, yet leaning towards the collection of actual, real scholarly evidence—​an approach made the gold standard by French ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp. Zemp practiced what he described as a “reflexive observational” mode of filmmaking, following one rule of thumb: to convey information that is both ethical and engaging to the viewer. Guiding viewers to contemplate the “truth” of a given situation as it occurred before a concealed observer (1988:393–​94; 1990:61)—​ borrowing from observational filmmaking—​Zemp also allowed for moments of reflection to take place by cueing viewers into the worldview of the filmmaker. This was achieved through a variety of techniques, such as: (1) the integration of stationary framing and flexibly moving cameras to emphasize the camera’s human touch and to remain truthful to “what the eye is triggering on” (Feld and Williams 1975:29); (2) the use of panned shots in close and medium range to capture the relationships of the musicians with their audiences in their natural environments; (3) the repudiation of the camera zoom because of its “artificial” framing of objects and their environments (1988:396); and (4) the frequent use of sequence shots (moving the camera physically from one point to another in an “improvised ballet”) where “the camera itself becomes just as much alive as the people it is filming” (Rouch 1975:93, quoted in Zemp 1988). In his films, Zemp captured “reality” as though he were a “fly on the wall” (Nichols 2001:112–​ 13). Nevertheless, the irony is that while characters appear to engage with one another usually in their (or a) “natural” environment, they tend to ignore the cameras entirely in scenes that seem to unroll as though they were scripted. My film Invisible Goddesses adopts aspects of Zemp’s concern for documentary-​ as-​representational authenticity. The cinematography is conservative, with tight, relatively stationary shots of the subjects’ faces as they sing and speak. It also employs minimal zoom to humanize the framing of its subjects; panned shots to capture the relationships between performers; and in one particular sequence taking place at an inter-​gharānā jalsā, long sequence shots to embody the energy of the event. In contrast to Zemp’s ideal of non-​interference, however, the camera participates with or intervenes in the life events of those it captures. Even as I contemplated my escape on more than a few occasions, working with my sisters more

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  171 often than not prevented me from assuming the desired role of “fly on wall.” Most of the filming took place in small spaces, and my presence as a queer-​bodied foreigner with a camera always managed to change something about the situation in which I found myself. In some cases, the subjects perform directly into the camera as though the camera were another human character within the narrative of the film. For instance, in the film’s jalsā sequence, which marks an important milestone in a young hījṛā’s life as she is unveiled for the first time as a newly inducted hījṛā through a ceremonial performance of Lāwanī (Maharashtran folk dance), the dancer performs directly into my—​and another camera’s—​lens. The invasive gaze of both cameras as they cover her body mediates the significance and visceral impact of this performative act as she becomes a nirvāṇ hījṛā (Roy 2015:270–​71; also in 2017:412; see Video 1, www.ethnomusicologyofthecloset. com/​configuringhijra [password: pechaan]).6 Ethnomusicologist Benjamin Harbert recognizes the futility of “capturing life unawares” in intimate contexts and filmed performances (2010:25). Mediating the need for the gathering of researchable material with participant engagement, he assumes the role of the intermediary between subject and camera in an attempt bring about, or in some cases, loosely situate events that are rich with ethnographic detail. In his view—​and in the view of many cinéma vérité–​ style documentarians—​the camera is used to capture the reality of the field as a product of the lived encounter between filmmaker and subject (Nichols 2001:117). This has obvious advantages. In reference to the cinéma vérité documentaries of David and Judith MacDougall, Lucien Taylor notes that films exist “not in contradistinction to participatory or ‘reflexive’ propensities, but rather as their consummation. What becomes incontrovertibly clear [ . . . ] is that if observation is not, in the end, participatory and self-​reflexive, then it is not human” (Taylor 1998:3). Indeed, Invisible Goddesses embraces film’s reflective and reflexive properties, capturing the humanistic encounters between my sisters and myself. My voice can be heard throughout the film asking questions about my field participants’ music practices, frequently implicating me in the scene of investigation. Nevertheless, the film’s concern for representational authenticity reinforces a certain separation between my field participants and me. The film transforms its dynamic subjects into a readability mired in the fetishistic need to uncover the “actual, lived encounter between the filmmaker and the subject” (Nichols 2001:116)—​a process that is grounded in the colonialist presumption that there is something to uncover in the first place.

6 I detail how music and dance performance plays important roles in the embodiment of self-​ understanding for a hījṛā in the midst of social transitioning in Roy (2017).

172  Jeff Roy

Figure 10.2  Interviewing Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and others. Stills from Invisible Goddesses (2011) by author

In Invisible Goddesses, a representational friction occurs when queer sincerity meets film’s concern for “truth.” This is most prominent in one poignant sequence that took place inside a bathroom, in which the performer enacts a rendition of her coming out story. She improvises the entire scene while looking straight into the camera: “I always never say I was ‘coming out’, because I was always ‘there’,” with a diminuendo and a breath at the end of the phrase. “What is ‘coming out’? Do I come out from the skin in what I am? Do I come out from the soul? [ . . . ] This body is skeleton with flesh. My soul is inside. The soul had decided when it took birth and came out into this world. So, I was always there. I was out. I need not be ‘out.’ ” Holding a small bucket, she engages the space around her to drive the point home: “Only like the water, if I take it in this container, and if it flows down and goes into another container and wants to be there, why not let it be there?” She pours the water into her mouth, swishes it around. Then, in a deadpan tone, with eyes focused on the camera, spits out the water to declare: “H2O. That is life.” The sequence subverts conventional storytelling by relying exclusively on an improvised script performed by the subject. The way that the performer delivers the story accounts for its expressive potency. Towards the end of the sequence, the subject stands to reveal her tall, slender frame. The camera follows this movement as she asserts: So, it is true that if you’re an artist and if you’re a true artist to your own self and to your own life, people accept you as you are. [She pours more water on herself] Why should I change? Will the politicians change for their own agenda? For me? No. They will do their own thing. Will the world change for me? No. Then why should I change for the world? Excuse me! [Pause] And my “art” is art. Art has no language, no sex, no drama. It is all there. It is even more so . . . music and dance and everything . . . and I’m happy to be an artist. Dance and music brought me acceptance, gave me what I was. And that is something which is great. Today, when I speak, when I talk, when I walk on the street, it’s

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  173 all the confidence what gave me right from my young childhood on the stage. And my art gave me that grace which puts a woman to shame. Isn’t that true?

The fidelity of the camera as it follows the performer’s close-​up movements evokes “the poetic world [she] brings into being” through her words (Nichols 1994:106) . At the same time, the realness of the encounter, the way the steady frame avoids the body, the vulnerability of the queer filmmaker indexed by a trembling voice, and the way this vulnerability appears to feed into her performance all seem to engender an uncomfortable epoché to a particularly queer situation. Maybe that is the point. Friends and colleagues read this scene as a powerful case study of the coming out narrative, drawing the spectator into the evocative world of the performer as she queers conventional boundaries of the personal and the public. The spontaneous, intimate events corroborated by the camera—​ especially those when the performer looks directly into the lens—​reveal a subject with incredible command of her environment, the people subsumed within it, and her means of communicating to them. The film is honest and of the moment, in all of its fragile assemblages. Yet in its representation of a poignantly real encounter, the film also leaves me to ponder Michelle Kisliuk’s question:  “Where is the border between getting at truth and going into a realm of the personal that is unnecessary or inappropriate for ethnographic purposes?” (2008:184). At times, the presence of the camera feels like an intrusion, an invasion of the imperialist overseer to the white, heterosexist cultural gaze of men performing as women (hooks 1992:146,151).7 In response to the original question, I ask what good is getting at truth in the first place if it fails to embrace the frictions and “fragile fictions” of the “real” in the dynamic moment of the storytelling event.8 How queer are filmmaking practices if, in their practices of representation, they continue to colonize the other? How can we dismantle ethnographic conventions without threatening the labor affirmation and critique upon which our collaborators, communities, and kin depend for cultural perseverance and prosperity?

7 This stems from a critique bell hooks makes on the film Paris is Burning (1990) in her book Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). She suggests that the film acts as an imperialist overseer to notions of white womanhood through its prioritization of Venus Xtravaganza’s storyline over those of black and Latinx individuals comprising the majority of those who participate in the balls (151). With Invisible Goddesses in my rearview mirror, I take this critique to heart when examining my own methodological approaches to filmmaking. 8 This is in reference to C. Riley Snorton’s examination of the “fragile fictions” of personhood. Through the “experience of psychic dissonance, affirmation, disavowal, and recognition, we engage in the process of passing off our daily experiences of embodiment as identifications” (2009:87).

174  Jeff Roy

Approaching Queer Ethnomusicological Filmmaking (in Dancing Queens: It’s All About Family [2016]) During a question-​and-​answer session following a screening of her film, the feminist documentary filmmaker Bishakha Datta admitted that the presence of the camera always changes something about the situation you enter, but it is the job of the filmmaker to find ways of dealing with it (August 15, 2015, Mumbai). For Nishtha Jain, director of the award-​winning documentary Gulabi Gang (2012), the role of the documentarian in the ethnographic encounter is to provide “a sense of stability where there is none and to tip the scale of justice for those that have none” (August 15, 2015, Mumbai, personal communication). Increasingly motivated to alter the script of my “real life” encounters with people, over the next four years I began to create films that my sisters were expressly interested in exhibiting to the public, and which centered the experiences of the audience through a deliberately reflexive means of storytelling.9 Using three cameras—​ two Canon 7D DSLRs and a JVC 3CCD—​as well as sound and light equipment, I structured my production (filming), post-​production (editing), and audience engagement (distribution) strategies to encourage my sisters to become collaborative players at all stages of the filmmaking process. By shifting my focus from the what of the encounter to the how, thus relieving documentary film from the burden of gathering culturally authentic material, I was able to address the fetishistic basis of filming trans-​hījṛā performers, uphold an ethos of social responsibility, and activate filmmaking’s potential for advocacy.10 This brought me closer to my trans-​hījṛā sisters as it transformed my role from that of evidence gatherer to “foreign chelā” film-​maker, and expanded my service to the community alongside their own efforts to change mainstream perceptions of trans-​hījṛā music and dance culture. I had already collected over five years of footage featuring performances from the Dancing Queens, a professional trans-​ hījṛā-​led dance troupe in Mumbai. However, the idea to produce a film with them originated from a meeting that took place at the Godrej India Culture Lab, where I  became a 9 Bill Nichols suggests that reflexive and performative documentaries “ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation” (2001:125). This sentiment is echoed by Mumbai-​based filmmakers K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, who recommend that documentary define its form by drawing attention not to its basis in “reality,” but to the way that it is made (August 24, 2015, personal communication). This is achieved in their own documentaries through non-​diegetic voice-​ over or subtitles, shots of the filmmakers filming their subjects, and pedagogically driven narratives concerning issues of social inequity. 10 E. Patrick Johnson discusses the importance of the researcher’s self-​reflexivity in the ethnographic process. A critical performative ethnographic approach, Johnson states, “demands that the researcher not only be conscious of one’s privilege [in my case, class, nationality, race, and institutional affiliation], but that she also uphold an ethos of social responsibility toward the advocacy for the people about whom she is researching” (2009:60).

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  175 Scholar-​in-​Residence during a Fulbright period in 2015.11 The Head of the Culture Lab, Parmesh Shahani, encouraged me to curate a capstone event to inaugurate a new 250-​seat auditorium inside their state-​of-​the-​art building named Godrej One. Shahani’s intention was to widely publicize the “First Transgender Event” held on the Godrej campus—​and, as he insisted, on the campus of any major Indian corporation—​using the Culture Lab’s robust media call-​list to draw in Godrej executives, staff, and otherwise middle-​class audiences for an educational experience about the plight of the transgender community. I called on the Dancing Queens with the knowledge that their founding chair, Abhina Aher, a hījṛā guru and activist who had previously curated events of this focus and magnitude for the trans-​hījṛā community, would rise to the occasion. She agreed on the condition that Shahani promise to push for the hiring of Godrej’s first transgender employee—​an offer which was positively received and executed following the event, marking an historical occasion for any major Indian corporation. Performance is a basic ingredient of documentary as far as the self-​expression of subjects in front of the camera and in their collaborative relationships with the filmmaker are concerned (Waugh 1997:111). In performative documentary, however, the overlap between the performance of the talent and that of the filmmaker is more explicit. Like illocutionary speech act utterances, performative documentaries “not only describe but also execute a transformation in the relationship of speaker and listener,” or, in this case, the filmmaker and subject (1997:111). They address the audience “with a sense of emphatic engagement” and in doing so, take on a self-​consciously theatrical tone (Nichols 1994:92; in Waugh 1997:111). This approach is particularly palpable in Pratibha Parmar’s reflexive-​esque documentary Khush (1991) and Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied (1989), both of which utilize raw documentary footage, scripted narrative, and somewhat bizarre pastiches of live-​action sequences, interviews, and dance sequences to raise questions about the nature of reality, truth, and being. Like these methodologically complex films, I  sought to evoke “the choreographies and modalities of performance” (Wong 2008:79) by creating a series of short documentaries that engaged dialogically with the Dancing Queens’ music and choreography in real time. Our goal was to involve my sisters in a development of a dynamic film production that educated middle-​class audiences about their daily lives, loves, and relations, while also drawing them into the narrative of our process (and even drama) as we worked together to achieve this shared goal. We called the project Dancing Queens: It’s All about Family. 11 The majority of these engagements took place while I was a Fulbright-​mtvU Fellow during a ten-​month period in 2012 and 2013. Fourteen short films were produced during this period and published on the Fulbright-​mtvU website:  https://​fulbright.mtvu.com/​author/​mtvujroy. In 2015, I became a Fulbright-​Hays Fellow and returned to India to become a Scholar-​in-​Residence with the Godrej India Culture Lab.

176  Jeff Roy We allotted two months of planning time, which in filmmaking terms felt like two days. To compensate for the limited time we had, I developed a production strategy that fused all three stages of conventional filmmaking—​a process known in the film world as “simultaneous production–​post-​production–​distribution/​ outreach/​audience engagement”—​and created key production positions for my sisters and Culture Lab colleagues. Working remotely from her office at the India HIV/​AIDS Alliance in New Delhi, Abhina assumed the role of lead producer, and her Mumbai-​based chelās, Urmi Jadhav and Madhuri Sarode, developed and directed the choreographic numbers. Once a firm footing had been established on the group’s dance numbers, I invited my “big sisters” Urmi and Madhuri to the performance venue at Godrej One. We conducted interviews, gathered B-​roll (supplemental footage), and staged two photo shoots for a photo exhibition planned on the evening of the performance. Following the meeting, I edited a short film entitled Sisters by combining our footage with B-​roll of previous performances. The following week, we exhibited the short film to the entire troupe, recorded their reactions, and after receiving their approval, continued filming the younger chelās. Two additional seven-​minute films were completed through a similar process: one entitled The Children, which includes interviews and dance footage from the younger, self-​identified male members of the dance group; and the second entitled Mom, which features Abhina and her biological mother Mangala in an intimate telling of their somewhat fraught yet loving relationship (see Video 2). The films’ narrative contours follow a long string of interview footage featuring the performers speaking directly into the camera in close up. The intention behind the staging of these “confessional style” interviews was to draw viewers into the intimate backstories of those whom they see on stage. In The Children, Tatva delivers a moving monologue about how he was kicked out of his home in his early teens. The interview dwells on his initial encounter with the hījṛā community intercut with behind-​the-​scenes footage of him preparing for a performance. One of Tatva’s final shots reveals a tattoo of Abhina’s name inscribed on his arm giving credence to the claim that “it is because of Abhina-​ ma that [he] is alive today.” The sequence concludes with a declaration of his wish to live in “one house as one family” with his chosen mother and sisters. Performative films reverse the direction of the viewer’s point of view onto queer subjects, ideally resulting in the familiarization of queer or transgender identities through the critique of the entire “belief system that sustains class, race, gender, and sexuality as visible, continually self-​ authenticating categories” in the “real world” (Fuchs 1997:195). The film Paris is Burning (1990) accomplishes this through the juxtaposition of performance footage in queer black and Latino underground spaces against shots of white business executives walking the streets of lower Manhattan. The sequencing of these images brings

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  177 the issue of viability to the community it represents by subverting hegemonic discourse concerning what we assume to be “real” or “truthful.” With the Dancing Queens films, we wanted to compel the spectator to think critically about their positionalities of privilege by drawing a stark contrast between images, sounds, and performances on the stage and on screen, representing the dancers’ public and more private lives. In the final three days of rehearsal, Abhina and I  worked on a film-​to-​ performance sequencing that embodied an interior/​exterior, private/​public, and past/​present dialectic encompassing the lives of those on stage. We weaved the films, which served as our “windows of interiority,” into the choreographed numbers by splitting the performance into three sections—​“patches” as Abhina referred to them—​making sure the sequencing of dance numbers corresponded to each of the films in content and form. For instance, we situated The Children in front of the troupe’s opening number Ganapathi Visarjan, which showcased all of the troupe’s younger chelās; Sisters introduced the second “patch,” which was opened with a duet number performed by Urmi and Madhuri; and Mom was placed before Abhina’s solo number, which was followed by a theatrical duet number featuring mother and daughter. The films’ aesthetic elements were also made to embody this interior/​exterior, private/​public, and past/​present dialectic. For instance, the color palettes in all three films are relatively monochromatic. Interviewees were asked to wear black and white clothing, and were recorded in front of a white background, which produced a striking visual contrast between the films and staged dance numbers in the final performance. Second, all three films possess mostly diegetic (heard within the ontological space of the film) soundscapes. Diegetic music was included only when relevant to particular shots of the performers dancing, and slow-​building, minimalistic non-​diegetic music was incorporated in the films’ introductory and concluding sequences. The self-​composed, non-​diegetic music comprises a self-​made recording of an electronic tanpura (plucked chordophone) strumming a single note with sympathetic overtones. Like the darkening of a cinema hall before a feature film, the intention was to ease the psychological transition into and out of the audio-​visual components of the performance for viewers. Finally, the films utilize footage of rehearsals and interviews, as well as footage of the performers watching the footage of the rehearsals and interviews, which took place in the same room as the final performance event. By including this meta-​footage, we hoped to facilitate audiences in contemplating their own physical placement and subjective positioning within the frame of the films’ narratives. As I was told, the performance re-​oriented some viewers’ attitudes about the trans-​hījṛā community. One audience member walked away from the event having “felt what it was like to dance in their shoes” (Anonymous, pers. comm.,

Figure 10.3  Diagram featuring the order of films and their patches. Developed by Abhina Aher and the author, November 12, 2015

Figure 10.4  Achieving visual contrast while filming Madhuri Sarodhe of the Dancing Queens. Stills from footage by author, November 18, 2015

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  179 November 18, 2016). Another “couldn’t help but to move to the rhythm with the performers,” an act that helped them empathize with their “current condition” (Anonymous 2, pers. comm., November 18, 2016). It was also noted by a reporter from NDTV in an interview they conducted with me that “while it may be stereotypical to feature dancing transgenders, [they felt] the event was very tasteful” (Anonymous 3, pers. comm., November 18, 2016). I told the reporter that I did not care whether or not he thought the dances were tasteful, but that I cared only whether or not trans-​hījṛā performers were able to perform in front of audiences that appreciated them for who they are. I noted how important it was for respectable institutions such as the Godrej Industries to open their doors to the Dancing Queens, and how cross-​cultural exchanges between trans-​hījṛā and mainstream audiences benefit everyone involved. It felt affirming to know that despite its potential for misrepresentation, the performance was nonetheless able to speak “with a sense of emphatic engagement” to its middle-​class audiences. It felt that we had, at least momentarily, shifted the gaze in a way that normally renders the controlling image of trans-​hījṛā identities as deviant. At the same time our efforts offered a certain promise of trans-​hījṛā visibility, the film nevertheless enacts another form of erasure. For one, the films’ scene of constraint never violates the boundaries of decency sanctioned by the Hindi and English-​speaking bourgeois audience. Its concern for the respectable show of face and its predictable narrative emit a faint potpourri scent not unlike that which is replicated in Godrej soaps. Moreover, their privileging of narratives from those who have undergone gender confirmation surgery or who have “come out” edits out the sometimes harrowing narratives of pre-​or non-​ operative transgender individuals—​not to mention the hījṛā, kothi, thirunangai, siva-​sati, non-​gendered aesthetic, asexual, or otherwise vernacular identities—​ that elude the logics of LGBTQIA+ liberation as told through the global coming out narrative. Tatva’s story, for instance, is shaped into a coming out narrative of emotional maturation and economic independence as he proudly embraces his newfound identity. In the narrative, aspects of his embodied personhood that evade this formula stand in as images of a forlorn, forsaken past (see Video 3). Another film sequence, which covers a four-​act theatrical dance number with Abhina and her biological mother Mangala, enacts a similar form of erasure. Narrating Abhina’s coming out story, the original choreography is set to a mix of prerecorded instrumental film music and cut against an interview of Abhina and Mangala. The number begins with a lighthearted duet between mother and son (“childhood”), then transitions into a scene detailing their dramatic separation (“adolescence”), a solo number from Abhina indexing her despair and emotional growth as a hījṛā chelā (“young adulthood”), and the eventual point of self-​affirmation and rapprochement of mother and daughter (“adulthood”) (Roy 2016). In the film, Abhina’s experience of joining a hījṛā gharānā serves as

180  Jeff Roy

Figure 10.5  Theatrical dance in four parts, featuring Mangala and Abhina Aher at the Godrej India Culture Lab. Photos by Nathan Sigman, November 18, 2015

the crux of the conflict in her coming out narrative. Viewers empathize with her as she finds herself begging in the streets, falling victim to sexual violence, and eventually returning to her biological mother whose initial resistance eventually gives way to loving acceptance for her daughter’s newly realized transgender identity. Through the way the film was cut, the spectator is left to ruminate about the bittersweetness of their reunion against the backdrop of a particularly dark vision of hījṛā gharānedar culture (see Videos 3 and 4). Aniruddha Dutta points to the dependency that global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender narratives—​which are established by the transnational HIV/​ AIDS NGO industrial complex, government, and privatized spheres—​have on socio-​cultural lifeforms that are not entirely recuperable to logics of the LGBTQIA+ identity trade, such as hījṛās, kothis, and other lower-​class gender nonconforming people that have existed in India well before the arrival of Europeans (paper presentation, October 20, 2016; Dutta 2012a, 2012b). This critique links the emergence of middle-​class Western and Asian LGBTQIA+ identities and movements to the growth and expansion of capitalist modes of economy and society.12 In their book Les feministes blanches et l’empire (2012), Félix Boggio Ewanjé-​Epée and Stella Magliani-​Belkacem discuss the principle of “pinkwashing” in reference to policies adopted by the state of Israel to increase gay tourism by washing away “the crimes of [the government] with a gayfriendly 12 Dennis Altman’s model of global expansion posits that the influence of Western nations and corporations played a central role in the global queering and transnational expansion of modern LGBTQIA+ identities and movements (1996). Peter Jackson’s hybrid model shows how local gender and sexual variances in Thailand are mediated by regional versions of capitalism to produce distinct vernacular queer modern identities (2011). As Dutta observes, these models reinforce conventional hierarchies of scale between transnational, regional, and local discourse and praxis about gender and other axes of identity (paper presentation, October 20, 2016).

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  181 detergent” (2012:93, translation my own). Here, pinkwashing is theorized as an instrument of a new Western imperialism on the bodies of queer, trans, and gender non-​conforming people whose identities reside somewhere outside or on the peripheries of the LGBTQIA+ galaxy. Alain Naze explores this further in his book Manifeste contra la normalisation gay (2017), suggesting that “by imposing particular categories of thought on the world, [the practice of pinkwashing] leads to the impoverishment of cultures and a diminution of their diversity” (2017:104, translation my own). As a moral shift in mainstream Indian worldview, the Dancing Queens films reconfigure traditional vernacular hījṛā values and practices in a way that appears to signal the sanitization of the hījṛā body as transnational codes of transgender respectability supplant older ones based on codes of local, working-​class servitude. As a white, queer representative of Western origin, my role in the filmmaking process only reinforces the production of such meaning. At the same time, the more you zoom in, the grainier or more pixelated the picture becomes. As Dutta points out, this model offers critical insight into the production and circulation of sex-​and gender-​based identity categories in the global public sphere, while also relying on conventional hierarchies of scale between transnational, national, and local spheres of influence, and obscuring some of the ways some agents may be productive in their engagement with transnational discourses and in the (re)visioning of their identities and cultural practices (paper pres., October 20, 2016). Leading up to the staging of the event, I had hoped to work through these frictions through our collaborative filmmaking process. As it happened, Abhina, Urmi, Madhuri, and some of their chelās assumed key production roles. In order to allow for greater circulation of the footage within and outside the community for educational purposes, we encouraged everyone to speak in the tongues in which they felt most comfortable. Hindi and Marathi dominate the landscape of vernacular languages, especially shared among the chelās, while Abhina, a transnational figurehead of the trans-​hījṛā community herself, code-​switches between Marathi, Hindi, and English, demonstrating her mastery of all three languages. Although providing some valuable production assistance, the Godrej India Culture Lab oversaw neither the editing nor writing of the films’ scripts. Abhina, my assistant Rahul, and I selected and included performance numbers and personal narratives on the premise that they reflect Abhina’s—​and increasingly Urmi and Madhuri’s—​long-​ term commitment to nurture the mental and physical well-​being of her chelās as they contend with systemic inequities and discrimination in everyday urban contexts. Abhina’s personal narrative, to an extent, disrupts conventions of trans-​ hījṛā storytelling as she draws on her mother’s presence to convey her pedagogical philosophy of political agency. This philosophy is summarized in a statement Abhina shared with me a number of years before our Godrej performance:

182  Jeff Roy It’s more than just a guru-​chelā relationship. I don’t think it has much to do with that, because I never treat them as my disciples. I never treat them as my chelā, or something like that, because I treat them equally. And they also make sure that they respect all the freedom and all the kinds of opportunities that I provide them. [ . . . ] Sometimes I’m their friend. Sometimes I’m their lover. Sometimes I’m their husband. I don’t know what exactly. That’s the kind of relationship that we have together and that makes us bonded to each other and keeps both of us grounded. (March 20, 2013, personal communication)

Abhina’s pedagogy revises customary relational hierarchies within hījṛā gharānedar culture. She employs the power dynamic awarded by the respect that is given to her as a guru to cultivate opportunities for her daughters to take ownership of their own labor. As co-​actors in the participatory process of meaning-​ making, we sought to reproduce this vision in the modalities of the films and choreographies of the dance floor.13 It has been said that queerness “is a horizon of being” (Husserl 1991) that can be glimpsed in utopian bonds, affiliations, designs, and gestures that exist within the present, “a type of affective excess that presents the enabling force of a forward-​dawning futurity” (Muñoz 2009:23). While the films themselves may have turned out less than ideal, the embodied practice of our collaboration offered us creative and cooperative ways of working with each other. This queerly sincere process unsettled, if only momentarily, conventional relational hierarchies established by a centuries-​old narrative involving contact between Western colonialists and postcolonial nationalists, upper-​middle and lower-​class social structures. The many failures that emerged out of it—​failure of authenticity, failure of heteronormativity, failure of phenotypical belonging—​forced us, in some cases, to “face the dark side of life, loves, and libidos” (Halberstam

13 In the months following the performance at Godrej One, the footage of all three short films was compiled into a single, free-​standing eighteen-​minute-​long film about the event. The intention was to submit the film to the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, where the Dancing Queens perform on a yearly basis. The film subsequently premiered in front of a spirited audience on Saturday, May 28, 2016 at Liberty Cinema, and was followed by a special performance with the Dancing Queens. Although I was unable to attend, the film was represented by members of the troupe as well as Parmesh Shahani and his team at the Godrej India Culture Lab. Hoping to retain the educational and experiential dimensions of the original event, the film embodies some of the formal qualities of the original performance. While editing, I placed the three short films on the timeline in linear order and threaded them together using dance footage from the event. Some of the original interviews were pruned to create a single narrative; however, the original characters and overall tone and sequencing of the films were preserved. The order of the scenes on the timeline corresponded to the order of “patches” originally established by Abhina, although greater importance was placed on the “windows of interiority” (the original film footage) than the staged numbers. In fact, the interview-​to-​performance ratio in the resulting film turned out to be an (almost) exact inversion of the original interview-​to-​performance ratio which had taken place at the Godrej India Culture Lab performance.

Con/​F iguring Transgender-​H ījṛā Music and Dance  183 2011) and to reimagine a new way of thinking, feeling, acting, and being in the world. It also forced us to think about new ways to engage our scholarly praxis. One may be unbound by the limitations of ethnographic authenticity—​in which certain truths are unearthed, measured, and appraised in relation to other truths within the colonial tradition—​and activated in the imperfect-​yet-​sincere participatory performances of affirmation, activism, and critique.

Further Thoughts In ethnomusicological scholarship, the use of the camera, audio recording device, and documentary film has historically relied on the consideration of music as a cultural artifact requiring special intervention so that it may live in an academic afterlife beyond its previously established temporal boundaries of existence. The conceit of the ethnographer’s “God view,” a manifestation of the imperialist overseer stemming from this tradition, is ultimately a fictive mode of observation which transforms subjects in their spaces from a “complexity into a readability” (de Certeau 1984:124). It also happens to reflect a location of power and control by allowing the ethnographer to observe action from afar and configure it in a manner that falls in line with their ideals, theoretical positioning, and subconscious biases. In film-​based research, as with all lines of research, we must redraw the theoretical and methodological blueprints that render these efforts as unworthy of critique or change. Considering performance studies’ foremother Peggy Phelan’s contested missive, “Performance’s only life is in the present” and that “[p]‌erformance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (1993:146), I ask how ethnomusicological filmmaking might reconfigure music practice as embodied research rather than a means to reproduce or preserve music’s forms and functions (Prasad and Roy 2017:207). Queer ethnomusicological filmmaking may offer a number of solutions to the undertaking of film-​based fieldwork. For one, it addresses the fetishistic burden of filmmaking to objectify the subject by drawing attention not only to the what of knowledge acquisition but also to the how. It shifts the ethnomusicological gaze away from what music is to what music does, and while not losing sight of the performance’s formal and often virtuosic qualities, considers the ways in which all embodied practices are already representations of the field rather than technically in/​accurate or in/​authentic demonstrations un/​worthy of catalog. It understands music to include the dances, theatrical numbers, images, languages, histories, films, multimedia, and all other material embodiments that shape and are shaped by culture. It engages the musics of the present, but also considers

184  Jeff Roy how they link to the traces, glimmers, residues, specks, and absences in that which comes after.14 Queer ethnomusicological filmmaking involves people who perform (ethnomusicology) in the structured, educated, and emotional process of imagining new futures for themselves (queer filmmaking). It considers queer not as subject but as a way of knowing and working through the forms, temporal arrangements, places, and processes of this research. As a researcher, you transform your role from a gatherer of recordable evidence to co-​performative filmmaker. You embrace your imperfections and the imperfections of this practice. You depend on failure in the hopes of learning and making something different and new. You concern yourself not in prescriptions of identification, behavior, or movement in the making of some cultural artifact, but in involving yourself and your relations—​queer, non-​queer, transgender, cisgender, or otherwise—​as agents integrated and productively engaged in shared social practice of working on, with, and against hegemonic structures of power.15 You take on the actual labor of affirmation and critique upon which your community depends for cultural perseverance and prosperity by revisioning new possibilities for yourselves and others. Harnessing the power of music to transcend the realities of the present, you change for your work and for the betterment of those with whom you work. You queer relational boundaries prescribed by tradition through your performances, and dance around the rapidly orbiting conceptual and ideological planets of your audience, performers, and yourself. With each orbit comes a new horizon, and with each horizon, a new you.

14 This is in reference to José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ephemera, which is a mode of proofing, producing arguments often worked by minoritarian culture and criticism makers. Ephemera is “a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself ” that can be found in the “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” (1996:10). 15 This references José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification, in which racial and sexual minorities engage in performances and readings of “utopian possibility” (2009:25).

11

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-​Hop Queerness? Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies Matthew Leslie Santana*

On July 13, 2013, The Guardian ran the headline “Gay rap, the unthinkable becomes reality” (Collins 2013). In this chapter, I consider just what is so unthinkable about “gay rap.” I suggest that the reception of queer artists doing hip hop has tended to depict Black queerness as new or novel, to characterize hip hop as uniquely and uniformly homophobic, and to interpret the work of queer hip-​hop artists through a politics of respectability. I  draw from Black/​queer studies and queer of color critique to suggest instead that queer artists doing hip hop historicize their own work as belonging to a long tradition of Black non-​ heteronormativity. I  consider the utility of Black feminist coalitional politics in understanding the relationships between these artists and their publics, and I turn away from respectability politics toward “tough love” and disidentification as critical tools in these artists’ performances. Finally, I argue that mainstream understandings of hip hop’s relationship to queerness have had the effect of scapegoating hip hop for homophobia and obscuring the role white liberalism has played in the promotion of homophobia as a national project of the United States. I am particularly attentive to the performance of three young artists who work primarily in and around New York City: Cakes Da Killa is originally from New Jersey, has a degree in fashion studies from Montclair State University, and after releasing several mixtapes and EPs put out his first studio album Hedonism in October 2016. Mykki Blanco is originally from California, studied art in Chicago and New  York, and released their debut album in September 2016.1 Princess * I am grateful to many people for the thoughtful advice they offered over the years on this topic and this essay. Sindhumathi Revuluri, Ingrid Monson, Carol Oja, Chuck Garrett, and Vincent Brown read earlier drafts and made comments that led to substantial revisions. Conversations with Bradley Craig, Krystal Klingenberg, Renugan Raidoo, and Sarah Hankins had a foundational impact on the way I thought about the topic and my approach. Discussions at the Feminist Theory and Music conference and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Gender and Sexuality Workshop (particularly with its faculty co-​conveners Robin Bernstein and Sophia Roosth), where I presented earlier drafts of this chapter, were also helpful. 1 Blanco has over the course of their career asked for different pronouns to be used when referring to them. I use they/​them/​theirs here.

186  Matthew Leslie Santana Nokia is an Afro-​Nuyorican woman who grew up in Manhattan, and her self-​ released mixtape 1992 (2016) has attracted considerable attention. Throughout this chapter, I rely on depictions of these artists in the media, participant observation at their shows, and analysis of their songs and music videos. While the examples I draw from come from music journalism, they rely on discourses that also traffic within music studies, and it is in the latter field that I hope to intervene. More generally, my aim is to consider what a queer of color music studies might look like. As an ethnomusicologist doing queer studies, I see performance as a site that troubles modes of queer analysis that seek to isolate sexuality as a category of analysis from the rest of the social sphere.2 Through performance, multiple and conflicting categories of the social can be expressed simultaneously and left in conflict without resolution. Beyond a shortage of queer scholarship within ethnomusicology, I contend that there are insufficient tools in the field for thinking race and sexuality together. Thus, I hope that in the cultivation of a new queer ethnomusicology, we as ethnomusicologists adopt an understanding of sexuality as inherently imbricated with social formations of race, gender, class, ability, and nation.

From Novelty to Continuity The representation of queer artists doing hip hop as novel is not unique to The Guardian. The subtitle for a 2012 article in Pitchfork reads: “The relationship between homosexuality and hip-​hop has long been a contentious one . . . [we talk] to a group of young New York artists who are breaking down ideas of rap identity” (Battan 2012). If queer people of color and their artistic production have been depicted over time as new or novel, I want to draw on Black/​queer studies to appreciate both the continuities between this work and earlier hip hop and a more historically grounded relationship between Blackness and queerness more generally. The novelty evinced in these titles recalls the treatment of Black/​queer studies as new and exciting within academia. Omise’eke Tinsley makes a particularly trenchant critique of this understanding, describing the sharp division between queerness and slavery as “the ‘newest’ and ‘oldest’ sites of Blackness” and how this phenomenon “reflects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant issues” (2008:193). To trouble this distinction, Tinsley describes non-​normative gender and sexual relations in the Middle Passage and in slavery,



2

I draw here from José Muñoz’s singular work (especially 2009:10–​11).

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  187 both amorous and forced. Thus, the erasure of Black folks from both popular conceptions and academic treatments of queerness forgets not only the lives of Black queer people but also the history of gender and sexual transgression as a tool for oppression during slavery. Ethnographic accounts of sexual transgression in the United States in the twentieth century also complicate the sharp line drawn between queerness and Blackness in the media representation of queer artists doing hip hop. In her pathbreaking account of female impersonators in the United States, Esther Newton describes the rather open attitudes toward gender and sexual transgression in Black neighborhoods in the middle of the twentieth century ([1972] 1979). While Newton’s Mother Camp catalogs the policing of gender transgressive white men in urban areas, one of her informants describes the relative freedom with which he and a “colored queen” walked around in drag on the street in a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles: “Because that was in the colored areas, and they never bother you. You could walk around nude, and they probably wouldn’t say anything” ([1972] 1979:39). Away from the gaze of the police, who did not seem to care much about the welfare of Black people in any case, Newton’s informant points to Black social spheres as spaces of acceptance for transgressive gender and sexual practices at a time when white middle-​and upper-​class spaces were especially repressive. More recently, Marlon Bailey described a history of Black non-​ heteronormativity in Detroit. Building on the work of scholars who have described similar attitudes in Harlem, Washington D.C., and Chicago, Bailey situates ballroom culture in Detroit as emerging from “a long history of nonconforming gender and sexual practices and non-​normative kinship formations that have been inherited by those referred to as Black LGBT individuals today” (2013:10). To buttress this claim, Bailey points to, among other things, “buffet flats” in Detroit in the early twentieth century in which all sorts of people “in the life” could gather and socialize without much interference from heteronormative institutions (2013:11–​12). Ballroom culture has served as an important referent in the work of the artists I consider in this chapter. Their gestures evoke the practice of voguing within this scene, and their lyrics borrow readily from ballroom’s lexicon. Cakes Da Killa, for example, routinely refers to himself as a butch queen, one part of the gender system outlined by Bailey in Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013). He has been unimpressed, however, with how ballroom gets depicted in the media. On Facebook in January 2017, Cakes wrote “I’m going back to editorial work. Yt writers wanna talk like a butch queen then hire a butch queen to peer edit. Book me sis!” and, later, “I’ve been feeling lately like vogue is the new bboy . . . a physical manifestation of the oppressed. You can’t hear us but you’ll see us. Protect ballroom and respect ballroom. Bigger than a trend piece.”

188  Matthew Leslie Santana This linking of Black queer performance and hip-​hop dance as embodied practices of the oppressed is an example of how Cakes and other artists often articulate their own work as connected to a long line of work in hip hop not necessarily by queer artists. Later, Cakes Da Killa posted on Facebook “. . . we sisters in sin (other gay rappers) are way more rooted in the original elements of hip hop then whats on the radio. Showmanship, comedy, glamour, dance culture, technique, tech & originality. That plus a respect for history and the classics. No brainer bye.” Similarly, Mykki Blanco explained in a 2013 interview that they feel their “place has been as a character,” likening themselves to “people like Wu-​Tang and Nas and other rappers who built a mythology within their own arena” (in Collins 2013). What Cakes and Mykki demonstrate, then, is not a reductive and paranoid critique of hip hop (following Eve Sedgwick 2003), but instead a loving knowledge of its history and a commitment to its foundational tenets. As a vital means of critique from the margins cultivated among working-​class Black and Latinx youth, hip hop emerges in their words as a propitious—​not unlikely—​site for queer of color critique. There are also, to be sure, explicitly queer genealogies within hip hop, and these, too, are elided in the mainstream press. In the early 2000s, Deep Dickollective led the charge of West Coast homohop that provided incisive critiques of racism and homophobia. The New Orleans bounce scene has also been a prominent site for hip hop that foregrounds gender and sexual transgression, particularly in the work of Big Freedia, Sissy Nobby, and Katey Red. Tellingly, in a 2010 article from The New York Times these artists were treated with the same wide-​eyed wonder as the later coverage of queer artists doing hip hop in New York City. The article opens with the rhetorical question: “If ‘gay rapper’ is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar?” Miraculously, according to the author, this is possible in the “cultural Galapagos” that is New Orleans (Jonathan Dee 2010). These representations of queer people doing hip hop fix these artists in states of newness, turning them into people without history (to borrow from Eric Wolf 1982). This erasure of Black queer history enables these culture narrators to circumscribe hip hop as a homophobic genre and to characterize current artists as novel interventions. Far from a coincidence, this is an example of what Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (1995, 2003) called a “silencing of the past” in which “the existence and deployment of mechanisms of silence” make readily available facts that “appear less relevant than they are” (2003:34–​35). In this case, the effect of such silencing is to elide the role that white middle-​class liberals—​the owners, producers, and consumers of mainstream media and record labels—​have played in the national project of homophobia. The reception of queer artists doing hip hop has, furthermore, played into the tendency Imani Perry describes in which “the mainstream press categorizes

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  189 and creates dichotomies of good and bad” in hip hop and “does not foster . . . but rather encourages the censorship of ideological diversity through condemnation or praise” (2004:6). Salon, for example, offers “10 queer rappers you should be listening to instead of Eminem,” encouraging readers to “support these super-​ talented queer hip-​hop artists” instead of listening to “the perpetually hate-​ spewing rapper” (Lang 2013). The complexity and ambivalence of the history of hip hop and heteronormativity, then, are foreclosed in favor of reductionist narratives that invest in the novelty of queer artists doing hip hop.

From Genre to Coalition The Salon author’s grouping of “10 queer rappers” and other authors’ references to gay or queer rap (e.g., Battan 2012; Collins 2013) suggest to readers that these artists form a kind of discrete scene or genre. The artists themselves, however, have reacted to this etic categorization with considerable suspicion and ambivalence. Rather than treating these artists as part of a genre, then, I want to discuss them as being in coalition in the Black feminist and queer of color sense. In a radio interview with Ebro Darden, Cakes Da Killa corrected Ebro when he described Cakes as a gay rapper, identifying himself instead as “a rapper who happens to be gay” (“Meet Cakes” 2014b). Cakes’s analysis here recalls an earlier comment by fellow artist Le1f, a dancer and hip-​hop performer from New York City who released his first studio album Riot Boi in 2015. In a 2012 interview, Le1f implored a music critic not to “make gay NYC rap a ‘thing’ ” (in Battan 2012). As he explained, “I’m not trying to be competing with my friends based on their race and sexuality. The whole ‘room for one’ mentality is homophobic . . . if the world is ready for a gay rapper, then they’re ready for multiple gay rappers. If we were straight, no one would be comparing us” (in Battan 2012). Even earlier, queer bounce artists from New Orleans resisted the “sissy bounce” label, insisting that their music ought simply to be referred to as bounce (Dee 2010). This contradiction—​that these artists participate in media representation while questioning the very grounds on which they are being represented—​ reflects some of the difficulties of interpolating oneself as a queer person of color in a phobic majoritarian sphere. Far from merely distancing themselves from the identity categories they invoke, the artists make trenchant critiques of the way sexual minorities are called to compete with one another in a phobic marketplace. Coalitional politics offers a generative way out of the binds of genre-​making. In Black feminism and queer of color critique, coalitions refer to unlikely structures of affinity that have the ability to effect unprecedented political change. In the iconic woman of color feminist text This Bridge Called My Back,

190  Matthew Leslie Santana Barbara Smith acknowledges the important foundational role identity and even separatism might play in feminist movements, but she argues that “the strongest politics are coalition politics that cover a broad base of issues” (1981:126). Writing in response to the HIV/​AIDS epidemic and experiences of racism in white gay spheres, Cathy Cohen envisions a coalitional politics in which “one’s relation to power, not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades” (1997:438). In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson understands the emergence of coalitional politics in Black lesbian and women of color feminist circles in the 1970s and 1980s as a radical revision of revolutionary nationalist ideologies that had obscured the realities of non-​heteronormativity in marginalized groups (2004:133). This consciousness forms the basis of the political orientation of what he terms queer of color critique. Queer of color critique, then, has had a complicated and rigorously theorized relationship to identity politics. For example, E.  Patrick Johnson has pointed out that queer people of color are often accused of being essentialist or anti-​ intellectual when their theorizing is based in a politics of identity. He reminds that “galvanizing around identity . . . is not always an unintentional ‘essentialist’ move,” and can be “an intentional strategic choice” (2001:5–​6). In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson demonstrates how identity-​based projects are tied up with nationalism, yet he understands identity as ambivalent, as “enabling and fraught” (2004:130), as a valuable starting point for oppositional politics. More recently, Jafari Allen has critiqued the phenomenon in which radical Black feminism is written off as no more than identity politics “as if the innovation of politicized identity formations as one strategy (or tactic) of resistance is the evil, rather than misogyny, racism, heterosexism, and classism” (2012:223). Through their work, Nokia, Cakes, and Blanco envision coalitions that go beyond rigid notions of identity categories. But their interventions—​Blanco’s gender-​bending performances, Nokia’s description of her “little titties and . . . fat belly” on “Tomboy,” Cakes’s description of himself as a butch queen—​are legibly Black and femme. Thus, thinking of these artists through the lens of coalition enables an understanding of them as a heterogeneous social formation while still acknowledging that their intervention emerges from Black, queer, and femme subjectivities. Finally, coalition helps theorize a relationship between audience and performer in this sphere. Through their performances, Cakes and Mykki trouble the divide between performer and public. Barely through one song at a February 2017 performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cakes Da Killa eschewed the stage to join the audience. After performing a second number tightly encircled by the audience, Cakes asked us to clear more room for him so he could reach more people. He then worked the runway-​shaped hole in the crowd for the duration of his set, interacting with all those closest to him. Performing just after

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  191 Cakes, Mykki Blanco turned the entire venue into their stage. Like Cakes, they quickly left the stage for the dance floor. Then, over the course of their set, they returned to the stage, performed briefly atop an unused bar at the side of the establishment, and finished on the stairs heading to the balcony. If Samuel Delany describes interclass contact as both the “locus of democracy as visible social drama” and the “lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis” (1999:198), then Cakes and Mykki use space creatively to encourage contact, furthering a pedagogical and political project that provokes and encourages their listeners to participate in their coalition. Rather than obscure the particularities that make up this coalition, however, Blanco explicitly referred to a diverse roster of members throughout the show:  queer people of color, gender nonconforming people, “Black and Spanish” people, white people, HIV-​positive people and their partners, and the students of MIT, Harvard, and an imagined “Boston Community College.” In doing so, they framed this coalition in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality while including some perhaps unlikely members. They also clearly articulated the stakes of such a coalition. Referring to the lived realities of queer people of color, Mykki proclaimed: “Oppression will no longer be a part of my narrative.” Similarly, Princess Nokia depicts a complex transnational coalition in her recent song “Brujas” from 1992 (2016). The music video begins with a song to Yemayá, the orisha or divinity of the sea in the Afrocuban religion Regla de Ocha or Santería.3 In the scene, four Black and brown women—​among them Princess Nokia—​dressed in white wade in water in the presence of a fifth Black woman also dressed in white with her head and torso covered in a blue lace cloth. The camera flirts with the water and always just avoids showing the scene in its entirety, giving the impression that the women cannot be fully apprehended by the viewer. In “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” Omise’eke Tinsley considers the ocean water as an archive of the Middle Passage, describing the bodily fluids of the enslaved as they traveled the Atlantic as “among the first sites of colonization” (2008:198). Water, too, emerges in her piece as a site of resistance. Nokia foregrounds water sonically—​in the rippling rhythmic motive—​and visually in a song that spells out the historical transnational movement of Black and Native women. She raps: “I’m that Black-​a-​Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba /​ And my people come from Africa diaspora, Cuba /​And you mix that Arawak, that original people /​I’m that Black Native American, I vanquish all evil /​I’m that Black a-​Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba /​And my ancestors

3 For a discussion of Yemayá’s significance within Afro-​Caribbean religions, see Alexander (2005:292).

192  Matthew Leslie Santana Nigerian, my grandmas was brujas.” Brujas, or witches, becomes Nokia’s way of encompassing and understanding her coalition, which is specifically Black, native, and femme.

From Respectability to Tough Love Not all critics appreciate the ways these artists go about their work. In a 2015 article for Out Magazine, a white gay writer admonished Blanco for alleged altercations in Miami and Brooklyn (Lindsay 2015). Lamenting Blanco’s behavior, the writer explains that “even a rebel soul should be tamed to public decency,” encouraging Blanco to “sav[e]‌this aggression and anger  .  .  .  and transpos[e] it to the music” (Lindsay 2015). Beyond the blatant racism of the desire to “tame” Blanco’s “aggression,” this writer’s patronizing tone demonstrates a desire for queer artists doing hip hop not only to overcome hip hop’s supposedly exceptional homophobia problem but also to do so within a politics of respectability.4 This desire further betrays the class position of these critics as they fail to appreciate this cultural production that emerges from working-​class people and communities of color as a heterogeneous array that draws from long histories of racialized non-​heteronormativity to imagine other possible futures. As such, I want to draw again from queer of color critique and turn away from the expectation of respectability politics toward “tough love” and disidentification as critical tools of these queer artists doing hip hop. The characterization of hip hop as uniquely and uniformly homophobic recalls earlier critiques of hip hop’s misogyny. In her groundbreaking study of hip hop in Black culture, however, Tricia Rose explains that “[s]‌ome responses to sexism in rap adopt a tone that suggests that rappers have infected an otherwise sexism-​free society” (1994:15). Rose also points out that other larger and more influential sites in which misogyny is cultivated—​like adolescent male gender role modeling and the larger music business—​do not receive similar homogenizing critiques. Writing a decade later, Imani Perry demonstrates that, regarding accusations of misogyny, “hip hop suffered the fate of the scapegoat, being no more misogynistic than American popular culture in general” (2004:175). While neither Rose nor Perry devotes much attention to homophobia in hip hop, I argue their observations about hip hop and misogyny can be applied to homophobia today. That is to say that “some responses to [homophobia] in rap adopt

4 While this term comes from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s pathbreaking work (1994), my use is meant to reflect what respectability politics has come to mean in popular culture.

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  193 a tone that suggests that rappers have infected an otherwise [homophobia]-​free society” (Rose 1994:15), and “hip hop suffered the fate of the scapegoat, being no more [homophobic] than American popular culture in general” (Perry 2004:175). This pernicious scapegoating of Black culture as the generator of larger social problems is continuous with the treatment of Black communities and families in canonical sociology (see Ferguson 2004) and the proliferation of the myth of the Black male rapist (see Davis 1983), processes that have been used to justify the physical and structural violence enacted upon Black people and communities since Reconstruction. Furthermore, these reductive characterizations of Black cultural production serve to relieve other groups—​in this case, white middle-​ class liberals—​of their complicity in the phobic social processes they denounce. For example, while the Recording Industry Association of America was adorning every hip-​hop release with parental advisory labels, a white Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was signing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Or, as Deep Dickollective’s Juba Kalamka put it succinctly in 2006: Queer hip-​hop in a lot of ways is killing the bogeyman in the gay community . . . If you talk about gay, white upper-​middle-​class men . . . they have had a convenient kind of bogeyman for a long time in the threatening straight hetero-​ normative Black male. It’s just kind of an easy and lazy event for classism and racism. But the truth be told, hip-​hop doesn’t create public policy. Hip-​hop didn’t create the Defense of Marriage Act. Hip-​hop didn’t create the climate in which kids like Sakia Gunn, Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena and Gwen Araujo (are killed). That’s not a new thing: The ills of society getting laid at the feet of disenfranchised people. (Hix 2006)

Unfortunately, the mainstream media never heeded Kalamka’s message, and the relentless representation of queer people of color and their work as new and novel allows interventions like his to be forgotten, and for the process he critiques to be repeated again and again over the following decade. In killing this bogeyman, to borrow Kalamka’s phrase, the artists I’ve been dealing with in this chapter often defy the politics of respectability thrust upon them. In his mixtape Hunger Pangs (2014a), Cakes Da Killa parodies this very expectation on the track “Rotation.” The song begins simply with a steady synthesized hi-​hat and a hollow percussive sound on the backbeats, building up like many other tracks on the mixtape. On the fourth (and last) beat of the second bar, a clap comes in that continues on the backbeats throughout the track. Finally, a subdued synthesized keyboard enters in the fifth bar playing jazz/​blues inflected chords in a voice-​like timbre. In measure 13, Cakes enters along with synthesized bass playing a tresillo rhythm. If the form of the song is familiar in the context of

194  Matthew Leslie Santana the mixtape, the content is distinct: The tempo is slower, the beat packs less of a punch, Cakes’s delivery is more lyrical, less percussive. The text, too, is unique on the mixtape. It features Cakes at his most sentimental by far. He begins: “How the fuck you leave a hickey on my consciousness? /​The way you do me really fuckin’ with my confidence /​Had me open too wide across continents /​Just let me keep you for the night without a consequence.” Cakes describes himself as “layin’ on [his] bed with tears falling on [his] shirt.” Just as Cakes finishes his fifth phrase, however, the track grinds to a halt. The instrumental backing cuts out completely, and Cakes addresses the listener directly: Hol’ up hol’ up hol’ up hol’ up, I know n****s ain’t think I was gettin soft. Like, what the fuck? Like y’all thought I was on my Drake shit like, “Don’t worry, coming home.” Like uh uh, that’s not me, like it’s gully cunt entertainment all day every day. I’m here with my coochie cutters and my crop top in the booth. Like you really think I was gonna let a n**** have me open bitch? Aaahh, laugh at them, hahahahaaaah. On to this cunt shit.

Without skipping a beat, the listener is dropped into the hard-​driving beat of the next track on the mixtape. Cakes’s eschewing of sentimentality here for “gully cunt entertainment” is a far cry from the sort of intervention music critics conjure. Cakes’s parodic move here from crying to laughing recalls Esther Newton’s description of camp humor as “a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying” ([1972] 1979:109). Cakes’s performance, then, might be seen as a reinvigoration of Newton’s camp, a tool used by queer performers in the middle of the twentieth century whose work, Newton points out, was imbricated in meaningful ways with racial and class formations. In Disidentifications (1999), José Muñoz acknowledges the pedagogical and political value of humor, and positions camp as a practice that exemplifies the disidentificatory strategies to which his title refers. Camp, he argues, enables artists to “reinhabit . . . stereotypes, both calling attention to the inaccuracy of these representations and ‘fixing’ such representation from the inside by filling in these representational husks with complicated, antiessentialist, emotionally compelling characters” (127). Cakes uses a related maneuver in the eponymous track “Hunger Pangs” when he raps: “Since I stepped out on the scene, /​everybody want a piece, /​cuz they know that what I’m serving is official /​They know I keep it real cunt, /​but a bitch won’t front /​I will slay a fucking fag with no issue.” Cakes’s lyrics here read like something the Salon author quoted previously might criticize. I understand Cakes here as disidentifying with the protocols of hip hop. Muñoz

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  195 explains that “[t]‌he disidentificatory subject tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form” (1999:12) rather than discounting the validity of the form wholesale. Muñoz’s conceit at various points in the text is that the queer of color cultural worker, operating in a phobic majoritarian sphere, does not have the luxury of discarding the constituent elements of their racial and sexual realities, even if these realities on their own do not fully apprehend their experience. For the queer of color subject, there is no prior structure or process into which we can be fully interpellated, so the allure of cozy identification is lost on us while the politics of counteridentification do not serve our needs. Rather than positioning himself in opposition to the genre—​as his reception often does—​Cakes recycles the material of the hip hop into something more useful for him. Cakes’s biting lyrics articulate with a strategy deployed by Mykki Blanco in the February 2017 performance mentioned previously. Performing after Cakes on their Stunt Queen Tour, Blanco procured a massive black cushion from backstage and, leaping into the audience, struck the listeners with it in a display of what they called “tough love.” The campy excess of the cushion gave the encounter a degree of levity while the act remixed the innocuousness of a pillow fight into something more menacing and meaningful. This moment recalled other performances in which Blanco has thrown themselves into the audience forcefully and with little warning, on at least one occasion causing injury to those below them. I do not read these acts, however, as careless or violent. Instead, I want to imagine Blanco as embodying the hard work of coalition building and of revolution. In their use of space and in their interactions with the audience, they seem to be demonstrating the texture of this coalition’s intervention and claiming tough love as a critical tool. In February 2017, Princess Nokia ended a performance at Cambridge University early after leaving the stage to confront a white male audience member who was verbally antagonizing her (George and Okundaye 2017; Gibsone 2017; Ravens 2017). In a conversation with students from a campus organization composed of women and non-​binary people of color, Nokia explained that she has a “ ‘zero-​tolerance’ stance towards ‘instances of sexism and sexual harassment’ ” (George and Okundaye 2017). More recently, Nokia took credit for an incident caught on camera in which she threw soup at and helped get removed from the L-​train a man who had been shouting racist epithets at passengers (Hensley 2017). In these acts that are often misunderstood by the mainstream press, I hear these artists claiming tough love as a critical tool for the queer of color actor operating in a phobic majoritarian sphere. Their work comes from a place of radical love, but they cannot afford to be limited by the binds of respectability politics as they perform revolution.

196  Matthew Leslie Santana

Conclusion The first time I saw Mykki Blanco live—​after admiring them from afar for some time—​was in Boston, Massachusetts, in August 2015 during a summer concert series at the Institute of Contemporary Art. I was about to start the second year of my PhD in ethnomusicology and was considering writing a dissertation on the artists that populate this essay. I remember being excited as I walked with a friend through the Seaport District in the dark night and then, as we entered the light of the museum lobby, being surprised by the people I saw around me: some friends from my department and an audience comprised mostly of the white gay men that had come to characterize Boston for me over the first year of my PhD. Blanco gave what I now know to be a typically incendiary performance. They frequently left the stage to perform among the audience, handed the microphone around at one point trying to get audience members to freestyle, and ended the show by joining the audience in a dance party powered by their DJ. Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake a sense of disappointment, not in Mykki but in the experience of the event. This feeling followed me as I saw these artists at other shows in New York City and the Boston area, though they sometimes attracted more diverse audiences. I  felt similarly when I  read the reception of these artists, which was so often guided by white liberal ideology and, to adapt Tricia Rose again, failed to understand homophobia in hip hop within a public sphere that is homicidal toward Black people (1994:xiii). I have tried in this chapter to draw from Black/​queer studies and queer of color critique to address such ideological shortcomings in this reception. Specifically, I turn away from an understanding of these artists as cultivating a novel genre based on a politics of respectability and instead suggest that they comprise a historically grounded coalition that deploys tough love as a critical performance tool. I value this intervention because whereas the former deliberately obscures Black/​queer history so as to forget the culpability of white liberals in the project of homophobia in the United States, the latter remembers Black and working-​class genealogies of sexual liberation. While I  draw from music journalism to make this point, I hope to have an impact within music studies, as the logics that undergird this reception can also be encountered in the halls and seminar rooms of music departments in the United States. Most importantly, however, I hope that if we in ethnomusicology are coming a bit late to the table of queer studies, we invest in modes of queer critique that understand sexuality as fundamentally inflected by social formations of race, class, gender, ability, and the nation. For me, as an ethnographer, Beverly Smith’s observation in This Bridge Called My Back rings particularly true:

Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness?  197 I think for purposes of analysis what we try to do is to break things down and try to separate and compare but in reality, the way women live their lives, those separations just don’t work. Women don’t live their lives like, “Well this part is race, and this is class, and this part has to do with women’s identities,” so it’s confusing. (1981:116)

Or, as anthropologist Jafari Allen put it recently, “we cannot understand the dimensions and dynamism of the social character of human being without thinking gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation as they are lived—​ simultaneously” (2016:618). A  queer of color music studies might embrace similar claims about performance. In doing so, it would be better suited to apprehend the work of artists like Princess Nokia, Cakes Da Killa, and Mykki Blanco as they gesture toward a long history of Black non-​heteronormativity while imagining and enacting better futures made possible by Black, queer, and femme performance.

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Going through the Motions Transgender Performance in Topeng Cirebon from North Java, Indonesia Henry Spiller

Over the past few centuries, in the Western imagination, practices of cross-​ dressing and transgender performance typically have been tied to presumably deviant erotic practices. It has not always been thus; Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough state, “cross dressing was not regarded as a sign of lesbianism or homosexuality [in Europe] until the eighteenth century” (1993:x). Since that time, however, in the Western view, such practices have come to index non-​normative desires almost exclusively. In order to redeem cross-​dressing as an acceptable, normative, even laudable praxis in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, queer studies scholars have combed through the customs of non-​Western societies in search of counterexamples—​transgender or cross-​dressing practices that might, as the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff puts it, “reveal regimes of idyllic pre-​colonial tolerance” (2007a:22). Kath Weston (1993:344) has criticized this “ethnocartography of homosexuality” as diverting scholars from conducting more theoretical work that could contribute to Afsaneh Najmabadi’s goal of avoiding the “re-​naturalization of sex and binarization of gender” (2006:13). Those eager to find models for alternatives to Western sexual identities have long turned to the expressive arts of Indonesia, which often involve what are perceived to be cross-​dressing and/​or transgender roles. This chapter focuses on topeng (masked dance) from rural areas around the north-​coast Javanese city of Cirebon. This kind of Cirebonese topeng, which is sometimes referred to as topeng babakan by foreign scholars, is a particularly interesting case study because it appears to represent the kind of utopian gender neutrality that Boellstorff described as “idyllic pre-​colonial tolerance” in two ways: (1) in the course of a performance, a single performer called a dalang topeng, who can be male or female, performs several characters, each of which reveals a complex combination of masculine and feminine qualities; and (2) male and female dalang topeng wear the same costume, perform the same gestures, and command comparable authority as artists, as entrepreneurs, and sometimes as shamans, suggesting a kind of gender equity rarely encountered in everyday life. Although the twists and

Going through the Motions  199 turns of topeng’s gender ideology do indeed provide fodder for reconsidering conventional Western ideas about cross-​dressing, gender symbolism, and gender equality, ultimately very little about the lives of dalang topeng—​male or female—​ challenges the everyday realities of gender differences and sexual inequalities, either in Indonesia or the West. The multicultural nation of Indonesia spans an archipelago that stretches for thousands of miles along the equator between the Indochina peninsula and Australia. A series of overlapping empires controlled parts of Indonesia before the twentieth century, and goods and ideas were spread through constant international trade. As a result, local cultures in Indonesia often exhibit traces of an array of influences, including indigenous animist belief systems, Hindu and Buddhist notions of cosmology and kingship, Islam, and European colonial cultures. The dominant European colonial power in the archipelago—​the Dutch—​was not concerned with educating or proselytizing their colonial subjects, so the indigenous peoples of the Dutch East Indies maintained several hundred different languages and a variety of religious beliefs, dominated in many places by syncretized versions of Islam, into the twentieth century. As a result, a profusion of gender roles, sexual identities, and sexualities that appear unconventional and non-​normative to Westerners have thrived in the face of nationalism, increasing Islamic orthodoxy, and European hegemonic modernity. In the twentieth century, an emerging European and North American homosexual elite exoticized accounts of beautiful brown bodies, liberal attitudes about sex and alternative sexual practices, and ritual practices involving transvestism in different parts of the Dutch East Indies. Between the wars, the Dutch made the island of Bali a tourist destination, marketing it as a tropical paradise. Some Western viewers were enticed by the bare-​breasted Balinese actresses in the 1932 “documentary” film, Virgins of Bali. Others, including notable homosexual long-​term residents such as the composer Colin McPhee, the musician and painter Walter Spies, and the linguist Roelof Goris, also spread tales of beautiful men and boys with liberal attitudes about casual same-​sex relations, and Bali acquired a supplementary reputation as a “paradise for homosexuals” (Shavit 2003:180) and a “heaven of tolerance in an anti-​homosexual world” (Pollman 1990:13). The Dutch squelched this reputation to a certain extent with a widespread “witch-​hunt” for foreign homosexuals in Bali in 1938, but the reputation neheless persists into the present day (see Lim 2013). The impression of gender equity attracted a number of American women (Deena Burton, Pamela Rogers-​Aguiñiga, Bethanie Gilbert, and Laurie Margot Ross, among others) to study and perform Cirebonese topeng in the 1970s. They reveled in a dance tradition in which women could assume strong, masculine roles—​an emerging subject position in the 1970s with no viable role models in

200  Henry Spiller conventional American society. The entry trope of topeng scholar Laurie Margot Ross’s 2009 dissertation expresses a common reaction among American women of the 1970s upon seeing a topeng performance for the first time: she found the situation in which “a woman was wearing masks and portraying male characters” to be empowering (Ross 2009:viii). Pamela Rogers-​Aguiñiga reported that she was immediately drawn to topeng when she first encountered it in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1970, because she had never before “seen such a powerful woman,” and she wanted to embody that strength (pers. comm., May 13, 2016). Bethanie Gilbert asserts that topeng dancing provided a context, otherwise unavailable, in which she could express “all that male energy I  have” (pers. comm., May 14, 2016). Topeng spoke to these women’s desires, which, although not sexual, qualify as queer by most definitions. On the other hand, two American men I know who seriously studied topeng both eventually came to self-​identify as gay. However, neither identified as such when they encountered topeng. They may have been empowered to try dancing—​an activity that is effectively prohibited to “normal” American men—​by the observation that male topeng dancers were not considered sexually deviant. One of these men told me that topeng’s initial appeal was that it was “exhilarating and fun,” and that his gradual adoption of topeng performance fulfilled a love of dancing that he learned to suppress as a boy (pers. comm., October 27, 2016). In any case, all these Americans—​both men and women—​found compelling models for their non-​normative inclinations in masked dancing from Cirebon. These American receptions of topeng demonstrate how Westerners reinterpret novel configurations of genitals and genders when they are encountered in other parts of the world to create what Susan Stryker dubs a “parade of gender exotics” (2006:14). By considering topeng’s gender ideology on its own terms, I gesture toward one answer to Afsaneh Najmadabi’s provocative question of whether gender and sexuality are useful categories “beyond America” (2006:11). While acknowledging that topeng can indeed fulfill Boellstorff ’s goal for queer studies—​to “ ‘make strange’ heteronormativity” (2007b:19)—​by inspiring reconsideration of conventional Western ideas about cross-​dressing, gender symbolism, and gender equality, I also question the universality of queer analytics, encourage queer theorists to find ways to decouple sexual desire from gender identities and biological sex, and interrogate queer theory’s applicability outside of global modern contexts.

Topeng Performances Although the conventions around topeng performance have changed considerably in the rural areas around the north coast Javanese city of Cirebon over

Going through the Motions  201 the past fifty years (see Ross 2016), a full topeng performance typically presents four or five solo dances, accompanied by a gamelan (an ensemble dominated by tuned bronze percussion instruments). Each dance features a different mask, which, through facial characteristics and color, suggests contrasting personality traits and tendencies. A dalang topeng brings the characters of the masks to life by adding appropriate movement and music. The characters have names drawn from several epic stories (including the Indic Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as indigenous Javanese stories such as Panji and Damarwulan). At times performances have a narrative element, but mostly the dances represent abstract character types, not particular characters. A topeng performance begins in the morning and lasts until the late afternoon. The main dances are interspersed with a variety of other performances, including bodoran (standup and physical comedy by the troupe’s clowns), tayuban (men’s social dance), and, in later years, even dangdut (a popular style of music and social dance) and other popular entertainments, as well as the requisite speeches and breaks for prayers that characterize most post-​independence traditional performances in Java. These rural topeng performances conventionally mark important events in the lives of individuals and of communities, both private and public, often followed by an evening of wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater) performance. The dancers, puppeteers, and musicians typically comprise an extended family whose members all contributed to the family’s livelihood through performing. In the past, family troupes also traveled the countryside, performing abbreviated topeng performances for anybody willing to pay them goods or cash; such itinerancy was suppressed after independence by the Indonesian government and banned in the 1960s (Ross 2016:10, 119).

Characters At the heart of topeng is a cast of archetypal characters, each with its own mask, backstory, and choreography (see Figure 12.1). Dances typically begin with an unmasked dancer, who begins to establish the character through movement and music alone. At a climactic moment in the dance, the performer quickly puts on the mask, which up until that moment has been hidden in a piece of fabric, by biting on a tab, completing the transformation into the character. Each mask confirms the dance’s character with appropriate facial features (delicate or coarse), colors, and decorations. (1) Panji’s mask is white, with delicate features and downcast eyes. The dancer’s movements are calm, refined, and static. The head, arm, and torso gestures are slow and subtle, while the dancer’s lower body maintains a

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Figure 12.1 Five topeng characters. (a) Panji; (b) Pamindo /​Samba; (c) Rumyang; (d) Tumenggung; (e) Klana.

wide plié. Although the dancer slowly alters the position of the feet to face different directions, the dancer rarely moves from the starting point. The character represents the pinnacle of refined behavior and the purity of a newborn. The accompanying music, in contrast, is often quite dynamic and loud, perhaps suggesting that the character is capable of maintaining dignity even in an environment full of distractions. The name Panji refers to a legendary prince of East Java who is the protagonist of an epic cycle of Javanese stories. (2) Pamindo, also known as Samba, has an ivory-​colored mask with carved and painted hair. Pamindo (or Mindo) simply means “second,” that is, the second dance, while the name Samba refers to a character from the Mahabharata (Kresna’s son). In contrast to Panji, this second dance involves quick walking movements and many sharp, dynamic head, arm, and torso gestures. In some versions, the dancer sits down and appears to nod off to sleep, inviting the musical accompaniment to change tempo and volume abruptly. (3) Rumyang’s mask is most often salmon color, and the character is androgynous, with a more playful quality than Pamindo. Not all local topeng traditions include Rumyang, and those that do sometimes perform it at the beginning and/​or at the end of a performance rather than in the middle.

Going through the Motions  203 (4) Tumenggung, also known as Patih, wears a reddish mask and is mature and masculine. His eyes are round and look directly forward. The dancer frequently lifts one leg off the ground while walking and while standing in place. Both names are titles for aristocrats with important administrative positions. (5) Klana, also known as Rahwana, has a deep red mask with bulging eyes. The character has been overcome with greed and lust. The dancer’s gestures are often large and manic, with outstretched arms and lifted legs. The names refer to the antagonists of the Panji and Ramayana stories, respectively. Some dalang topeng and many audience members consider Pamindo to be female and Rumyang to be androgynous, while Panji, Tumenggung, and Klana are unequivocally masculine (although Panji’s refinement sometimes reads as androgynous). However, the gender identity of these characters is not quite that simple. The theater arts scholar Kathy Foley states that “most performers think of Pamindo as female” (1990:78), and the performance scholar Laurie Margot Ross agrees that in the village of Palimanan, at least, Pamindo is “decidedly female” (2009:21). Palimanan’s version of Pamindo was updated by the dalang topeng Wentar in the mid-​twentieth century, at the request of aristocrats from Sumedang, to portray a female character—​“Kencana Wungu”—​from the Damarwulan stories—​and his descendants still perform it that way. Ross also recounts, however, that Sujana Arja from Slangit regarded Pamindo (whom he called Samba) as female in the 1960s, androgynous in the 1970s, and definitely male toward the end of his life (Ross 2009:21). Indeed, in some versions of the Mahabharata, the character Samba is known for frequent cross-​dressing (Bullough and Bullough 1993:7). However, topeng insiders rarely if ever remark on the character’s gender-​bending ambiguities in relation to the masked topeng dances. The dance ethnologist Pamela Rogers-​ Aguiñiga mentions that Sujana Arja related a story to her that implicates the Samba topeng character as a cross-​dresser, but there is no indication that either Sujana Arja or Rogers-​Aguiñiga knew that these anecdotes related directly to the Mahabharata story (Rogers-​Aguiñiga 1986:65). The Panji character may have associations with cross-​dressing as well. The name Panji comes from an indigenous Javanese epic story whose female protagonist, Candra Kirana, cross-​ dresses as a prince. Topeng’s gender symbolism extends beyond simple designations as male or female in other ways as well. Panji’s static refinement, for example, is regarded as a masculine quality, while the indubitably male Klana’s inability to control his lust is regarded by many as a feminine trait. Accordingly, Panji’s white mask is the color of semen, while Klana’s red coloring is associated with menstrual blood (Rogers-​Aguiñiga 1986:53; Foley 1990:78n18; Ross 2009:18–​19).

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Musical Accompaniment Aspects of musical accompaniment further complicate the characters. The gamelan music that accompanies topeng has much in common with other Javanese and Sundanese gamelan traditions (see Spiller 2008). A  repeating time cycle, demarcated by interlocking patterns of strokes played on instruments including goong (a large, hanging gong), kempul (a smaller hanging gong), kenong and jengglong (horizontal gong chimes), and ketuk and kebluk (both single horizontal gongs with different pitches and timbres), provides a temporal foundation for repeating melodic material played on metallophones and gong chimes. The cycles of each dance’s accompanying pieces place certain constraints on choreographies in a way that is philosophically analogous to the constraints that cosmic and social orders impose upon human lives. Each of the topeng characters negotiates these musical constraints in different ways, adding layers of character-​specific associations to the dancing. The largest cycles are marked with a stroke on the large goong. Gamelan music’s pitch vocabulary is typically pentatonic, although actual pitches and intervals vary widely from one set of gamelan instruments to another. Individual instrumentalists apply their own understandings of the idioms of gamelan instruments to create melodic lines based on a shared, fixed sequence of pitches that defines a particular piece. Because they are cyclic, the kernels of the gamelan pieces that accompany topeng can be repeated as many or as few times as the context necessitates. The dalang topeng Sujana Arja once described to me his notion that the universe operates a sort of constant, inaudible, cyclical gamelan music—​that is, a sort of “music of the spheres” which humans cannot ordinarily perceive. In topeng, he continued, it is the responsibility of the gamelan musicians to somehow ensnare these universal cycles and transform them into something that humans can perceive. That is why, he said, the opening piece for a topeng performance, “Tratagan,” starts so abruptly—​as if the musicians had plucked the music directly from the sky—​and opens with a very fast cycle. Once the cycle is captured, the musicians immediately translate it into the world or humans by slowing it down by adding more and more notes in between gong strokes. Each character’s dance has four different sections (dodoan, tengahan, kering, and deder), which proceed from longer to shorter gong cycles. For example, in one recorded rendition of an accompaniment for Klana, there were 66 seconds between goong strokes in the slowest cycle of the dodoan; 36 seconds in the tengahan; the kering cycles start at 18 seconds and get faster and faster (the fastest is 8 seconds); finally, the deder cycle is repeated over and over, each cycle occupying

Going through the Motions  205

Figure 12.2:  Basic outline of the piece “Gonjing” and techniques for expansion for (a) deder; (b) kering; (c) deder; (d) dodoan. Following a common West Javanese notational practice, the pitches are simply numbered from highest (1) to lowest (5), without any attempt to fix particular pitches to those numerals or to define the size of the intervals between them. All these sections share the same overall pitch structure: two structural pitches (2 and 4). (a) individual instrumentalists expand the two structural pitches into four by repeating each pitch and use the resulting four structural pitches as a guide in determining their individual parts. (b) The kering extends the deder version by adding pitch 1 in between each existing structural pitch. (c) The tengahan version substitutes a pitch 5 for the pitch 1, then repeats each of the resulting structural pitches (d) The dodoan adds pitch 1 between each of the structural pitches in the tengahan.

5 to 7 seconds.1 The spot in each cycle when the large goong sounds represents an important cadential moment that demands, by convention, some sort of recognition in the choreography. As the goong strokes come closer and closer together, the Klana dance appears to be more and more frenetic as the dancer tries to acknowledge each goong stroke. In the deder, it becomes almost impossible to do so, and some of the choreographic sequences simply ignore the goong strokes. One possible interpretation of this musical structure is that Klana, despite his great physical power, exerts little control over the cycles that govern him, or over 1 Track 2 on the CD that accompanies Spiller’s Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia (2008) includes a complete recording of the Klana dance as performed by Sujana Arja’s Panji Asmara troupe. On that recording, there are two cycles of the dodoan (66 and 52 s, 0:26–​1:34 and 1:34–​2:22); two cycles of the tengahan (36 and 22 s, 2:22–​2:58 and 2:58–​3:20); ten cycles of the kering (18, 14, 15, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, and 8 s, 3:31–​3:49; 4:03; 4:18; 4:33; 4:47; 5:00; 5:12; 5:23; 5:33; 5:41); and many, many cycles of the deder, 6–​7 s each (5:41–​5:48; 5:54; 6:00; 6:06; 6:13; 6:19; 6:25; 6:30; 6:36; 6:43; 6:49; 6:55; 7:00; 7:06; 7:12; 7:18; 7:24; 7:30; 7:37; 7:44; etc.).

206  Henry Spiller their inexorable acceleration. The musical materials are relatively simple—​all four sections are generated from the alternation of two fundamental melodic pitches (see Figure 12.2) and should be easy to keep track of. But as the cycles get faster, imposing more frequent requirements, Klana reacts with gestures that are more and more out-​of-​control. Yet he never marshals his power to transcend the limitations imposed by the musical accompaniment. In this way, the character’s feminine frailty emerges from the hypermasculine gestures. The musical treatment creates a gender ambiguity—​a putatively masculine character put in a feminine position of being controlled and overpowered. The first and most refined character, Panji, on the other hand, dances to an extremely complex suite of pieces that is impossible to distill into a few structural pitches (see Figure 12.3). A single cycle of the first piece, “Kembang Sungsang,” can take five minutes or more to iterate (each of the structural pitches notated in the figure represents a very slow four-​beat phrase that can take 4 to 7 seconds to perform). The goong strokes come very infrequently, and the dancer has plenty of

Figure 12.3:  Basic notation for “Kembang Sungsang” to accompany the topeng character Panji, indicating two “edits” as performed by the Panji Asmara troupe.

Going through the Motions  207 time to prepare and execute satisfying cadential movements. The character thus commands the music, with full control of his own power. Panji’s choreography is even more remarkable in that the dancer can alter the musical cycle. If the dalang performs particular movements associated with a different part of the cycle, then the musicians follow by deleting whole sections of the tune, as if they had jumped through a wormhole in the cosmic order, to keep up with the dancer. The gray arrows in Figure 12.3 trace two such “edits” in a performance by Sujana Arja of the dodoan section of Panji. The musicians proceed through the piece as normal until they come to the point marked with the Roman numeral I, where they proceed to skip a large chunk of the piece. From there, they continue as normal until they come to the place marked with Roman numeral II; this time they skip only a small section of the piece. Such malleability in the fixed cycle of a gamelan piece is exceptional.2 One possible interpretation of these edits is that Panji’s refined, almost androgynous, masculinity has the power to alter the cosmic order; the rules for ordinary people do not apply. Samba’s accompanying pieces involve fairly long cycles, too, but the Samba character is not empowered to edit them. The dalang can, however, destabilize the music’s regular cyclical structure by performing movements that demand goong accentuation in the middle of a cycle. This action does not give off an aura of mature power, however, but rather a sophomoric disregard for the rules, as the local term for these extra strokes—​goong maling (“stolen gong”)—​suggests. The traits expressed by these musical curiosities are consistent with the ambiguities in the characters’ gender identities: power for Panji despite his refinement, transgressiveness for Samba despite her/​his callowness, and lack of control over the environment despite his physical prowess for Klana. Taken as a whole, the sequence of characters also enacts several other metaphysical gamuts beyond gender. The progression from Panji’s newborn purity, through Pamindo’s youthful exuberance, Rumyang’s budding maturity, Tumenggung’s resolute mastery of life, to Klana’s loss of self-​control depicts the life cycle of humans, male or female. The masks’ colors and characters also have been interpreted to correspond to other Javanese philosophical systems, including the days of the week, the winds, and five elements of human character.3 The topeng characters also have been mapped to the four levels of achievement

2 This process of editing the pieces on the fly is not unique to topeng Cirebon in Indonesia—​Susilo (1984) documents a similar practice in wayang wong dances from Central Java—​but it remains a highly exceptional practice. 3 Panji = refinement and patience (Mutmainah); Samba = calm acceptance of will of god (Supiyah); Tumenggung  =  will-​power and determination (Luwamah); Klana  =  anger, uncontrollable lust (Amarah). The fifth element is the body itself, which may correspond to Rumyang, whose position (either in the middle, or at the end, of the performance) supports this interpretation (Pringgodigdo 1982:120–​21; see also Foley 2015).

208  Henry Spiller in the practice of the Sufi path of Islam in the Malay world, as cultivated in the Cirebonese courts: syariat, tarekat, hakikat, and marifat.4

Dalang Topeng I have introduced several ways in which topeng indeed confounds conventional Western notions of cross-​dressing, gender symbolism, and gender equality. What sorts of individuals enact these gender-​bending behaviors? What about the dalang topeng themselves? Dalang bring a lifetime of physical, spiritual, and practical training to bear on their performances. Most come from long lineages of dalang, putatively reaching back to saints thought to have brought Islam to Java in the sixteenth century—​ Sunan Kalijaga and his son, Pangeran Panggung. Dalang topeng learned their craft directly from their parents or other close relatives. They have mastered both an enormous repertory of dance movements and the art of stringing them together for each performance in new ways that conform to the complex limitations imposed by the accompanying musical pieces, all while communicating the subtleties of each character to their audiences. While mastering the characters of topeng requires extensive training and practice, and is enhanced by life experience and wisdom, it does not require the dancer to develop each character within his or her own self. The theater scholar Kathy Foley ascribes to topeng dancers what she terms an “empty vessel” school of acting, in which “the actor’s central task is to abdicate his own personality and let his body become a vessel for the character he presents” (Foley 1985:36); she contrasts this with Western methods in which “actors find themselves, not by abdication, but by acute examination of the self ” (Foley 1985:37). Each topeng performer develops “multiple personae, with different vocal, energy, and spatial usages—​different ‘bodies’—​so that the performer can ultimately realize that all the masks of the ‘other’ are merely sides of the eternal self ” (Foley 1990:65). This does not mean that topeng dancers are in trance, and most say they are aware of themselves when dancing (Ross 2009:234; 2016:173). Dancers do, however, strive to be “empty”—​as described by Endo Suanda, “empty” here means clean, relaxed, ready to respond to any situation, open to being guided by one’s training and/​or by the spirit world. One dancer told me that he does not worry about character; if he does the movements correctly, he said, then the character 4 Marifat is the highest level; people who have achieved it are called insan kamil. According to Elang Yusuf Dendabrata, Panji expresses this final level because the movements are refined and calm even in the face of boisterous music. The remaining characters have lower levels of Islamic achievement: hakikat for Pamindo; tarekat for Tumenggung; and syaria for Klana, who is characterized as a beginner in Islam who often gets things wrong (Dendabrata 1993:11).

Going through the Motions  209 emerges automatically, without any soul-​searching on his part (pers. comm., June 19, 2013; see also Ross 2016:172). This “decoupling” of dancer and character enables a dalang topeng, whether male or female, to convincingly represent gender characteristics foreign to his or her own identity by literally “going through the motions”—​it is “performed” gender rather than the performative gender enacted through unconscious repetition in everyday life (see Butler 1990; Spiller 2014a:342–​43). Using this approach, even the most masculine of male dancers can easily portray the feminine or effeminate (genit or centil) Samba without compromising his masculinity. And female dalang never complain about encountering difficulties in portraying masculine characteristics. Very often, female dalang are regarded as the most skilled at presenting the indubitably male dances, and vice versa. The female dalang, Keni, for example, is best known for her rendition of the male Klana, while her brother, Sujana Arja, was renowned especially for his Samba performances (Endo Suanda, pers. comm., June 19, 2013).

Dalang—​Male or Female English-​language scholarship on topeng from Cirebon usually takes note of the fact that both men and women can be dalang topeng; Ross asserts that this has been the case since at least the early twentieth century (Ross 2016:90). There are some exceptions to this gender equity. For example, in some villages, the dalang must be male for a female kasinoman (initiation ceremony for young people old enough to marry but not yet paired up); sometimes the girls dance with the dalang, one on each side, following him with simple hand gestures and floor patterns (Suanda 1993:20). Another example:  while it is customary for male dalang to don their costumes in full view of the audience as the gamelan performs the opening music, female dalang are not supposed to get dressed on stage, according to Sujana Arja, because it is forbidden (haram) in Islam to show their bodies (Ross 2009:455–​56; 2013:19). By contrast, I have noticed that Indonesian scholars rarely take note of the apparent gender egalitarianism of topeng. I  speculate that they do not find it remarkable because they see dalang topeng as one type among many ritual specialists throughout Indonesia who operate in a cosmological world governed by duality, complementarity, and the reconciliation of opposites—​indigenous and Hindu ideas that persist despite the primacy of Islam in Java (van der Kroef 1954; Errington 1990; Boellstorff 2004; Blackwood 2005; Peletz 2006), and persist even in some streams of Islam. Ross attributes gender equity among male and female dalang in part to Sufi traditions that have dominated north-​coast Islam, in which women enjoy equal rights (Ross 2013:13–​14). In such contexts, the divine

210  Henry Spiller is imagined as a perfect union of male and female, transcending the gender differences that characterize the mundane. The genital status of the performers of such ritual roles is not significant. Topeng’s gender binaries, as described earlier—​male vs. female, white vs. red, refined vs. coarse, powerful vs. weak, semen vs. menses, patience vs. lust—​point to a gender ideology that is predicated on male-​female difference. The insertion of an androgynous character (“Rumyang”) into the middle (or end) of the performance, whose salmon-​colored mask blends Panji’s white and Klana’s red colors, strengthens this understanding. The fact that a single performer, whose body can be either male or female, performs all the dances drives home a dualist notion that masculine and feminine energies dwell inside everybody, regardless of sex, and that a balance between them is desirable. Therefore, a dalang topeng’s gender ambiguity, in portraying both feminine and masculine energies, contributes to his or her power as a ritual specialist and to the efficacy of the performance. Male and female dalang wear the same costume, for the most part, for all the characters. Loose, short trousers and a shirt provide the costume’s foundation, to which an assortment of batik cloths are added, secured by a decorative belt. A special long sash, called soder, is an important prop in the dances. A characteristic headdress, called sobrah, is one of topeng’s most iconic costume features. Ross notes that it is made from human hair, almost always provided by young women (whose hair is long enough and black enough to produce appropriate results; Ross 2013:30–​32). The topeng costume also often features a Western-​ style necktie, which Ross associates with Dutch influence (2016:294). Aside from the trousers and the necktie, the basic costume is relatively gender-​neutral (see Figure 12.1 for the trousers/​shirt, soder, and sobrah; in Figure 12.4, Sujana Arja ties his necktie; his belt and batik cloths also are visible). Dalang topeng, however, modify their costumes slightly for different characters. For the first and most refined character, Panji, dancers completely unfurl their kain (batik cloth wrapped around the lower body) so that it obscures their legs, in keeping with the character’s static lower-​body movements, and lending the character an androgynous aura (Ross 2016:40). They tie the kain up around one leg, out of the way, for the other characters. For Tumenggung, the most aggressively masculine of the characters, some dalang replace their sobrah headdress with a cap and visor, reminiscent of Dutch military outfits (Ross 2016:294). The costume is arguably masculine, and female dancers are cross-​dressing the moment they put it on. But cross-​dressing also arises when a man dons a headdress made from a woman’s hair, puts on a female mask, and affects feminine gestures. Thus, all dalang topeng, regardless of sex, must transgress gender norms at some point in their performances.5 5 Ross notes that female dalang further modified the costume in the 2000s to conform to more orthodox Islamic requirements for women to cover certain parts of their bodies (2013:34).

Going through the Motions  211

Figure 12.4:  Dalang topeng Sujana Arja dresses for a topeng performance in 1981.

Different origin myths for topeng suggest that both male and female dalang have been around for a long time, and that gender ambiguity has long been a trademark of masked dancing in the region. A description in the early nineteenth-​century manuscript, Babad Cerbon (by Abdul Kahar), identifies the first dalang as Sunan Kalijaga, one of the saints (wali) who first brought Islam to Java, who proselytized using puppet performances and masked dance (Ross 2009:140, 455–​56; 2013:26). Elang Yusuf Dendabrata relates a different legend from another manuscript, Carang Satus, which identifies the first topeng dancer as a woman, however. In this version, another saint, Sunan Gunung Jati, organized a troupe of performers to help vanquish a non-​Muslim foe. The female dancer was instructed to wear a magic mask, and she so entranced the foe that he submitted to Sunan Gunung Jati and converted to Islam (Dendabrata 1993:10; see also Narawati 2003:70).

212  Henry Spiller Regardless of whether male or female dalang came first in legend or history, the value placed on a dalang’s lineage is an important reason for the acceptance of both men and women in the role. There are at least two reasons. First, dalang trace their family lineage to Sunan Kalijaga or his son, Pangeran Panggung. The fact of their descent is a major source of their authority (Rogers-​Aguiñiga 1986:94–​96), regardless of gender. Second, topeng performance provided a means of livelihood for an entire family, and all the children were required to contribute according to their aptitudes (Masunah 2000:46). For example, the renowned dancer Sawitri’s father, Sumitra, was a dalang, and all Sawitri’s siblings became artists:  Punjul, a dalang for wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater) as well as a dalang topeng; Sinom, a dalang wayang kulit and a drummer for topeng; Kocap, a dalang wayang golek (rod puppet theater); Kacip, a gamelan player and puppet carver; Sawitri, a dalang topeng and dalang wayang kulit; Rasinah, sinden (singer) for wayang and a dalang topeng; and Nurwening and Tarsimi, both of whom became gamelan players (Masunah 2000:46–​47). A major source of income before Indonesian independence was berbarung or ngamen—​traveling as a family to busk in other villages and towns. As Ross puts it, “the impetus to produce progeny who could be molded into superior dancers was great” (2009:141). Long, intense training involved constant exposure and evaluation by the public. As a result, a fledgling dalang’s position within an artistic family and his or her innate capabilities had more bearing on his or her potential to become a dalang than his or her genital status as male or female.

Analysis Foucault speaks of “regimes of normalization” that regulate gender non-​ conforming behaviors (Stryker 2006:13). In the milieu of topeng, there are at least two competing regimes of normalization. I have already described the first such regime, namely, the shaman/​ritual one, in which “genital status” is eclipsed by two more important valuations—​lineage and economic necessity—​that operate while the dalang topeng is doing his/​her work in performance. A  much more quotidian regime of gender normalization nevertheless applies in the off-​stage real world, in which female dalang topeng are subjected to a different set of restrictions than male dalang topeng—​restrictions that reflect both long-​ standing gender ideology in north Java and changing ideas about gender and the performing arts in Indonesia. Audience members often find the power of dalang topeng to be an aphrodisiac and seek them as spouses. Once married, however, the new husbands of female dalang often forbid them to perform, especially if the husbands are not artists themselves (Wangi 1993:15–​16; Ross 2009:169). One female dalang, Buniah

Going through the Motions  213 from Gegesik, claims one of her husbands poisoned her because he did not want her to perform (“Buniah” 1993:60). The renowned dancer Sawitri did not dance for sixteen years while she followed one of her husbands to Sumatra (“Sawitri” 1993:39). Like many other rural Cirebonese people, dalang topeng often get married and divorced many, many times during their lifetimes;6 female dalang typically return to the stage when newly single, both to earn money and to attract new mates (Ross 2009:170). Male dalang, on the other hand, continue to pursue their craft while they are married (Ross 2009:170), and often attract new partners while performing. Historical contingencies, too, have affected the relative fortunes of male and female dalang. During the Japanese occupation, female dalang had more opportunities to work because the Japanese hired them to entertain troops (Ross 2009:79). Arja (the father of Keni and Sujana Arja), for example, did not receive a single invitation to perform during the occupation (Ross 2009:79). After Soeharto took over in 1965, on the other hand, a suppression of performers of all sorts was inspired by a backlash against Gerwani—​the women’s wing of the communist party (PKI)—​and allegations of a ritualized “dance” they performed over the mass grave of the corpses of military officers contributed to a general condemnation of female dancers of all sorts, and many female dalang were forced to stop performing (Ross 2009:119–​20). In more recent decades, female dalang topeng often perform as ronggeng (female singer/​dancers) for tayuban and dangdut (Ross 2009:79; Endo Suanda, pers. comm., November 10, 1998). Endo Suanda suggested that one reason female dalang topeng are popular is that they can act as both dalang topeng and ronggeng (pers. comm., November 10, 1998; see also Ross 2016:42–​45). Transvestite male ronggeng may have been common in the distant past (Foley 2015:359, 370; Ross 2016:11), and male performers who present themselves as female singers are not uncommon in the present. However, the artifice required to transform from a genitally male dalang topeng to a convincing female ronggeng, with appropriately prominent hips and bosom, and then back again, is not practical given the time constraints of a topeng performance, but it is a simple change of blouse for a female dalang topeng. At the same time, despite topeng’s long association with Islam in Cirebon, those who espouse the more orthodox approach to Islam that has become common the past few decades tend to view female dalang topeng, like other female performers, with suspicion (Masunah 2000:88; Foley 2015).

6 For example:  Buniah, 13 times (“Buniah” 1993:60); Sudjih, 11 times; Dasih, 29 times (Ross 2009:174). According to Jones, Asari, and Djuartika (1994), before changes in marriage laws in 1974, about 11% of women in West Java had been married four times or more (407), and multiple marriages suggested a woman was attractive to men, and thus accorded her status (406, 411). See also Foley (2015:371).

214  Henry Spiller

Is It Transgender? Is It Queer? The preceding discussion has established that many aspects of topeng performance practice indeed challenge Western notions of gender ideologies, gender identities, and gender roles. The lives of dalang topeng, whether male or female, however, are manifestly heteronormative. Their cross-​dressing and gender-​ bending behavior stems from well-​established ritual responses to conservative cosmological understandings. Gender equity between male and female dalang topeng has little to do with any utopian “regimes of idyllic pre-​colonial tolerance” (Boellstorff 2007a:22). It is, rather, a function of two related principles: (1) a valuation of lineage and genealogy, and (2) economic pragmatism for artistic families. According to Ross, “Topeng Cirebon is an old, rural transvestite mask tradition from Java’s northwest coast” (2011:146). This chapter has presented much evidence of various cross-​dressing behaviors in topeng, and I therefore have no trouble agreeing with Ross’s unequivocal characterization of topeng as “transvestite.” Nevertheless, her statement could easily be misinterpreted if readers assume an understanding of the term “transvestite” that implies deriving pleasure from cross-​dressing—​an image to which none of the old-​fashioned dalang topeng, nor any of the modern topeng dancers I have met, conforms. Scholars of gender in Indonesia have coined new terms to disassociate Western tropes of transvestism and homosexuality from rituals in Indonesia that involve cross-​dressing and/​or androgynous performers. Michael G. Peletz proposes “transgendered ritual specialists” (2006:312), and Tom Boellstorff offers “ethnolocalized professional homosexual and transvestite subject positions,” which he abbreviates as ETPs, to emphasize that “homosexuality or transgenderism is secondary to a specialized ritual or artistic activity; they are first and foremost professions, not sexual or gendered subject positions” (2004:162–​ 63). Although these rather contrived designations sound apologetic at times, they do serve as reminders to avoid taking for granted conventional associations of cross-​dressing with homosexual desire, deviancy, and transgender identities. Justus M. van der Kroef hypothesized four explanations for non-​normative gender and sexual identities in Indonesian religious rituals. In role-​playing, males who are unable to fulfill typical masculine roles assume feminine ones instead—​ for example, a shaman—​for which he must adopt appropriate dress to succeed. Cross-​dressing might also be a strategy to deceive the spirit world—​an explanation van der Kroef calls protective.7 Cross-​dressing is functional when cosmological beliefs rely on a dualist balance between masculine and feminine powers,



7

He cites James George Frazer for this explanation.

Going through the Motions  215 and ritual specialists embody the “sacred antithesis which operates in his environment” by expressing both male and female characteristics. In an impositional situation, male priests have taken over an obsolete female-​dominated cosmology8 (van der Kroef 1954:257–​58). Perhaps van der Kroef ’s role-​playing explanation is closest to mainstream Western understandings of transvestism and explains Americans’ attraction to topeng. The functional explanation, however, has proved most compelling for scholars to explain Southeast Asian ritual practices. Peletz argues that many cultures in Southeast Asia were characterized by identity practices he calls “gender pluralism,” in which alternative approaches to gender and sexuality were not only tolerated but were also accorded legitimacy under some circumstances (2006:310). Both Peletz and Shelley Errington characterize early-​ modern Southeast Asian religious systems as “profoundly dualistic” (Peletz 2006:312), with a spirit world in which the masculine and feminine are fused into an “undifferentiated wholeness”; “at the level of gods, male and female are fused into one; but in merely human practice, men and women must be separated for the purpose of exchange” (Errington 1990:51). A topeng performance’s nuanced exploration of masculine and feminine qualities (as they manifest across male, female, and androgynous character types) communicates such cosmic principles to audiences. It is problematic to characterize dalang topeng and similar Indonesian gender non-​conforming ritual specialists/​ETPs as “queer.” Let us consider Annamarie Jagose’s definition of what makes something queer:  “gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire” (1996:3). From a Western outsider’s point of view, topeng indeed dramatizes these incoherencies; the Americans I described at the beginning of this chapter, who evidently embraced topeng as a medium to explore their own dissatisfaction with enforced gender-​specific behaviors, are arguably queer in their deployment of topeng to resist the regimes of normalization to which they are subjected. It is doubtful, however, that queer as a category makes any sense at all from a topeng insider’s perspective. First of all, although modern Indonesians have adopted other English-​language terms to give names to emerging Indonesian sexual identities (e.g., gay, lesbi, and tomboi) that outsiders might characterize as queer, “queer” as a category “remains virtually unknown in Indonesia” (Boellstorff 2007b:20), and thus has no local valence. Jasbir K. Puar has made a case that modern United States nationalism relies on “perverse [gay, lesbian, and queer] bodies [that] reiterate heterosexuality as the norm” (2006:67). In a comparable way, performances by male and female dalang



8

He cites G.J.A. Terra (1951).

216  Henry Spiller portraying both male and female characters do not challenge norms of sex, gender, and desire; indeed, they actually serve to stabilize and make coherent the complex gender ideologies that underpin Indonesian society, including gender complementarity. It is perhaps for this reason that cross-​dressing ritual specialists were (and are) accorded great prestige and invested with supernatural powers in many parts of Indonesia, including the areas around Cirebon. In contrast to the American performers, who embraced topeng to resist their milieu’s heterosexual matrix because their bodies, predilections, and desires did not conform to the norm, dalang topeng from Cirebon reinforced prevailing norms by “going through the motions” to portray different gender identities.

13

Fielding the Field Belonging, Disciplinarity, and Queer Scholarly Lives Tes Slominski

First Story: Not That Kind of American When I started immersing myself in the world of Irish traditional music as a college student in the early 1990s, I did not think of it as fieldwork. Instead, it was a compulsion and a social outlet—​and it quickly became a social space into which I anxiously sought to belong. As someone who can pass as a person of Irish heritage, I desperately did not want to be thought of as an American in my first ten years of playing. So, it was not until much later that I accepted my Americanness within Irish contexts. I remember sitting around a friend’s kitchen table in the west of Ireland—​it must have been the summer of 2005—​when my Irish friends were “giving out” (complaining) about Americans. Suddenly, one of them looked at me for a long moment, and hurriedly said, “Oh, but you’re not an American!” I was simultaneously proud not to be one of those Americans and indignant to have part of my identity erased in the name of fitting in. For years, I had been trying to look and act more Irish, but for the first time, I chose to emphasize rather than minimize my difference: “Oh, but I am an American!” Standing up for my identity as an American—​an identity that was always part of myself, however much I might have tried to hide it—​felt uncannily like asserting my queer identity to well-​meaning friends and family who, through denial, hoped to protect me from non-​normativity—​“Oh, but you used to date men. Maybe you will again . . .” The disappointment of loving friends and family when they realize that we will not have lives like the ones they had wished for us. Those moments when you say, “Ma, I’m gay,” and the words hang in the air. Silence.

Some Questions I Can’t Answer, and Some I Can (But Not Here) Does doing historical and ethnographic work on gender and sexuality in Irish vernacular and art musics make me a musicologist or an ethnomusicologist?

218  Tes Slominski Both? Neither? What are the consequences—​both positive and negative—​of experiencing my intellectual subject position as queer? For myself? For the field(s)? What might “intellectual queerness” look like, and is it—​like other forms of queerness in homonormative societies in the early twenty-​first-​century West—​in danger of disappearing?1 Do economic pressures on the academy and in the arts “straighten out” music/​sound studies both intellectually and in ways that determine which bodies fill which jobs and how those bodies are disciplined?2 Here, I write of identification and disidentification, and more pointedly, of yearning—​of being drawn toward sounds and sociabilities and methodologies; of orienting oneself toward (or away from) a place, a music, a beloved, a discipline; and of orienting oneself toward the field, where individual experience often has a complicated relationship with the epistemologies and agreements of the collective.3

Second Story: Choose Your Own Adventure, Ethnomusicology Edition I was one of the weird kids in high school. You might have been, too. Maybe you, like me, found refuge in the public library, and maybe you also discovered a new world in the seemingly abandoned area where the record albums were kept. Maybe you bought blank tapes by the brick, tirelessly dubbed your library finds onto cassette, and blasted the staid streets of your Bible Belt town with treasures like Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, & Magic:  Music of the Yurok and Tolowa Indians. Hearing The Thistle and Shamrock on National Public Radio for the first time may have had you leaping out of your chair to find a blank tape to feed

1 “Homonormativity” refers to the increasing alignment of same-​sex affective relationships with heteronormative institutions like marriage (see Duggan 2003). While emphasizing the ways that LGBT people are “just like” our straight counterparts has proved an effective tool in pursuing some forms of legal equality, like federally recognized same-​sex marriage, it erases or abjectifies bodies (including genderqueer and some trans people) and practices (like polyamory or asexuality) that do not fit normative models. 2 As this book goes to press, I find myself in a situation where these questions about the relationship between legibility and professional employment are especially pointed. The queerness of precarity (whether by choice or happenstance) and the precariousness of queers and queerness bear more attention in music/​sound studies. 3 With “identification” and “disidentification,” I  mean to invoke the work of José Muñoz—​ particularly his suggestion that disidentification has an antiassimilationist agenda (1999). Thus, in addition to problematizing my own responses to fieldwork in Ireland (in which I remained closeted during my most formative years in the interest of fitting in), I also question music scholars’ tendencies to assimilate into disciplinary norms and gesture toward the temptations toward homonormativity many LGBTQ subjects experience. “Orientation” invokes Sara Ahmed’s work, particularly Queer Phenomenology (2006).

Fielding the Field  219 into your boom box. And maybe you had a history teacher who introduced you to Joan Baez’s “The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti,” and maybe you also wanted to grow up to be an activist folksinger fighting for economic, racial, and gender equality. Maybe, in listening to those warbling, dubbed cassettes, you felt a sense of belonging to an imagined community very different from the one you knew from mainstream media and enacted by the churchgoing bodies of your race and social class that surrounded you. Playing in the school orchestra or band might have brought you the same kind of sense of being part of something larger than yourself, but these ensembles afforded no outlets for proclaiming your difference sonically: in that teenage moment, your listening practices afforded more agency than performance did.4 We were weird, you and I, and our musical tastes both created and maintained our difference—​and gave us a way to connect with the other freaks, geeks, and nerds who crossed our paths. Even though my sensibilities were decidedly queer, same-​sex desire was not yet part of my personal soundscape—​it was not safe to entertain the notion in that time and place. Remember defending the Indigo Girls by saying that their sexuality did not matter because it was their music that counted? Making this defensive move said more about our internalized homophobia than anything else. By upholding the essentialist notion of “the music itself,” we protected—​but also erased—​ourselves, just as we may also have sublimated our performances of gender and sexuality in our performances of music. For me, ethnomusicology and American vernacular music classes in college promised musical and social belonging, and my engagement with the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble and playing Irish traditional music delivered on those promises, in part because they offered alternatives to what I  perceived as the enforced normativities of Western art music. At that time, deciding that I no longer belonged to “classical” music brought me an unexpected sense of social belonging, but the sounds of not-​belonging (in uncomfortable albeit interesting ways) echoed in conversations about authenticity, in dating, and in grappling with slow-​to-​decay questions of what it means for a non-​hyphenated American to play and study the music of another—​an Other—​in a field defined by The Field.

An Introduction I begin this piece with two stories and some questions to suggest that belonging is partial, contingent, and not always entirely desirable, and to intimate that “the 4 Both my mode of storytelling and concern with listening and agency index Suzanne Cusick’s “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight” (1994); for more on listening and agency, see Nicol Hammond’s chapter in this volume.

220  Tes Slominski field” as the fundamental marker of the discipline of ethnomusicology works against the subjectivities of some of its practitioners as well as through, with, or on them. Thus, in this piece, which aims to queer the boundaries between theory, storytelling, and call to action, I intend to think more about working on the field rather than in it.5 My goal is to describe the ontological and corporeal positioning of queer ethnomusicologists in order to convince you that the divisions between ethnomusicology and musicology have material as well as intellectual consequences for non-​normative scholarly and performing bodies, especially queer, non-​cisgendered, and non-​White bodies.6 In other words, we’re here and we’re queer, but (sub)disciplinary boundaries threaten to erase many of us and much of our work. By introducing this piece with several questions I face as a scholar, and by considering the application of theory to lived experience, I also mean to show how the very existence of these disciplinary boundaries queers work that does not fit neatly within facile dichotomies of archive/​field, past/​present, West/​rest, and so on. Binary thinking is a big part of the problem, so to demonstrate the ways disciplinary boundaries contribute to the erasure of non-​normative subjects (both people and topics), I explore the tangled oppositions between belonging/​not-​ belonging and home/​away as they figure in the overlapping imaginations and realities of ethnomusicologists as a group as well as for scholars who identify as queer. Then I investigate the effects of these logics, which produce foundational understandings of both the field of fieldwork and the field of ethnomusicology, on non-​normative scholars and scholarship. Finally, I conclude with a lament about the disappearance and erasure of feminist and queer music scholars in order to emphasize the performative nature of silence.

We’re All Actually Queer Here, or, “Ten Percent is Not Enough—​Recruit, Recruit, Recruit” In my opening story, I likened anxieties around national belonging with those felt by LGBTQ people and foregrounded the possibility that the anxieties of 5 Here, I am somewhat in “Sara Ahmed writing drag”—​in particular, I am trying on her use of prepositions to ask us to look around or behind questions rather than at them. I believe a look around the disciplines of music studies is never a bad idea, and in the current moment in higher education and world politics more generally, this kind of investigation is vital. By suggesting that the field of fieldwork or the field of ethnomusicology might work through, with, or on ethnomusicologists’ subjectivities, I mean to invoke reflexivity, of course, but also to point toward the ways that our work both grows out of and becomes part of individual identities. 6 Here, I  use “non-​cisgendered” and “non-​White” provocatively to signal the enduring social norms that define people of color and transgender/​non-​binary people in relation to the White, cisgendered mainstream.

Fielding the Field  221 normative members of society may mirror those of non-​normative ones: those who enjoy the condition of belonging within the structures of heterosexual or homonormative monogamy may sometimes feel pain at the exclusions faced by their non-​normative peers. In the second story, I implicated readers (particularly White, heterosexual, functionally middle-​class American readers—​the demographic that predominates in the Society for Ethnomusicology7) in a story from my youth to try to help you belong in my text and, I hope, remember the sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes empowering feelings of belonging and not-​belonging that may have characterized your own coming of age and your early experiences in fieldwork. I  invoke these remembered feelings to invite you to inhabit a subject position we might call “queer,” whether you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, genderqueer, asexual, and so on—​or as heterosexual, and thus normative in the context of early twenty-​first-​century American life. Because ethnomusicologists are trained to consider people and lifeways unlike our own, this shift in perspective should come fairly easily. And after all, music scholars of all stripes are in the minority in academic society, not to mention in society more generally, so we find ourselves translating our work and lives constantly.8 What do I mean by “queer”? In this context, I define “queerness” as the condition of finding—​or placing—​oneself outside the symbolic order of everyday life, yet still needing to function within the institutions and practices structured by that symbolic order. This subject position may be intelligible (you may be labeled as a tourist, an immigrant, a researcher, a spinster, a slave, or any number of other categories) within a social context, but your position is not normative within that context, and you may not have access to all (or any) of the institutions and activities that constitute full participation in the society you are part of. Ethnographic literature features countless examples of fieldworkers’ queerness through tales of successes and failures to fit in, and the accounts included in one of this volume’s inspirations, Shadows in the Field (Barz and Cooley [1997] 2008), provide excellent examples of both—​especially the chapters by Michelle Kisliuk and Nicole Beaudry. Alternately, interlocutors may try to “make you (more) normal” by finding a way to fit you into the symbolic order, however forced that fit may 7 Among the 32% of Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) members who responded to the 2014 Membership Survey Report, 84.8% of respondents identified as heterosexual, and between 75.5% and 85% identified with categories generally understood as White (“Though 75.5% selected “Euro-​American” in 2014, many of the 9.4% who selected “Other” entered such terms as “White,” “Caucasian,” “Jewish-​American,” or specific European national groups”). The survey did not attempt to gauge class affiliations of SEM members. 8 This idea—​and the heading to this section—​come from Suzanne Cusick’s response to the colloquy on music and sexuality in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (66/​3, 2013). (The second part of the section heading quotes a famous Lesbian Avengers’ slogan. For discussions of the 1900s activist group, see Rohy [2014] and http://​www.lesbianavengers.com.)

222  Tes Slominski be. As I  describe in my opening anecdote, by deeming me “not American,” my Irish friends sought to make a different space for me in their circle, just as some straight friends have sometimes invoked my past heterosexual dating experiences to offer me a continuing home in the normative fold. And in the ethnographic realm, Steven Feld’s place in Kaluli society as Bambi Schieffelin’s ao, or younger brother, is a classic example of this sort of space-​making, even though Schieffelin is quick to point out that the Kaluli still considered them “different” (Schieffelin 1990:23–​24). Why do I invite you to occupy a subject position understood as queer? I call ethnographers “queer,” and thus emphasize our moments of not-​belonging, because I believe this exercise asks us all—​but especially White, heteronormative, functionally middle class, and American ethnomusicologists—​to do necessary interpretive work around the dichotomies of insider/​outsider, Self/​Other, and West/​non-​West that have bedeviled Western ethnomusicology since its earliest days. And indeed, the impulse that entices many of us to study far-​flung musics is the same as the mindset that makes many people uninterested in traveling abroad:  home is belonging is happiness, while away is not-​belonging is unhappiness—​is queerness. By likening negotiations around belonging during fieldwork to the marginalization faced by queer subjects in heteronormative societies, I hope to make apparent the intellectual and institutional exclusions created by the binary oppositions I enumerated earlier in this paragraph—​binaries into which queer experience simply does not fit, and binaries that erase intellectually queer work through their exclusions. Just as vitally, I hope to demonstrate that those exclusions matter for everyone, not just those on the margins—​and to raise your stake in helping remedy those exclusions, whoever you might be.

Interlude: A Conversation Irish friend: [Another Irish friend] was asking when you’d be coming home. Me: He said “home,” and not “back to Ireland”? Irish friend: He did.

“Belonging” Is the Unmarked Term In The Promise of Happiness, queer theorist Sara Ahmed examines the constraints imposed by the presumption that happiness is the state toward which everyone must be oriented. She argues that attempts to measure happiness position some institutions, such as marriage, as social goods, thereby reinforcing normative social structures: “The science of happiness could be described as performative: by

Fielding the Field  223 finding happiness in certain places, it generates those places as being good, as being what should be promoted as goods. Correlations are read as causalities, which then become the basis of promotion” (2010:6). In other words, discovering happiness (or belonging) in certain normative institutions, often domestic ones like marriage or home, means that those institutions are considered “happy,” and therefore desirable. Following this logic, to not desire to be a participant in such “normal” institutions means to desire to be “unhappy,” which means that people who understand themselves as “queer”—​that is, off-​kilter with social norms—​ must automatically also be “unhappy.” Although common sense and lived experience should tell us this conclusion is flawed, associations between being “happy” and “normal” endure, and one of Ahmed’s aims is to demonstrate that contemplating unhappiness offers an intellectual freedom not bound by the constraints of normative happiness. Ethnographers, who often find ourselves outside social norms, will immediately understand the utility of following “unhappy” paths in the pursuit of deeper knowledge—​unhappy in the usual sense, perhaps, or maybe in the sense of “happenstance”—​subject to the whims of chance.9 I would like to do two things with this idea:  first, I  would like to follow Ahmed by exploring the implications of “unhappiness,” and by extension, “not-​ belonging” in the context of ethnographic fieldwork (in which “not-​belonging” is framed as productive), and second, to shift this examination of happiness, unhappiness, belonging, and not-​ belonging toward disciplinary formation, in which not belonging to a discipline constitutes erasure. Happiness typically emerges from the familiar, Ahmed writes, while unhappiness is the province of the stranger: The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar. (Ahmed 2010:17)

Similarly, non-​ belonging is the condition ethnographers often experience during the first days of fieldwork. We are unfamiliar—​strangers, newcomers, maybe even tourists—​we do not belong, and our not-​belonging is obvious. Maybe we are estranged from “the very happiness of the familiar”: in the field, we know loneliness, homesickness, and often, a simple and often somewhat abashed yearning for the comforts we associate with home. But like “follow[ing] the weave of unhappiness” (2010:18), we spin out our threads of not-​belonging, curious to discover what fibers of social and musical life we might find in this new

9 Throughout The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed reminds us that “hap,” or “chance,” is the root of “happiness” (2010).

224  Tes Slominski place. We can do this because we are anchored to the spindle of home, and we must do this because we are intent on learning what not-​belonging can teach us. The problem with this imagined path is that Western anthropological understandings of what happens at home and what happens away are structured relentlessly through decades or centuries of capitalist, colonialist, and industrialist theory and practice, orientalist and primitivist stereotypes, fireside poets, World’s Fairs, Little House on the Prairie, travel writing, the nuclear family, stranger danger, Stephen Foster songs, Indiana Jones movies, and so on.10 Further reinforcing tensions between belonging and not-​belonging at home and away is the inexorable alignment of domestic spaces with the feminine—​the realm of women and children, and not the realm of research, paying work, or high theory (see Lutz 1995). In addition to the gender-​inflected devaluation of work undertaken “at home,” this connection with belonging and “home” (automatically understood as the site of not-​fieldwork) is significant because contradictory dynamics of privilege and the feminization of emotion simultaneously overvalue and erase the ethnographer’s affective development over the course of fieldwork: the writerly Self chooses how to speak of the gradual and feelingful process of belonging in the field, but discussing affect at all may mean that one’s work is taken less seriously, especially for those who identify as women. As ample research on gender in the workplace has demonstrated, heterosexual men with children reap the benefits of being perceived to be caring, while women and queers are systematically penalized for their affective and familial responsibilities (AAUP 2016; Euben 2005). Thus, we assume that belonging happens at home (or in places that seem to resemble home), and is therefore presumed less productive, while productive not-​belonging is supposed to happen as far from home as possible, with the slow progress toward belonging used as evidence of what we are learning in the field. In our ethnographies, we chart the progress of learning to be, and to belong, because we are presumed not to have belonged from the beginning—​just as we seem to have belonged wherever it was we came from. This learning to belong, however provisional that belonging, has become a rite of passage for ethnographers. Indeed, the awkwardness of learning to belong in a distant culture may be a de facto requirement for U.S.-​based ethnomusicologists—​a way of reconciling the embarrassing power of U.S. imperialism with the power of phenomenological knowledge we attribute to our interlocutors. This belonging then becomes the discipline’s chosen way of troubling the insider/​outsider opposition,

10 For a cogent if dated account of anthropology’s investments in ethnographic not-​belonging, see Lewin and Leap (1996), especially pages 4–​5, in which they discuss the ways that norms around anthropological fieldwork construct the identity of the ethnographer.

Fielding the Field  225 though it still does not quite know what to do with scholars of color—​but more on this conundrum later. In the last several decades, we have generally acknowledged the ways that lived experience does not neatly fit into dichotomies, and we challenge binary thinking in our scholarship and in our embodiment of sounds and movement in performance. But the Other, as it appears in the tenacious dichotomies of Self/​Other and insider/​outsider, continues to haunt us, as editor Ellen Koskoff ’s introduction to the Spring/​Summer 2016 volume of Ethnomusicology demonstrates: “This issue . . . presents six articles, each dealing in its own way with one of two opposing urges: the urge toward social and musical boundary making and the maintenance of ‘otherness’, and the opposite urge toward merging or fusion” (2016:v). Two of the six articles contain the words “Otherness” and “Other” in their titles, thus demonstrating the concept’s endurance—​though refreshingly, A. J. Racy plays with the concept by setting up his argument as an ethnography of Western preoccupations with snake charming rather than snake charming as an object (Racy 2016:198). Here, I do not intend to replay countless important conversations about binary oppositions and the ways they structure what and how we are able to think. Instead, I want to offer a gentle reminder that queer lives and much feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race scholarship already invite us to think outside binaries—​ including the intractable West/​ the rest opposition that still drives scholarship and institutional practice in music studies. It is easy to dismiss Western poststructuralist critiques for their Westernness, and to fight—​ rightly—​against hegemonies of Western theory when applied to places outside Europe, the United States, and Canada. By now, we know that making music is not the same in Chennai as it is in Chicago, nor is partaking in behaviors around sex, gender, and music and dance performance (e.g., Koskoff 1987; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Spiller 2010; Morcom 2013; Morad 2014).11 We also know from personal experience how often the distinctions between Self and Other and insider and outsider blur, and how difficult it can be to think in non-​dichotomous ways—​to speak of multiplicities rather than opposing urges—​another thing queer lives have to offer scholarship, as adjectives like transgender, genderqueer, and non-​binary enter our vocabularies in intensely non-​theoretical ways, and pronoun options in English expand to make space for lives that are not either/​or. As a way to bring us incrementally toward non-​binary thinking and to demonstrate the erasures brought about by the dichotomous thinking that separates ethnomusicology and musicology, I ask what this continuing friction between 11 Feminist scholars writing about postcolonialism also offer important correctives to assumptions that sex and gender systems operate in the same ways around the world. This ever-​growing list includes work by Lughod (2013), Mohanty (2003b), and Visweswaran (2008).

226  Tes Slominski the poles of binaries does—​in our scholarship, in our discipline, and in the world more generally. Specifically, how does the value we place on some kinds of belonging and not-​belonging devalue the work of those who are queers among queers—​those whose intellectual difference (often determined in part through differences in sexuality, race, or ability) is not the same kind of difference the field of ethnomusicology rewards? How might we act—​as well as think about the Self/​ Other and insider/​outsider dichotomies—​in multiple rather than binary ways? These questions reach beyond music studies to larger issues in higher education, including the oversupply of PhDs, contingent labor, and diversity, and I believe that examining individual and local beliefs and contexts around these issues can offer clues in answering the questions I pose in the previous paragraph. For example, do you understand career options for ethnomusicologists as either academic or non-​academic? Where does alt-​ac work fit into this dichotomy?12 How does the academic/​non-​academic binary shape the ways you mentor students to enter the work force, and how does it guide your interactions with adjunct labor—​with both the concept and the bodies labeled “contingent”? How does your institution (if you are in one) define and do “diversity work”? How does it decide what is “normal,” and how does it treat those who fall outside that definition? If you are in a teaching position, what structures do your curricular offerings uphold? Do classes, ensembles, and lessons reinforce other binaries, like West/​the rest, art/​craft, musicology/​ethnomusicology? How might attempts to balance offerings in Western art music with those in non-​Western music reify rather than remove the imbalances ethnomusicological work seeks to address? I am not the first person to ask these questions, but they remain vital—​and answers that fit within binary frameworks are not sufficient.

Sometimes Good People Fighting Good Fights Do Not-​So-​Good Things So far, I have been intentionally setting up not-​belonging/​belonging, away/​home, and even normative/​queer as oppositions, and I recognize the danger of the magnetic pull toward binary thinking that draws us in even as we fight it, as well as the irony in using the master’s tools to try to dismantle the master’s house.13 If you identify as an ethnomusicologist, you may now be thinking, “Master? Who’s 12 “Alt-​ac,” or “alternate academic” was coined around 2010, and now often refers to non-​teaching jobs within higher education. See Bethman and Longstreet (2013). 13 See Lorde ([1979] 1984). I am grateful to Gregory Barz for asking me to think about the metaphor of fighting as a heterosexist, masculinist way of understanding conflict. I choose to retain this framing in part because departmental and disciplinary conflicts tend to understand in this way, but particularly to draw attention to what I believe is misdirected energy, as evident in most fights among

Fielding the Field  227 the master? Maybe musicology (or Western art music performance) is the master, with the weight of institutional power, resources, and numbers, but not ethnomusicology! We are a young(er) discipline, we are beleaguered, we are fighting the good fight against universalizing theories and culture-​blind scholarship!”14 And we are fighting that good fight—​as are many musicologists and performers of Western art music. But there is still a master, and that master is the set of disciplinary and institutional norms that pit the subdisciplines of music against each other—​that set ethnomusicology and musicology in intellectual and often material opposition to each other and in doing so, squander the human resources of each. In working so very hard to build rationales about why this program must not be cut, or that tenure line must be granted, subdisciplinary lines become even more deeply etched. This engraving comes at a high cost, both for queer bodies and for ways of thinking that queer disciplinary boundaries and challenge the area studies/​time-​period paradigm that, despite some attempts to problematize it, remains the primary means for organizing music scholarship.15 What does this have to do with belonging? Everything. First, let us return to my earlier discussion of home, in which we conveniently presumed that home is a place of belonging. As usual, lived experience is much more complicated. What if home is a space of longing rather than belonging? What if not-​belonging is the foundation of our everyday experience, as it is for many of us who identify as queer? Here, we might hear echoes of Suzanne Cusick’s explanation of the Italian at the beginning of her piece in Queering the Pitch: And it would be easier to say my say in Italian. It would be easier in that language that isn’t mine because there, in that language, there is no illusion of the natural, native “mother tongue” (it would be thus easier for everyone to accept the not making sense that is the lingua franca of those who live outside the symbolic order; it would be thus easier, for everyone, to know that what I say is a translation, subject to infinite infinitesimal errors). (1994:68)

subordinates. Dominance in these contexts is ultimately meaningless in the face of institutions that exert power over music departments as a whole. 14 Deborah Wong’s (2006) ethnographic study of ethnomusicologists in music departments offers grounding for the rationale behind the indignation I introduce here, as well as a thought-​provoking indictment of the ways the discipline has been marginalized. 15 At the SEM annual meeting in Mexico City in 2009, the President’s Roundtable, “Area Studies and Ethnomusicology: Culture/​Critique/​Community,” chaired by Deborah Wong, featured a discussion that challenged the area studies paradigm. The job market continues to reflect an area studies–​ based understanding of what ethnomusicologists do; however, of the small number of tenure-​track job postings in ethnomusicology in 2015, most contained a phrase like this: “with preferred research fields including the music of Asia, Latin America, and/​or Africa” (http://​academicjobs.wikia.com/​ wiki/​Musicology/​Ethnomusicology_​2015-​16, accessed 4 June 2016).

228  Tes Slominski There is no illusion of the “natural, native, ‘mother tongue’ ”—​no illusion of home, or of being at home. Or, back to Sara Ahmed, it “estrange[s]‌us from the very happiness of the familiar” (2010:17). A person does not need to identify as sexually queer in order to experience this kind of estrangement, to discover that our families of origin are just about the last places we might expect to belong, or to seek belonging in the professional realm or in chosen families spread over several continents rather than in the places most would consider our homes. Here, as they would say in Ireland, things get fierce tricky for ethnomusicologists who do identify as sexually queer. Whether in our hometowns or on the other side of the world, productive not-​belonging is not a problem for most of us. We are constantly engaged in trying to make sense of the symbolic order of home, and we are well used to our very presence not making sense within that symbolic order. Figuring out social norms and how to function within them is what we do every day, and for some of us, the most powerful intellectual pull is toward understanding and explaining home, resplendent in all its contradictions, frictions, uncertainties, and moments of not-​belonging. Why would we not want to follow that impulse? Yet canny graduate advisors and savvy students know that the market value—​because of course we operate in a neoliberal capitalist system—​of a dissertation that focuses on a genre in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East will be higher than one that explores Western musics ethnographically. The market for ethnomusicologists who work on popular and vernacular musics of the West is bleak. Academic jobs in folklore are few, interdisciplinary departments (including American Studies and Gender Studies—​once potential homes for these areas of study) are being cut, and especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008, consumer (hiring committee) demand has largely been for candidates who fit stereotypical understandings of each subdiscipline. In ethnomusicology, this trend is evident in hiring practices:  between 2011 and 2016, 73% (48/​66) of tenure-​track jobs seeking an ethnomusicologist have been given to specialists in non-​Western and Latin American musics, while the majority of jobs in musicology continue to seek candidates who fall into time-​ honored categories based on time periods. Only a handful are pitched toward popular or American (including African-​American and North American indigenous) vernacular music specialists.16 Therefore, whole areas of study are becoming disciplinarily queer and disappearing, even if they do not have anything to do with gender or sexuality. Moreover, music studies writ large is in grave danger of losing a generation of feminist, queer, and non-​White music scholars 16 These figures come from an analysis of the Musicology/​Ethnomusicology Jobs Wikis between 2011 and 2016, and I offer them with the caveat that they are based on crowd-​sourced data and may not include every position offered in any given year. Further complicating wiki data is the presence of hybrid musicology/​ethnomusicology jobs and a handful of other jobs (including several popular music jobs). In my tabulations, I considered these jobs having been filled by an ethnomusicologist

Fielding the Field  229 of vernacular and popular Western musics because of essentialist attitudes toward “the West and the rest.” This disappearance of scholars and their work ironically undercuts the “diversity” that is ethnomusicology’s raison d’être. That the symbolic order of the West is changing to embrace same-​sex monogamous couples is small consolation to those of us who chafe at the business-​as-​ usual imperatives of neoliberal consumerism and the splintering of communities in the name of reproductive capital.17 The irony is that despite its imperfections and exclusions (and, at the time of this writing, the threat of the far-​right), the West still affords LGBTQ scholars more possibilities for being out of the closet and more protections for personal safety than many other places in the world.18 Yet for American ethnomusicologists, home as a supposed place of belonging is devalued as a site of research, both because of its connections with the domestic sphere and because of ethnomusicology’s binary relationship with musicology. Privileging the faraway and the exotic as gold standards for productive not-​ belonging creates a hierarchy of research topics in ethnomusicology that tends to exclude the work of people for whom distant fieldwork is unappealing or impossible, particularly for queer scholars and scholars with disabilities. The creation of such an ethnomusicological canon systematically excludes some work, and therefore some bodies, just as surely as Western canons of literature, art, and music have done for centuries. That the United States-​based based on scholars’ subdisciplinary identifications in their online biographies. These figures do not account for scholars’ changing disciplinary identifications, and it is useful to note the trend of Western popular music scholars who identify as musicologists, even when they do ethnographic research. I am not including numbers for visiting assistant professor, postdoctoral, and non-​tenure track hires because the wiki information is less likely to include the majority of jobs, since many such positions are filled locally or regionally—​but for the non-​tenure track jobs in ethnomusicology listed on the wiki, 87% went to scholars whose primary research is on non-​Western and/​or Latin American topics. If this percentage holds more generally, ethnomusicologists who work on Western/​American topics may be less likely to hold the “feeder” jobs that lead to tenure-​track positions. I have not correlated job descriptions with recipients, but the numbers indicate that “open specialty” jobs in ethnomusicology generally go to non-​Western/​Latin American specialists. Also worth noting is the steady decrease in tenure-​track ethnomusicology jobs of all kinds in the five-​year period in question, from 18 on offer in 2011–​12 to 9 in 2015–​16 (thanks to Rachel Homeniuk for helping me tabulate this data). 17 For an articulate takedown of neoliberal consumerism with a brief but effective cultural studies-​tinged literature review (as well as his own arguments about citizenship and belonging), see Miller (2006:7). Here, I  am particularly interested in the ways that consumer culture drives homonormativity. By “reproductive capital,” I mean to invoke the enduring function of institutionalized heterosexuality and the nuclear family—​the expectation that marriage produces offspring. No longer generally necessary as domestic or agricultural labor, children often later serve as insurance for the well-​being of aging parents in the absence of viable state support. 18 For example, Out Magazine, a publication for middle-​class LGBTQ readers, routinely publishes a list of places not to travel—​the 2015 list includes several countries in sub-​Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the Caribbean, as well as Lithuania and Russia—​all areas that have played host to canonic work in ethnomusicology (http://​www.outtraveler.com/​features/​2015/​ 01/​12/​10-​places-​lgbt-​travelers-​should-​never-​visit, accessed 4 June 2016). It’s also worth noting that the perception of danger is as powerful as actual danger, and that even in places where queer sexuality is legal, it may not be embraced.

230  Tes Slominski ethnomusicological canon is built around geographical areas of study linked by a preference for ethnographic rather than historical research keeps binaries between musicology and ethnomusicology, Self and Other, and insider and outsider constantly in play, along with an uneasy toggling between constructivism and essentialism. For example, why is it that music scholars of color are assumed—​even expected—​to study musics that “match” their outward appearance or point of origin, while one of the implicit obligations for White scholars of ethnomusicology is to study people who are not White and who live far away?19 This implicit expectation reinforces hierarchies of race, gender/​sexuality, and class because it still equates whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, middle-​class positionality, and able-​bodiedness with cultural mobility and an imagined “objective” distance.20 Those who write from marginalized identities—​from “home,” as it were—​do not get to claim such distance, and ethnographic work on Western popular, art, and vernacular musics (including African-​American genres), music in LGBTQ life, and historical work on performance and gender/​sexuality usually remains on the fringes of the discipline. While ethnomusicology often successfully decentralizes narratives of the primacy of Western art music, it continues to privilege the Self/​Other binary in ways that reinforce and replicate heterosexism, ableism, and white supremacy. However distasteful or theoretically unsound we may consider the Self/​Other binary and its implications, its continuing exclusions undercut efforts to increase both intellectual and identity-​based diversity in the discipline and in the professorate. Marginalizing work on non-​canonic topics thus creates an intellectual community in which some topics belong more than others, and in which some scholars belong more than others. This setup puts queer ethnomusicologists in often untenable positions: to belong in the discipline may mean choosing the closet in order to work in a location where being openly queer might endanger oneself or the process of belonging in that community. In this scenario, scholars may nurture their musical/​intellectual selves at the expense of their freedom to engage in affective relations with others. On the other hand, choosing a field site where open queer sexuality will not be a barrier to community participation often leads to not-​belonging in the field of ethnomusicology, and over time, disciplinary not-​belonging usually means disappearance from the discipline altogether. Thus, it is still easier to be legible as a queer musicologist than as a

19 Under prevailing administrative logic, I  suppose this makes every ethnomusicologist who studies a non-​Western topic a “diversity hire” in the context of most universities. 20 In discussing categories of race, class, gender/​sexuality, it may be tempting to think of them as mutually exclusive. Here, I particularly want to draw attention to the deeply problematic elision of whiteness and queerness, and thus, the implicit assumption that non-​White subjects are automatically heterosexual—​an elision challenged by intersectionality as an interpretive framework (see Kimberlé Crenshaw 1991).

Fielding the Field  231 queer ethnomusicologist in the United States—​which contradicts the common belief that ethnomusicology is the more progressive of the two disciplines. I believe the “everything else” catch-​all of ethnomusicology, meant to be liberating but in reality still stuck in the Other part of the Self/​Other binary, allows its queer scholars to disappear (whether through attrition or by means of the closet) more than the seemingly more restrictive field of musicology. After all, in post-​Stonewall historical musicology, few scholars find it necessary to sacrifice important aspects of their Self in order to study the Other in the interest of maintaining subdisciplinary norms around topical areas and methodologies.21 This hierarchy of topics also continues to reflect gendered imbalances: when done by women, queer scholars, or scholars of color, work on gender, sexuality, and race carries the taint of identity politics, and work on gender and sexuality has long found itself on the margins of canonic ethnomusicology. While recent Society for Ethnomusicology Merriam Prize committees have ably resisted the temptation to equate work that focuses on male subjects with the universal and work that focuses on women and queer subjects with the particular, the acceptance of feminist and queer papers at Society for Ethnomusicology annual meetings has been uneven. Unfortunately, the evidence that corroborates this claim is anecdotal—​the blind review process does not produce citable statistics—​ and I hasten to add that the formation of the Diversity Action Plan Committee and recent efforts to diversify the SEM Council and Board of the Society for Ethnomusicology are well placed to attempt to change decades of imbalance. Nonetheless, these efforts are not (yet) positioned to address issues of belonging and not-​belonging in fieldwork or in the discipline.

A Lament As I write this piece, I am haunted. Haunted by the living ghosts of the feminist and queer music scholars who have left the academy because their scholarship was not legible as either musicology or ethnomusicology. Haunted by scholars who heeded well-​meaning calls to keep trying to get an academic job 21 This state of affairs is obviously damaging for scholars of color, too, though in different ways. Also, it is important to recognize that queer musicologists have had to struggle to gain recognition and support for queer topics, and that the longstanding fight to weed out “effeminacy” in musicology has led to discriminatory practices. Today, good advice to graduate students in musicology suggests that a student choose a primary research topic that “reads” among more conservative musicologists, though students are also often encouraged to choose more “sexy” secondary areas, including popular music and ethnomusicology—​thus inadvertently peopling the neoliberal dream of more work out of fewer faculty. I believe that the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology should be combined to broaden our intellectual scope—​but not condensed into ever-​decreasing numbers of positions in the interest of profit or even “budget relief.”

232  Tes Slominski until those calls became too painful to hear, and until the stigma of the “independent scholar” position became too much to bear. Haunted, indeed, by the assumption that non-​academic career paths constitute failure. Haunted by the ethnomusicologists who have had to make the choice between studying a music culture they love and the freedom to work uncloseted. Haunted by graduate students and adjunct faculty who, in their hopes of getting an academic job, avoid venues, topics, and support that might out them on the job market. Haunted by queer scholars who paid the “gay tax” of choosing contingency in queer-​friendly cities rather than taking tenure-​track offers in less hospitable climes, or who left academia altogether to avoid this tax (Morris 2016). Haunted by the knowledge that only a few of the new graduate student faces each year at the Gender and Sexuality Taskforce meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology will be there five years hence, and haunted by not knowing what happens to them all. Haunted by the attrition rates of queer, overtly feminist, and non-​White scholars, and wanting desperately to track them, if only to know rather than suspect that those rates are unacceptably high. And haunted by those who, like Sara Ahmed, leave the academy because the emotional costs of fighting inequity and discrimination on behalf of students, colleagues, and selves have become too high. She writes, They [confidentiality clauses] leave silence. And silence can feel like another blow; a wall that is not experienced by those not directly affected (because silence is often not registered as silence unless you hear what is not being said). And another consequence:  we have no way of knowing the scale of the problem. That we have no way of knowing the scale of the problem is indicative of the scale of the problem. [ . . . ] There were many students who left in silence. We still do not know not what they would have said if they could have stayed. Missing documents; missing people. We don’t know how much we are missing. Silence.22 (Ahmed 2016; italics in the original)

A lot of living ghosts are among us, and these ghosts have names. And the knowledge that offering a roll call of many of those names would do them more harm than good further illustrates how ethnomusicology and academia more generally are not yet spaces of equality. They are spaces of silence. To echo Ahmed: we do not know how much we are missing. 22 Sara Ahmed left her job at Goldsmiths, University of London, in protest of the university’s unwillingness to address the problem of sexual harassment.

6

IN ST IT U T IONS A ND IN T E R SE C T IONS

14

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet Heteronormative Institutional Research and the Queering of “Traditions” Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss

This chapter is co-​written by a cis-​gender female, straight(ish), White, Irish, traditional musician and American-​ trained ethnomusicologist, and a cis-​ gender male, queer, White, American, traditional dancer and Irish-​trained ethnochoreologist. Drawing on our combined experiences with Irish traditional music and dance, we explore the dialectic between research and practice, insider and outsider, self and other, and ethnomusicology and its sister (or, more aptly, queer little brother) discipline of ethnochoreology. Here we evoke the Lion and Witch as gendered metaphors for music and dance ethnographers and performers. We also invoke this Narnian pantheon for institutionalized/​disciplined research practices that are constructed or tacitly performed as heteronormative (Lion) or queer (Witch). For rhetorical purposes, we also provisionally tag ethnomusicology (and music) as Lion and ethnochoreology (and dance) as Witch.1 The Closet is an Americanism (at least originally) for the place of coming out. In Ireland, a closet is called a wardrobe or sometimes a press or dresser.2 1 We borrow and adapt our chapter title from C. S. Lewis’s fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950 in London by Geoffrey Bles. It is one of seven novels from the Chronicles of Narnia series. The fantasy world of Narnia is accessed by the protoganists via a portal at the back of a domestic wardrobe. For our chapter, ostensibly it seems fitting that the Lion should represent heteronormativity, as a strong, masculine, and proud figure (all the more fitting for a nation-​ state that lionizes, in very masculine, heteronormative ways, its own traditional music). And yet the lion is also a figure that has been cast as flamboyant, prancing, and vain—​descriptors that come dangerously close to reifying one stereotypical register of gayness. The witch’s default gender is female though she is most often represented in more binary terms. The wicked witch exists on the borders of society, making mischief, causing trouble, the opposite to so many of the graces found in normatively constructed women (subjugated, colonized Ireland is often represented as a musicking—​harp-​ playing—​female). The wicked witch is unnatural, just as her counterpart the good witch embodies all that is fair (in terms of justice and beauty). The real potency of the Lion and Witch metaphors, of course, lies in the mutability of their associated gender/​sexual identities. However, by pairing them as we do here, we are endeavoring to indicate the dominant and the associated normativity of ethnomusicology (and music) in contrast with ethnochoreology and (dance). Ultimately, we wish to create a queering gesture that teases out, complicates, and unmakes these binary opposites. 2 Instead of using the idea of coming out of the closet to express one’s sexual or gender identity, generally people in Ireland simply say, “coming out.” The closet, as a term, has been embraced to a limited extent, owing to the ubiquity of North American cultural influences in Ireland.

236  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss The closet has the potential to represent the often-​perceived dominance of queer theory originating in the United States. It also alludes to the hegemony of North American ethnomusicological models of inquiry.3 With these points in mind, we have two aims. In the first instance, we want to queer institutional research practices in terms of heteronormative approaches and methodologies, making scholastic space for queer ethnomusicological research in both Irish university contexts and also beyond. Such a move should also necessarily allow for new ways of thinking about indigenous Irish music and dance studies, which historically tend to be quiet on sexuality generally and utterly silent on queerness specifically. As part of this process, we reflect upon the challenges of uncritically deploying what is normatively constituted as “ethical” fieldwork models from ethnomusicological practices that may be understood as etic.4 This leads us to our second, interrelated task. We want to queer the ethnomusicological project writ large, with its either unthinking or deliberate exclusion of dance/​dancers, by (re)introducing ethnochoreological perspectives and dancing bodies as a queering methodology. The domain of Irish traditional music and dance offers a salient example of a music-​dance culture wherein the immediacy of bodies in dance allows for queerness as a legible potentiality, perhaps more readily than in music. Music and dance prove inseparable in the Irish context, and queerness finds various and often contradictory forms of articulation, (un)revelation, and performance within “the Tradition.”5 Of course, many ethnomusicologists pay attention to dance, historically and currently. However, we may all benefit from a renewed emphasis on dance and on ethnochoreological positionalities and methodologies, in order to dance out as well as sound out our discipline. We begin by giving a brief overview of our backgrounds as scholars and performers. Then, we reflect on Nic’s experience of applying for mandatory 3 At the same time, we acknowledge that by invoking a North American hegemony or a British one, we are in danger of creating immutable monoliths, a decidedly non-​queer gesture on our behalf. However, in the context of a small, post-​colonial nation state such as Ireland, there is a perception that this can be the case, something that in turn shapes performance and inquiry but which also needs to be critiqued. 4 There is no doubt that the ethnomusicological enterprise, made up of largely North American and British institutionalized sets of practices, may be unaware of its own conservative, heteronormative structures. Moreover, the discipline needs to be sensitive to the local context, both in terms of the university that “permits” its methodologies to be deployed, and in terms of local norms, that is, where the research is occurring (in this instance, research into Irish music and dance practices in Ireland, from the context of an Irish university). 5 Irish traditional music, song, and dance practices and associated behaviors, cultural values, and norms are often emically represented as “the Tradition” with a capital T. This singular construction belies the diversity of identities and practitioners. Further, given that Irish traditional music and dance have long been transnational forms, it is important to note that much of the study of Irish music and dance outside of Ireland is understood as part of the Irish Diasporic experience that is tethered to Ireland in significant ways. For a discussion on how Irish music shifts from immigrant to ethnic to civic status, in the US in particular, see Dillane (2009).

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  237 university ethical clearance in order to seek out LGBTQIA+ informants for an Irish dance ethnography (a hitherto unexplored research area). This leads us to a discussion of the broader arena of heteronormative underpinnings to research agendas in the university by virtue of what is deemed ethically sensitive subject matter and (in)appropriate research methodology. Here, we posit ways in which ethical paradigms in the context of research practice need to be critically examined and what a queer methodology might look like in relation to the study of Irish music and dance practitioners. We call for a context/​place-​ sensitive queering methodology, expanding queerness to include culturally specific performances of gender and sexuality. Such an approach would take into account not just ideas that circulate from North American or British scholarship but also from native scholarships that are in tune with locally constructed identities. By being aware of local meanings, not just in the field but also in the Irish academy, ethnomusicology can benefit from contemporary emic theorization, especially—​for the purposes of this edited volume—​from “quare” theory, that is, culturally specific approaches emanating from Irish Studies.6

Dancing into the Wardrobe: In Search of Queer Ireland Writer, musician, and ethnographer Helen O’Shea notes that “ ‘queer’ and ‘Irish’ are mutually exclusive identifications” in the Irish traditional music scene (2008:66).7 Perhaps it should come as little surprise, therefore, that the first substantial piece of research to deal with LGBTQIA+ issues in Irish music and dance culture should emerge not from ethnomusicology but from its queer little brother, ethnochoreology, through research undertaken by Nic. Already a successful professional performer in traditional dance forms from both the US and Ireland, Nic entered the master’s program in ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy in the University of Limerick in 2010, following undergraduate studies in the United States. Nic came to the program with many pedagogical and theoretical questions, but over the course of his studies, one question emerged as a guiding line of inquiry: How do queer Irish musicians and dancers negotiate 6 We are acutely aware that Irish music and dance are not tethered to the island of Ireland. Therefore, what constitutes “emic” is not defined by geographical borders but rather by the specific shared practices found amongst practitioners in Ireland, in the associated Diaspora, and beyond, where such boundaries are continually challenged. 7 As one of the first scholars to deal with the role of women in Irish music (see also Slominski elsewhere in this volume), and as an Australian woman and Irish fiddler, Helen O’Shea is well positioned to critique as both insider and outsider. We dispute O’Shea’s claim in this chapter, as indeed there exist many queer practitioners of traditional Irish music. However, it is important to note her assertion, as it both reveals homophobic discursive formations within this realm and challenges us to the ethnographic task of amplifying queer voices in traditional Irish arts.

238  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss their sexual identity today while working within an idiom historically cast so close to the heteronormative heart of rural Ireland? Having previously spent time in Ireland as an undergraduate student, Nic had befriended many amateur and professional practitioners of traditional music and dance. He began by inquiring among colleagues if they knew any gay, bisexual, or trans Irish dancers or Irish musicians. Nic understood from the outset that this was a sensitive domain indeed anywhere, but especially so for many in the conservative province of Munster in Ireland’s southwest, where he was living at the time. It is important to note that this research took place over four years before the 2015 plebiscite vote in Ireland enshrined into the Irish constitution equal marriage rights for all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation (more on this later). Nic began to hear performers share their stories, couched in “going out for a smoke,” in order to obtain privacy. Other times, stories were whispered in the corner of a pub. Many of these ethnographic anecdotes seemed to confirm O’Shea’s view of the impossibility of the mutuality of Irishness and queerness. In one account, Nic’s friend Sean—​who at the age of nineteen was already an All-​Ireland champion traditional accordion-​player seven times over—​confided in Nic that when he began to question his sexuality in his small town in Donegal, he also questioned his national artistic identity. Sean concluded: “I knew that I would have to give up playing traditional music. I knew that I couldn’t be both gay and be in trad” (personal interview with Gareiss, July 2011).8 Sean decided to enroll in university to study classical music and occasionally still plays in informal traditional music sessions. Another friend, Scott, one of a few openly gay fiddlers in the Irish traditional music scene, related a story of sitting down to play in a session in Limerick and having all of the musicians get up and leave, seemingly preferring to drink at the bar than play music with him. Gradually, Nic learned that the small scene of Irish traditional music and dance has its own scandals, which, as is the case in most social scenes in Ireland, are bestowed considerable significance. The “goss” (short for gossip) or “having the chat” are important cultural conventions in Ireland. In the traditional music world, any scandals involving homosexuality remain the most “unspeakable,” yet ironically, travel the fastest. Nic encountered rumors about prominent musicians running off with priests or hiring rent boys. He was told about one of the few traditional musicians who had the courage to come out, a young male bouzouki-​ player from Mayo. The response from an older musician: “That one is not long out of the tumbler” (personal interview with Gareiss, March 2008).9 But it was 8 “Trad” is specifically a shorthand for traditional music, as used by practitioners. Sean sees playing Irish traditional music, and all that entails in terms of being a bearer of tradition and being gay as incommensurable. 9 “Out of the tumbler” here represents a pejorative reference to coming out that the older musician used to deride the young gay musician.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  239 not just musicians who experienced this mutual exclusivity or encountered homophobia. An Irish dancer confided in Nic that he would “do the straight thing for teaching dancing, then go home, change clothes, and switch over to gay when the Irish activities were over and head out to the scene” (Gareiss 2012:48). These stories are shared in the context of this chapter neither as a critique of rural (or indeed urban) Ireland, nor as a critique of the traditional Irish music scene Nic encountered. Rather, they function as provocative testimonies to open the possibility for a queer ethnographic methodology that might inform both vernacular music and dance studies and ethnomusicology. Nic quickly came to realize that there was a need to illuminate the ways traditional musicians and dancers have long used ostensibly conservative cultural forms to perform their queerness. Aileen’s experience is a curious, if refracted, mirror image. An Irish traditional musician (where “Irish” connotes genre, but also nationality, in this instance) and Irish university graduate, Aileen began her doctoral studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s. While learning how to be an ethical ethnographer was part of coursework assignments, there was no specific institutional ethics process to go through at the University of Chicago then.10 Fieldwork experience included gigging in Irish bands around Chicago and for Aileen, writing about the people with whom she became friends (and bandmates in many cases) proved personally challenging. In retrospect, perhaps having formal ethics mechanisms might have helped create critical distance (which is not, of course, the stated aim of a university ethics procedure). But the introduction of consent forms would also have been potentially alienating. In spite of always being up front that her dissertation would be about Irish music in Chicago, past and present, “participants” in the research said they did not need or want to know; they just wanted to hang out and make music.11 In terms of subject matter, while LGBTQIA+ issues did not directly inform how the research unfolded and was framed, normative identity constructs did. As the only female member of two different bands—​playing keyboards in the background or traditional flute as part of a larger ensemble—​when audiences discovered Aileen was “really” Irish, the band was frequently heckled, albeit in a good natured way, to “get the girl singing up front” because of the expectation that “all Irish girls” could sing.12 The 10 At the time of writing, in early 2017, the Society for Ethnomusicology listserv featured a rigorously debated thread on research ethics and IRB (Institutional Research Boards). SEM had drafted a position statement on ethnographic and IRBs in January of 2008. New ethical debates around representation, intersectionality, and netnography were now emerging and members were invited to discuss and present on these issues at the annual meeting in Denver in 2017. 11 Perhaps unsurprisingly, few formal interviews were undertaken during this period of research. Some were done after Aileen moved back to Ireland before completing her dissertation. Aileen is currently writing a monograph using much of this historical material, together with more recent fieldwork and to date, not one of her music informants has publically identified as LGBTQIA+. 12 Aileen was most likened to “Irish” role models that included the commercially successful artists Sinead O’Connor, and Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, both of whom were popular at the

240  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss singing Irish female body, as normative and authentic, was revealed as deeply ingrained in discourses of Irishness in the diaspora and in American public life.13 On commencing work as a lecturer in Irish music in University College Cork and then moving to teach students pursuing their bachelor’s degree in Irish Music and Dance at the University of Limerick some years later, Aileen quickly came to experience firsthand the struggles of LGBTQIA+ students. These students were seeking ways not only to come out but also to make sense of their place in a Tradition that did not seem capable of accommodating them fully.14 In both pedagogical and fieldwork experiential situations, then, we each felt a strong desire to queer the role of the ethnomusicologist/​choreologist as well as the music/​dance traditions under scrutiny in order to open up questions around how to do research. In addition, we wished to address the limited way in which Irish music and dancing identities are often conceived in terms of Irish cultural nationalist tropes. Other identity constructs come into play, but often gender and sexuality, especially from a queer subjective position, are ignored or not even up for discussion in the first place. How might that work for genres of music and dance whose very appellation conjures up national boundaries and particular normative imaginaries? If there is one space in which this transgression of the formal shackles of institutionalized, heteronormative music/​dance practices and research can occur, it is a queer one. Welcome, then, to our closet, our wardrobe, not a hermetically sealed space from which queerness emerges when ready to face the world, but rather a Narnia-​esque journey into new realms where the possibilities for queering through intersectional research practices that place moving bodies at the center may offer us new ways to think about queering ethnomusicology more broadly.

time. These women also displayed their own politically subversive tendencies in their performances and public life, especially O’Connor, who is famed for her closely shaved head and for having torn up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the American TV show Saturday Night Live, in October of 1992, in protest of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. 13 Stokes, of course, argues that there is no such thing as authenticity per se but rather that this is a “discursive trope of great persuasive power” (Stokes 1994:7). The connective tissue between identity and authenticity in Irish traditional music discourse and practice is well documented by numerous scholars. For a discussion on how performed Irishness can become a public or civic avatar for ethnicity in the United States, see Dillane (2013). 14 Interestingly, the rather familial but anti-​homophobic ethos of the Irish world Academy undergraduate course assisted in many students coming out, with the help of LGBT(QIA+) society in the university. On presenting a version of this chapter at the annual Society for Musicology in Ireland conference in Dublin in June 2016, we experienced very positive feedback from audience members, many of whom thanked us for bringing this topic out into the open. Some attendees, including graduate students, indicated to us that they felt we had now somehow given them permission to engage in this research.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  241

Querying (and “Queering”) Research Ethics in Third-​Level Educational Institutions To queer ethnography  .  .  .  is to curve the established orientation of ethnography in its method, ethics and reflexive philosophical principles. –​Rooke (2009:25) What does it mean to challenge normative ideas of what constitutes safe research practices?15 In working towards protecting research participants, how many third-​level universities and colleges are complicit in undergirding uneven power relations, in spite of seeking to do the opposite? Do such institutions conceive of the research project in restrictive, binary ways, thereby limiting intersectional dialogue and discovery? Universities by their very nature are conservative, in part due to the need to protect their reputations (as well as to protect against potential litigation, one must assume). For both authors, one as a former graduate student and the other as current faculty member, any research undertaken at the University of Limerick has to adhere to the following: “research involving human subjects . . . must be approved by the . . . Research Ethics Committee (REC).”16 REC goes on to reiterate that if research includes “human subjects in any way,” researchers “must complete the . . . ethics application form and include any relevant supporting documentation in appendices.” The Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences REC meets once a month between September and June. A letter sanctioning the research is not issued until all criteria are met. This letter supports the consent form, with contact details of the university REC committee clearly printed for a research participant, should they wish to contact the university. The faculty Research Ethics Committee (REC) is regularly subject to audits by the University of Limerick Ethics Governance & Faculty Research Ethic Committees (ULREG). ULREG describes itself as a “Research governance . . . process, which sets standards for research, defines mechanisms to deliver

15 In March 2018, the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and co-​editor of this volume, Gregory Barz, posted two new draft statements on ethical research, as drafted by the SEM ethics committee, for review by the broader membership. The first pertained to ethical concerns and research responsibilities within the discipline. The second was a reflection on engaging in ethnomusicological fieldwork with human subjects and how that relates to matters of consent within the context of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). While very useful, ethical guidelines provided by professional organizations such as SEM may not reflect individual third-​level, institutional requirements, particularly outside of North American contexts. 16 See the associated webpage for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science Research Ethics Committee at http://​www.ul.ie/​artsoc/​ethics (accessed March 10, 2016).

242  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss standards and describes monitoring and assessment arrangements.” Its webpage is extensive, but of particular interest for our discussion is the following: Ethical clearance must be gained before any research begins. In preparing for a submission to the Faculty REC, the following should be considered: Anticipate ethical dilemmas likely to be encountered in the research (such as informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity of participants, expertise of the researcher, protecting the rights of those involved) and indicate how they will be surmounted; Anticipate safety issues likely to be encountered by the researchers in the course of their fieldwork; Anticipate the project’s data storage needs.17

The ethics form and related appendices include carefully crafted information letters for potential participants, outlining the nature of the research and underscoring the participants’ rights and privileges; individual consent forms for each participant in the research, including their right to withdraw at any point from the process; a list of sample interview questions; a clearance form from An Garda Síochána (the Irish Police Force) which is applied for upon entering the university system; and, where relevant, a Child Protection form for anyone wishing to work with subjects under the age of eighteen. In any dissertation work submitted for consideration to the university, signed consent forms of participants and the original information letters must be placed in appendices. A dissertation will not be processed without such documentation present. In terms of the form itself, it asks for no more than three hundred words on each of the following: purpose of research; research methodology; sample questions. The next section on human participants is reproduced in Figure 14.1. If the researcher answers yes to any of the following, a more detailed section is required to be filled out later in the form. Focusing on the “sensitive subject matter” area mid-​page, it is clear that Nic’s research was going to prove problematic. Due to his particular intersection of identities (as an American, a queer cis-​man, and a step dancer), the communities with which Nic would have greatest access in building rapport for this kind of research were fellow step dancers, in this case Irish step dancers involved in competitions occurring in the Republic of Ireland sponsored by An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha, the largest of the regulatory bodies that governs Irish step dance. Based on what he perceived to be the shadowy role of queerness in contemporary traditional music and dance circles, Nic wanted to design a study to focus primarily on those individuals within this realm that self-​identify as homosexual, bisexual, or transgender using a queer methodology. In doing so, Nic 17 The full text is available from ULREG’s website at http://​www.ulsites.ul.ie/​researchethics/​ul-​ research-​ethics-​governance-​faculty-​research-​ethics-​committees (accessed April 15, 2016).

Figure 14.1  Single page research ethics form. 

244  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss not only wanted to dialogue with queer people but also to queer institutional research precedents in the process. A queer methodology is, as Jack Halberstam points out, “a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior” (2008:13).18 To an ethnographer this may sound surprisingly run-​of-​the-​mill as it is what we do all the time: investigate the heretofore uninvestigated perspectives of marginalized people. But ethnomusicologists have not always been forthcoming about the nature of their methodologies, especially where “different” methods can involve social liaisons that might be deemed “unethical.” The study Nic designed aroused homophobic anxiety in its “scavenger methodology” especially in relation to approaching informants. After some preliminary fieldwork explorations, Nic assembled his proposal and submitted it to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee (FAHSS REC), detailing that he would: “gather primary data from participants by attending Irish step dance competitions (feiseanna) sponsored by An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha in order to meet and interact with informants.” He went on to explain how he would “distribute questionnaires at these events, by post or by electronic correspondence . . . [and] also conduct interviews either in person or via telephone with key informants to gain insight into the experience of the dancers, musicians, dance teachers and adjudicators as well as their friends, supporters and partners.” Nic explained that he would contact informants by approaching them in person at such events and potentially conduct follow-​up interviews in person or via the phone at a later date, or via electronic contact (email or Facebook). This methodology relied heavily upon an affectual exchange between researcher and interlocutor that would possibly result in an interlocutor’s participation.19 Yet the feedback he received from REC was as follows: “The Committee is uncomfortable with your methods of recruiting—​ consider using snowball sampling; publicizing research and asking people to participate.” Clearly, what appeared as unsystematized lines 18 In considering the ethics of working with LGBT Irish step dancers, Nic also drew upon the methodology of Lila Abu-​Lughod’s work with Bedouin women (1993), Fiona Buckland’s work in queer dance clubs in New York (2002), and bell hooks’s philosophy of marginality and resistance (1990) to design his study. The danger of removing the agency of marginalized individuals is magnified by the poetics of ethnography. As a document, the ethnographic monograph tacitly presumes an authoritative voice; there is a danger that the voices of the participants may be elided in favor of the ostensibly “more qualified” ethnographer. Nic attempted to devise a monographic structure that would allow the stories of the dancers to be heard with as little mediation as possible, in an attempt to both preserve the agency and highlight the ingenuity of the dancers as they spoke about their artistry, identity, and world-​making (see Gareiss 2012). 19 Though not exactly the same, a similar affectual exchange is employed through the gay and lesbian ritual of cruising. Michael Warner writes, “When gay and lesbians cruise, they directly eroticize participation in the public world of their privacy” (2000:179).

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  245 of acquaintance—​legible only through queer affect—​were not welcome by this ethics committee.20 Though Nic’s methodology was revised to start with snowball sampling, a critical reading of the feedback he received from the university ethics committee reveals institutional anxiety around issues of queer sex and gender in Irish research institutions. Effectively, the committee seemed “uncomfortable” with Nic approaching potential participants in the flesh (or in social media vernacular, IRL: in real life) to discuss matters of queer sexuality and gender without a referral from another participant. By extension, the committee seemed nervous about any kind of affectual exchange that might be interpreted as public intimacy. The committee’s feedback reveals homophobia at the possible suggestion of queer subjects meeting corporeally in the open air. We wonder if there is something revelatory here, something belying an institutional heteronormative discomfort for the ways in which queer networks exist. In their essay, “Sex in Public,” Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant explain how “the queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (2008:558). Berlant and Warner describe queer modes of relation that resist systemization. In the case of Nic’s study, one participant who chose the pseudonym Gerald described a gay man’s secret network similarly: A lot of gay men within the Irish dance world often know about each other and others who may not be out in the whole community. There is a kind of “gay man’s network” within the community. Gay men are teachers, adjudicators, dress makers, musicians, stall holders etc. In some ways I think the fact these men are gay is brushed under the carpet in the open public . . . the “gay man’s network” is less visible. There are many events, actions, discussions, etc., that take place within this network, that are not open and visible within the community. It is a kind of underground community. So even though many understand and recognize there is this community of gay men within the Irish dance world, a lot of things that take place within it are kept out of the public eye. There is, however, little to no open and visible community for lesbian, transgender, or any other orientations/​identities within the Irish dance world. (Gareiss 2012:41–​42) 20 As a supervisor for undergraduate and graduate theses, each semester, Aileen works with individual students on research ethics applications. Aileen has observed that sometimes students will avoid doing the project they want to do and instead will pick something “more direct,” in order to ensure they secure their ethical clearance quickly. This is not meant as a criticism of the FAHSS ethics committee, which is peopled with capable faculty members, but rather to illustrate the challenges that arise for ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology students for whom fieldwork and ethnography can be more nuanced and complex than research methodologies more typically used by students and staff in the Humanities and especially the Social Sciences (for example, widely accepted methodologies such as focus groups and anonymous research participants).

246  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss The ethics committee was uncomfortable with a queer resistance to systemization and reacted with heteronormative anxiety, insisting that participants of the study must have their queerness legitimized through another, private, source. This discreet exchange of information was preferential to a corporeally performed queerness that could be “read” by a fellow queer subject, in this case, the ethnographer. The official REC feedback resonates with a quote from earlier in the same essay by Berlant and Warner: “the sex act shielded by the zone of privacy is the affectional nimbus that heterosexual culture protects and from which it abstracts its model of ethics . . .” (2008:555). Rather than allowing queer Irish step dancers to negotiate their own culturally specific queerness in the public gaze of the ethnographer through performances both theatrical and quotidian, the ethics board required a quiet, discreet articulation of this queerness through another member of the community. In this case, the “affectual nimbus” resides in the dangerous possibility of queer connection in ways heteronormative culture cannot (or has not yet learned to) penetrate. The insistence that Nic’s research could only engage those whose names had been privately given by other participants is also predicated on the tacit assumption that research participants would only share the names of Irish step dancers who are out of the closet as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans. While this suggested protocol was most likely intended to protect closeted members of the Irish step dance community, it may also be read as constituting an imposition of mores drawn from North American or British gay cultures, rather than allowing for local, culturally specific queerness through Irish music and dance. Within Anglo-​American LGBTQIA+ subcultures, there exists a widespread cultural precedent, insistence even, upon an indubitably clear, mutable, and finite articulation of calcified queer identity, and a pressure to come out of the closet. To reiterate, the word “closet” (as opposed to wardrobe or dresser) is itself an American word, a foreign object or even affect in Ireland. Instead of using the idea of the closet to express one’s sexual or gender identity, Irish people generally say simply “coming out.” Even taking into account legitimate concerns to protect informants, the ethics committee essentially imposed the Anglo-​American idea of the closet, eliminating space for Irish queer identities that exist in other, perhaps localized, ways. Such a methodological imposition potentially colonizes queer relationality, and in turn is in danger of perpetuating Anglo-​American imperialism in terms of research methodology. This exoticizes local Irish renegade sex and gender performances, thereby discrediting ingenious cultural performances of identity that queers devise in order to locate themselves within their specific worlds. The fact that this was happening in an Irish third-​level institution is not without its irony. Restricting researchers to approach only subjects who express their identities in Ameri-​ centric, un-​ closeted, out-​ and-​ proud ways forecloses the

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  247 documentation of an ineffable, Wildean “love that daren’t speak its name” that is historically part of the negotiation of Irish queerness. Quoting Honor Tracy, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-​Hughes characterizes this cultural-​specific mode of Irish communication as “requiring a sharpness of ear, a feeling for halftones and shades and subtleties” (1976:158).21 Part of Nic’s ethnography was learning to hone this subtlety of listening, and learning to speak his own halftones and shades in order to connect with the Irish dance community with which he became enmeshed.22 For Nic, the process of learning to listen and speak in a culturally specific queerly intelligible way helped illuminate the ways queerness is performed among Irish step dancers. In Nic’s study, the dancer identified as Gerald confirms there are of course many queer people in Irish step dance. In cultural contrast to gay communities outside of Ireland, however, there is “little to no open and visible [read: systematized] community for lesbian, transgender, or any other orientations/​identities within the Irish dance world” (let alone in the Irish music world) (Gareiss 2012:41–​42). Following anthropologist Victor Turner’s assertion that performers are at the limit of the boundaries of a culture, yet “at once the distillation and typification of its corporate identity,” the specifics of certain modes of LGBTQIA+ openness within communities that revolve around Irish cultural forms such as step dance reveal something about Irish culture and society (1982:16). At best, by the ethics committee allowing only the performance of Irish queerness that resembles queerness in North America or Britain to be researched, the University continues the exportation of the culture of the closet from U.S. and British cultural imperial powers. And as for the immutability of certain identity discourses and the nature of Tradition within Irish Music and Dance Studies, how might that inner circle of belonging, which is also one of exclusion, be ruptured?

Inside the Stone Circle: Queering the Tradition and Learning from “Quare” Irish Studies To be queer is to “spoil” discourses and practices based on exclusivity and oppressive normativity. To be queer is to claim difference 21 Somewhat ironically but tellingly, Scheper-​ Hughes’s work Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Ireland caused consternation among the members of the community she studied in Ireland because in spite of using pseudonyms, people could identify each other and learn about intimate and private mental health issues from reading her text. Despite her own acknowledgement of the work as a failed ethnography, Scheper-​Hughes went on to garner prestige for her study in the American anthropological community. 22 Anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes, “You don’t exactly penetrate another culture, as the masculinist image would have it. You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you” (1996:44). For more on Nic’s performance of this enmeshing, see Gareiss (2017).

248  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss as a necessity in the world. Queer theory has emerged as one of the prominent areas of academic scholarship that thoughtfully and fundamentally challenges notions of heteronormativity, bringing powerful insight to what it means to live, love, think, and act outside construction of the norm. –​Madison (2012:80) How might the Narnian stone circle be queered?23 Or its already-​queerness be made visible? “I wouldn’t go there,” Shane said flatly in response to Nic’s inquiry about a certain Galway nightclub. Nic had just finished giving an hour-​long private Irish dancing lesson to his student Shane, who was Irish; the lesson took place in Limerick. The instruction was finished for the day, and they were chatting as they both removed their dancing shoes. “Weirdos go there,” he continued. “What do you mean, ‘weirdos’?” Nic probed. In response, Shane extended his hand, palm-​down, fingers parallel to the wooden floor, then relaxed his wrist so that it flopped effeminately. Employing a campy physicality, Shane had conveyed precisely the information Nic was seeking. The manner in which he delivered it could not have more succinctly summarized Shane’s view of people of alternative sexual identity. Nic wondered if he had realized his teacher was among those “weirdos.” After this conversation, Nic was somewhat flabbergasted that his student would assert his homophobia in such a forward way. From his American cultural background, there seemed to be nothing about Nic’s identity presentation that was attempting to pass as a heterosexual man, and yet this was how he was seemingly perceived as Nic had no doubt Shane would not have mentioned anything had he known about his sexual identity. This anecdote draws our discussion to the specific ways that Queer Studies has been engaged by Irish Studies. In a chapter entitled “Quare Theory,” quare being a very Irish vernacular way of saying the word queer, Noreen Giffney makes the following critique: An unvoiced assumption circulates within LGBTQ studies that queer theory is produced in North America and to a lesser extent in Britain, and then exported as a form of neo-​liberalist rhetoric to other parts of the world. . . . Certain individuals, locations, and disciplines have become conflated with producing theory while others are seen as simply applying it, colonized by its ideological effects (2013:245).

23 Ancient standing stone monuments arranged in a circle are quite common in Ireland and are invoked here to represent often perceived immutability of the Irish Tradition in the discourse on Irish music (see Vallely, Hamilton, Vallely, and Doherty, 1996).

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  249 For Giffney, an understanding of the texts and contexts of Irish queerness is critical in appreciating the real and lived experiences of people (one might extend the same argument to ethnomusicology).24 Such conversations, of course, need to be less about some reified notion of what constitutes “Irish” people and more about the lived experiences of different peoples in Ireland or connected to Ireland. Surprisingly little attention has been given directly to gender and sexual identity issues in ethnomusicological work on Irish traditional music. Notable exceptions are the previously mentioned Helen O’Shea (2008) and Tes Slominski (2010), both of whom focus on women’s roles in music. Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire’s work engages with the topic of masculinities through a singular, iconic performer and sean-​nós singer Joe Heaney (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011). The absence of queer scholarship is notable, though hardly surprising, particularly given that within indigenous Irish music studies, heteronormativity abounds in a vernacular tradition that is construed as inherently conservative in nature (see Slobin 2011:1–​3). This is perhaps largely because of the historiographical rather than discursive nature of such works. For example, “The Great Collectors” and various practitioners in the Irish music Tradition (predominantly men, at least historically) are lionized as protectors, careful transmitters and gate-​keepers, and thoughtful innovators, albeit within strict parameters that do not push the Tradition too far beyond what one inherits.25 To understand Irish Music Studies is to situate it within a broader narrative of Irish colonial, post-​colonial, and national identity discourses and practices (see White 1998). Ireland is a place that has been either ignored, discarded, or romanticized in equal measures. Historically, the country is invariably represented as female—​as a conquered body or, in the twentieth century, as an over-​productive yet disciplined Catholic and native body, where sex is for the procreation of citizens, not for pleasure or self-​expression. Conversely, because of the centrality of emigration in the Irish experience, Ireland has also been dematerialized and de-​corporealized. This sublimation into nostalgia or sentimentality has often 24 In addition to Giffney’s work, our project is also indebted to E. Patrick Johnson’s piece “ ‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Johnson suggests “Quare” as a culturally specific term to articulate the experience of LGBTQIA+ people of color. Though we came to his work only as we were editing the final version of this paper, we find Johnson’s search for “culturally-​specific positionality” (2001:2) especially apposite, preceding our own interest in Irish-​specific queering. 25 Examples include Tomás Ó Canainn’s Music in Ireland ([1979] 1993) and Breandán Breathnach’s Folk Music and Dances of Ireland ([1971] 1996). The approaches of such scholars owe as much to folklore and indigenous forms of music scholarship as they do to (ethno)musicology. Breathnach, in particular, wrote extensively on the inextricable relationship of Irish traditional music and dance. More recent ethnomusicological texts on Irish Traditional Music include Williams (2009), and Hast and Scott (2004), neither of which deals with queer music-​making, being more focussed instead, unsurprisingly, on normative identity issues, especially as it relates to expressions of cultural nationalism.

250  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss resulted in the elision of the real experiences of displaced Irish bodies (see Dillane 2013). But Irishness is a performative state too, just not one historically associated with queer identities, either in Ireland or beyond. Irish traditional music and dance over the past two hundred years or more are profoundly implicated in the cultural nationalist project (White 1998), not least in dance where the dancing body was constructed, delineated, and regulated by Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) beginning in the 1890s (Hall 2008:38). This rejection of the Other (in line with Conradh’s president, Douglas Hyde, and his “de-​Anglicization of Ireland” project) continued into the middle of the twentieth century after the establishment of the Irish free state (1921) and then the Republic (1949), especially in the rhetoric of indigenous academics.26 Their accounts of Anglo-​Irish or English collectors of Irish traditional music from the nineteenth century reveal perspectives of native scholars who appreciated these outsiders’ efforts, while simultaneously lambasting them for not really understanding the native perspective/​musicality (see Ó Canainn 1993; Breathnach 1996). In the late 1950s, Irish composer and musicologist Seán Ó Riada stated that Irish music was not European at all; it was “Oriental” (Ó Riada 1981:2). What might now be possibly read retrospectively as a queering gesture was essentially a post-​colonial reflex and an attempt to elevate the status of Irish indigenous cultural practices to the “High Arts of the East” (Dillane and Noone 2016). Such fears of the British and colonizing Other continued to be perpetuated in high profile discussion among practitioners and the intelligentsia of the Irish music scene in the first Crossroads conference on “Tradition and Innovation” in 1996, where traditional flute player Seamus Tansey warned against the mongrelization of Irish music, which he feared would be lost in copulating with so-​called foreign influences, thereby rendering the music that emerged from the soil and landscape inauthentic (Tansey 1999:211–​13). Within this normative, pro-​creative, masculine cosmology espoused by traditional Irish musicians, LGBTQIA+ sexual and gender identities are often erased in the Irish public sphere.27 In that same decade, the world stage was crashed by Michael Flatley and Jean Butler, the Irish American stars of the commercial Irish dancing production Riverdance, who popularized a stylized version of Irish step dance based upon competitive step dance technique to music written by Bill Whelan. The music itself challenged the hegemony of the 4/​4 and 6/​8 time signatures in Irish

26 This is not an uncommon occurrence in the study of vernacular music traditions, especially by native scholars (see Bohlman 1988). 27 In Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–​1938, University of Chicago doctoral graduate in history Aidan Beatty argues that Irish nationalists’ anxiety about declining male power is something shared by Indian nationalists and Zionists in the same era. The former were troubled by accusations of effeminacy by British imperial power while the latter sought to resist anti-​Semitic claims of weakness. See Beatty (2016).

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  251 traditional reels and jigs, changing Irish dance music irrevocably, in discourse if not in practice (see Foley 2001). Even if Flatley would go on to produce shows that amplified traditional heterosexual male/​female binaries (Lord of the Dance [1996] and Feet of Flames [1998]), the new professionalism, travel, and glamor of this show opened a space where queer Irish dancers could potentially reside and professionally thrive.28 Fast forward to 2016, more than twenty years after this show had successfully toured the world over, and four years after Nic’s initial foray into this realm of study, to an Ireland that has enshrined gay marriage, securing equal rights for some queer subjects (those who are White, middle class, cis-​, non-​polyamorous) while facilitating a closeting of another kind: privatizing, depoliticizing, and domesticating Irish gay culture.29 Are things about to shift for queer Irish traditional musicians and dancers? Are ethnographers ready to tell these stories? Will their research be supported by neoliberal universities? Irish queer theorist Anne Mulhall takes up Lisa Duggan’s idea of the “new homonormativity,” and advises caution not just to those in Ireland and in Irish institutions, but also beyond: The “new homonormativity” . . . is a powerful weapon in the armament of the neo-​liberal state. The new homonormativity reinforces the old heteronormativity, and is made as a means of rationalizing and papering over the logic of the racist state. Assimilated into the charmed circle of state-​sanctioned respectability, the new homonormativity affirms the abjection of non-​normative bodies and lives, particularly those that fall outside of traditional gendered roles and the structure of the white family cell. (2007:215)

28 Even as we finish writing this chapter in 2017, Flatley continues to stage hypermasculine representations of the male, dancing “Irish” body. When the cast of Lord of the Dance performed at Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in January of 2017, the three-​minute all-​male a cappella segment opening the performance embodied camp fascism, patriarchal capitalism, and homonationalist masculinities. This subject is explored at greater length in forthcoming research. 29 Duggan refers to this as the new homonormativity (see Duggan 2002). Though Duggan’s analysis centers on American LGBTQ communities, following the Irish marriage referendum, an Irish homonormativity emerged, anchored in depoliticized domesticity with newly bestowed marriage rights. For example, during the #WakingtheFeminists movement that occurred in the Irish contemporary arts scene in autumn 2015, hundreds of Irish female playwrights, directors, and theater artists rallied in Dublin to demand equal representation in the programming of iconic Irish theaters such as the Abbey Theatre. One female acquaintance of Nic’s involved in the movement who had also previously canvassed for the gay marriage referendum approached two of her gay male actor friends about supporting the women who were striving for equity in Irish theater and performance. They laughed and said now they were all too busy figuring out whom they were going to marry. Though tongue-​ in-​cheek, this exchange highlights the potential demobilization of Irish queer (or in this case, White middle-​class gay male) subjects in working in solidarity alongside other marginalized populations including women, lesbians, queers of color, trans folk and polyamorous communities after the acquisition of gay marriage rights.

252  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss Specifically, in terms of Ireland, Mulhall goes on to warns that “a neo-​liberal agenda is not, ultimately, so much concerned with the livability of queer lives as with the maintenance, in line with other Western European states, of a white Irish futurity” (2007:195). Mulhall’s comments have implications for Irish music and dance studies. To queer the Tradition has the potential to lay bare the racist homophobic underpinnings that mar Irish cultural nationalist agendas. As for the implications of her arguments for queer ethnomusicology, it is clear that a return to a more nuanced understanding of the performing body (or bodies) is required.

Bewitching the Lion: Queering Ethnomusicology through Ethnochoreological Subjectivity and Methodology What might that return to the performing body(ies) actually mean? What is particularly striking about the Irish traditional music and dance culture case is that it was through dance that Nic could more readily pursue his academic interest in LGBTQIA+ issues. As already stated, as a cis-​gay male dancer, Nic had lots of connections in the scene, and because he was out, some dancers came out to him in the cultural space they shared at feis (dance competition) events. An equivalent, permissible space was unavailable to Nic in which to hold similar conversations with musicians (such as the pub session, live gig, more formal concert, even music competition). Within the realm of traditional Irish dance, cultural practice is enacted without the aid of musical prosthesis (that is, without instruments). In many ways, it is this immediacy of the body that opens the floor to conversations about diverse bodies, affect, and physicality, along with non-​normative sex and gender. This reveals something about the specific tradition under scrutiny and why focusing on dance, with its particular form of embodiment and physical display, might often be a way of queering tradition and ethnographic practices. Compared with ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology (not forgetting the related disciplines of critical dance studies and dance anthropology) arguably has more deliberately engaged with sexual and gender diversity, regularly employing queer scholarship and indeed creating its own queer theory.30 The particularity of the corporeal focus of ethnochoreology, in which 30 Ramsay Burt’s 1995 publication on male dancers as bodies of spectacle constitutes an important early intervention in scholarship around queer moving bodies, invoking a Foucauldian epistemology by locating queer dance practices (primarily Western concert dance) within a history of homophobia (Burt 1995). Jane Desmond’s work, both in her book Staging Tourism:  Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World—​in which she unpacks anxiety around “staging the natural” during localized folkloric performance—​and her ground-​breaking 2001 edited volume Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage—​in which she addresses the feminization of male dancing bodies through spectacle—​represents two very important generative moments in

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  253 bodies in motion are the center of ethnographic attention, facilitates a perceptual sharpening of our and others’ physical selves. Ethnochoreology, our Witch, is preoccupied with an attentiveness to physical bodies. Sex and gender are but two facets of this physicality and have become crucial fields of inquiry in dance-​ related disciplines. Part of this precedent of queer work in ethnochoreology and related dance disciplines may be the prevalence of women and LGBTQIA+ researchers working within these fields.31 Another contributing factor may be that ethnochoreology has also historically been less uncomfortable with allowing the (often marginal) subjectivity of the researcher, often in concert with proprioceptive, body-​sensory knowledge through physical participant-​ observation, to be voiced in monographs.32 If bodies are the ethnographic tool for an ethnochoreologist, she must know her own body, be attuned to the ways that bodies are subject to various forms of power (material, patriarchal, homophobic, trans-​phobic), and acknowledge the ways her corporeal subjectivity (including sexual orientation and gender) influences her observations. However, despite its history of engagement with corporeality, ethnochoreology certainly does not hold exclusive purchase on ideas of embodiment. One ethnomusicologist whose work highlights the centrality of bodies in cultural practice and the inextricable connections between music and dance is John Blacking, who dance studies in which moving bodies inscribe new queer theoretical insight through somatic knowledge (Desmond 1999:xvi, 2001:19). Fiona Buckland’s dialogical ethnography of queer dancers in New York nightclubs turns the choreological gaze from the proscenium to the improvised world of social dance, allowing the voices of dancers of many genders to illuminate issues of communal intimacy, transcendence, and queer corporeal praxis (Buckland 2001). Ramon H. Rivera-​Servera’s 2012 book Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics engages dance as a generative site in Latinx queer public cultures, leveling an incisive queer critique of whiteness and xenophobia while exploring the intersections of race, language, gender, sexuality, and movement in Latinx communities throughout the United States (Rivera-​Servera 2012). Finally, and perhaps most relevant to this essay is ethnochoreologist Catherine Foley’s project Step Dancing in Ireland: Culture and History, in which she confirms that indeed the Irish Dancing Commission promoted a heteronormative culture based upon Irish nationalist ideology (Foley 2013:150). Catherine Foley is the founding director of the Master of Arts in Ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick. 31 Another possible explanation for the scarcity of engagement with marginalized moving bodies within ethnomusicology compared (proportionally) with ethnochoreology may be dancing bodies’ resistance to be commodified to a singular sense of perception. In other words, though there are indeed dance forms that make sound (for example, Indian Kathak, Spanish Flamenco, American clogging, or in our case Irish step dance), dancing bodies have not had such a long history of single sensory mediatization as music has. Audio recording of music has facilitated an extraction of audio material from the other sensory information such as sight and smell. Dance video (though it co-​opts taste, touch, and the olfactory) is a more recent intervention. It is important to note that indeed no musician makes sound without movement. However, the lack of somatic regard for queer bodily practice within ethnomusicology may be due in part to this fetishization of music-​making; indeed a corporeal act, but regarded as reducible to sound alone through media that prestiges a single sense. 32 In addition to queerness, other marginal body considerations not yet well represented within ethnomusicological research include the following:  bodily (dis)ability—​opening the discipline to insights from crip theory—​and body size—​where fat theory may make salient inroads as moving bodies of many sizes and shapes are beginning to be included within ethnography’s gaze.

254  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss was also a founding figure in the development of dance anthropology. Blacking’s student Andrée Grau reminds us that: To Blacking, ethnomusicology and dance anthropology were branches of social anthropology, whose chief areas of study were the expressive, social movement of bodies in time and space. He argued that “the evidence of the forms and functions of music and dance in different societies can throw considerable light on relationships between man’s biological evolution and cultural development.” (Blacking 1976:5, cited in Grau 1993:23)

Blacking referred to the existence of “shared somatic states” as the basis for a kind of “bodily empathy” (1977:8), and went further to insist that “the embodied nature of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound, characterizes music across cultures and across time” (1984:20). Specifically, in terms of dance, for Blacking, “the power of dance rests in acts of performance by dancers and spectators alike, in the process of making sense of dance . . . and in linking dance experience to other sets of ideas and social experiences” (1984:20). Blacking’s intersectional approach correlating cultural creative practices to other aspects of potentially queer human experiences could prove a fecund theoretical approach for ethnomusicology to engage marginality, sexuality, and gender.33 In addition to considering bodies as fields of inquiry, Blacking also advocated “dialectic anthropology,” a self-​determined system of ethics around anonymity for his interlocutors that bears relevance for our discussion (Grau 1993:24). During their work with the InterCultural Performing Arts Research Project (ICPAP) at London University’s Goldsmith’s College from 1986–​1989, Blacking and Grau wrote to informants asking whether they wanted to use names, initials, or pseudonyms in the final publication. They also invited participants to comment on their text; if informants disagreed with any aspect of the writing, or even with the whole project, they included this participant commentary. Following Blacking’s dialectical anthropology, Grau wrote that if informants “felt that some of the information had been given in confidence and should not be included, they were asked to say so, and I would follow their wishes” (Grau 1993:26).

33 Bohlman’s 1993 article “Musicology as a Political Act” is also worth mentioning here particularly in terms of his critique of musicology and the rejection of the body by musicological historiography up to that time (and beyond, arguably). Bohlman outlines the fears of many musicologists that an embracing of bodies, especially sexualized bodies, might result in a loss of the mind and ability to reason (see in particular page 431). Overall, Bohlman suggests that in privileging musical text above musical embodiment, especially where that text is perceived/​fetishized as sophisticated and worthy of study (unlike under-​examined forms such as rap), an essentializing process takes place that has ramifications for the bodies that perform that music/​dance culture. Excluding the body, in turn, limits our understanding.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Closet  255 This methodology of participant self-​determination was particularly inspiring in Nic’s field research, allowing for various and often contradictory forms of articulation, (un)revelation, and performance through the ethnochoreological lens. By refusing to impose a closet of anonymity, Blacking’s interlocutors retained agency. It was in this spirit that Nic conducted his study with Irish step dancers. In consideration of both their notoriety as accomplished dance artists and their sexual and gendered marginality, enforced anonymity would have co-​opted their agency. If any participant desired to remain anonymous, Nic provided them the option and assigned a pseudonym for all references in the final work. However, if the dancers wished for their identity to be known, it seemed appropriate to offer them this option. While in the view of the 2010–​2011 University of Limerick ethics committee, complete discretion may have been regarded as the best option for the protection of queer subjects, we argue that it is important to allow participants the opportunity to self-​identify, both in name and through localized queer identity. Self-​identified voices of marginal communities must have an opportunity to be heard, and closets of all kinds must become more than unidirectional, homo-​normativizing queer spaces.

Conclusion: Round the House and Mind the Closet The future is not known to anyone. However, there are mechanisms in place that suggest basic blueprints, providing outlines, goals, and potentials. Weddings, marriage, children, grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren suggest a model to work from, a social foundation that is perpetuated in film, television, religious institutions, and political debate. What does it mean to exist in a space outside of these blueprints and images, to be denied access to the dominant scripts? –​Goltz (2009:562) What does it mean to be a traditional Irish dancer or musician today, being part of an inherited Tradition largely focused on lineage and connections to the past? What does the future hold for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual performers as more musicians and dancers come out of (or dance ‘round, upon, or within) the dresser/​Irish wardrobe?34 What might this mean to their 34 The round is an important metaphor in Irish music and Irish dance culture. The round constitutes the structure of a typical dance tune (8-​measure, repeated A part plus an 8-​measure, repeated B part; constituting a 32-​measure round). A round of the tune is then repeated a number of times before moving on to the next tune. In Irish dancing, a set is typically constituted by four couples who take positions opposite each other, creating what is called a set or square; the final part of a given figure in the dance is a quick spin around the house to get back to the original position. This spinning

256  Aileen Dillane and Nic Gareiss performance practice, opportunities, and general acceptance in the community, as well as to our understanding of the performance of queerness(es) based in local culture and geography? Undoubtedly the time is ripe for further study, but the degree to which Irish (or other) universities will sanction the kinds of research people may want to do, the kinds that emerge through chance meetings, unregulated contacts, and haptic affective connection, makes it difficult to tell. While it is important for universities to protect the rights of informants, the deeply heteronormative assumptions that underpin ethics codes need to be problematized, particularly in terms of current neoliberal influences within educational institutions. Not only is queer research necessary and warranted, because of what it tells us about minorities often excluded from traditional music and dance discourses; it is also doubly warranted here for the manner in which it ruptures the narrative of Tradition in the Irish music and dance scene, allowing for a shift in focus to performing Irish queernesses. Perhaps queer practices might manifest as performance techniques that challenge and extend current styles and expressions. Rather than being a place of coming out, the closet reworked as wardrobe/​ Irish dresser has represented our Narnia-​esque journey into or toward new and emergent performance practices in the realm of Irish music and dance; tacit or inarticulate identities that are revealed through the dancing rather than musicking body (thus far); and methodological considerations that call into question the manner in which ethnomusicology runs the risk of sidelining dance as related but not central to its research agenda. For all of its built-​in reflexivity, ethnomusicology as an institutionalized practice within particular university/​ national contexts (and possibly more broadly) may sometimes prove more conservative and unaware of its heteronormative structures than the music (and dance) traditions it purports to study and reveal. To bring a queering ethnomusicology perspective to the study of Irish traditional music and dance may be the very thing that decouples such music and dance genres from default, normative, nationalistic structures. Such a queer perspective may also help all ethnomusicologists engaged in the study of Irish music and dance to appreciate how historically essentialist and romantic identity discourses on Irish music and dance are shifting under all of our feet.

motion can be very vigorous and in dances taking place in houses, dancers have to take care not to crash into furniture, hence “round the house and mind the dresser.”

15

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black” Assumptions and Limitations of the Normative Queer Gaze in a Panamanian Dance-​Drama Heather J. Paudler

In the community of Bugabita, Panamá, the townspeople preserve and guard a tradition of los moros y cristianos. Based on a sixteenth-​century Castilian adaptation of the Chanson de Fierabrás, a version of the performance was brought to the community from México in the late eighteenth century. The community’s version represents a struggle for holy relics between two factions: the Moors and the Christians. Led by the Moorish King, Almirante Balan, the Moorish soldiers steal the relics from the Christians and deface them. Carlomagno—​the historic figure Charlemagne—​leads the Christians in battle to attempt the recovery of the relics. Eighteen males participate, including a Christian king, a Moorish king, six Christian soldiers, six Moorish soldiers, one angel, the devil, and two musicians (an accordionist and percussionist). The dance-​drama incorporates singing, dancing, spoken dialogue, a ritualized baptism, and musically accompanied mock sword battles divided into three acts composed of thirteen choreographed scenes. The six Moorish soldiers each wear a dress called la pollera, the official national Panamanian feminine costume customarily used in various ritual and folkloric activities. The costume consists of a loose, often low-​cut blouse with an extremely wide neckline that can allow for an optional off-​the-​shoulder manner of wearing it. This blouse is paired with a wide, two-​tiered full skirt commonly hand-​embroidered with elaborate, brightly colored motifs of indigenous designs, birds, flowers, fruit, or vines with one or more handmade petticoats. In practice, the Moorish soldiers wear a simple pollera lacking elaborate embroidery with only one petticoat. Their costumes are adorned with two large pom-​poms centered at the chest and at the back. These Moorish soldiers also wear conical hats that they call turbans with fringe tassels attached to the point. Moreover, they use eye and lip makeup and wear jewelry. No other Panamanian folkloric dance-​ drama features males dressed in the traditional feminine pollera. My research investigates this rural Panamanian dance-​drama, known locally as la danza Bugabita, which incorporates elements of “drag” into the overall performance. The assumption that follows, for many onlookers, is that these male

258  Heather J. Paudler performers are gay. This “natural” reading of drag is based on assumptions and beliefs that permeate Panamanian culture and are reinforced by the National Institute of Culture, known by the acronym INAC. Such profusion inadvertently validates this perception and often results in implicit acceptance of this canonized interpretation. When the imposed normative expression of drag becomes dominant and internalized, its assumptions are taken for granted, blind to other interpretations that fall outside the imposed conventions. The same holds true for the pervasive presumptions and restricted meaning of drag in queer theory. Popularity of queer theory as a mode of critical investigation has led to its ascendancy within academic spheres and its dissemination in classrooms. Yet the institutionalization of theories within universities, professional organizations, governmental entities, and even ideologies themselves remains under addressed. Institutions demand conformity, often functioning as a bastille of thought domestication. As the purpose of queer theory is to discourage canonizing, the formulation of a queer canon paradoxically reifies hierarchical categorization of a “queer” reality. Its canonization within institutions moves away from plurality and a celebration of difference, and queer theory becomes susceptible to essentialism and generalization—​homogenizing the field. The packaged ideology risks being arbitrarily prescribed, thetical, sterile, simplistic, and negligent, excluding important details and exceptions. This danger warrants an interventionist disciplinary project that would provoke critical examination of the reductionist and homogenizing tendencies of institutionalized queer theory. How do presumptions about the “normative queer,” for example, idealize certain expressions of queerness that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion? What is privileged when a theory becomes institutionalized? In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian argues that academia’s “new emphasis on . . . critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks” (1987:55). The ideology of feminism as dismantling “general truths” concerning gender norms became the foundation of its critical framework and methodology, whereby its institutionalization recreated the traditional stricture and structures of discourse, becoming what it challenged:  a general truth. Before the rise of third-​wave feminism, Christian’s 1987 article explored how the “race for theory” within feminism led scholars to “restrict the definition of what feminist means and overgeneralize about so much of the world that most women as well as men are excluded” (1987:59). Christian’s article explores how institutions and their inherent power, as the overseers of discourse and practices, determine which ideas are deemed valuable. By exploring ways in which theory can serve to constrain knowledge-​ making, Christian concludes that when the academic preoccupation to theorize renders a practice that “becomes prescriptive, exclusive, elitish” (1987:58) it results in “academic hegemony.” In turn, when a discourse is so prevalent that it monopolizes how a topic is discussed, the theory’s institutionalization has

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  259 created an “authoritative discourse” (1987:60). She contends that the academy’s emphasis on theory is dangerous in its aggressive impulse of defining the theory’s accepted perspective and establishing the generalized doctrine it advances, exposing a double bind. Decades later, queer theory faces the same catch-​22 in which its anti-​authoritarian rhetoric must be authoritarian in order to wield any power. In the case of critical theories, often it is the process of an institution canonizing a theory, rather than the theory itself, that is limiting. Lois Tyson explains that: Most critical theorists today recognize that all critical theories are produced by historical realities and have political implications, whether or not their advocates are aware of those realities and implications. . . . A critical practice that ignores political reality does not thereby remove itself from politics. It merely protects, however inadvertently, whatever power structure is in place by drawing our attention away from that power structure. (2015:450)

Accepting the fact that theoretical institutionalization creates boundaries, circumscribes its canon, and can construct a theoretical epistemology that is not dynamic enough to meet the needs of the field, scholars must be in dialogue with the questions of who has the privilege of theorizing about whom; when they do so; how they do so; and the institutional, social, economic, cultural, and political implications of such theories. Christian emphasizes that scholars should actively investigate and unmask the ideologies implicated in our acts of theorizing. Regardless of how necessary and noble the motivations behind critical theorizing may be, theorists are still susceptible to delimiting the bounds of the theoretical frameworks that they use. Presently, as queer studies has gained momentum and forged a space within higher education institutions as a legitimate disciplinary subject, its delineations reflect the ideological framework that the universities support. According to Ruth Goldman, this institutionalization of queer theory “leaves the burden of dealing with difference on the people who are themselves different, while simultaneously allowing white academics to continue to construct a discourse of silence around race and other queer perspectives” (1996:173). In an effort to address this catch-​22, E. Patrick Johnson directs attention to the issue of what has been left out in education’s curricular institutionalization of queer theory: While queer theory has opened up new possibilities for theorizing gender and sexuality, like a pot of gumbo cooked too quickly, it has failed to live up to its full critical potential by refusing to accommodate all the queer ingredients contained inside its theoretical pot. (Johnson 2001:18)

260  Heather J. Paudler Johnson argues that much of the scholarship produced in the name of queer theory consistently conflates race and class as interrelated dimensions of analysis in the study of sexuality. Proposing a “quare theory,” Johnson redresses the erasure of discourse on queers of color in the hegemonic queer hierarchies. While the queer theoretical paradigm fails to acknowledge the ways in which bodies are marked and read through race-​and class-​specific discourses, quare studies aims to recuperate culture-​specific positionalities that queer theory dismisses in academic discourse. Application of quare theory offers one methodology to counter higher education’s trend of institutional reduction to one interpretative queer frame to theorize experience. Pursuit of this objective can illuminate ideological formation and values, thus exposing the underlying and disavowed presuppositions, limitations, and consequences of normativities. Use of quare and performance studies promise the means to transform the normative in queer theory by highlighting how these acts are historically and culturally situated. These interventions question the conventions elaborated by queer theoretical frameworks, moving beyond the received understanding of its practices and proposing new modes of critical reflection for phenomena that escape the formulations of previous paradigms. In the Panamanian genre of la danza Bugabita, the naturalized knowledge of gay drag performances by audience members outside the community and reinforced by INAC operates as a presumptuous, erroneous reading of the dance-​drama. Those who make such allegations derive their judgments on the basis of what appears, taking anticipated and prescribed clothing aesthetics as evidence of homosexuality. Interpretation of what is seen regularly gives rise to dubious, ethnocentric generalizations, and “seeing” substantiates the (mis)reading. As the act of observing men wearing la pollera reinforces preconceived notions about the bodies which the costumes adorn, the following analysis applies the theoretical foci of Brenda Farnell’s “Theorizing ‘the Body’ in Visual Culture” (Farnell 2011). The three discourses she presents “chart a paradigm shift from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of the body as a somatic and sensory resource for dynamically embodied action in cultural space/​time” (Farnell 2011:136) categorized as 1) discourses about the body, 2) discourses of the body, and 3) discourses from the body.

Discourses about the Body Farnell explains that in discourses about the body, “ ‘it’ is observed, classified, written about, and represented visually” (Farnell 2011:139). Audience members outside the community drew attention to the Moors’ costumes. The rise of gender and sexuality issues from the observation of la pollera relates to the relatively new and changing performance contexts of the dance-​drama. Until

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  261 recently, the rural community of Bugabita guarded their performance tradition of los moros y cristianos, and it remained largely unknown to outside communities. Due to financial burdens caused by the dance-​drama’s separation from the Catholic Church, the community struggled to maintain the tradition, and it often faced temporary discontinuation for the past two decades. As part of a national-​level cultural preservation initiative, INAC interceded in order to preserve the tradition of la danza Bugabita, and their mediation marks the first time that the dance-​drama was embraced by an institution since its separation from the Catholic Church. INAC’s appropriation of the tradition repositions la danza Bugabita as a cultural representation that highlights the country’s diversity of dance-​dramas and, subsequently, the cultural diversity of the nation. As Peter Wade suggests: The elaboration of diversity feeds into the dynamic of appropriation, in which middle and upper class include in their cultural repertoires elements that they identify as originating from the lower and/​or darker-​skinned classes, often resignifying such elements, mystifying their origins, and repositioning them in value hierarchies. (1997:266)

In the adaptation of the local practice to more cosmopolitan aesthetics, the institutionally sponsored presentations reworked and annotated la danza Bugabita for presentations to the wider community. In la danza Bugabita, “meanings” of gender are located in la pollera as gender is symbolically represented in this article of clothing. Viewed outside the local community, the visual impression of la pollera being worn by men in INAC’s early presentations led many Panamanians to view the costumes worn by the Moorish actors as the adoption of drag aesthetics. The local viewing public, constrained by their etic point of view, perceives these actors in relation to their concepts of normative sexual identities and the ways in which gender is encoded in la pollera. Positing la pollera as the “text,” outsiders who “read” the prescribed dress codes raised questions about the sexuality and gender identification of the performers based on their understanding of the costume as the feminine national dress and their social construction of gender. The public’s myopic focus on gender identity and sexuality in la danza Bugabita resulted in ambiguity and misunderstanding, as these issues are not addressed or answered in the dialogue of the dance-​drama. The public projected conceptions of gendered cross-​ dressing only for the Moors wearing la pollera, and not the use of a white dress for the male angel. The allegation of cross-​dressing was applied unequally to males wearing dresses in the dance-​drama, which demonstrates the cultural construction of gender and the garments associated with it. The dress worn by the angel is seen as a ritual garment and occurs within an expected frame of reference;

262  Heather J. Paudler la pollera is seen as a female garment, leading to the conflation of drag with a transgender performance. While “[t]‌he Moors, who are the ones that wear this costume (pollera), display it with a lot of pride” (Requena 2011:55), subjection to a gendered gaze by a wider national audience led to the community’s preoccupation with these participants being perceived as gay. On first encounter, labeling la danza Bugabita as a transgender performance would be a dangerously easy misunderstanding based only on the observation of the Moors dressed in drag. Such misrecognition in fact occurred, and the misrecognition eventually led participants to fear being labeled as gay, a largely negative association within the predominantly conservative Catholic country. To accommodate the need to make the dance-​drama less controversial, INAC used girls in the traditional male roles, drawing even more attention to its reorientation of la danza Bugabita along lines of gender and sexuality. This interpretation rests on, and imposes, a heterosexual viewpoint that only females should be wearing la pollera. INAC’s use of females in the speaking roles of the male Moorish soldiers reinforces heteronormative biases and entirely resignifies the characters’ sartorial element. Moreover, it does not comply with standards of the community performances, as females are forbidden from participating in the dance-​drama. INAC’s current performances draw on hegemonic gender norms and work to reinforce normative gender roles by functioning as the “authoritative Other” in its assumption of the motivation behind the cross-​dressing. Its restriction of meaning perpetuates exclusionary drag norms within its institution. The governmentally sponsored initiatives present a distorted representation of la pollera that changes the contexts of la danza Bugabita. These changes have caused a rift between INAC’s institutional sponsorship and the community’s non-​governmental performances of the dance-​drama. The critical remarks by local practitioners of la danza Bugabita provide significant insights into understanding meanings attached to la pollera that cannot be perceived solely through observation. Yet, as INAC has denied the community of Bugabita Arriba a hand in its role in the transmission process, the nationally viewed performances do not address the misrecognition as all community autonomy disappears once it encounters institutional hegemonic power. Positioning the dance-​drama in this manner indicates the type of essentialism that queer theory claims to so adamantly fight against. Without the assumptions being corrected, the perception of drag has had repercussions in the rural community. Being subject to a gendered gaze by the wider national audience led to the community’s preoccupation with these participants being perceived as gay. This fear caused many local performers to quit participating since they did not want to face discrimination. Many community members withdrew their support for this tradition and called for its removal from the national stage. Such concern even led mothers to forbid their sons from

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  263 participating in the local community performances. The local folklorist Ángela María Requena Otero explains: It is worth mentioning that . . . over the years, [la danza Bugabita performances] have not been performed, since nowadays, for moral principles, the mothers of this community do not look upon it favorably, afraid that their sons, with such a loss of moral values, could be changed. In folkloric terms we can say that they do not want their sons to become effeminate. (Requena 2011:54–​55)

Requena then declares that “a member of that category has NEVER participated in the dance group” (2011:55). Her emphasis on the word “never” and the caution taken in avoiding the term “gay,” and instead using “a member of that category” to refer back to effeminate men, demonstrates the concern and fear that surrounds the visual impact of men donning dresses. In defending the masculinity of the men wearing la pollera, Requena indicates that “the Moors put on make-​up, use necklaces [and] striking earrings, but their posture continues to feel masculine [with] rustic and natural movements, in agreement with their sexual position” (2011:56), reaffirming that the men who participate in la danza Bugabita are heterosexual. The ways in which the governmentally sponsored performances differed from the tradition as performed in the community provided insight into what exactly the community contested. The central polemic among residents regarding INAC’s performances concerns the interpretation of la pollera and the meaning and importance that it holds. It should be noted that “the culture-​bearers do not question whether INAC should be active in preserving the tradition, but rather how closely they should adhere to historical precedent” (Paudler 2014). However, the generalizations and preconceptions that underlie the normative queer gaze and performances of cross-​dressing instilled by one’s own cultural background and constructions of gender, reinforced and perpetuated by INAC, cannot be applied to all manifestations of cross-​dressing equally without regard to its specific cultural context. Dress often signifies aspects of the self and constructs various states of being and social relations, and it meant something very different to those outside the community than to those inside it. Cross-​dressing is more than what meets the eye. Bracketing these ideals challenges INAC’s codification of how to interpret the observed drag and ways of knowing this phenomenon.

Discourses of the Body In contrast to the approach championed in the earlier paradigm about the body that defines what is observed, discourses of the body investigate the socially

264  Heather J. Paudler constructed knowledge that humans utilize in conventions of body movement. Research into the management of corporeal performances and the presentation of the self within social interactions, conducted by Erving Goffman, proved significant in the transition to considering human activity as action. The preference for the term “action” over “behavior” implies an entirely different definition of body and agency. Goffman investigated the socially constructed knowledge that humans utilize in conventions of body movement. This shift from behaviorism to an agentist perspective followed across the various social sciences. According to Farnell, “in anthropology there was a further understanding that human action is best framed in accordance with the ideas of practice, discourse, and embodiment” (2011:151). This second category of discourse concerning the body in visual culture considers criticisms about the body and moves toward subjective assessments of the body that recognize the emic voice of the “lived” body. By listening to the culture-​bearers and their critique of INAC’s presentations of la danza Bugabita, their interpretation of the use of la pollera and its use to adorn the Moorish dancers reveals a discourse of the body. Susan Crane demonstrates that during the Middle Ages and continuing into the Renaissance, “dress was becoming an important system of recognition in urban and mobile populations” (2002:11). Thus, dress served to mark diverse classes, ethnicities/​races, and religious groups, which then, in turn, “could serve to perform a different identity or to become unrecognizable—​to go incognito” (Grinberg 2013:82). The performative use of these garments occurred in ceremonies, festivals, court events such as weddings, civic processions, and rituals, including mystery and miracle plays. Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler’s article titled “Othered Bodies: Racial Cross-​ Dressing in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament” documents uses of disguise to denote Turks or Saracens during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance that include specific clothing, masks, and blackened faces to represent the Muslim Other (1999). While the Moors have been donning dresses in the community of Bugabita for over one hundred years, even the dance-​drama’s sixteenth-​century textual source, Piemonte’s Historia del emperador, includes various episodes of cross-​ dressing. This historical precedent intended to present ideological changes and the contemporary preoccupation associated with the Islamic Other. Throughout the dance-​drama’s textual source, Piemonte clearly recognized the function of cultural practices to distinguish the religious and ethnic Other. He defined identity through various visual markers, which were deliberate modifications in his translation of his French source of Fierabrás. Piemonte uses the sartorial markers to comment upon ethnic cross-​dressing, defined by Barbara Fuchs as the use of garments of an ethnic Other by a member of a different culture (Fuchs 2009). All these practices denote identity and belonging, but can be used to mimic the Other in acts of ethnic cross-​dressing that could undermine

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  265 visual differentiation. Literary scholar Ana Grinberg claims that Piemonte’s use of ethnic cross-​dressing “is not a casual deviation from his source” (Grinberg 2013:82). She continues, Cross-​dressing has frequently been associated with a transgender performance. But cross-​dressing can also be a “transracial masquerade or sartorial event,” and even one that crosses boundaries of class. This implies that using clothing and other external markers of a different group—​be it gender, religion, ethnicity, or culture—​is an embodiment and appropriation of the Other. (Grinberg 2013:82–​83)

Grinberg argues that Piemonte’s various uses of ethnic cross-​dressing found in textual instances where the characters’ cultural practices, and specifically clothing, become markers of their religious and national identity, and are used to represent the Other. According to Grinberg, Historia del emperador is the only textual rendition where we find details regarding the clothes that were presented to the “Christian knights” (2013:86). Per this narrative description, unique to Piemonte’s text, Oliveros wears a cloak embroidered with an Arabic passage from the Qur’an in an open act of ethnic cross-​dressing. Grinberg explains that the incorporation of this scene “allows Piemonte to comment on ‘ethnic cross-​dressing’, to pass as the ethnic and religious Other, to disguise as a Moor” (2013:94). In particular, Grinberg claims that the Turkish princess’s comments in perceiving this ethnic cross-​dressing suggest that this type of drag causes visual hesitancy in assigning ethnic identity. Piemonte’s inclusion of ethnic cross-​dressing addresses contemporary Iberian sartorial policies regarding differentiation between religious and ethnic communities and the problematic nature concerning objective observations about the body and subjective views of the body. While the use of disguise or identity concealment was a common element in literature during the Middle Ages, Piemonte’s additions and modifications made in translating Bagnyon’s L’Histoire de Charlemagne of ethnic cross-​dressing refer to important political issues within Iberia. The aforementioned textual cases illuminate the apparent instability of identity, as “Historia del emperador focuses on [the] issue of the permeability of boundaries between an Other and the Self—​ both groups inaccurately deemed homogeneous” (Grinberg 2013:99–​ 100). According to Grinberg, these examples “signal a fascination with clothing as a marker of identity in the time period when Historia del emperador was translated: the preoccupation with how clothing fashions a man” (2013:100). These noticeable narrative departures from Bagnyon’s text dealing with cross-​dressing serve to identify the texts based on Piemonte’s Historia del emperador that circulated throughout the American continents. In the manner that Clark and

266  Heather J. Paudler Sponsler explain that cross-​dressing can mark bodies as Othered in racial or ethnic ways, Piemonte attempts to define the emerging notions of race, ethnicity, and religious identification in the Iberian Peninsula, based partially upon visual markers of culture such as sartorial signs of identity. Piemonte’s adaptations are not casual deviations from his source. Similarly, I believe that the use of la pollera in la danza Bugabita is purposeful and best understood in the context in which it was implemented. Cross-​dressing, while often associated with an opposite-​sex presentation, can also be understood as a transracial or trans-​ethnic performance. As such, cross-​dressing can be used as an external, visual marker of a different group, be it the typically associated gender, or other appropriations and embodiments of an Other ethnicity, race, culture, or religion. Clark and Sponsler demonstrate that drag can designate bodies “as ‘other’ in ways that demonstrate the performativity of racial categories and the deployment of racial thinking” (1999:61). Like its sixteenth-​century textual source, the cross-​dressing observed in la danza Bugabita is not primarily about performing gender or sexuality, but rather about performing the multifarious Panamanian ethnoracial categories. Musicologist Emily Wilbourne explains that “travestied sound . . . articulates different conceptions of embodiment and ethnicity, each overlaid with a variety of historically contingent references” (2010:6).

Discourses from the Body This final category stems from a theoretical principle that unifies the of the body concepts of action, discourse, and embodiment in what Farnell calls “the primacy of the signifying moving person” (2011:155), constituting a dynamically embodied discursive theoretical framework. Farnell’s second category concentrated “largely upon the body as a static object—​albeit a social and cultural one rather than a biological or mechanistic entity” (2011:153). Consideration of the body “as a moving agent in a spatially organized world of meanings” centers on the idea that action should be understood and gauged as dynamic, or from the body (2011:153). According to Farnell, [I]‌n positioning dynamically embodied persons as components of visual culture, however, there is a somewhat ironic proviso—​analysis and interpretations must be grounded in the multiple and complex invisible forms of cultural knowledge that make that which is visible meaningful to its practitioners. (2011:138)

While the outsiders’ perspective views these dancers as cross-​dressers, the subjective experiences of the dancers throw this observation into question, and this results in differing meanings and interpretations that exist concurrently. The

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  267 contemporary use of la pollera challenges the normative queer assumption of drag perpetuated by INAC and reveals an alternative local understanding that is at odds with the explanation offered through observations about the body. The drag costume, examined as ethnic impersonation, presents its own prism of race and ethnicity that allows for the wide range of the dancers’ polyvalent identities that bend with contextual changes. Lived experiences and memories of the hybridity of ethnoracial identities sewn into la pollera are expressed in community performances of la danza Bugabita, especially in the zapateo music and dance that allows participants to experience bodily the many strata of their own histories. The practice of dancing provides clues to the underlying concepts and values embedded in la danza Bugabita’s culturally choreographed movements, understood from the body that contradicts observations about the body. Aspects of performance theory create a framework to examine and understand this dance-​ drama as both a visual art and a corporeal sensation. Local folklorist Ángela Requena explains that the Moors “utilize la pollera as the montuno,” that is, the masculine Panamanian national costume (2011:61). However, this counterpart to la pollera has a different history and cultural connotation; it is considered indigenous in origin. Requena further explains that within the context of la danza Bugabita, la pollera represents “the beautiful and most valuable thing that we have in our Panamanian Republic” (2011:55). The community agrees that the costume of la pollera worn by the Moors is meant to be interpreted as a powerful symbol of Panamanian identity and to represent the continuation of their cultural heritage in the midst of imposed Spanish hegemony. Requena states that the intention and significance of the cross-​dressing men is to indicate the possessors of the riches and power. She aligns the costume with the Otherness of the Moorish soldiers, declaring that “the gold, silver, and rich materials that are represented in la pollera” are symbolic of the Turkish “riches and power” (2011:55). The performers believe that the use of the national costume displays the non-​Spanish heritage of the province of Chiriquí, Panamá. In this sense, the dress does not represent another gender but represents the Panamanian ethnic Other, challenging the fundamental assumptions of drag. It functions as a visual symbol of the Other, the Moors or Turks, and is understood at another level as the Other in Panamá, representing the wide spectrum of indigenous and Black races and ethnicities. In a recent investigation of los Congos, a related Panamanian conquest dance-​ drama, Renée Jacqueline Alexander explains that while there are several shades of racial categories in Panamá due to five centuries of intermingling among Spanish, African, and indigenous populations, “cultural identification among and between these historically distinct groups in Panamá has allowed enough space for individual agency, even among people within the same immediate

268  Heather J. Paudler family, to construct their cultural identities differently” (2005:10). Requena adds a level of hybridity to her account of the racial and ethnic demographics of the settlement of Bugabita in a personal elucidation: “We are already everything. We are all indigenous. We are all black. We are all Panamanian” (2011:45). Moving beyond simply creating a space that honors the dualism of Black and Latino without imposing a hierarchy or an erasure of one or the other, Requena honors all facets of Panamanian race and ethnicity. She acknowledges the plurality of Panamanian identities described by Alexander and confirms that Bugabeñas and the participants of la danza Bugabita also possess agency in how each individual constructs his or her racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. One of the ways that Moorish dancers display national identity and pride, and celebrate Panamá’s ethnic diversity, is in the cross-​dressing act of wearing la pollera. According to its practitioners, music and dance allow the performers to explore the identities of their minority races that the community subrogates into the line of the Moors in their local expression. In the words of dance scholar Sally Ann Ness, “Nobody, ‘no-​body’, can learn unfamiliar neuromuscular patterns without being willing to acquire a new and perhaps startling insight into who it is they actually are—​that is to say, a truly plural being or figure” (Ness 1992:5). The final act of the dance-​drama incorporates zapateo music and dance. The zapateo occurs toward the end of the performance after the conversion of the Moors to the Catholic faith. Both the Christians and newly converted Christians participate in this celebratory dance that lasts approximately twenty minutes. The zapateo is a pan-​Latin American music and dance form. It has been defined in various sources as “an archaic dance associated, as its name suggests, with percussive footwork” (Manuel 2002:326). Susan Thomas explains that the “zapateo was ‘creolized’, or hybridized, energetically with other local musical styles, particularly in regions with large African populations, where the movements and hard-​soled shoes of Andalusian dance merged with African rhythmic sensibilities” (Thomas, 2015). Carolina Robertson and Gerard Béhague note: [I]‌n Panama a large number of people of African descent (both slaves during the Colonial period and Caribbean blacks) play an important role in contemporary folk music. This African musical heritage is best expressed in the mimetic dance theatre known as los congos, performing congadas, coming from a black colonial tradition, and also in the types of drums accompanying most Panamanian folk dances and in their dancing style (Afro-​Hispanic sensual choreography). (Robertson and Béhague, 2015)

The Panamanian version of the zapateo found in la danza Bugabita is a hybrid, or creole, mix of Spanish and African influences, and is considered a genre of masculine national folkloric dance, distinguished as an expression of Black

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  269 dancing. The sentiment, opinions, and expressions of the dancers of the Bugabita Arriba troupe claim that performing the zapateo helps them to experience multiple layers of Blackness. Robertson and Béhague’s aforementioned quotation indicates two distinct Black groups: colonial slaves and Caribbean Blacks. For the practitioners of la danza Bugabita, embodying Blackness references these two culturally distinct Afro-​Panamanian communities: the Afro-​Colonials, or Costeños, and the Afro-​Antilleans, or West Indians. The tradition’s evolving relationship to African heritage must be understood through the historicization of the conception of Blackness in Panamá. Since la danza Bugabita’s establishment in the 1930s, the zapateo dance has consistently been identified by the community as a Black folkloric dance, even though the Panamanian government demographically categorizes the bodies of its practitioners as mestiza. In the words of E. Patrick Johnson, “blackness, like performance, often defies categorization” (Johnson 2003:2). In the mestizaje in Colombia, Peter Wade explains that: Black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participatory in the overarching process of mestizaje, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in “national society.” (1997:263)

Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness that “the history of the Black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade” (1993:19). He further posits a challenge to examine the routes of Black identity rather than the pursuit of that identity’s relationship to situated roots. Within this conception of Black identity as a route of movement and mediation, Alexander explains that “in the micro-​diaspora of Panamá, Blackness forks at the place where a sixteenth-​century Spanish colonial legacy meets a twentieth-​ century neo-​colonial United States force” (2005:32). The Black Panamanian population labeled Costeños with roots associated with slavery more than five centuries deep, entered into the era of United States intervention in Panamá as Spanish-​speaking native Panamanians with a worldview shaped largely by their identities as Latinos. At this juncture they met the contrasting, English-​speaking West Indian immigrants who lived in and understood the world primarily as Blacks. Jeffrey J.  Cohen describes race “as a shifting, ultimately unreifiable category that nonetheless passes itself off as possessing an essence and a historical durability” (2013:115). Therefore, the notions of race transported from the United States to Panamá collided with an entirely different conception of race. Rather than take for granted that Black identity indicates Afro-​American or

270  Heather J. Paudler Afro-​Panamanian, Renée Alexander problematizes the contested terms and labels they evoke in Panamá. She explains, “Race” and “culture” produce and circulate within their own unique political economies. Like all currency, their value in local markets is not necessarily the same as their value in global ones. Like the Balboa, Panama’s official currency, and the dollar, the country’s practical one, race and culture sometimes stand in for each other and have the same structural effect even though they may have radically different affects. [ . . . ] Because the two categories are non-​exclusive and rely on each other to make their meaning, their material consequences are similar. Further, the Republic justified its asymmetrical distribution of resources  .  .  .  through ethnic/​cultural discourses with veiled racial undercurrents. In Panama, as in other parts of Latin America, “nation” superseded “race” whereas the reverse was true in the United States.  .  .  . Twentieth-​century Panamanian blackness evolved through a dialectical tug-​o-​war between Anglo and Latino ethnoracial politics. (Alexander 2005:42–​43)

The “tug-​ o-​ war” began with the 1846 Mallarino-​ Bidlack treaty between Columbia and the United States, in which the latter gained full transit rights in Panamá, then a “department” of the Columbian government, in exchange for yielding official sovereignty of the isthmian territory to Colombia. While providing the United States national capital gained through inter-​American trade, this treaty also set the precedent for all future United States-​Panamá relations. Under the guise of Panamericanism, the United States asserted power and dominance throughout the Western hemisphere, aligned with a geopolitical motivation to differentiate itself from Europe. The United States had long sought to become the preeminent hemispheric and then world power. These two dreams began to merge with the United States-​built Panama Railroad in the 1850s and became permanently fixed in 1903, when the United States abetted Panama’s independence in exchange for the right to build and operate a ship canal. In essence, Panamá had shifted from a department of Colombia (that had granted all transit rights to the United States) to a protectorate of the United States. These neo-​imperialist attitudes largely fostered bitterness from Panamanians. Many Panamanians refer to this date as “The Separation” rather than as their “Independence.” To facilitate these large pan-​isthmus projects, the United States imported a labor force composed of Black West Indians from various English-​ speaking Caribbean islands. The United States fashioned Panamá as symbolically Black and female; defining the Other helped to construct its own identity as white and male. Historian Gail Bederman explains: “To prove their virility, as a race and a nation, American

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  271 men needed to take up the ‘strenuous life’ and strive to advance civilization—​ through imperialistic warfare and racial violence if necessary” (1995:171). This depiction occurs in numerous artistic works. An illustration found in Leslie’s Illustrated, reporting on the 1856 Watermelon Riot, depicts pristine white figures being attacked by shabbily dressed black bodies accompanied by a written description that claims that the battle was instigated by “natives” and “negros” (McPherson 2003). It clearly asserted the United States’ whiteness in contrast to Panamá’s savage Blackness. Furthermore, the portrayal of Panamá in Leslie’s Illustrated suggested that it was in need of a civilizing operation, and therefore supported the United States’ imperialist expansionism. Due to the anger over the symbolic blackening of Panamá, much of its national project pushed back against the racialized form of imperialism imposed by the United States. The United States’ intervention served to advance a Panamanian nationalism directed against the United States and non-​Hispanicized Canal laborers. According to Alexander, Part of this animosity was caused by Canal Zone Jim Crow policies, which not only segregated West Indian workers as “black” and therefore inferior, but also constructed a blackness elastic enough for Panamanian workers, regardless of ethnicity, to fit uneasily and resentfully alongside them. (2005:39)

Panamanians were treated as black immigrants inside the Canal Zone; as a redressive effort, Panameños collected themselves under a shared Latino cultural identity separate from the Anglo neo-​imperial space. Within this emerging national identity, West Indians eventually shared a space with the United States as targets of the “Panama for the Panamanians” campaign of the 1930s started under Harmodio Arias’s administration. West Indians fluctuated between “undesirable” and “prohibited immigrants” during this era, as “race” was teased apart from “ethnicity.” In 1941, during Harmodio’s brother Arnulfo Arias’s first administration, the rage against the United States was legally projected onto West Indians. An article in the Panamanian Constitution listed West Indians as “prohibited immigrants” because they did not add to the “ethnic improvement” of the country (1941 Panama Constitution, Article 23). This legal mandate consigned West Indians to a racial category that existed outside of true Panamanian identity, threatening even those whose legal citizenship was Panamanian. West Indian immigrant workers were subjected to Panamanian law outside of the Canal Zone and United States law within it, yet possessed citizenship in neither country. During Arias’s demonization of West Indians associated with the Canal, the Black Costeño communities that were previously classified as “negra” on the census at the turn of the century became ethnically demarcated as “mestiza” when race was officially removed from the national census and Costeños were

272  Heather J. Paudler considered a Panamanian ethnic group. Thus, Black as a category was made to mean “West Indian.” This brand of nationalism protected Costeños as assimilated ethnic compatriots and created a distinct awareness of “West Indian-​ness” as a Black race, which was punishable by the loss of citizenship. The socially constructed label of Black, rather than visual dermal identification of blackness, became the marker of Otherness that distinguished the Black Costeños and the Black West Indians. The identities of both Panamanian Black groups shifted according to concepts of race and ethnicity largely determined by a color line effected by the United States throughout the mid-​nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not until the year 2000 did the Panamanian government recognize both communities’ shared space as refractions of etnia negra, or Black ethnicity. Charting the juxtaposed affective, cultural, historical, political, racial, sexual, and social connotations of la pollera that entangle in the music and choreography from objective observations to contextualized subjective viewpoints to experiences from body provides insight into how participants and spectators alike make sense of the performance. The incorporation of la pollera worn by the Moorish soldiers in the 1930s aligns with and demonstrates the United States’ construction of Panamanians as the Black, female Other. In community presentations, the Moors, or Others, wear la pollera, a sartorial, visual representation of the Panamanian Other. While this costume is situated as Othered in the dance-​drama itself as the Moors wear it, the community’s subversive transcript illuminates that the real meaning of its use signifies and celebrates the power, riches, and beauty of the Republic of Panamá. In this context, la pollera represents not only another gender but also the ethnic Panamanian Other. The incorporation of the marginalized Black zapateo music and dance aligns with and demonstrates the United States’ agency in the construction of Panamanians as the Black Other. However, its deliberate use in community performances also functions as a critique of the United States’ racial construction, classification, and representation of Panamanian Others. This context comments upon the neo-​colonizing gaze at work in the racial contexts in which Panamanians lived in the first decades of Republic. Employing a queer theoretical framework that is committed to the lived, historical, cultural, and political body as a site of knowledge, instead of perpetuating its own institutionalized assumptions, provides a path for the ideas of the culture-​bearers of la danza Bugabita to comment on the dance-​drama’s evolving and continuing relationship in discourses of race and ethnicity. By queering INAC’s institutionalized queer gaze, one becomes capable of appreciating the rich density and shades of meaning available in this Panamanian dance-​drama. In making queer theory work for its constituency, it can resist the imposition of normalization and essential structures to avoid the tragic gap between monolithic assumptions and particular meanings. In highlighting the role

“I’m Not Gay, I’m Black”  273 of performance in Panamanian identity formation and agency within la danza Bugabita, the story of the conquest is rewritten, as today’s dancers continue to resist complete assimilation into mainstream Panamanian culture by performing their traditional dance-​drama with ethno-​racial cross-​dressing, just as these dancers’ ancestors fought to maintain their culture under colonial rule.

7

WHO’S QU E E R (W ) H E R E ?

16

Self and/​as Subject Respectability, Abjection, and the Alterity of Studying What You Are Amber R. Clifford-​Napoleone

As a feminist ethnographer and postmodern anthropologist, I often approach my work differently from my colleagues in ethnomusicology and musicology. I am a reflexive scholar and find that unpacking my own experiences leads to revelations about my biases, my positionality, and the challenges of being a native ethnographer in and out of the field. My approach, therefore, seeks to reterritorialize academic space not just for my interlocutors and informants, but also for myself. In her germinal postmodern ethnography Translated Woman, anthropologist Ruth Behar wrote extensively about this very concept. “If I’m going to be counted as a minority, if I’m going to be on the margin, then I’m going to claim that space and speak from it, but in the interests of a politics that challenges the language of authenticity and racial purity,” wrote Behar about her status as a Latina woman in the field (2003:339). Reflexive writing in the social sciences is still, after decades of scholarly use, branded as “navel gazing”—​but what does that mean when it’s a minority scholar? I suggest that marking reflexive work as solipsistic is indeed a method of discrediting and branding such work as somehow inauthentic. In a 2010 interview for the Smithsonian, artist Kehinde Wiley stated: “Believing that navel-​gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other’s experiences and points of view” (2010). What follows is my reflexive exploration of a lesbian ethnographer, in and out of the field, in and out of academia, as a way to see the challenges that remain for native ethnographers. In a 2010 article titled “Sounding [the] Ethical,” Kay Kaufman Shelemay addressed the ethics of studying music and sound, and the disciplinary gaps between anthropology and ethnomusicology. “Regular soundings of ethical concerns across the boundaries of our societies could provide opportunities to air new concerns as they present themselves,” wrote Shelemay, “and to refine our ethical approaches in this fast-​changing field of study” (2010:25). My chapter focuses on precisely these problems. I am a fly in the authenticity ointment, a

278  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone conundrum. I  study heavy metal, specifically the self-​identified queer fans of heavy metal around the world. I am also an out lesbian academic, masculine-​ of-​center, and a lifelong heavy metal fan. My subject-​position is fraught with hazards:  a queer scholar in a heteronormative academy, a female-​ bodied person in a patriarchal world, a masculine-​of-​center individual in a society that struggles with gender expression. At the same time, my identity as a metal fan leads to assumptions that I am uneducated, working class, and that any scholarly work on heavy metal is not academic. I am an interdisciplinary academic who studies, writes, and thinks about popular music through an anthropological lens. My lack of academic credentials in music, combined with my lowbrow sensibilities, adds yet another layer of alterity to my academic life. Last but not least, there are my informants and consultants, queer people in the male-​bodied masculinity of heavy metal. These layers of alterity lead to abject status, both for myself and my informants. I will explore the dichotomies of queer and straight, anthropology and ethnomusicology, popular and academic, respectable and unrespectable, alterity and concordance. Exploring these dichotomies, and the power differentials they produce, is key to a queering of ethnomusicology. When identity and subject merge along boundaries marked deviant and abject, what do you do? This essay is an attempt to address those ethical concerns, and the many contestations of identity, subject and abject, and disciplinary boundaries inherent within them. For me, those mutually imbricated contestations feel like a series of conundrums. Conundrum is, as it turns out, a word that began as a joke. While lexicographers debate the actual moment of invention, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that conundrum was a neologism coined by sixteenth-​century English students, meant to mock their pedantic, uncool professors by taking Latin and turning it into a pun that essentially meant “crotchety.” Modern vernacular defines conundrum as a confusing problem, a difficult question, a sort of academic dilemma. In twenty-​first-​century scholarship, scholars talk and write about conundrum all the time. In a 2011 article on ontology, Benjamin Alberti suggested that alterity is like a fly in the ointment that is theory. “Once alterity is introduced as a conundrum,” wrote Alberti, “then any self-​contained theory (ontology) is open to critique” (2011:905). Alterity is the pedantic pun, the pesky fly, the earworm of Alanis Morrisette singing about death row pardons and traffic jams. It is the thing that takes otherwise deftly tied packages and rips them open like excited children at a birthday party. But it is also, in my experience, the place where one’s complicated identity is challenged. The self-​contained theory that is the self is ripped open for critique and surveillance, making a mess of definitions and boundaries. The possible instances where these conundrums present themselves are often not predictable, and always challenging. For example, I do much of my writing

Self and/as Subject  279 in my office, the same place I meet with students and grade papers. Like so many of my fellow academics, I write surrounded by books. My “go to” bookcase, the shelves of books that I have counted on year after year, sits close to my computer. The top shelf is what I sometimes think of as my coming out shelf: everything from George Chauncey to Randy Shilts, Oscar Wilde, and Judy Grahn, Vested Interests and The Material Queer. Among others, these texts helped me build my identity as a lesbian feminist, a dyke academic, a queer in a straight world. The next shelf down is all theory: gender theorists from Mary Daly to Judith Butler, Foucault and postmodernists, queer anthropologists, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay. These are the works that helped me become an academic, though I still struggle with what that means, just as those theorists did. Finally, there is the shelf that contains my research sources. And what is on that shelf? Queer anthropologists, or the ethnomusicological texts of gender and sexual minorities? No. The shelf holds the collected biographies of the members of Mötley Crüe, the writings of Lester Bangs, Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, four volumes of metal lists and quotes, and two books of saved ticket stubs. Frequently, my students focus on the metal books or sign their emails with the horns emoji (\w/​) to signal some form of musical kinship but react with trepidation at the queer titles on the shelf. Colleagues think nothing of the word queer on the spine of a book but make jokes about my research as my “hobby.” One colleague tells me often that I need to come talk to other students about Foucault because “you’re gay, you get him.” A student met me in the aisles of the local Walmart on a weekend, when I was wearing a neon Rob Zombie shirt with the design of naked women straddling a title card. The next day the student asked how I could wear that “if I was a feminist,” and followed that with a strange wink and an “Oh, I forgot you were a lesbian!” If I write on Mötley Crüe’s debauchery, am I less a feminist? Does my lesbian identity somehow give me a neon naked girl free pass? Does being gay mean that I understand Foucault? What does it say about my body, my identity, my work, my class consciousness, that I show up to teach in jeans and black T-​shirts portraying Armageddon? For me, among all these conundrums is the fact that I am a fan of the music I study—​not just an aficionado based on the cultured ear of a scholar, but a lifelong fan of heavy metal when academia was the last thing on my mind. Being metal is part of my identity, but I am often struck by the conundrum that writing about metal is not very metal. The things I write are on the shelf next to Foucault and Chomsky, not Nikki Sixx. In her essay “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” jazz historian Sherrie Tucker wrote about the problems of doing work on queerness without a self-​identified subject. Tucker’s study of female swing musicians had the potential to uncover lesbian-​identified women in jazz history. Her research, however, did not produce what she expected; her subjects did not come out despite her hopes and

280  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone plans, causing a major revision of her work. Just as problematic is when closely guarded informants do come out, giving you greater responsibility in protecting and defending their stories. These responsibilities are greatly changed when you not only empathize with your informants but consider your identity analogous to the identities of your informants. What do you do when you, the “out” queer academic, become a representative for your queer-​identified informants? What do you do when you and your informants, your people, identify themselves with a musical genre and geography that makes them outsiders in a group of outsiders? What do you do when you, the music fan turned authority, become the body upon which the mainstream projects fears and aggressions about your informants? Even though the very purpose of queer scholarship, indeed of anthropological work, is to avoid de facto representation of any group, it remains extremely difficult to avoid when you identify as both researcher and insider. What happens to your academic respectability when you are, as Kath Weston wrote, the “native ethnographer”? The result is an outsider among outsiders, the one who gets called when a reporter needs a “queer perspective,” stuck in the dilemma of authenticity. It is quite the conundrum, with its feet firmly planted in alterity and abjection. For those of us who identify as minority persons, those conundrums are the soil from which our work springs. Alterity rears its ugly little head all the time, buzzing around concepts, fussing about field notes, poking at lyrics and notation and sound, always trying to tear open theories. In her essay on the intersection of theory and participation in music, Kyra Gaunt aptly pointed out that African American musical “ways” are often used as the symbols of “ideal participation” (2002:119). Essentially, African American cultural acts are reified, reterritorialized, and then applied as an indicator of authentic musical participation. I  argue that, similar to Gaunt’s claims, alterity is presented in words that serve to abjectify insider ethnography, specifically as a method of marking such work as inauthentic. Working with alterity is dirty work, messy work, the kind of scholarly turn that requires heavy boots. Alberti’s image of the fly, however, introduces another important aspect to this conniving conundrum. Flies, worms, and dirt are all forms of the abject, and in academic terms, forms of the abject are signposts for systemic alterity. As Mary Douglas explained in her germinal text Purity and Danger: Dirt then, is never unique. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-​product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves us rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-​up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. (1966:36)

Self and/as Subject  281 Alterity is that residue of the system, the by-​product of a discursive production that marks some objects, some people, as abject. We are inherently inappropriate. In the study of music, those inappropriate elements of Douglas’s work are the materials deemed inauthentic. In that endless march toward authenticity, scholars of music leave a lot of dirt. While these abject conundrums exist along multiple and intersecting grids of subjectivity, I believe that this complex assemblage of self and subject can be understood through three constructs: the academy, the discipline, and the self. None of these constructs are simple or clear, and indeed hundreds of scholars have devoted their careers to understanding just one of these difficult fields of inquiry.

Collegial Conundrums Though I often must make claims to the discipline, I am not an ethnomusicologist. As Michelle Bigenho explained, ethnomusicology frequently depends on the ability of the scholar to produce music, to apprentice as a musician (2008:29–​ 30). I am not authentically trained in music, however, having never studied music theory. My experiences as a musician are not scholarly or professional; they are casual and by ear. My work, however, is frequently identified as ethnomusicological, though its focus is on fan culture, not on musical practice. The result is that I, in truth, have little interest in notation, or the exploration of music as played. I, like Bigenho, find more kinship among scholars of performance (2008:36–​37). Consequently, I often feel that I am passing as an ethnomusicologist, not through claims of my own but through the assumptions of other scholars. All of that came to a head at an important workshop. I was in a session with a senior scholar in ethnomusicology, going around a table of colleagues discussing our research projects. I had just begun research on queer identities in heavy metal scenes, a project I saw crossing all sorts of boundaries. As my turn came, I described my project, my theoretical stance, how I saw my identity informing my project. The senior scholar in question began by calling my research “baseless,” followed by a stream of academic epithets that amounted to categorizing my work as elementary, not scholarly, too reflexive, and in a word, inauthentic. What struck me as most confusing was that he then began addressing the table, explaining that my work was a good example of what was wrong with current scholarship in ethnomusicology. I was, it seemed, the dirt in the room. He argued that I was not a “real” ethnomusicologist, even though I had never claimed to be one. At the same time, I  am not an anthropologist according to my education, though that is my disciplinary home. I  do not have an official degree in anthropology, but that is my home discipline, and at my institution, my academic

282  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone home as well. My fieldwork as an anthropologist has never taken me outside my home country. I never had to learn a second language to do my fieldwork, I never experienced culture shock, and according to many historical and disciplinary tenets of “anthropologist,” I am not one. This makes for long confessionals about my academic pedigree, moving from one silo to another. Consider, for example, the music faculty members who told me no, that teaching a course titled “Ethnomusicology” was not something I could do. It seemed that I, according to the people in question, lacked the qualifications to teach ethnomusicology: a degree in music and disciplinary training in music theory and notation. Perhaps, the email suggested, I  would be interested in teaching the general education Introduction to World Music first? My experiences in the field, it seemed, were not sufficient. I ended up retitling my course “Anthropology of Music,” after deciding that I did not have the right to call my work ethnomusicological. What exactly was I unqualified to do? How was I still inauthentic? While these examples may seem minor, being in the middle of disciplinary systems is an abject position. Any exploration of abjection and alterity, especially where it concerns the academy, must deal with the conundrum that is disciplinary thinking. Disciplines are just another set of systems within systems, ones as territorial and competitive as any other system on earth. While anthropology and other disciplines had extensive debates during the postmodern turn of the 1990s about dichotomous thinking, in truth little has changed. As Alexandra Bakalaki explained in her essay “Students, Natives, Colleagues,” dichotomies were simply refashioned, and anthropologists who do not fit within those dichotomies must conceal themselves in order to be considered legitimate (1997:502–​ 3). African American and non-​Western academics have written about this in more detail, but the problem is just as clear for those scholars outside an academic silo. If I call myself multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, I am marking myself as an outsider, an altered being out of sync with the academic system. Any scholar who works in departments with titles such as ethnic studies, gender studies, or cultural studies (to name but a few) knows this all too well. I am a multi-​trans-​inter person before I even discuss my individual identity, marked as abject and altered before my work is even begun. It is an outing no less professional than a personal one and an outing predicated entirely on the idea of an authentic scholar. While this may seem a debate that has all but ended for some, for many academics working in public institutions with a focus on teaching rather than scholarship, disciplinary boundaries are still well-​defended territory. Constant struggles over funds, debates about assessment and state-​ mandated standards, and the necessity of proving a discipline’s worth via metrics has only deepened the disciplinary divide for those academics. When trying to prove the worth of a small anthropology program to a state higher education system focused on post-​graduation employment, a list of publications crossing

Self and/as Subject  283 disciplinary boundaries is not considered a contribution to the metrics of retention and graduation. Disciplinary challenges such as these deepen when the scholar identifies as an insider-​member of the population under study. Much has been written interrogating the subject-​position of the “native ethnographer.” True scholarship, we learn as students and scholars, means a symbolic distance. In a now classic essay, Kirin Narayan explored this very problem and suggested that hybridity, or understanding native ethnographers as “minimally bicultural,” could close a gap between the ivory tower and the street (1993:672). This, though, is still a dichotomy, one that suggests an ethnographer can straddle a line with a foot in either territory. Narayan went on to consider the very idea of a native anthropologist as an unstable one specifically because such a scholar was “divested of authority” (Bunzl 2004:435). The problem is that, in both ethnomusicology and anthropology, once you cross a line to study your own people, you lose a claim to authenticity. Outed and minimized, you quickly become someone who has “gone native,” an old eighteenth-​century trope identified by Barbara Tedlock as a product of marking some work as crossing a line out into the abject territory of the non-​academic (1991:69). Tedlock’s work was firmly part of the postmodern turn of the 1990s and looked back to the eighteenth century for indicators of the line of abjection. Twenty years later, accelerating into what some are calling the ontological turn, scholars are looking back on seventeenth-​century Spinoza. Have we really come all that far in dismantling the very dichotomies we critique? Is this ontological turn actually making scholarly work more responsible?

Flies in the Fieldwork At the macro level, this divestiture of authenticity could easily be seen as a simple disciplinary problem. In practice, however, the abjection of one’s work descends from claims of disciplinary authenticity to the subjects and foci of individual research. My own research is on heavy metal music, specifically on the self-​identified queer fans, performers, symbols, and performances of heavy metal music. Queerness is not a frequent topic in the study of heavy metal music. It is a musical genre considered pop music by some, as fringe music by others, and by most, it is not often considered an academic topic of choice. While the academic study of heavy metal music has grown quickly in the last decade, the field of study is still seeking academic respectability. Studying queerness in heavy metal meant outing myself from the beginning, and not just as a lesbian, but as a fan of heavy metal. My fieldwork is mocked, my topic joked about, my interlocutors forgotten. One evening after work, my research was the topic of a long laugh at my expense, as other scholars slapped each other on the back

284  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone for their cleverness: “Oh yes, she’s got research to do, Hot Topic followed by the Black Sabbath concert!” The problem, however, was never whatever jokes I was subjected to by colleagues who knew no better. The problem was that my work was seen as lowbrow, dirty, a hobby, and not a field of inquiry. As Kath Weston wrote: “Yet her [the native ethnographer’s] work will remain suspect, subject to inspection on the grounds of authenticity rather than intellectual argument or acumen” (1997:163). All those ticket stubs are mine, after all. The question of native, virtual, or insider ethnography has been a frequent topic among scholars who identified as marginalized. Those of us who study communities of which we are a part are faced with challenges, competing allegiances, push-​pull factors of community and academy that scholars who approach as outsiders do not have to consider. This goes beyond the act of gaining a sense of belonging or gaining rapport and trust of a studied community of interlocutors. When you identify as an insider before you become a scholar, the stakes are different. For example, Linda Williamson Nelson wrote about “gradations of endogeny” in researching one’s own community, and the challenges inherent in the fact that one could never be entirely in or entirely out of a community shared with fellow natives (1996:184). As a scholar, you are indeed an outsider, putting your own community under a microscope. As a member, a native, you are beholden to protecting the community, and in doing so, protecting yourself. You are a native sneaking up in the academy, and an academic spy catching subjects in a net. You are, on both sides, abject and altered. Weston’s work on life as a native ethnographer of queer subjects is particularly applicable, in that she points out that your work is all too easily portrayed as effortless non-​research, and that the researcher is “a creature of another order” who cannot be understood as scholarly (1997:164). Like Frankenstein’s monster, the hybrid of all hybrids, we lurch along in our abject state, separate from a creator and stoned by the villagers. Frankenstein was not natural, and it seems neither are those of us who study our own. “Studying ‘one’s own’,” wrote Kath Weston, “is no more a matter of natural affinity than nativity is the consequence of birth” (1997:169). As native ethnographers, we are supposed to translate, but for what audience? Lanita Jacobs-​Huey explained that reflexive native ethnography has the potential to embrace the postcolonial but is challenged to translate for competing audiences that see each other as adversary (2002:792). Further, Jacobs-​Huey wrote that good native ethnography should have an “ultimate goal of engendering a more representative, translatable, and accountable anthropology” (2002:800). This goal, however, seems difficult to reach from this native subject-​position, where colonialism is enshrined in words like “reputation” and “respectability.” In addition to their self-​identified position as native ethnographers, the authors cited have something else in common: they are studying, and identifying

Self and/as Subject  285 with, a marginalized group. Native ethnographers who are also racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual minority persons may elect to use the promise of ethnography to explore their own community. For someone working in a discipline based on fieldwork, however, that is a slippery slope. The old trope of “nativeness” is still alive and well, and it depends on an exoticism, an otherness that requires travel, alienness, and the abject forms of our increasingly interconnected twenty-​first-​ century world. It implies a hierarchy, another method of alterity and abjection, that positions “native” as non-​Western, powerless, and voiceless. This trope also demands a labor and economics that are increasingly difficult for scholars to achieve, even if the ethical issues are addressed. As Bakalaki explained, the very concept of fieldwork as a rite of passage marks it as somehow liminal and shocking, placing the focus on interacting with the altered other rather than the supposedly normed self (1997:505). For those doing fieldwork among marginalized groups with which they identify, where is the rite of passage? Who is the other? Just as one cannot assume nativity, one cannot assume naiveté either. I study queer fans, and I am one. Can I speak on behalf of all my informants? No, just as they cannot speak for me. At the same time, however, my emic knowledge of the subculture means that the ethical burden on me is greater, not lesser. I have to prove not only that heavy metal is worthy of study, or that popular culture is more than lowbrow, or that queer fans do exist and have a voice. I also have to do this while protecting my informants and speaking in academic voice. There is, to put it simply, nowhere to hide. Being a native ethnographer means understanding one’s position intimately and using it as a vehicle for embodying the complex, expressive, and conflicted lives of ourselves and our subject(s). As Bakalaki wrote: Instead of locating otherness within the self, being conscious of one’s own positionality may lead more directly to awareness not only of the multiplicity of our identities, but also to the fact that our control over any one of these identities is partial, as are our truths, representations, and even evocations. (1997:518)

The Self and/​as Subject Earlier in this essay I  recalled the work of Sherrie Tucker. Her essay “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” is groundbreaking in terms of its exploration of native ethnography. For Tucker, the problem was that her subjects would not come out. A self-​identified lesbian and jazz fan, Tucker was conducting an ethnographic study of the members of all-​female bands in the swing era. In one memorable passage, Tucker wrote about informants giving her a tour of their home, carefully

286  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone showing Tucker two rooms with twin beds neatly made. Later, when the same women send Tucker a check from a joint checking account, Tucker questions whether “joint checking account” is a signpost of queerness. In the end, Tucker concludes that the closet is more than a metaphor, and that her position as a native ethnographer does not equal the experiences of her informants. As Tucker wrote: My own struggles with narrators concerning how to talk about these issues suggests that they harbored conceptions of identity, privacy, and disclosure, and investments in what a history of all-​women bands should include, quite different from the ones I was prepared to recover and write into history. (2002:300–​1)

When I began my research on queer fans of heavy metal, I too wanted to write them into the study of metal music. Metal was supposed to be a bastion of heteronormative masculinity, a place unsafe for queer folks, women, anyone who was not straight, white, male, and willing to mosh. I conducted interviews, in person and online, with people all over the world. I ran an online qualitative survey that received hundreds of responses. I had a lot of notions about what I would find, and in many ways they were true: that heavy metal was not all straight, that queer people often found a place and space for themselves in the metal scene, and that attraction ranged across generations, genders, and sexualities. What I did not expect, having entirely to do with the “conceptions of identity, privacy, and disclosure” of my informants, was how their willingness to come out would affect my work and my identity. One example is an interview I conducted with an eighteen-​year old Dutch fan. When I asked how he identified, this fan told me that he was a man who preferred men, but if I must use a label, I should please call him “a homo,” a term he explained to me was Dutch slang for men who had sex with men. He told me that he preferred masculine men, “like Motorhead’s Lemmy.” When I began to ask about his attendance at shows, relationships with others, my metal fan told me several times that he had no friends. He went to shows alone, other friends who were into metal did not know he was a homo, and he felt isolated. When I asked his favorite song, he pointed me to the following lyrics: I have a question I would like to ask To who’s ever listening To myself Does everything that you give come back to you And if nothing’s offered you might as well be dead. (Andromeda 2006)

Self and/as Subject  287 This was a young man who was clearly hurting. I was more than twice his age; in fact, earlier in the interview he had mentioned that he got his first metal album from his grandfather, and that he wished he’d been born in my generation instead of his. His identity struck a political chord with me, but the cultural and generational differences were stark—​calling someone a “homo” felt like a slur in the mouth. He told me that metal music was a vehicle for him, a release from the pressures and stresses of life, and that the passage he told me “tells something about my past and my future.” I was not searching for someone to come out; we were both out. We were both sharing subcultural connections. At the same time, we could not have been further apart. I was struck, and remain struck, by a particular problem: What if my subjects are out, and they are hurt? Or scared? Or in pain? I knew immediately that our grids of identity and privacy were intersecting at one point, and that was all. I could write my subjects into the story of heavy metal, but that would not be enough. Though I have kept in touch with many of my informants over the years, I have never heard from this particular informant again. What could I have done to help a lonely, isolated boy in Holland? Did I do enough? Where does my responsibility lie? Another interview revealed a different aspect of these same concerns. An over-​fifty American who identified as a transgender woman, this informant wanted me to understand that there was no separation between metal music and her identity. Throughout our long conversation, this informant asked if I had contact with anyone else in her area, if I could put her in contact with other trans musicians (especially single ones), and whether I was queer and attached. After we really got into a conversation about heavy metal music and the role it played in her life, my informant told me this: Ok . . . I don’t hang with many TGs . . . I don’t like labels . . . I just recently discovered that about me . . . that I don’t like labels. To me, the stereotypical Trans woman likes to dress up a lot . . . big heels . . . you know the type, I’m sure. A lot of them like to do drag, even though they are not really drag queens. They walk and talk a certain way and act a certain way, typically. I’m not judging . . . I’m just saying . . . it seems to be how I view them. Hardly any of them are into metal . . . they’re more into rap or Lady Gaga type of crap. Well, I’m not. I’m a metal chick! And I like to dress like a normal chick that you see walking down the street who seems to have a different non-​traditional lifestyle. For me, I wear skinny jeans and rock tee shirts and hi top sneakers. So for me, metal definitely has an impact on my identity because I basically live it 24/​7. It’s just my way. Does that answer your question, or do you need more info on that one?1 1 The survey “Queer Fans of Heavy Metal Music” was approved by the Human Subjects Review Committee of the University of Central Missouri, the IRB of that institution, in January 2009 (#700117228). Survey respondents were anonymous, so in the text respondents are identified by the

288  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Sherrie Tucker was looking for signposts of queerness. Here, I had billboards of queerness, but did I also have signposts of misogyny? Patriarchy? Transphobia, whether internalized or not? Because I identified as a queer person, I was supposed to “know the type.” I was an insider, but also an outsider. “It is never easy to tell the difference between ideology and real life, and for a social identity like homosexuality,” wrote Heather Love in Feeling Backward, “so saturated with negative ideology, tearing away the veil may leave us with very little” (2008:23). In these two stories, and the more than five hundred other stories I collected from informants, I felt in some ways that I was left with very little. I had to do what all ethnographers do: build conclusions from disparate experiences and participant observation. The more I spoke with informants, however, the more I felt detached from the community I called home. Ideology and real life were indeed far apart. During these eighteen months of active fieldwork, I was dealing with my own queer issues. This project was very much the vehicle of my outing as well, and whether I was a self-​identified queer or not meant nothing; in academia, doing research on queer subjects means you subjectify yourself. I found myself, in 2008, in a German lecture hall giving my premiere paper in metal studies, this one about lesbian fandom in heavy metal music. The first question I was asked: “Two women together was hot, what was the problem?” I pointed at myself, a fat, masculine butch woman, and said, “women who look like me?” I then launched into a discussion of popular conceptions of lesbian sexuality and its modality as a vehicle for hetero-​masculine fantasy, but that first sentence rang in my ears. I had made myself the abject, the altered other that could not be the subject of fantasy. Now I was not Frankenstein’s monster, or a fly in the ointment, or a crusty old Latin professor; I was the ugly dyke of popular imagination, the punchline of a million jokes. While many other scholars have written about their experiences as an abject native ethnographer, it is perhaps Joanne Passaro who explained this best in her exploration of fieldwork among the homeless: They [the homeless] are the rejects of internal colonialism, peripherals because of their positions within our race, class, and gender systems of domination and subordination. This lack of “distance” makes them doubly suspect—​the position of homelessness in U.S. society stigmatizes not only homeless men and women themselves, but also their words. (1997:154)

Not only was I rejected because of academy, or discipline, or fieldwork subject, or informants. My words themselves were used as a stigmatizing weapon, and randomized five-​or six-​digit number assigned to the respondent by the online survey system. No identifying information was collected unless volunteered by respondent. Interview subjects were abbreviated by initials only. Example: DK, interview with the author, August 20, 2010, Skype interview.

Self and/as Subject  289 I was the one wielding them. I was agonizing about a young man in Holland and the words I considered slurs that he used so easily, while shaming myself in turn. In a recent essay on alterity in Kenya, George Paul Meiu explained that anthropologists who reveal experiences that informants wished to keep secret risk bolstering otherness (2016:216). I think the same can be said of revealing experiences that the anthropologist wishes to hide. At the same time, reflexivity is a primary method of exploring the connections between subject, researcher, and informant(s). When I made myself the subject, I found common ground with my informants, not as metal fans or queer people, but as subjects. Meiu also wrote that “it is important to move beyond a simple critique of sexual alterity, to examine also how ethnosexuality figures in the concrete processes through which people craft collective belonging in the present” (2016:217). As a self and a subject, those concrete processes are always happening for me, for my informants, and are embedded within the frames I place around their experiences as well as my own. My ethical responsibilities extend to the ways in which my informants are presented as collective beings, indeed, as collective musical beings.

Conclusion: With a Sullied Veranda View Revisiting many of these questions, Matti Bunzl suggested that the “abject construction” of native ethnographers resulted in a loss of authority, a loss that was essentially about authenticity as “real” fieldwork (2004:435–​38). Bunzl cited Malinowski as the cause of all this trouble, stating that his Self/​Other dichotomy was too enshrined as fieldwork canon. Interestingly, I had an opportunity to examine an exchange of letters between Malinowski and Havelock Ellis at the British Library in the summer of 2016. I expected the Malinowski of the canon: detached, objective, staid. In a 1923 letter to Ellis, Malinowski explained his perspective on the purpose of his upcoming work The Sexual Life of Savages. He explained to Ellis that his goal was to counter the Western morality movement and its pundits. As Malinowski wrote of those pundits: Don’t deprive us of the few beautiful things and moments in life; don’t, by your trappings, carvings of fig-​leave [sic] distort the meaning of the greatest and finest mysteries in life; allow the truth to be told, reverently, yet fully. The open profligate is nearer to me than the hide-​in-​the-​corner Bible-​onamist. . . . I have always suffered greatly from the desire to shock people.” (1923)

Bunzl further wrote that Malinowski’s dichotomy would remain canonical in fieldwork until the time alterity was no longer “a privileged basis of anthropological knowledge production” (2004:441). But my reading of Malinowski sheds a

290  Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone different light. A profligate is abject, grounded in alterity, a licentious and shameless character. When you are a hybrid native fieldworker studying yourself in a million conundrums, are you not also the profligate, violating all the moralities of academy, discipline, and canon? According to Tom Boellstorff, Malinowski saw humans as culturally contested (2010:216). In all my subject positions, with their competing interests and self/​subject contestations, am I not just as culturally contested as my subjects and informants? Perhaps Malinowski was not as married to the view from his veranda as we think. Despite whatever claims each may make to authenticity, both the anthropology of music and ethnomusicology have ethnographic fieldwork in common. The issues of academy, discipline, research, and subject are shared in these fieldwork disciplines, and are fraught with the abject, the altered, and the other. “We still need to expand what we call ethnomusicological theory to encompass the ethnographic and contradictory truths that live behind and within musical grooves of mixed company,” wrote Kyra Gaunt (2002:131). Only through the work of native ethnographers, who force both selves and subjects to reexamine whatever truths we cling to, will the study of music embrace its mixed company.

17

Straight to the Heart Heteronormativity, Flirtation, and Autoethnography at Home and Away Kathryn Alexander

Field Flirtations I first danced with Y in the Glencoe Mills community hall on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in early August 2013. A local man in his sixties, Y never lacked willing partners because he was an excellent dancer and could thus provide an enjoyable square dancing experience. He approached me for a square set one evening after seeing me dance with another Glencoe regular. My performance was competent enough that for the next few weeks, Y pulled me out onto the floor for at least one square set whenever he saw me at a hall. At the end of my fieldwork month, it was getting late at the last Brook Village dance of the season, and Y was leading me through one of the final sets of the evening. The movement familiarity we’d gained as a dancing pair was comfortable, and our dancing was improving, but in this final dance, that physical familiarity took an unanticipated turn. He pulled me by the hand into position, and for the first time, kept his hand on my waist between the sets. As we danced, I was pulled flush against his torso, and his hand slid down to the small of my back. I was uncomfortable at the proximity, at the difference of this physical closeness from the other times we had danced together. Our dancing had changed from a space of chaste, heterosexual pantomime to one in which heterosexual desire could be enacted. Social dancing has long been an exhilarating experience for me; yet at the end of three seasons of fieldwork, I was experiencing resignation every time I drove out along narrow rural roads to Cape Breton’s late-​night dances. My reluctance lay not in my positioning as a female participant, but in the increasing flirtation I experienced from older local men, and my inability to change this situation. As a following dancer, when and with whom I danced was something over which I had little control, and the physical movement of my body was directed by my physically larger, stronger, male partner, whose social role it was to “lead” me. Not only did I need to know how to dance and follow the choreography

292  Kathryn Alexander without stepping on any toes, my ability to participate in the square dance at all depended on my convincingly acquiescent performance within a patriarchal and heteronormative system. In 2012, I lost access to an excellent dancer and potentially key informant when I declined his offers of becoming a regular, pseudo-​romantic companion. The feeling of potential (hetero)sexualization in the boisterous, exhilarating social dance spaces never quite left me, especially since I saw this individual at every dance I attended. The constantly implied flirtation of the square dance manifested as actual flirtation often enough that I reframed my work. Instead of searching for queerness in Cape Breton’s Scottish music and dance community, I began to investigate how heteronormativity was essential to a culturally Scottish Cape Bretoner identity, and as a queer researcher, what negotiations this gendered and sexualized landscape required of me.

Fieldwork: Finding Yourself Out East Part of the province of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island separates the Gulf of Saint Lawrence from the open waters of the North Atlantic. Data from a 2016 census shows the island’s population at just over 132,000 people, a 2.9% decline from the 2011 population figures (Jala 2017). Almost 75% of the population lives in the metropolitan region around the island’s largest city, Sydney. While Scottish culture is found throughout the island, Cape Breton’s rural western side has the densest concentration of Scottish cultural institutions and events. The main highway along the western coast is aptly named the Ceilidh Trail in reference to the Scottish ceilidhs (musical gatherings) held in small towns along the route. The numerous Scottish cultural events in that region owe their existence to the substantial population of islanders who trace their ancestry to settlers from Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart initiated a rebellion in an attempt to reclaim the British throne from the House of Hanover. The disastrous Battle of Culloden the following year put an end to the rebellion and led to a period of economic restructuring of the Scottish Highlands, during which time Gaelic culture was actively suppressed. This culminated with a series of Clearances; from the late eighteenth century until the mid-​nineteenth century, Gaels were forced off their land, and many ended up on Cape Breton Island. The island is now known for its strong Highland Scottish cultural traditions, audible in its distinctive style of fiddling accompanied by piano, and accessible through the many square dances and ceilidhs that remain meaningful social occasions for locals, while also being promoted as “authentic” opportunities for tourists to encounter a “living” Celtic community (Alexander 2014, 2016).

Straight to the Heart  293 I undertook dissertation fieldwork in Cape Breton from 2011 to 2013, working primarily during the summer and early fall. During this season, the island’s roads, pubs, historical sites, cultural institutions, and accommodations overflow with tourists in search of natural scenery and, increasingly, Celtic culture. They are attracted in large measure by the consistent promotion of Cape Breton as a captivating destination for any tourist’s itinerary. Destination Cape Breton, the island’s official travel organization, promises that “your heart will never leave” the island after your trip (Cape Breton Island 2016), while the Celtic Heart Cooperative, a clearinghouse for Cape Breton’s “Celtic” (read:  Scottish) culture, encourages visitors to “add a dash of Celtic to your Cape Breton vacation!” (Celtic Heart 2016). These trademarked slogans invite the visitor to fall in love with a beautiful and culturally vibrant place, but the overwhelmingly white cast of heterosexual couples and families populating tourism advertising suggests that Cape Breton is a destination for tourists at the intersection of these identities (Alexander 2014:156). On the Destination Cape Breton website, a photo essay depicting the attractions of the Ceilidh Trail includes a young white heterosexual couple sipping whisky together at the Glenora Distillery, wedding rings visible as they raise their snifters. In the next image, just down the road in Mabou, a young, conventionally feminine white woman meets a young, white male fiddler at the Red Shoe Pub, smiling chastely even as she examines his slightly phallic violin bow. The emergence, in the last twenty years, of a post-​industrial service economy based on scenic and cultural tourism was necessitated by changing energy markets and a depleted marine ecosystem that led to the collapse of Cape Breton’s former economic base in steel milling, coal mining, and commercial fishing. Tourism is seen as a sustainable industry that can generate economic development in small, often isolated rural communities on an island suffering population loss due to out-​migration. In some ways, mine was a standard doctoral project, full of cycles of increasing familiarity, negotiations of my place and purpose, loneliness and isolation, and transcendent moments of clarity. Once on the island, local exclamations about my presence began immediately:  my California license plate attracted notice from the Gaelic College to the Glenora Distillery. At the Red Shoe Pub, an epicenter of Cape Breton’s Scottish community’s traditional music scene, a man reeled back in his seat, exclaiming, “California! My heavens . . . Well, are ya lost?” Locals wanted to know how I had even found out about the island’s Scottish music, their curiosity stemming from my geographic removal from the island and my lack of a familial link to Cape Breton. Trying to find a connection, some attributed my darker features and more olive skin tone to membership in a local Scottish family, the Frasers, or to a long-​ lost French Acadian heritage. Over time, though, my geographical and familial

294  Kathryn Alexander alterity mattered less as I demonstrated the cultural ways I belonged through my competence as a fiddler and square dancer, and through my knowledge of local tradition bearers. Even as I began to fit in, I continually encountered the ways I was still culturally removed within Cape Breton’s dance spaces. This feeling of being an outsider centered on my fluctuating positionality as an always (if often unread) queer researcher of people presenting as heterosexual and enacting a binary interpretation of the male/​female gender roles associated with that sexual orientation. This chapter explores and theorizes the embodied experiences that led me to analyze the cultural praxes of the square dance as heterosexualized and to discern a phenomenon of queer elision. As sites that help constitute socially normative heterosexual behaviors, the square dance also supports a recognizable Celtic authenticity for tourists, and I  argue that this heterosexualization is central to tourists’ nostalgic perception of Cape Breton’s Scottish culture as “traditional” and distinct from the urban milieu of engendered diversity from which most island visitors hail. The whiteness often implicit in Celtic identity, especially in Celtic regions such as Cape Breton, and a normalized heterosexuality are central to a recognizable performance of Celtic music and dance within communities and in the transnational Celtic music industry. Following several feminist scholars engaged with deeply contextualizing themselves in their work and exploring the relevance of personal subjectivity for research (Savigliano 2000; Hagedorn 2001; Babiracki 2008; Wong 2008; and Hayes 2010), I  use autoethnography to reveal the role my queer identity always played in my participation in and perception of field encounters and experiences, even when it was elided, and how I have subsequently performed that understanding in academic contexts. Autoethnography is a fundamentally feminist practice in that it privileges knowledge gained through direct, lived experience; women’s knowledge has traditionally been positioned as a kind of “low theory” (Halberstam 2011:16) that existed outside realms of valued academic knowledge. But being low to the ground, or as it’s said in Cape Breton dance, “close to the floor,” is a position of strength and stability. I arrived at my theory partly by learning to dance in this subtle, grounded way. The ineffable feeling of “neat and tidy” step dancing, especially within the square dance, formed my understanding of dancing identities and performances as socially consistent and unobtrusive within a gender binary and heteropatriarchal structure. My queer body felt the effort of having to consciously perform within this binary, and my choice of how to position my body—​as opposed to my self—​was a complex, dissociative negotiation of three factors: how I was perceived by informants in the field, which was the more sustainable engendered dance role, and considerations of my physical safety. This field account begins to articulate a theoretical frame for researchers of fields that

Straight to the Heart  295 appear primarily straight, or which value heterosexuality as a norm, with the hope of moving queer ethnomusicology towards an investigation of the assumptive gender normativity at the core of our discipline.

Straight to the Heart Fieldwork relies on norms but can never be normalized. My experience in Cape Breton involved a routine of events, but every square dance and ceilidh required new negotiations. Though I had been integrated into the social world to the satisfaction of some participants through conversation and through performing my knowledge of Scottish cultural forms, I did not feel a keen sense of belonging. My persistent awareness of my own difference, most noticeable in my discomfort with the heterosexual flirtation directed at me, kept at bay the feeling of being settled in my field site. At the core of my dancing experience was gender identity and the unusual opportunity of needing to choose my gender in the square dance. My body, assigned female at birth, is not always perceived as female due to my minimal curves, easily masked by the “masculine” attire I favor. An alto voice and short hair contribute to frequent confusion others find in assigning me a gender; in the square dance halls, I could not at first assert a reliable gender identity. I found my gender shifting, sometimes between one conversation and the next: one conversation ended with “nice to meet you, young man,” while the next focused pointedly on why I was there as a single female without my boyfriend. A local man directed me to dance with a young woman (“you dance with her, young man”), and I was later asked to dance in the following role by another local man. This confusion may have contributed to the few dance offers I initially received. Fundamentally, however, my genderqueerness was elided in these encounters: I had to occupy one of two possible genders rather than a gender between. The assumed and functional heterosexuality of the square dances and dancers erased my non-​normative gender expression and infused the masculinity or femininity assigned to me with heterosexualized potential. The variability of my gender opened up a brief space in which I could decide to take on either gendered role in the square dance; I could pass as male and learn to lead, or I could pass as female and learn to follow. This was a decisive and ethically complex choice: either choice was somewhat deceptive because I experience my own gender identity as somewhere between male and female. But the more important consideration centered on safety and research efficacy. I did not want to risk the physical violence that sometimes results from situations in which dancing partners or bystanders feel tricked when an individual’s gender expression and gender identity are found not to align with the normative cultural

296  Kathryn Alexander conventions of sex assigned at birth.1 I decided that “becoming” a woman, rather than a man, was the safer choice that would be more easily maintained (as it matched my sex assigned at birth) and best facilitate interactions through which I could accomplish research. To that end, I waited on the benches and chairs for men to ask me to dance, and as I was accepted as a woman (albeit a sartorially non-​feminine one) by more dancers, I  performed my way into a more stable gender identity within the square dance. In a process of literal patriarchal approval, my gender legibility and place in the dance was confirmed by men. I did not anticipate that this choice would also expose me to the gendered violence of unwanted flirtation and physical touch, thinking that my relatively unfeminine appearance would protect me from the heterosexualized attentions of men. Choosing to take a following role was also guided by an emerging understanding of Cape Breton’s praxis of humility. I have theorized this praxis elsewhere as a social modesty that discourages standing out or drawing attention to oneself by being noticeably different or exceptional (Alexander 2014:62). While individual musical and dancing skill is valued, drawing attention to oneself by showing off is considered inconsistent with cultural expectations that performance be modest. For example, during the period devoted to solo step dancing at every square dance, each dancer is expected to dance for the length of a tune (about a minute or two) but no more. As Margie Beaton, an accomplished step dancer, told me, “This music, this culture is humble . . . a fiddler’s playing and a dancer will come up, dance a few steps, and then let someone else take the lead. That person won’t get back up and kind of try to one up them” (Beaton 2013). Within this frame, I enacted my modesty by following the rules of the dance, and by not drawing attention to my gender fluidity, nor discussing my personal life. Ellen Lewin and William Leap note, “No matter what the specific difficulties accounts of fieldwork focus on, they are virtually unanimous in emphasizing the importance of playing a suitable role in the setting one has chosen” (1996:5), and my role was one of personal and performative modesty. Recognizing and committing to this praxis helped me find and embody an acceptable gendered and ethnicized role for myself in Cape Breton. Though my olive skin tone was noticeable, I was still recognizably white, which, alongside my gendered passing 1 Gender identity, gender expression, sex assigned at birth, sexual attraction, and romantic/​emotional attraction are five aspects of experience that construct a multi-​dimensional matrix in which an individual can map themselves. Gender identity refers to an individual’s understanding of their own gender in relation to established societal markers of male and female. Gender expression is an individual’s relative presentation of masculinity or femininity. Sex assigned at birth is usually based on visible anatomy, and often unspools a chain of gender identity and gender expression: a child assigned female at birth is expected, and often culturally conditioned, to become female identified (gender identity) and express her identity in normatively feminine ways. From this stability of masculine males and feminine females comes a binaristic understanding of gender that leads to presumptions of heterosexuality.

Straight to the Heart  297 as a following dancer, helped me fit in. Modestly passing was essential in showing my respect for the tradition and ensured my continued access to local dancers and other informants. In their analysis of fieldwork manuals, Lewin and Leap find that: Instructional manuals on fieldwork tend to be preoccupied with the mechanics of establishing oneself in the field and going about the business of collecting data. Because the central medium of data collection is, in fact, the anthropologist, getting settled satisfactorily in the field tends to be all about identity management, requiring a highly attuned awareness of how one is being perceived in the community. (1996:11)

For myself, my understanding of how I was being perceived, and my direct action to solidify which gendered perception I would convey, were centrally implicated in my analysis. My own embodied understanding of how gender queerness could at least superficially “disappear” into a gender binary, in turn, shifted my entire project. Initially, I went into the island’s Scottish cultural sites looking for queerness and was stymied. There were, it appeared, no queers here, which necessitated a fundamental reassessment of my research goals. I was confronted first by the reticence of participants to discuss gender non-​normative social dancing, an avoidance strategy ethnomusicologist and Gaelic scholar Heather Sparling has called a “politics of silence” (2005:408, 450). I was also working against the invisibility (to me at least) of queer participation in spaces that seemed populated only by straight-​acting couples and individuals. These factors, combined with the praxis of humility discussed in the preceding paragraphs, made my goal of investigating the queer potential of Cape Breton’s square dances seemingly unachievable. Moreover, would I recognize queerness when I found it? I was reminded of Katie King’s caution that broadly applied categories of queer identification (her example: “lesbian”) are by no means universal, despite the actions of many to “produce just such a ‘global’ category” (2002:33; see also Lewin and Leap 2002:8). For King, such terms are unstable, in need of constant reproduction in order to become a “standard, unmarked category” (King 2002:41). Likewise, we as scholars reproduce disciplinary conventions through repeated performance. Bruno Nettl has rightly suggested that Ellen Koskoff ’s “three waves” of feminist ethnomusicology (see Koskoff in Moisala and Diamond:2000) have ushered in a newly critical period in scholarship that highlights androcentric bias in canons, research, and scholarship (Nettl 2015:402–​3). This has focused attention on minority communities, rather than assuming unified musical expression for a whole society (Nettl 2015:406), opening up a space to discuss queer music production. Though Nettl notes that “homosexual and other gender-​defined minorities make special

298  Kathryn Alexander contributions to musical life” in many societies (Nettl 2015:407), the implication that this contribution is definably queer leaves it exceptional, even if it exists within mainstream musical life. Music is still often assumed to be straight, and unless it is demonstrably identifiable as queer in practice or participation, most of a society’s music will seem to occupy this unmarked category. The heterosexual assumption of “normal” music, the majority of a community’s music, remains unacknowledged, and the critical lens has not as easily focused on the intricacy of dominant identities, still so frequently cis-​gendered, male, white, and heterosexual. The negotiation of gender within and through musical participation in Cape Breton tempers Nettl’s argument for music as “ ‘anticulture[’] opposing the stream of culture [and] providing relief from requirements and norms” (Nettl 2015:409). Cape Breton’s culture instead reinforces social requirements and norms, especially around gender identity and gendered relationships. Even so, musical participation does allow people to socialize and have fun, and for tourists, it may represent a nostalgic escape to a simpler time when communities were small and unified, and gender was uncomplicated. The suggestion of an ideal world with simplicity in opposite-​ sex, cis-​gendered relationships still has currency in the imaginations of tourists visiting contemporary Nova Scotia, as historian Ian McKay suggests: The notion that once upon a time men were men and women were women in the Maritimes, and that around the hearths of the simple folk gathered large and contented families, still makes the idea of the “Folk” deeply attractive to anyone with an interest in evading the twentieth century’s difficult politics of gender. (1994:264)

Cape Breton’s photographic tourism literature constructs the island as just such a haven for traditional folk culture. Dance spaces, pubs, and ceilidhs are shown filled with male and female actors who appear cis-​gendered; these actors are arranged in opposite-​sex pairings that are almost uniformly heterosexualized by the presence of wedding rings and the physical intimacy of the actors. The implication is that the visitor will, by virtue of their familiarity with traditional gender and gender roles, slip easily into these cultural spaces, and have a great time doing so. As an outsider “come from away” (not from Cape Breton), my social integration was a slow process built up through many encounters with the same locals over successive seasons. Performing the expected heteronormative behaviors of square dancing was casual up to the point when the always-​implicit heterosexual flirtation of square dancing became actual flirtation, and my dancing role became my perceived sexual identity and romantic/​affectual attraction. In the moment of field flirtation that began this chapter, my queerness was obscured

Straight to the Heart  299 by the pervasive normalcy of functional heterosexuality undergirding social interactions in Cape Breton’s Scottish community functions. Queerness was never discussed nor obviously present in dance spaces, and the normal sight of oppositely-​gendered, seemingly cis-​gendered couples, often married, arriving together for the dance created an environment that appeared heterosexualized and cis-​gendered. On the single occasion I met a gay cis-​gender female friend at a dance, there was no discussion of us dancing together. Men came by to ask us to dance—​my friend first, due perhaps to her more conventionally feminine appearance—​and that was that. We were situated within a heterosexual lens. Though my queerness did not insulate me from unwelcome advances, neither did it preclude my involvement in the almost nightly square dances that fill the calendar during the island’s short summer season. The space David Kaminsky (2011) finds in urban revivals of Swedish polska dancing for “egalitarian flirtation,” that is, flirtation unfettered by assumptions of heterosexuality, does not manifest in Cape Breton’s social dance spaces. At the various square dances, what I perceived as research small talk could become heterosexualized flirtation. Talking to older men resulted in them sitting closer to me than ambient noise or seating space necessitated, and overly familiar touching of my back, shoulders, and arms outside the dance pairing. The openness necessary for my research was sometimes being interpreted as romantic or sexual interest. The discourse around dances also imbues the spaces themselves with heterosexual meaning. The much discussed “magic in the floor” at Glencoe Mills, for example, refers specifically to the large numbers of married straight couples who trace their initial courtship to that square dance hall; this heterosexualization of the physical and psychological spaces of the hall was institutionalized by the summer 2011 premiere of a musical, John Archie and Nellie, written by a local woman about her parents’ courtship at Glencoe. The normalcy, even the expectation, of dance pairings resulting in a “successful” heterosexual outcome is reified through the repetition and sheer number of such narratives. Many of Cape Breton’s older generation learned to flirt and court in the watchful community environment of the square dance, producing a set of normalized, engendered patterns of interaction between men and women. As a researcher, my identity necessarily impacted how I related to this experiential set of relational ethics and praxes, and this kept me aware of heterosexuality’s pervasive presence. Searching for theory to help frame my experience, I  turned first to queer theory for its potential to illuminate gender and sexuality as systems. Though queer theory’s disruptive utility has shifted since its academic debut in the early 1990s, it does offer us an opportunity to unravel what we have not yet highlighted in our work and attend to the unmarked identities and structures we tend to assume. Beyond this explicit theory, I go further to suggest that an implicit queer theory, a theory drawn from embodied experience, is at play whenever

300  Kathryn Alexander we encounter the world. This implicit queer theory draws on Deborah Wong’s work to explore the importance of our subject positions for the ethnographies we produce. She notes that who we are and where we’ve been necessarily impact our work in the field and the discipline, because our subject positions can lead us towards specific theoretical frames and methodological toolkits (2006:260). Further: “Theory is made by people thinking through the valences of their moment . . . [and] theory, like any part of culture will be inflected with the power play of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc.” (Wong 2004:317). From my struggle to place and then immerse myself in the role of the feminized following partner arose a theory of my embodied practice as differing from that experienced by other researchers in those same dance halls. The experience of Mats Melin, an ethnochoreologist with extensive experience in Cape Breton’s social dance scene, diverges from mine in part due to our gender identities, expressions, and attendant gendered expectations with the square dance. An accomplished step dancer, Melin’s offer to dance would generally be welcome, and as a cis-​gendered man, the expectation that he would extend the offer to women gives him direct control over his dancing participation. It is notable that his discussion of gender in square and step dancing does not mention his own gender and how that affected his experience within the dance community (Melin 2012). That it was unremarkable suggests that it did not present a significant barrier or was not even noticed as a factor in his participation and experience. Once I was consistently read as female, custom dictated that I generally wait for a man to ask me to dance; since men are usually responsible for extending dance invitations, Melin, as an experienced dancer, would have much more control over his role in the square dance. Though I spent a lot of time waiting to dance, my participation was by no means lacking in ethnographic significance. As Michelle Kisliuk notes, “because of our participation in performance, ethnomusicologists are especially aware that there is much one can only know by doing,” but that we can “only presume to speak from [our] own experience” (2008:193) even when we are in dialogue with informants. The heterosexualized square dance space is one such environment where my own understanding of performance was made partial by my participation in a gender role that did not fit me. Though my performance of a female role within the square dances was passing—​after all, I was routinely asked to dance by men—​I felt myself not passing as heterosexual because of my adverse response to the flirtation. The tension of having to lose informants or accept what I experienced as harassing behavior impacted my research and my personal well-​being in the field. Ethnographic research necessitates a kind of intimacy with strangers, our potential informants. The persistence with which I developed familiarity with my male dancing partners was necessary for my research, but my professional intentions were not the only discursive frame at play. That persistence was sometimes taken as a sign of

Straight to the Heart  301 my extra-​professional interest. Back home, I entered another negotiation—​how to situate these experiences in my writing. Performing queerness in ethnographic writing often looks like focusing on deviance from heterosexual bodies, behaviors, and identities. Queer work has always sought to destabilize categories and unveil unarticulated assumptions and biases; heterosexuality, of various kinds, is an organizing social principle of many music cultures, and should become one of the categories we explicitly interrogate in our scholarship. How researchers negotiate gender and sexual orientation in the field is often a side note in ethnographies, but I centralize it here because my choice of gender identity, and the heterosexuality assumed to follow, was critical to the research experience I had and the scholarship I created and continue to create from that experience. Avoidance of researchers’ sexuality and sexual experiences in the field is a normative part of fieldwork, and often of ethnographic writing, even when the writing is self-​consciously reflexive (for a discussion of the impossibility of the ungendered fieldworker, see Babiracki 2008:169–​71). Naming one’s sexual orientation is not the same as discussing our sexuality in the field (see Kulick and Wilson 1995), however, and the paucity of work that does so suggests a pervasive discomfort around truly exposing ourselves as human beings in communities that are not ours; we ask, and we are told, but we ourselves do not tell. Desexualizing and ungendering the researcher, through omission or reflexivity, is a kind of closeting that distinguishes us from the thoroughly unpacked identities of our subjects. It shores up our competence as experts and professionals. We practice professional detachment while also enthusiastically immersing ourselves in situations that will challenge us to leave that at the door. Perhaps we fear revealing those experiences that might seem “unprofessional” to the people with whom we share our professional lives: colleagues, mentors, students, and potential search committees.

Playing the Part I initially attempted to fill a void in the scholarship by focusing on queer participation in a community-​based Celtic musical and dancing culture. The body of scholarship on gender in Celtic music is limited but growing. Feminist ethnomusicologists have worked historically (Slominski 2010) and ethnographically (Moisala and Diamond 2000; Johnson 2006) to bring the stories of women into a narrative of Celtic music. Studies of sexuality in Celtic music performance are even more limited, and often locate non-​normative identities in staged festival competitions rather than in more social community contexts (Gareiss 2012). Even though gender is not his primary line of inquiry, the deepest ethnographically based analysis of step dancing as a gendered activity comes from

302  Kathryn Alexander Melin (2012), who asked step dancers about the role of gender in step dancing praxis and embodiment. Melin reports: [Local step dancer] Anita does not feel that there is such a thing as gendered “steps” but that there is a personal preference of how the dancing is presented. Men and women hold themselves differently in Anita’s opinion. She refers in particular to the older men who grew up with it. . . . The main difference between women and men is that the men are more relaxed when they dance, she believes. (2012:286)

During my fieldwork, I was also told that step dance is an egalitarian practice in which all are welcome (Alexander 2014:332), though my experiences suggested that the reification of the male/​female dance pairing works to functionally maintain a cis-​gendered social space. The centrality of this encultured practice to legible cultural performance makes it unremarkable. Despite the prevalence of the opposite-​sex, cis-​gendered couple, there is space for certain forms of female same-​sex dancing in Cape Breton’s square dances. These pairings are rendered safe and socially acceptable, however, for two main reasons: the pair may present clear barriers to a heterosexualizing gaze by involving, for example, a grandparent and a small child; or because of a heterosexual assumption that renders female same-​sex sexuality relatively invisible. Anthropologist Megan Sinnott explores the pervasive assumption in literature on sexuality that “women’s same-​ sex sexuality/​transgenderism is rare.” She suggests that historically, The inability of various researchers to recognize female forms of same-​sex sexuality is related to the lack of gender analysis often found in studies of male same-​sex sexuality.  .  .  . Gender, as a hierarchical system that defines and structures relationships between men and women as these categories are culturally defined, must be a central component of an analysis of sexual identities, categories, and practices. (2009:226)

Permissiveness around same-​gender dancing among women and girls appears in very few circumstances and has two primary functions depending on the age of the participants. I frequently saw prepubescent girls and young women in their early teens dancing together at the all-​ages (no alcohol served) family dances. This same-​sex dancing, however, was usually prompted by a lack of young male partners; at dances I attended, girls were present in greater numbers than boys. Even when the partners seemed to evade a heteronormative frame, their embodiment as dancers was unchanged: I once overheard two girls discussing “who would be the boy,” and having fought over who would get to remain in the female

Straight to the Heart  303 dancing role, they physically switched spots so as to occupy the appropriate starting position with the other couples in the square set. Women in their twenties and thirties, by contrast, may dance together in order to avoid men with whom they do not want to dance; from my observations, women who danced together seemed to have either a friendship or a family connection, and usually danced with male partners as well. At adult dances, the heterosexual flirtation implied in the square dance becomes more visible (Alexander 2014:337), perhaps owing to the presence of alcohol. Women choose to avoid some men who are poor dancers, and avoid other men from whom these women have experienced unwanted sexual or flirtatious advances (Anonymous B 2013b). One male dancer I interviewed told me that he has been asked to dance by female friends so they could gracefully avoid dancing with an unwanted male partner. Rather than theorize same-​sex female dancing as a tool of queer world-​ making, I  see it as means for female-​identified, cis-​gendered women to take subtle control over a space normally dominated by male agency. The female dance pair still conforms to local social expectations because of an assumption that sexual orientation follows from expressed gender. This is particularly so in Scottish Cape Breton communities, where a traditional Catholic worldview also supports an understanding of gender as binary and values heterosexuality as a biblical mandate. This assumption of participants’ heterosexuality, or at least that participants will adhere to heterosexualized behaviors in the social dance, is tacitly understood. While my attempts to perform heterosexuality made me very aware of its hegemonic place in the dances, feminist anthropologists have pointed to the ways scholars often enter the field with a heteronormative assumption about the social relationships they will encounter (Geller and Stockett 2006:12, 15–​17). Writers in Feminist Anthropology locate our cultural assumptions of gender relations as arising from, in Louise Lamphere’s words, “a pervasive heteronormativity—​[an] inability to see family relations as anything other than based on the heterosexual couple” (2006:xii). Evelyn Blackwood describes anthropology’s complicity in “creating and sustaining heteronormative marriage and family” (2006:74), while Thomas Dowson notes the discipline’s investment in reading the archaeological past through an unfailingly heteronormative lens (2006:96–​97). Lewin and Leap regard gay fieldworkers as “always aided by the ‘heterosexual assumption’, the tendency of heterosexuals to regard heterosexuality as axiomatic” (1996:12); while this is becoming less the case in many communities in North America, this was indeed at play in Cape Breton. Deborah Wong notes that “like all core cultural values (anywhere), its nature is implicit—​a matter of understanding, not of discussion” (2006:273), and while she was discussing the ambivalent role of ethnomusicology in the American music department, the same may be said of heterosexuality and cis-​genderism.

304  Kathryn Alexander In the recent past, female scholars seeking credibility were compelled by disciplinary expectations to avoid researching women’s music, just as queer-​identified scholars felt pressure to hide their queerness in their professional lives and scholarship. Increasing intersectionality has produced a great deal of scholarship on gender in relation to other identities, but the construction of sexuality is less studied, and the persistence of an oft-​unmarked heterosexuality in scholarship presents an opportunity to question the assumptions we carry into the field. As a “core cultural value,” heterosexuality in Cape Breton is not discussed; it is simply understood. The only comment I ever elicited regarding male same-​sex dancing came from a dancer at a Gaelic College square dance. Having cited the presence of some female same-​sex pairs, I asked if male pairings ever occurred. The dancer replied, “I suppose two men could dance together, but it just wouldn’t happen, you know?” (Anonymous A 2013a). The invisibility of Cape Breton’s and ethnomusicology’s heteronormativity followed me off the island. In 2013, prior to my last period of fieldwork, I was sweating through my shirt in Shanghai, fighting summer humidity and nerves. After offering my conclusions on heteronormativity, queer sublimation into a gender binary, and the politics of being a gender non-​conforming researcher-​ participant in Cape Breton’s square dance venues to a handful of scholars at the 2013 International Council for Traditional Music gathering, one scholar in attendance put up her hand. “I was so interested to hear [this] because my husband and I love Cape Breton.” The scholar, a white woman in her mid-​fifties, added that she and her husband had attended square dances during their visit to the island. “But I never felt excluded from dancing. Someone always asked me. My poor husband was left on the sidelines!” she said. “Actually, ma’am,” I replied, “that perfectly illustrates my point.” By giving an example of her own inclusion as a recognizably feminine woman within the dance space, her heterosexuality shored up by the presence of her husband and her wedding ring, she highlighted her legibility as an appropriate dancing partner for other men, who would be expected to ask her to dance. Her husband remained on the periphery of the dance space, caught between performing a male role that required him to ask women to dance, but emasculated by his lack of knowledge of the Cape Breton square dance, and thus unable to lead a woman through the square dance choreography. Ashley MacIsaac, Cape Breton’s most famous, and perhaps only, out queer fiddler, conforms to social standards of humility when he performs in island contexts by muting signs of queerness visible in his off-​island performances. When playing for square dances on Cape Breton, he blends in musically because of his expert curation of the dance tune repertoire (Caplan 2006); additionally, he adheres to social expectations by performing normative masculinity, in contrast to the campy masculinity that has characterized his off-​island performances (MacLeod 2002). When discussing Ashley with the locals, they would praise his

Straight to the Heart  305 ability to create a great dance experience as a fiddler but were silent regarding his non-​normative sexual orientation. In printed interviews as well, his queerness is avoided even when an interviewer brings it up. A pervasive climate of normalized heterosexuality, a heterosexual assumption, and a strategy of silence around gender fluidity that insulates Ashley also allowed me to continue occupying a female role on the condition of my (partial) heterosexual performance.

Conclusion Social musical performances are sites in which identities are created and practiced. These often-​public performances are shared, meaning other members of the cultural community participate in the acculturation process. Shared musical practice identifies a social group to its own members and to outsiders, and such “group performances . . . enact solidarity, provide a means for a community to see itself acting in social harmony” (Rice 2014:46). Music is thus a tool for constructing the very embodied praxes and competencies that differentiate group members from cultural outsiders. In focusing on the pervasive assumption, performance, and expectation of socially recognizable heterosexuality within Cape Breton’s Scottish social dance spaces, I recognize cis-​gendered heterosexuality as a hegemonic ideology undergirding this community. Assumptive heterosexuality comes to bear on the transnational Celtic music industry as well, influencing on-​stage performances of Celtic masculinity and femininity, and reifying heterosexualized behavior between binary genders as normal and indicative of Celticness (Alexander 2016). That the dance space functions as a site of heterosexual flirtation is due partly to well-​rehearsed and verifiable community discourse about the successful heterosexual unions that have emerged from courtships enacted under the watchful gaze of other community members in the dance halls. It also arises from a praxis of humility that encourages modesty in performance and limits an individual’s ability to act outside the bounds of community behavioral expectations regarding gender and sexuality. Queerness has been consistently visible in ethnomusicology through its discursive absences, surreptitiously appearing through careful or unintended avoidance, one way the marginal is centered directly within the canon of field sites and methodologies. Illuminating queer subjectivity is vital, and yet it does not necessarily expose the dominant structures to which queerness is subjected. Even as we expand the range of appropriate ethnomusicological concerns, powerful ideological, discursive, and epistemological foundations persist. Timothy Rice has located the mid-​twentieth-​century solidification of our field as a moment when we began asking new questions about culture and music (2014:21), and we are at another threshold when the foundations of those initial questions

306  Kathryn Alexander must be examined as well. Those foundations have influenced which questions the field has asked, who has done the asking, and who has been asked. The queer theory of embodied research practice I have suggested offers a deeply reflexive methodology to engage consistently with gender as an often-​unmarked factor in research and writing, with the promise to add meaningfully to the questions we ask our participants and ourselves. Applying gender to a marked category of difference, woman (Geller and Stockett 2006:1), is akin to aligning sexual orientation with queer identification. In such a system, only the marked categories of difference are studied: women, but not men, have gender, and queer folks, but not straight folks, have sexual orientations. Only for the othered subject position do these identities matter for experience in the world. The unmarked core of subjecthood, seemingly still covertly male, white, and heterosexual, remains largely outside the analytical gaze. As feminist theory does more than give the permission and tools to study women and their music, queer theory can move beyond studies of queer peoples and cultures. Queer theory is fundamentally about deconstructing labels and assumptions; as an ideological system and socially constructed subject position, heterosexuality necessarily becomes a subject of queer inquiry. Exploring gender always involves an excavation of social power and authority (Stone 2008:150), and I  have begun to delineate the heteronormativities that shore up ethnomusicology’s methodologies. “Queer” ethnomusicological methods can alter the field by encouraging us to excavate heteronormativity and cis-​ genderism operating at the ideological heart of our discipline.

18

Coming through Loud and Queer Ethnomusicological Ethics of Voice and Violence in Real and Virtual Battlegrounds William Cheng

I fought thousands of informants in my first year of fieldwork. In my defense, everyone was shooting and swinging and shouting at me. Guns, flamethrowers, swords, and pipe bombs made the earth run red, day and night. One afternoon in August 2008, I was hiding out in the sewers, taking a break from the mayhem to write in my journal. Upon preparing to leave this relative safe zone, I stopped to spray-​paint Barack Obama’s iconic “Hope” image on a nearby wall.1 Before I could reach the concrete arch of the exit, however, I heard a faint ploosh, ploosh, ploosh in the distance. It sounded like the crescendoing slap of boots against shallow water in an adjacent tunnel. Someone was coming. Ally? Foe? A spy disguised as a friend? I couldn’t take any chances. So I dashed to a corner and activated my cloaking device. The splashy staccatos grew louder, and the source emerged:  yes, combat boots worn by a gigantic enemy soldier with a rocket launcher slung over his shoulder. As the goliath lumbered into view, I could hear him muttering under his breath, a hodgepodge of trash talk, homophobic curses, and misogynist slurs. His voice was gruff, coarse, almost intimidating. At least he hadn’t seen me. But just as this soldier was about to make his way back out of the tunnel, the Obama poster caught his eye. He paused in front of it . . . then whipped out a metal shovel and began bashing the image. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Each strike of the shovel carved a charcoal scar on the red, white, and blue pensive face. And with each scuff mark, I grew more indignant. I probably should have stayed put and jotted down observations. Instead, I tip-​ toed out of the shadows, uncloaked, and inched toward the preoccupied soldier. For a second, I considered saying something—​raising my own voice—​but

1 Shepard Fairey created this now-​famous and enormously commercialized poster of Barack Obama (Gambino 2009).

308  William Cheng

Figure 18.1: [above] Sewers in a Team Fortress 2 match and [below, from left to right] a Barack Obama poster, covered with dents, scuff marks, and eventually blood. Screen captures from the author’s first-​person avataric perspective.

ultimately decided against it, and instead plunged the blade of my knife into his back. The soldier collapsed onto the floor like a rag doll. His movements looked unreal, like some overanimated fatality one would see in a cartoon or a video game. I stared at the soldier’s corpse, then at the beat-​up poster of the would-​be president, before abandoning the scene of the crime, probably none the worse for wear (Figure 18.1).

There’s Something Queer about Ethnography Was it bad ethnographic form to stab this soldier? And to do so silently? Perhaps the issue wasn’t so much the fact that I attacked him, but rather how my stabbing felt partly motivated by his symbolic assault on my spray-​painted poster.2 Was 2 TF2 enables a player to upload any image to their account and to spray this image on any in-​ game surface (one copy at a time), visible to all other players in the map. A player can update their image at will and swap images on the fly.

Coming through Loud and Clear  309 he an anti-​Obama fanatic? A merely mischievous Republican? A racist? Exactly the opposite? Could I discern any of this solely from his shovel and his throaty cussing? In the absence of pertinent information, I made a snap judgment and assumed the worst of the soldier. Yet my presumptions of his unsubstantiated bigotry lent extra satisfaction to his demise anyway, a tiny victory of swift retribution via bytes and pixels. Strange though these reflections may sound, here was just an ordinary day in the online video game Team Fortress 2 (TF2), where I conducted fieldwork between 2008 and 2011. TF2, released by Valve Corporation in 2007, is a first-​ person-​shooter (FPS) game that continues to host tens of thousands of active players every day. In TF2 matches, a player is sorted into a Red Team or a Blue Team to compete in scenarios such as Capture the Flag and King of the Hill. My ethnography, which formed a chapter of my dissertation (Cheng 2012:151–​92) and subsequent book (Cheng 2014:139–​66), focused on how the use of live voice-​chat (players speaking to one another in real time through microphones) could produce playful, inflammatory, and politically charged soundscapes. With TF2—​as with any FPS game—​one tends to hear voices that are overwhelmingly male. Most female-​identified players whom I interviewed thus noted that they hesitate to use voice-​chat due to the high risks of verbal harassment. On the blog Terra Nova, one commenter remarked that in online shooters, “the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly, and all that is left are the 12–​ 18 year old guys, and it becomes a locker room” (Cheng 2014:143). Because male voices audibly dominate, any non-​speaking players are largely assumed to be male unless or until they vocally out themselves as Other(wise). I framed this dilemma as an acoustemological closet for women: damned if you speak, homogenized if you don’t. Peering into this closet, I  grappled with a slate of perplexing sounds and subjects: prepubescent male players whose disembodied voices were misheard as female by other players (some of whom were likewise boys who ended up being misidentified, and so on), giving rise to nervous chatter about the ambiguous sex telegraphed by high-​pitched voices in general—​chatter that reified binarized genders and elided spaces for transvocalities; the potential for voice-​ changing (sonically cyborgian) technologies, or suspicions thereof, to thwart players’ attempts to visualize and categorize speakers’ identities; and players’ frequent appeals to alibis of role-​play, performativity, and humor when accused of sexual harassment or trolling (just a game, just hamming it up, just for laughs), championing the normative sociality of seemingly antisocial speech and simulation.3 It has been ten years since I first stepped into a TF2 match, and now, 3 On the materialities, poetics, and potentialities of trans and genderqueer vocalities, see, for example, Krell (2014) and Goldin-​Perschbacher (2007).

310  William Cheng at a decade’s distance, I feel an urge to provide some long-​marinating critiques about the ethical vagaries and quandaries of online game fieldwork. Stabbed informants? Check. Got blown up by a grenade while text-​interviewing the player holding the grenade launcher? Check. Saw graffiti sprays of lesbian pornographic hentai? Heard the words fag and bitch and rape slung around as casually as bullets? Wobbled around decisions of whether to speak up or stay quiet in this carnivalesque hunting ground? Constantly. In my encounters with violence, vice, and voice, my fieldwork seemed to afford, encourage, and even necessitate a playful and pliable methodology. As an ethnographer, I learned to perform the same kinds of simulated barbarities as my interviewees and research associates. Engaging in gameplay and participant-​ observation, I—​my avatar—​looked just like one of the guys, the rambunctious dude-​bros with guns blazing. To parse this idiomatic phrase: just (merely, fairly) like (almost, but not quite) one of (concealment, exculpation, diffusion of responsibility via group participation) the guys (the homosocial imaginary in charge). I heard countless instances of sexual harassment and racial epithets, and even though I never contributed to this offense, I took few steps to deter them. In fact, I rarely used voice-​chat out of concerns that my own audible contributions could unduly influence or outright silence the very social dynamics I sought to understand.4 Upon hearing verbal abuses, I thus came to experience dissonant emotions of gratification (for how these offensive voices gave me something to quote, something to write about) and guilt (for enabling these voices through nonintervention). In light of this dissonance, I wish to focus on how perhaps much of online game ethnography—​and maybe any ethnography—​can activate a queer ethics, a flux of guiding ideas defined precisely by their playful indefinition. If ethnography implies the general study of a culture and its people, then does an ethically queered ethnography entail reimaginations of how a culture and its inhabitants may coexist and thrive otherwise? Can queering ethnographic ethics animate the troubling of right-​versus-​wrong binaries? Does it move us to yo-​yo affectively between what is purportedly ethical and what feels ethical from moment to moment? In one sense, then, a queer ethics does not sound like an ethics at all, if by ethics we mean a codifiable arrangement of attitudes, principles, and behaviors. In another sense, a queer ethics may be the only viable ethics given the ambiguous identities, unpredictable circumstances, and moral vicissitudes 4 I realize that, when it comes to fieldwork in physical spaces, most scholars no longer believe in the feasibility of pristine environments (enabled by a minimally disruptive, tip-​toeing ethnographer). But virtual fieldwork introduces a twist because ethnographers can, via disembodiment and avataric re-​embodiment, choose to lurk and thus observe the environment without perceptible interference (Hall 2011).

Coming through Loud and Clear  311 of fieldwork and interactions at large, online as well as offline (Hankins 2014). One caveat:  my agenda here to normalize ethical queering (a chic verb and gerund among humanists) plainly risks draining the concept of its antinormative charge, dulling its radical edge, and reducing it to a sparkly rhetorical accessory (Wiegman and Wilson 2015; Halberstam 2015). Although this paradox binds me from preventing semantic entropy, I will do my best throughout this chapter to safeguard queer and queering as active, actionable terms, as opposed to buzzwords complacent with their own ubiquity and opacity. Maybe this has happened to you: students who are new to studies of gender and sexuality often ask me what it means to queer something . . . and what follows is a winding hem-​haw dialogue in which I pretend to know how to answer that question, ultimately resorting to a half-​assed admission of how the alterior principles of queering may defy the verb’s definitional cohesiveness. So that’s what I say (okay, ramble) to such a student. But here’s what I want. I want queering foremost to serve as a call to social justice and a quest for better worlds, real and virtual. I want to live, play, and dig in the sandbox of queer optimism upheld by writers such as José Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Michael Snediker (2009). I want even a preliminary conversation about queerness, in ethnomusicology and beyond, to fill a student with antihomophobic fire and fight, not demoralizing confusion and academic insecurity. With this in mind, and with an ear toward crises of masculinity, surveillance, and shame, I will work through here the concomitant power and powerlessness conveyed by TF2 players’ voices—​voices that come through loud and clear (full of semantic mischief, rage, misogyny), yet, in the absence of in-​person contact, remain comparatively impotent, given speakers’ limited potential to make good on threats . . . or so some assume. I close on two solemn notes that drive home the purpose of coming through loud and queer: first, the 2015 tragedy of a real life lost in a storm of internet trolling and transphobia; and second, queer reflections on students’ vocal-​turned-​violent protest of guest speaker Charles Murray at Middlebury College in 2017.

No Harm, No Foul? “A primary ethical obligation shared by anthropologists is to do no harm,” advises the Statement on Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). “Anthropologists should seek to avoid [ . . . ] harm to dignity, and to bodily and material well-​being, especially when research is conducted among vulnerable populations” (American Anthropological Association 2012). First-​do-​no-​harm principles—​the mantra of non-​maleficence familiarly adopted by healthcare practitioners—​are, as the AAA insists, especially important for fieldwork that involves underprivileged communities. But on the surface, these rules don’t map

312  William Cheng neatly onto my ethnomusicological project and my simulations of violence toward informants in Team Fortress 2. An easy way to claim moral exemption in video games overall would be to say that playfighting is par for the course, enabling individuals to connect with one another, build mutual trust, and partake in creative teamwork as well as friendly rivalry. Simulations of war in TF2 are qualitatively different from the challenges of researchers who face severe precarities in real-​world environments (Peritore 1990). A legitimate crisis in fieldwork would involve, say, an ethnographer deciding whether to join in violent initiation rites to gain entry into a criminal youth gang in Nicaragua (Rodgers 2001), or an ethnographer choosing whether to stay or to flee when “threatened, searched, suspected of subversion [ . . . ] in the midst of crossfire” on the streets of early 1990s Port-​au-​Prince (Kovats-​Bernat 2002:209). Compared to such harms, virtual violence could be brushed off as all but trivial.5 Yet it’s not so simple. In 2010, I presented some preliminary research on TF2 during the LGBTQ study group session at an American Musicological Society conference. I showed footage of TF2 gameplay: representations of visceral violence (explosions, gore, flying limbs); players uttering misogynist, racist, and homophobic remarks; and an atmosphere shot through with colorful carnage, all recorded from the first-​ person perspective of my own knife-​waving avatar dashing through the battlefield, apparently engaging in the exact chaos that I, the researcher, had been trying to parse. After my talk, a professor approached me. He said he enjoyed the paper, but also recommended that I, upon completing my dissertation, should move on to a less distressing project for my own peace of mind. A few days after the conference, he emailed me to elaborate: Dear William, [. . . ] It is your spirit that I worry about in your pursuing such research. I fear that the constant violence, anger, and prejudice found in these video games will affect you psychologically in ways that you cannot foresee and that may be difficult to shake. One cannot touch pitch without some of it coming off on one’s fingers. I fear the desensitization to the act of killing another person, even within such a context. [ . . . ] Please excuse this avuncular concern if it is unwelcome, but I feel an ethical duty to point out what I see are possible dangers. Warm regards, —​(9 November 2010) (Cheng 2012:17).

5 Anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnomusicologists contend frequently and imperfectly with the ethics and experiences of violence in the field. Moral and behavioral challenges confront researchers who venture into circumstances and locations (war zones, gang territories, households with domestic abuse) containing violent acts or ideologies. See Chari and Donner (2010), Craven and Davis (2013), and Castelo-​Branco (2010).

Coming through Loud and Clear  313 The professor’s message rang a useful wake-​up call, reminding me that second lives (and virtual violence) aren’t second nature to everyone. Especially for a person unaccustomed to the aesthetic and cultural conventions of video games, this media can seem outrageous and even dangerous. So while injuries to avatars cause no corresponding physical harm to the players who sit safe and sound behind computer screens, this professor’s concerns, if merited, imply that participating in virtual violence can subtly do harm to one’s own conscience and, by extension, to society’s moral fabric. For despite my lifelong engagement with video games, I can’t say for certain whether I’ve been immune to violent video games’ effects on mind, body, and spirit. If I have been socialized or adversely affected by games, would I know it? Could I admit it? Over decades of debate, little scholarly consensus has emerged on stubborn questions of how and whether simulations of carnage link up with real-​world hostility. Ideas of causation, correlation, imitation (mimesis), and release (catharsis) remain empirically difficult to circumscribe or prove. Either way, one thing I have to remind myself is that, if ludic violence were surreptitiously harmful, then the mere fact of being an ethnomusicologist probably doesn’t grant me immunity. In TF2, simulated violence is the norm. Annihilating enemies comes with the territory, as players’ disposable avatars are free to die and respawn dozens of times in a matter of minutes. In players’ eyes, in fact, it is pacifism that would constitute an explicit violation and daresay queering of social relations (Dougherty 2012). Refraining from killing opponents is a surefire way to get scolded by teammates for not pulling one’s weight. Nonviolence in an online FPS can register as its own form of trolling behavior, subject to administrative sanction. Likewise, choosing to sit out a TF2 match—​assuming the role of an impartial Spectator who forgoes an avatar and instead observes the match from various selectable camera angles—​can appear just as problematic given that such a benchwarmer still technically takes up a spot on a server (each of which maxes out at thirty-​two players). Too many nonparticipating Spectators can thus shrink the active roster of teams, resulting in a thinned-​out arena, akin to a baseball field with no shortstop or no left-​fielder. In this regard, abstaining from TF2’s combat during fieldwork wasn’t a realistic option. Violence was a virtual imperative.6 In a book about the online world simulator Second Life, Tom Boellstorff remarks that “ethnography has a special role to play in studying virtual worlds because it has anticipated them. Virtual before the Internet existed, ethnography has always produced a kind of virtual knowledge. [ . . . ] [Anthropology] has

6 Another common challenge of narrating any violence lies in how violence can exceed description altogether. To capture, streamline, or sanitize a portrait of violence risks doing ethnographic (that is, representational) violence to the field and the inhabitants in question, essentially virtualizing the realities at play. See Das (1990:33) and Daniel (1996:154–​93).

314  William Cheng always been about avatarizing the self, standing virtually in the shoes (or on the shores) of another culture” (Boellstorff 2008:7, emphasis in original).7 Any ethnographic writing or work, Boellstorff remarks, is already virtual owing to its epistemic labors and communications. And any ethnography, we could add, is likewise already playful via elements of performance, improvisation, dialogue, conflict, and collaboration. Video games, as explicit domains of play, are ideally positioned to highlight these ludic elements. Violent simulations in a gameworld such as TF2 further queer such play by upending typical formulas of polite conduct. As theoretical bedfellows, playfulness and queerness both allege the unsettling of norms, rules, and expectations. As political gambits, both call attention to alterity, marginality, and differential embodiment. To deem fieldwork virtual and playful is not to trivialize its aims; to call fieldwork queer is neither to postulate nor to valorize its methodological exceptionalism. Rather, prioritizing a concept of playful queerness can be one means of staving off our potential complacency with one-​size-​fits-​all approaches to ethnography. Game spaces, as much as any site, showcase the possibilities of antinormative personas as they navigate contests of who’s in or out, who’s top or bottom.8 Even if we consciously do our best to adapt and improvise across our respective fieldwork, the embodied labors of research might still press us into certain physical and mental habits over time. As I successively passed the 100-​, 200-​, 500-​, and 1000-​hour mark in TF2 (automatically tracked by the game), my actions and methods started feeling positively mundane: chat with an informant, blow up a sentry gun, listen to verbal sexual harassment, scribble down a few paragraphs, stab a friend, repeat and repeat and repeat. The novelty of such ventures faded gradually, and the cognitive dissonance born of their initial absurdities melted into familiar tunes. Yet I  wonder if this normalization was queer in itself. As much as I attempted to retain a sensitivity toward the stakes of my research, my tried-​and-​true field methods betrayed a degree of calcification and desensitization nonetheless. One facet of TF2 fieldwork offered a safety valve in this respect. My go-​to avatar was a character capable of camouflage, disguise, and literal backstabbing. Issues of observation and surveillance thus never roamed far from my mind. This reflexivity, however, posed a conundrum in its own right. With my avatar, I could appear doubly masked and pseudonymized while undertaking my class-​specific duties of infiltration, sabotage, and deceit. Did the two-​pronged excuses of just a game and all for research still fly? Could ethnographic respectability even remain possible when every few minutes in the field, I would hear someone scream . . .



7 8

See also Boellstorff (2007). On top-​bottom and sub-​dom metaphors in music theory, see Maus (1993).

Coming through Loud and Clear  315

Figure 18.2:  A Spy’s disguise options in Team Fortress 2.

Figure 18.3:  A Blue Spy disguised as a Red Soldier, as he [left] would appear to his own team and [right] to the opposing team.

“Spy!” In TF2, players can select and swap freely between nine character classes (all male in appearance), each with its own distinctive avatar and abilities. Although I dabbled in every class, I spent most of my time playing as the Spy, who possesses skills that happen to be especially conducive to fieldwork. The Spy can disguise himself to look like any other character on either team. So a Spy on the Blue Team can, for example, shapeshift into the appearance of a Blue Sniper, or a Red Medic, or even a Red Spy (Figure 18.2 and Figure 18.3). A Spy can further activate an invisibility cloak and disappear from the enemy’s sight. As a counterweight to these remarkable clandestine powers, the Spy is otherwise frail—​plagued by low Hit Points, average speed, and poor ranged offense. An outed Spy is usually a dead

316  William Cheng Spy. As an ethnographer who almost always played as this sneaky class, hearing my informants and friends shout “Spy!” not only distressed me for gameplay purposes (fearing for the safety of my avatar, exposed as a traitor in the vicinity) but also reminded me of the fraught politics of fieldwork and witnessing. Yelps of “Spy!” brought imagined echoes of “Ethnographer!” (as in someone who’s watching us . . . an outsider, an imposter). The TF2 Spy personifies the tricky affordances, predicaments, and temptations of fieldwork. This character can blend into—​literally look identical to—​the others around him (assimilating into the native population) or turn invisible altogether. This said, players controlling Spies must learn to move and behave like the specific enemy class that they are imitating at any given moment. If Spies are disguised as speedy Scouts, they might want to run around frantically with a swinging bat; if disguised as stoic Snipers, they should calmly step from side to side with an outstretched rifle. Embodying a Spy is a one-​man show and nine-​ character performance, demanding a stylized improvisation of animated and normative gestures to maximize the chance for safe passage through perilous surroundings. And just as the Spy wears many masks in unfamiliar territories, so fieldworkers put on alternate hats over the course of their travels and residencies, tailoring their actions, voices, routines, and rituals to the allowances and pressures of particular circumstances, interlocutors, and institutions. According to the mandates of ethics review boards, ethnography and espionage don’t mix. In the field, however, the two can appear—​or feel—​hard to differentiate. Anthropologists have certainly been accused of espionage, whether it’s government-​hired spying in particular or uncouth modes of surveillance in general (Price 2016:221–​24; Browman 2011; Zenobi 2010). Official guidelines for fieldwork tend to push researchers toward transparency except in cases where disclosures might result in the harm of self or others. But transparency in online multiplayer video games can run into medium-​specific challenges. A game ethnographer may intentionally or inadvertently lurk in virtual spaces with relative ease, defaulting to anonymity or pseudonymity via monikers and avatars. Deliberate efforts to come out as an ethnographer in an online gamespace aren’t as easy as one might think: while in the physical world, some fieldworkers might be identifiable through their appearances or comportment—​say, a light-​skinned researcher, with audio recorder and notebook in hand, openly and audibly interviewing musicians in a black church—​video game avatars, even when visually customizable, have few means of looking like a researcher. Furthermore, in an online game, broadcasting one’s research intentions either out loud or via text can cause disruptions. Especially when the topic of inquiry is voice-​chat, the surprising announcement of an ethnographer’s presence might lead players to cease speaking or modulate their conversations out of self-​consciousness, discomfort, or sheer confusion. Yet another complicating factor owes to the rapid

Coming through Loud and Clear  317 turnover rates of a game’s server population. As players hop from one match to another—​which they do in order to experience a variety of maps and communities, akin to channel-​surfing—​any disclosure by a researcher would require constant performative repetition upon this entry of new participants. It is therefore not only procedurally and morally questionable but also practically impossible for an ethnographer of an online game to be definitively, continuously out in the field. (Granted, this revolving-​door dilemma is hardly new for certain unmarked queer or nonvisibly disabled individuals whose coming out is an exercise in repetition.) As a Spy-​embodied researcher whose personal and research identity could not be reliably disclosed to surrounding players, I practiced an unconventional and at times uncomfortable manner of ethnography. This wasn’t lurking per se, since I was participating actively in matches and corresponding with individual informants through one-​on-​one email exchanges and text messages. But during matches, my own silence enabled an aural stance that felt like eavesdropping. Did I hear players, or did I overhear them? For starters, I was tautly listening to the dialogues of players who had little reason to assume the presence of an ethnographer. Upon hearing offensive utterances, I would document them while trying to remain impartial and level-​headed, effectively rising above the fray as I overlooked the need to intervene. And during these practices of observation and documentation, I would instinctively assume that the insults—​even, say, homophobic slurs or racist Asian jokes—​couldn’t possibly be about me, given that, as a non-​intervening researcher, I saw myself in but not of the field. None of this means that my remote, avatarized, and pseudonymous ethnography was able to remain impersonal. Largely due to TF2’s ludic frame, I took playful liberties in my virtual actions, whether it was stabbing an Obama-​basher or going undercover as a Spy. One line I rarely crossed was the sound barrier. I wore a mic-​equipped headset during fieldwork but seldom spoke into the curved microphone hovering just two inches from my lips. In moments when I considered speaking up, I became extra aware of this dangling mic—​how it was always ready to receive, ready to absorb my voice. Yet I neither participated in trash talk and harassment nor spoke out against such abuse. Elaborating on Dwight Conquergood’s concept of “co-​ performative witnessing” in ethnographic work, D. Soyini Madison has stressed the political implications of a researcher’s push and pull with communities in question: “We are quintessential witnesses in dialogic performance because the reciprocity of our engagement—​the inter-​animation of response and address—​ affirms and creates our subjectivity. We cannot be subjects without dialogue, without witnessing” (Madison 2007:829).9 Dialogue here, as Madison uses it,

9

See also Conquergood (1991).

318  William Cheng refers to relationships writ large rather than to literal speech. Still, my abstention from voice-​chat in TF2 throws questions of subjectivity into loud relief. I did engage in the push and pull (in fact, the shove and yank and so much more) of virtual play, yet all without voice. Although I’ve already floated some preliminary factors for this silence—​risks of intrusion, undue influence, ethnographic etiquette—​there’s another factor that I’ve had difficulty admitting to myself, much less to others. It is an unsavory consideration because it digs at not just the present me (the adult ethnographer) but also the past me (a closeted gay child, once upon a time).10

Locker Room Talk: Confessions of an Ethno-​Gaymer During TF2 fieldwork, a part of me—​namely, the inner gay child—​balked at the thought of speaking out against a torrent of offensive, jocular, or otherwise agitated male voices. The acoustic locker rooms of TF2 reminded me of . . . well, the high school locker room, the no-​fag’s-​land where, away from adult supervision, the loudest and largest sweaty bodies reigned: sonically, visually, odorously, kinetically, against all senses, against all reason. With gay rumors, size comparisons, and dick and pussy jokes flying left and right, my preteen and teenage selves had good reason to keep the eyes down, speak only when spoken to, and change in and out of gym clothes with the alacrity of a magician’s assistant. In TF2 matches, hearing a profane chorus of male voices thus had the uncanny effect of repeatedly transporting me back into my adolescent body, back to a closeted, insecure, and embarrassingly pubescent stage of life. Shouldn’t I have outgrown these insecurities by now? As an out-​and-​proud professor, didn’t It Get Better? Despite the demonstrable safety of my ethnographic body (pseudonymous, avatarized, physically untouchable behind the computer screen), an illusory feeling of danger lingered throughout fieldwork. The semantics, affective charge, and mere timbre of masculine vocality en masse sufficed to trigger an illogical state of high alert. Just as in youth, when I remained fearfully mute when peers spat curses and derogatory gay jokes, so I kept my mouth shut whenever TF2 players struck up incendiary banter. My nominal role as a fieldworker actually afforded a convenient excuse to stay quiet. Moral and vocal reticence came preapproved through appeals to academic decorum. Discordantly, the sounds of slur-​slinging players could feel more visceral to me than the death-​a-​minute eviscerations onscreen. As I clung to silence, I enacted and endorsed the avataric actions by default, playing along in virtual bloodsport. 10 On the heuristic queerness of childhood and the queered relationship between (artificial) separations of child and adult, see Stockton (2009) and Halberstam (2012).

Coming through Loud and Clear  319 So despite my uneasy relationship with the speech acts of hegemonic masculinity, I engaged nevertheless in simulated violence, which, especially to outsiders (such as the concerned, avuncular professor at the musicology conference), could very well register as an egregious performance of hypermasculinity.11 On the one hand, then, I wielded some authority in the TF2 field, given that I played proficiently as a Spy, extensively surveilled arenas, interviewed and befriended individual players, and eventually published a narrative on the sexual and queer politics of in-​game voice-​chat. On the other hand, I forfeited notable opportunities for direct influence: by failing to speak up, I was neither claiming the potential agencies of voice nor actively redressing the game’s cultures of harassment—​ harassment that may have become habitual precisely by the scarcity of forthright objections to such offense. To be sure, in online gameworlds where trolling is the status quo, any voice that pleads for toned-​down rhetoric would immediately sound like the outlier, the sanctimonious scold cutting against the arena’s topical and amplitudinal grain. Voices of reason and de-​escalation would come across, in other words, as veritably queer . . . meaning the new (or not-​that-​new) normal has become so-​called locker room talk, glossed by the tautological apologia of boys will be boys (Wierzbicka 1987). Here are two quotes, both recorded in 2005, unearthed from audiovisual archives during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign: (One) Well, I’ll tell you the funniest [thing] is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting. I want to make sure that everything is good. You know, the dresses. “Is everyone okay?” You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. “Is everybody okay?” And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that. (Kaczynski, Massie, and McDermott 2016) (Two) I moved on her [Nancy O’Dell] like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.12

In the first instance, on The Howard Stern Show, Trump was describing what he had said in women’s actual dressing rooms. In the second, on the notorious 11 Sociologists, psychologists, and gender theorists have long posited and contested the connections between masculinity and violence. Despite an absence of consensus, what’s certain these days is how following any mass shooting or criminal atrocity, numerous articles spring up to pin blame on the ideological strangleholds of toxic masculinities. For critiques of “hegemonic masculinity” as a concept, see, for example, Hall (2002) and Connell (2002). 12 “Donald Trump—​‘Grab Her by the Pussy,’ ” http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=8wM248Wo54U.

320  William Cheng Hollywood Access tape, he was boasting about sexual assault to Billy Bush, a hot-​ mic’d conversation that Trump and his political surrogates have tried to wave off as the humdrum banter of hypothetical men’s locker rooms (Fahrenthold 2016). Trump, when grilled by journalists and by debate moderators in 2016 about these remarks, said he had never actually done the things he said he had done. Trump’s insistence to Billy Bush that he “can do anything” because he is famous and powerful cast a lengthy rhetorical shadow, one that gave Trump the cover to say anything about doing anything because, as far as evidentiary burdens of speech acts go, saying is not doing. But victims came forward to corroborate the lewd encounters. “[Trump] just came strolling right in,” recalled Tasha Dixon, who, during her time in the Miss USA Pageant 2001, was eighteen years old. “There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-​naked changing into our bikinis” (“Former Beauty Queen” 2016). As #Pussygate made the 2016 headlines, it incited a renewed war of words about the defensibility of locker room talk. Some people insisted that locker room talk shouldn’t be taken seriously. Others argued that such talk perpetuates and normalizes rape culture. Some upstanding male athletes tried to offer chivalrous assurances that men don’t talk this way in locker rooms at all, while others reported they do (Figure 18.4). Such debates, of course, have raged for decades, and online technologies have only fed the fire. Concerning the internet at large (beyond online games), Danielle Keats Citron describes how online “commentators dismiss [gender harassment] as harmless locker-​room talk, characterizing perpetrators as juvenile pranksters and targeted individuals as overly sensitive complainers. Others consider cyber gender harassment as an inconvenience that victims can ignore or defeat with counterspeech” (2009:375; see also Lipton 2011).

Figure 18.4:  Chivalrous refutations of locker room talk by athletes [left] Sean Doolittle and [right] Chris Conley, who leverage their culturally sanctioned masculinity (via baseball and football, respectively) to deny wholesale, implausibly, the existence of locker room talk—​good intentions notwithstanding.

Coming through Loud and Clear  321 Consider the physical and acoustic space of a gym locker room, where some men spew rhetorical fantasies about heterosexual cravings. Maybe they do so to dispel or sublimate the homosocial and homoerotic tensions erected by the copresence of sweaty nude bodies. Libidinous banter becomes an efficient one-​two punch of female objectification and queer disavowal. It’s also an implicit form of extreme vetting that helps root out any gays in the midst (join in persuasively, lest you get outed). But the occasional yet inevitable glimpse of another man’s junk is not the only inducer of overcompensatory speech acts. Sights of genitalia aside, the sounds of men’s collective voices convey an audible threshold of testosterone that can urge counteractive bids for heterosexual masculinity. Here, then, is the soapy rub: chauvinist banter is used to banish the specter of homosexuality, but the banter itself repeatedly provides sonorous, timbrally gendered reminders that there sure are a lot of chatty, naked men in the room. At first blush, players of an online game have a strong case for excusing foul speech acts as just locker room talk. Due to the geographic distance between pseudonymous players, some of whom might reside on separate continents, offenders could argue that they literally, physically cannot make good on their threats or come-​ons even if they wanted to. Trolls and online harassers can also easily disavow their speech acts as the stuff of games. Attributions and accusations of authenticity, nature, or intent bump up against offenders’ claims of speaking in the spirit of histrionics, hyperbole, and comedy. Trolling is, the excuse goes, the bombastic adoption of virtual personas and nonserious communication. As performative creatures, trolls purport to speak in many tongues, in voices not always their own. Indeed, despite the popular valorization of voice as somehow natural and intrinsic to the body, there may simultaneously remain, as Martin Daughtry puts it, an “ever-​present element of artifice in vocality,” in the sense of its discursive “constructedness” and iterative “theatricality” (2012:246). Notwithstanding their frequent trafficking in sexism and homophobia, trolls hide behind verbal drag and semantic masquerade, claiming that what they say doesn’t define who they are. Vexingly, the more flagrant (semantically charged) a troll’s speech act may be, the more easily it passes for hot air and expletive artifice (semantically empty). The ventriloquistic rationalization: the things I’m saying are so appalling (so out there), you can’t possibly believe they represent my real voice (the person inside). Abundant philosophical, musicological, and media scholarship has framed disembodied voices as phenomenal curiosities (or explicitly queer objects) implicated in matters of power, persuasion, and even violence. Steven Connor, author of Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, notes how “the separation of the voice from its source has often been represented as a wounding, or severance. Voices do not merely drift apart from their origins, it is suggested, nor

322  William Cheng are they inadvertently lost: they are ripped or wrested” (2012:1).13 Beyond the mutilation, censorship, and otherwise violent measures that can strip voice from body, disembodied voices themselves can perform a violence to the symbolic systems around speech acts and their accountability. A built-​in alibi (Latin: alius + ibi, meaning someplace else) accompanies the disembodied voice, which indeed emanates from (or gets projected to) someplace else, somewhere other than the visible body. A voice’s very disembodiability indexes a technological artifice that enables the speaker to claim intrinsic performativity, an occasion of theatrical artistry that debars a listener’s attempt to read into the speech act at face value. Despite the violence that can be done to and done by voice, Enlightenment ideals in the West have largely positioned voice as violence’s opposite. “According to the connotative field that surrounds voice,” observes Martin Daughtry, “to speak is to communicate with one’s others, to sing is to commune with them, and both together are the antithesis of killing” (2012:252). Drawing on his fieldwork on sound and music in wartime Iraq, however, Daughtry goes on to disclaim: Shouting curses at someone is not the same as shooting bullets at them. But shooting people, it must be said, is often preceded, accompanied, and followed by shouting, and screaming, and sobbing, and laughing, and singing, and all manner of vocal expression, both ritualistic and improvised. Our voices are actions that set the stage for further action, and that action can bend toward or away from violence, sometimes in keeping with our intentions, sometimes in contradiction to them. (2012:254–​55)

Daughtry’s observations jibe with the warnings of legal theorists and sociologists who reject the mitigated term “nonlethal weaponry.” A more appropriate and accurate term, some argue, is “prelethal” (Davison 2009; Cheng 2016:96–​98). To designate Tasers, tear gas, or sound cannons as “nonlethal” is to unleash a rhetorical smokescreen that obscures the always real potential for lethal escalation during the deployment of such devices. In anthropological terminology, the smokescreen requires “diachronic” scrutiny to clear up; the story arc takes time.14 (Pepper spray may be nonlethal on its own, but when was the last time local riot police—​or a S.W.A.T. team—​carried only pepper spray?) In physical or virtual battlefields, voices can likewise accompany brutal action, sharing a common stage. An offender’s voice, in injurious situations, is not just background noise, second fiddle to the knife. More than a virtual force, this voice can act as an embodied accomplice, and, depending on its juridical classification (incitement 13 See also Connor (2000). Appropriately, Ventrilo is the name of a popular proprietary VoIP (Voice-​over Internet Protocol) software for gamers who use voice chat. 14 On synchronic versus diachronic ethnographic approaches, see Rice (2017:49–​53).

Coming through Loud and Clear  323 to violence, hate speech, fighting words), may be charged and condemned accordingly in courts of law.15 Although the sing-​songy, lilting playground mantra ♪ sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me ♪ posits hypothetical resilience against verbal assault, the misleading conjunction (but) veils the reality of how the people who are subjected to harsh words are likely at greater risk to suffer the slings of material sticks and stones. Make no mistake: it’s not just children who, without knowing better, use the sticks and stones excuse. Adults do it. Lawyers do it. Even Supreme Court Justices do it. During the oral arguments for the 1996 case Schenck v. Pro-​Choice Network of Western New York, concerning the First Amendment rights of anti-​abortion protesters, Justice Antonin Scalia stated, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me. That’s the First Amendment.”16 “That’s certainly our position of it,” responded Jay Alan Sekulow, the lawyer representing anti-​abortion activist Paul Schenck and his co-​petitioners. “And your point is they’ve never used sticks or stones,” queried Justice John Paul Stevens. “Not these clients!” replied Sekulow with a loud chuckle (a sound clear as day in the audio recording but undocumented in the transcript), as if there were anything laughable about a high-​court legal decision on the constitutionality of whether someone can yell at abortion patients that they will burn in hell. As philosopher Susan Brison puts it, constitutionalist defenses of hateful or harmful speech often rely on fallible claims to speech’s “costless” or “priceless” properties (1998:40). Arguments that speech is “costless” propose that it cannot exact tolls or cause injury. Arguments that speech is “priceless” call for its unqualified protection even where vitriol and threats are concerned. Yet empty threat and idle threat are oxymorons. By definition, a threat exerts force, which should simultaneously obviate the possibility of inconsequentiality (empty) or inaction (idle). In a book on hate speech, Judith Butler argues that although a verbal threat “is not quite the act that it portends, it is still an act, a speech act, one that not only announces the act to come, but registers a certain force in language, a force that both presages and inaugurates a subsequent force” (1997:9). Now, someone who slings hate speech over the internet or in online games could argue that these screen-​based mediums make it almost systematically impossible for this speech to prefigure harm. Unless a troll were to track down a target’s

15 In short, the graphical assets of a game such as TF2 are predetermined; play the game for a few hours and you can pretty much see every animated explosion, dismemberment, and portrayal of violence that the game has to offer. Players’ own voices, by contrast, are not bound by these preset parameters. 16 Full audio recording and transcript of this case can be found at “Schenck v. Pro-​Choice Network of Western New York” (2017). I first came across Scalia’s remarks in Brison (1998).

324  William Cheng home address—​which does happen—​the leap from speech act to physical harm is curbed by the nature of remote and pseudonymous interactions. Online FPS players who shout threats, unlike soldiers who do so in real-​world warzones (per Daughtry’s investigation), then, cannot themselves physically make good on their words. Physically might look like the most emphasis-​worthy word in this preceding clause; it stands out, as adverbs tend to do. A subtler key word, however, is themselves. A male player (Player M) who hollers to a female player (Player F) through voice-​chat, “I want to find and rape you!” likely cannot and will not ever find the woman he is addressing to inflict harm, even if the desire to harm existed. But to fix our sights on Player M’s unlikelihood of directly and corporeally assaulting Player F is to miss the broader regime of sexual violence in a society where such speech acts are condoned or outright normalized. One-​to-​one: this Player M may never meet this Player F in person. Yet one-​in-​ five: the probability, according to conservative estimates, that Player F has been or will be raped by someone in her lifetime; statistics for assault and victimization climb even higher for trans women, black and brown women, and homeless or displaced women. And on his end, Player M might at some point assault (or have already assaulted) a woman other than this Player F, especially if one believes that his misogynist remarks in an online gamespace—​appeals to just joking! or just a game! aside—​signal, even in the slightest, a penchant for the trivialization or perpetration of sexual assault. Aside from cases of extreme trolls who have done immediate damage to the lives and livelihood of their victims, assumptions that trolls are all talk overlook—​ overhear—​the grander networks of harm that enable and ensue from collective offenses in virtual as well as physical environments.17 Appeals to performance, play, and humor only take us so far. At some point, reprehensible speech acts cannot be waived or waved off as nonharassment, as a pure matter of whether (as in, I said I will rape you, but I will not be able to rape you); at the very least, they are materializations of preharassment, previsions of if or when (as in I said I will rape you, and here is a cruel memento or warning for the all-​too-​possible abuse you have experienced or will eventually experience).18 Most people who spout sexual harassment in games or on the internet would disavow any affiliation with actual communities of sex offenders. Then again, such disavowal isn’t simply up to the harassers to ascertain. Inverting the familiar postcolonial query of whether one can speak for others, we could say that anyone could already be speaking on others’ behalf, wittingly or not (Alcoff 1991–​92). Even in virtual spaces, players’

17 My ideas on speech, act, and community here draw on classic theories of dialogism, polyvocality, and networks of (vocal) performativity. See, for example, Bakhtin (1981), Cavarero (2005), Sedgwick (2003); cf. Peraino (2007). 18 See Waldron (2012) and Brison (2004).

Coming through Loud and Clear  325 selective threats and slurs both represent and reproduce the systemic realities of how queer, feminized, raced, disabled, dislocated, and stigmatized bodies are disproportionately targetable by incendiary speech acts and actions. Trolls participate in infinite games of contrarianism and antagonism. But even when their words or actions result in demonstrable violence or injury, the sheer number of participating trolls is typically so large that the guilt associated with any tragic consequence is unlikely to dig into any single inciter. People often sigh about the unbanishability of trolls and lament how the internet will simply remain the way it is. This is a familiar lost-​cause stance that contradicts from within.19 The apparent ubiquity of online vitriol means that agendas of rectification and critical understanding should be all the more, not less, compulsory.20 At times, the nonhuman metaphor of the troll—​some mythical beast resistant to reason and socialization—​might lead us to forget that trolls are people, after all.21 Victims, dehumanized by trolls, are people, too. And different people can learn, unlearn, and be broken in different ways. Here is one such story.

Rachel Bryk (Say Her Name) On April 23, 2015, Rachel Bryk jumped off the George Washington Bridge and ended her life. She was twenty-​three years old. As a trans woman working as a game developer, Bryk had lived with chronic pain and depression. In the months preceding her death, she confessed her thoughts of suicide on social media sites such as 4chan, Reddit, and ask.fm. Some responses came in the form of bullying messages—​messages including “DO IT, if you’re such a weak willed thin skinned dipshit then fucking do it” (Miller 2015), “How do you feel about closed casket funerals,” and “You’ll be back online a few days later thriving on the drama you created” (Ask.fm 2015). Rachel Bryk never appeared online again, although a few webpages became sites of commemoration, debate, and further trolling. “So on the post mortem will they refer to [Bryk] as ‘it’ ‘she’ or ‘he’?” asked one 4chan user (Miller 2015). 19 Trolling is often characterized as offense without reason: insulting others or spewing hate for its own sake. Writers who take dyadic or dialectical approaches to conflict theory declare that conflict necessarily carries implications of conflict resolution. This doesn’t apply to trolling in the internet age because with trolling, there’s no resolution per se: “While the instruments of control that sustain power are not considered here, the definition of conflict is itself implicated in a wider ideological debate concerning the appropriate constitution of a harmonious world. In this respect, conflict by definition implies the possibility of conflict resolution, an equivocal position that calls into question its fixity as a concept” (O’Connell 2010:2–​3). 20 For challenges against the “lost-​cause stance” toward social justice, see Scarry (2000). 21 On the uses and misuses of characterizing sexual offenders as nonhuman, see Brison (2002:89–​90).

326  William Cheng Bryk’s death received some news coverage, but not a lot. One reason may be that Caitlyn Jenner’s two-​hour interview with Diane Sawyer happened to air the day after, on April 24. News sites and channels seized on the celebrity and clickbait-​value of Jenner’s grand gesture. For the next several days, the name “Cait” saturated mainstream, triumphant, self-​ congratulatory conversations about trans concerns, the new age of tolerance, and the boldness of ABC News. Following the death of Rachel Bryk, her mother, Lisa, insisted on Facebook that “while Rachel was certainly bullied and harassed online, that was NOT the reason she committed suicide. Please pass along info on the abuse that trans individuals endure, but let’s also educate people on how difficult it is to live every moment in pain. A combination of everything was likely the cause, so let’s not make her a[n]‌anonymous statistic” (Miller 2015). Lisa Bryk rightly noted that suicide accommodates no singular or satisfactory explanation. Besides the calamity of a life lost, suicide begs incomprehension and disbelief, generating explicit wails of why did they leave? with an implicit wondering of . . . how did they stay for as long as they did?22 Without conclusively trying to weigh, quantify, or pathologize the overbearing factors in Bryk’s life, suffice it to say that summative experiences of chronic pain (physical and psychic), depression, transphobia, and cyberbullying could have been altogether responsible for leading this young woman to cross a point of no return. Besides the fact that vicious trolls would not have helped Bryk in the slightest, the staunch attribution of her suicide to intractable pain ends up ignoring the systemic injuries at play. (Elsewhere, I have shared an account of my own neuropathic pain.)23 Perhaps Bryk’s trans-​identification led her to encounter discrimination and hostility in a search for medical care, whether for pain management, mental health, or gender confirmation procedures. Perhaps, as a game developer, Bryk felt alienated by the gaming industry’s legacies of hegemonic masculinity, sexism, and transphobia. Perhaps Gamergate’s war on women’s “self-​proclaimed” oppression has spawned a repressive climate that dissuades women like Bryk from asking for help (Parkin 2014). For harassers, Bryk was a perfect victim. Her open admissions of physical and emotional pain enabled tormentors to use her own confessions against her, twisting an ailing voice into an avowal of self-​ incrimination and self-​destruction. To lament repeatedly that Bryk suffered pain is to state a matter of fact, but also to isolate and stigmatize her as a perished individual who was, in life and in 22 In an essay criticizing the It Gets Better Project, Jack Halberstam (2010) writes: “First, just because a teen is gay and kills himself, does not mean that he killed himself because he was gay. Second, looking for hard and fast reasons for suicide, particularly in young people, is a fool’s game and it ignores the multiple pressures facing young adolescents on account of the messed up worlds that we adults pass on to youth.” 23 See Cheng (2016:20–​36).

Coming through Loud and Clear  327 death, trapped solitarily in her body, her exceptional situation, and her unavailed mind. This doesn’t so much respect the memory of the deceased as it serves to let ourselves—​survivors still here to make better and more accommodating worlds—​off the hook. People who lambast suicide as a foremost selfish act tend to declare that individuals who kill themselves must bear sole responsibility for their actions.24 Put another way, these are the same people who would insist that nothing other people say or do can either deter or encourage an individual’s choice to die. This is the wrong way to approach questions of liability. To challenge these precepts of resilience and self-​determination is not to disavow the significance of individual accountability and agency. Rather, it can underscore how such matters of accountability cannot always serve as a frontline excuse for the complementary responsibilities of the larger community. Words spewed online have apparent offline effects, and these effects refract through a conglomerate of exculpatory apparatus, technological mediums, institutional machinery, and moral fail-​safes. The last words of Rachel Bryk were: “Guess i am dead. Killed myself. Sorry” (Figure 18.5). She composed this tweet ahead of time and scheduled it to go live on Twitter at midnight on April 24, 2015, approximately eight hours after her time of death. The self-​sendoff is a haunting postmortem echo. Queer in its disjointed temporalities, virtual in its delivery, and cruelly calcified by the screen-​ grab-​happy cultures of archival zeal, Bryk’s farewell was typed out with the understanding that by the time the message materialized in cyberspace, it was already too late. (Or is it: it would be too late? It would have been too late? It would have had to be too late? No verb tense or participle sounds adequate to account for this loss.) Bryk did not, it seems, want to be talked out of her decision; for if attention had been all that she desired, she might have sent this tweet while still alive. But I don’t want to abstract this circumstance with any further expatiating reference to fancy rubrics of queerness or virtuality, because the stark, straight-​ up reality is that Bryk was once alive, and now she is not. Indeed, although my calls for a queer ethnographic ethics in this chapter have emphasized ideas of flexibility, ambivalence, and adaptive improvisation, none of these principles should take priority over a commitment to justice. Like many queer theorists and activists, like many first-​time students in courses on gender and sexuality, I continuously wrestle with how the semantic vagueness and academic overuse of the term queer may counteract its own 24 Here is an anonymous comment responding to the Washington Post article about Rachel Bryk: “No one can be blamed for another person’s suicide. It’s (?) sickening to do so. We all make choices. if we are not held accountable for the choices we make, or claim what we do is someone else’s fault, then maybe we should be in a nut house. ‘Cannot be trusted to make rational decisions’ is one of the main reasons people are placed into mental health facilities. No accountability for their own actions” (Miller 2015).

328  William Cheng

Figure 18.5:  [above] Rachel Bryk and [below] her last tweet, tagging two friends.

antinormative force and dampen its calls to action. If we’re intent on vaguely verbing queer, then queer needs to pay its dues as an action word. Queer isn’t just liminality, interstitiality, and performativity. Queer is the bottles thrown, the bodies broken, the flesh and the flame, the strategic rationing and renewal of how many fucks we have left to give. Let queer (ethno)musicology, as Susan McClary puns, work toward “effing the ineffable” (2012:252). Let’s envision queerness’s manifold uses as the chromatic rays diverging from a prism: refractory, diffuse, at times faint. To guard against being dazzled by these colors, we must train our sights on the original and primary purpose of the brilliant beam that enabled such a spectrum: to illuminate, pierce, and root out injustice with laser focus. A queer ethnographic ethics would do well to remember the historic blood and sweat that made queer a reappropriable, empowering rubric to begin with. Ethnography is already much queerer than we assume. Yet it can be queerer still. In life, on the internet, Bryk had dared to say her name and show her face on public forums, rather than cower behind pseudonyms or avatars, as trolls tend to do. Rachel Bryk: say her name, because she no longer can. I don’t know when I will embark again on fieldwork of an online game. But when I do, I intend to learn from my past errors and to use my voice, so long as I have one. I will not default to prioritizing the preservation of a field’s informational integrity. I will protest harassment and hate speech, no matter how slyly or

Coming through Loud and Clear  329 persuasively the speakers try to excuse their words as ventriloquistic ad-​libs or locker room banter. Recall the professor who wrote me an email explaining his doubts about the capacity of my spirit to survive virtual violence and desensitization. He had a legitimate reason to worry. It’s not that the belligerent game communities have deterred my scholarly efforts to fulfill the ethnographic mission. It’s that my scholarly efforts failed to track the ethical imperatives beyond the mere mission of ethnography.

Coda: Middlebury, Envoiced On Thursday, March 2, 2017 at Middlebury College, about one hundred people protested against visiting speaker Charles Murray. Thereafter, Middlebury professor Allison Stanger, who was accompanying Murray outside, suffered whiplash and a concussion when they were physically confronted by a mob. The protest was not just for show—​not just a game—​and the violence was both symbolic and palpable. Princeton professors Robert George and Cornel West coauthored a statement and invited academics around the world to sign. The statement began: The pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a free and democratic society require the cultivation and practice of the virtues of intellectual humility, openness of mind, and, above all, love of truth. These virtues will manifest themselves and be strengthened by one’s willingness to listen attentively and respectfully to intelligent people who challenge one’s beliefs and who represent causes one disagrees with and points of view one does not share. (George and West 2017)

Above all, love of truth. Yet can a pursuit of truth in part serve the pursuit of justice, and can a love of truth go hand in hand with a love of people? How does “truth” factor into a minoritarian protest against Murray, whose oeuvre reeks of smokescreened eugenics—​exactly the kinds of eugenics that have long been institutionally, sneakily leveraged to victimize LGBTQ+, disabled, and black and brown bodies? In conducting my TF2 ethnography, I had chosen to stay mostly silent in the face of offensive speech. I realize now that I did so with the implicit assumption that staying silent would help me grasp, as George and West would say, the truths about what online interactions are like, about the gendered dynamics and verbal violence of multiplayer games, and so on. I was trying to trace an asymptotic arc towards a compelling and truthful ethnography. In so doing, I let my hands slip from the long arc of justice.

330  William Cheng Here, then, is another statement responding to the protests against Charles Murray, this one issued by a group of Middlebury College professors: On March 2, 2017, roughly 100 of our 2500 students prevented a controversial visiting speaker, Dr. Charles Murray, from communicating with his audience on the campus of Middlebury College. Afterwards, a group of unidentified assailants mobbed the speaker, and one of our faculty members was seriously injured. In view of these unacceptable acts, we have produced and affixed our signatures to this document stating core principles that seem to us unassailable in the context of higher education within a free society. (“Free Inquiry on Campus” 2017)

I agree that the physical violence was unacceptable and was likely the portion of this incident that escalated the clash to the topic of national media attention. But we shouldn’t conflate our condemnation of this violence with the mistaken notion that Murray’s inability to deliver his planned lecture necessarily signified a complete breakdown in communication. Something else was communicated that day: anger, confusion, pain, resistance, refusal, and truths of a different shade. The event was snapped out of its normative format and queered in its collective affect and legibility. Indeed, the professors who penned this statement included a list of principles attesting to the importance of the free exchange of ideas. One principle misguidedly stated: “Students have the right to challenge and to protest non-​disruptively the views of their professors and guest speakers” (“Free Inquiry on Campus” 2017). Non-​disruptive protest is as oxymoronic as empty threat. No such thing. Another principle: “The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices” (“Free Inquiry on Campus” 2017). Again, I agree. Yet this principle seems to presume that people who speak out and act out do so largely in order to maintain a level of comfort with their preexisting views—​that is, by protesting and by drowning out the opposition, one is able to avoid the discomfort of hearing competing views. Now, it’s likely that echo chambers can indeed feel safe and comfortable, but it’s not accurate to imagine that people protest because it is comfortable and is the easiest thing to do. Sometimes the easy thing to do may be to stay home and do nothing. The apparent discomfort of protesters was actually observed and narrated, in separate accounts, by both Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray. In a New York Times op-​ed, Professor Stanger wrote: From the stage where I sat with Dr. Murray, waiting for students to take their seats, I saw a sea of humanity. Students were chanting, “Who is the enemy? White supremacy,” and “Racist, sexist, anti-​gay:  Charles Murray, go away!” Others were yelling obscenities at Dr. Murray or one another. What alarmed

Coming through Loud and Clear  331 me most, however, was what I saw in the eyes of the crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have seen another human being. [ . . . ] Never mind that Dr. Murray supports same-​sex marriage and is a member of the courageous “never Trump” wing of the Republican Party. (2017)

First:  yes, never mind that. With all due respect and sympathy for Professor Stanger, Charles Murray’s alleged support for same-​sex marriage doesn’t make the man a queer ally, and in any case should not award him a get-​out-​of-​jail-​ free card. And here are Murray’s own reflections in the American Enterprise Institute’s neo-​conservative blog: About a week before the event, plans for protests began to emerge, encouraged by several faculty members. Their logic was that since I am a racist, a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a pseudoscientist whose work has been discredited, a sexist, a eugenicist, and (this is a new one) anti-​gay, I did not deserve a platform for my hate speech, and hence it was appropriate to keep me from speaking. [ . . . ] I stood at the podium. I didn’t make any attempt to speak—​no point in it—​but I did make eye contact with students. I remember one in particular, from whom I couldn’t look away for a long time. She reminded me of my daughter Anna (Middlebury ’07)—​partly physically, but also in her sweet earnestness. She looked at me reproachfully and a little defiantly, her mouth moving in whatever the current chant was. I’m probably projecting, but I imagined her to be a student who wasn’t particularly political but had learned that this guy Murray was truly evil. So she found herself in the unfamiliar position of activist, not really enjoying it, but doing her civic duty. (Murray 2017)

In choosing to speak out, the student protesters became both volatile and legible bodies, offering themselves up for a master class in close reading. Professor Stanger and Charles Murray were evidently moved to read into the students’ shouts, bodies, and faces, using vivid imagination to ascertain some inconvenient truths about the power play in full swing. The protesters compelled Stanger and Murray to become unwitting ethnographers of sorts: to read the room, to check its boiling temperature, to perform a hermeneutics and acoustemology of space, voice, and skin. A queer reversal indeed. Finally, based on Stanger’s and Murray’s individual accounts, the Middlebury students didn’t look comfortable at all; it was as if many of them were trying on a new outfit—​awkward in composure and choreography, unsteady in confidence, uncertain in their propriety and precarity, coming out of their shells.

332  William Cheng We might never be comfortable with envoicing ourselves queerly. We might never feel comfortable speaking out. Yet if and when we, as scholars and fieldworkers and activists, choose to resist or queer the codified ethics of our profession, we cannot expect to feel comfortable. We will continuously come to crossroads where we must choose between saying something and saying nothing. Different people will choose differently, with different justifications and potential repercussions. It falls on each of us to choose well, and just as importantly, to choose good. It has taken me ten years. Better late than never. Only after completing an ethnography of TF2 have I come to recognize how my primary responsibility is not to an Institutional Review Board, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Anthropological Association, or any institution, period. My responsibility is to queer allies, students, and individuals like Rachel Bryk who deserve my voice of resistance more than they need my behavioral propriety or my signature on an authoritative contract. How does my cursive name even matter on that contract’s dotted line when Rachel Bryk is no longer here to say hers aloud? In pursuing a life of the mind, let’s not forget to attend to the lives of bodies, here and now. Standing in solidarity, let’s come through for one another, loud and queer*.

* I extend my sincere thanks to Gregory Barz, Cora Johnson-​Roberson, Sarah Hankins, Peter McMurray, and Frank Lehman for their feedback on drafts of this essay.

8

C LU BS, BA R S,  S CE NE S

19

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork Luis-​Manuel  Garcia

The complexities of working with sound and musical performance pose challenges to all ethnomusicological fieldwork, but researchers of musical nightlife—​at bars, clubs, raves, and so on—​must face even greater challenges, such as engaging with communities that are loosely organized, constantly in flux, secretive, and often justifiably skeptical of external scrutiny. These researchers must also contend with aspects of nightlife settings that render conventional data-​collection methods inappropriate, impractical, or even potentially harmful: crowding, darkness and/​or disorienting lighting, constant high-​volume levels, heat, humidity, intoxication, sexual courtship, aggression, anonymity, and endless distraction. And when the scene of study features queer-​identified actors in large numbers or in key roles, researchers encounter yet another layer of complexity that raises issues of in/​visibility, fleshy entanglements, daytime/​nighttime personae, and identity management. What do ethnographers of queer nightlife do with the dissonance between their fieldwork sites and their disciplinary training? Is there a way to queer ethnomusicological best practices, or to assemble an alternative methodological repertoire? In this chapter, I begin this line of inquiry by examining how queer nightlife fieldwork sites demand new, adapted, and flexible methods. I open with a brief review of the status of fieldwork within the social sciences, along with an overview of methodological insights offered by queer anthropology. I take a problem-​ based approach, drawing first from my own fieldwork experience to highlight issues that are specific to nightlife and that complicate conventional fieldwork methods. I then turn to interviews conducted with three ethnographers who use queer nightlife spaces as field-​sites, thus establishing a comparative framework that allows for the identification of common problems, skills, and strategies. Although the methodological solutions reported by interviewees are varied, they are characterized by improvisation, contingency, and a pragmatic approach to identity-​management. I will suggest that these characteristics are best encapsulated in an analogy with queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) contrast between “weak theory” and “strong theory.” In social science’s most prominent ethnographic disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and folklore studies, there already exists a robust literature

336  Luis-Manuel Garcia on fieldwork methods, from didactic to critical to experimental (Atkinson, Delamont, Coffey, Lofland, and Lofland 2001; Bernard 1998; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011; Honigmann 1973; Naroll and Cohen 1970). These “top-​level” disciplines, however, span a wide range of sites, scenes, and themes, often making the guidance they provide too general, thus leaving the budding queer nightlife researcher to adapt these models to very different fieldwork contexts. One can nevertheless glean valuable methodological insights from particular sub-​disciplines and thematically related fields,1 while both feminist ethnography and mobility studies offer useful examples of the agile, reflexive methods necessary for queer nightlife research.2 Issues of sexuality and gender are especially relevant to cultural anthropology, where the process of researching and writing ethnography requires the active social involvement of the ethnographer in their field-​site. In the past, the disciplinary desire to conform to prevailing notions of scientific impartiality, disinterest, and objectivity discouraged anthropologists from revealing details about what they imagined to be the unscientific, subjective process that took place in the field. However, the rise of post-​colonial critique in the 1970s and the ensuing “crisis of representation” in the human sciences (George E. Marcus and Michael M.  J. Fischer 1986)  prompted a critical reappraisal of the purported objectivity of ethnographic methods, leading to a call for more reflexive ethnography. These first forays into reflexive methodologies illustrated how ethnography is collaborative work, where “meaning,” “truth,” and “data” are negotiated between situated actors, including the ethnographer (Clifford and Marcus 1986). These insights thus highlighted how the ethnographer’s identity impacts these processes of collaboration and negotiation—​that is, what fieldwork consultants will reveal, how people will act in your presence, what kinds of access you are granted, how you perceive and interpret the data, and so on (Adler 1990; Barz and Cooley 1997; Jackson, Jr. 2012; Starn 2012). But this raises an issue previously formulated in the introduction to Ellen Lewin and Edward 1 For example, one can find relevant reflections on ethnographic methodology in popular music (Cohen 1993; Garcia 2013; Maxwell 2002), ethnomusicology (Barz and Cooley 1997; Myers 1992), dance studies (Buckland 1999), and theater/​performance studies (Kershaw and Nicholson 2011; Smith 2009). Across several disciplines, there are also instructive and critical interventions to be found on field-​notes and the writing of ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011; Marcus 2002, 2012; Markham 2005; Van Maanen 1988). Certain fields have already developed a substantial discourse on nightlife fieldwork, such as youth studies (Blackman 2007; Hodkinson 2005; Hunt, Moloney, and Evans 2010; Le Breton 2004; Lyng 2005) and public health /​epidemiology /​drug use studies (Adler 1990; Demant, Ravn, and Kirstine Thorsen 2010; Hunt, Moloney, and Evans 2009; Measham and Moore 2006; Moore 2002). 2 The reflexive turn in the social sciences produced important accounts of the impact of gender and sexuality on fieldwork methods (Allison 1994; Gurney 1985; Perrone 2010; Ronai 1992; Sanders 2006), while recent research on mobility and translocal networks has been producing a range of “mobile methods” that may prove useful for scholars of increasingly mobile nightlife scenes (Büscher, Urry, and Witchger 2011; Marcus 1995, 1999).

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  337 L. Leap’s Out in the Field: Reflections of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists: “If reflexivity demands candor about the assumptions and desires one brings to the field, then one must be open about how one manages one’s identity and how this contrasts with or resembles strategies one employs at home” (1996:2). Indeed, many of the challenges of queer ethnography can be understood as having to do with identity management in one form or another; in contexts where sexuality is a pivotal aspect of group belonging, managing the visibility and framing of one’s sexual identity becomes both important and unavoidable. Being candid about sexuality in fieldwork would require discussing sexual desire and expression in the field—​including the researcher’s own sexuality—​which has long been an uncomfortable subject in ethnography. If a productive examination of queer matters in fieldwork requires violating long-​held disciplinary taboos, this is all the more so for fieldwork in nightlife settings, where the transgression of social norms is often part of its subcultural fabric (Demant, Ravn, and Thorsen 2010; Hodkinson 2005; Lyng 2005; Maxwell 2002; Measham and Moore 2006; Perrone 2010).

The Challenges of Nightlife Fieldwork Before focusing on the specificities of queer nightlife, it is worth considering how any sort of nightlife context requires new and adapted research methods, since nightlife entails circumstances that conventional fieldwork methods are ill-​equipped to address. In the introduction to a special issue of the electronic dance music journal Dancecult (Garcia 2013), I detailed several nightlife-​specific challenges to ethnography drawn from my own experience conducting fieldwork in electronic dance music scenes: Respecting night-​lives:  Nightlife provides a realm of activity that is at a remove from everyday life; as such, it holds open an imaginative space for play, experimentation, and self-​fashioning. The “nightlife industry” contributes to and profits from this difference by cultivating environments that seem permissive, fluid, and clandestine. For some, such settings offer the opportunity to take on nocturnal personae that contrast sharply with daytime identities; for others, nightlife can serve as a vital testing ground for transformations they wish to extend into other domains of their lived worlds. Nevertheless, the stakes of violating the boundaries between day-​life and nightlife can be very high, especially in queer contexts. How does one go about gaining access responsibly, collecting data, storing sensitive information, and finally publishing—​making public—​ information about social worlds that rely on avoiding public scrutiny to sustain their experiments in living differently?

338  Luis-Manuel Garcia Establishing trust in “underground” scenes:  The denizens of “underground” scenes have very good reasons to be wary of inquisitive scholars and journalists. Firstly, low visibility is often valued within these scenes as a form of subcultural capital that distinguishes them from the “mainstream.” And secondly, what little information about them that does reach the general public has a history of being distorted and/​or used against them. Throughout the 1990s, for example, many dance music scenes in Europe and North America (“acid house,” “rave,” and “free parties” especially) were the object of a moral panic built upon reports by subcultural outsiders that sensationalized youthful sexuality and drug use at these events (Hier 2002; Marsh 2006; Thornton 1996).3 Invariably, these moral panics led to brutalization by law enforcement, increased surveillance, forced closures, and regulatory changes that either erected insurmountable logistical hurdles or banned such events outright. From the perspective of many partygoers, ethnographers are part of a larger group of curious interlopers who have exposed and/​or misrepresented their life-​worlds in the past. How are they to know that you’ll be any different? No photos, please:  One of the few explicit methodological directives I  received during my training as an ethnomusicologist was that we should be accumulating our own research archive by recording as much as possible (see, for example, Myers 1992). Photos, audio recordings, and videos all have important talismanic value to the discipline as proof that what we are doing is “serious” and “scientific” fieldwork. Moreover, recordings provide us with objects to analyze while also providing “objective” evidence to support our own phenomenological descriptions of musical culture. But photography and other forms of documentary capture are often unwelcomed at nightlife events. Ethnographers of religious ritual and secret musical practices also confront similar challenges in their fieldwork, although the sensitivity to surveillance found in queer nightlife worlds has its basis in sexualized stigmatization and its concomitant risk of harm. Part of what makes certain dancefloors feel like “safe spaces” for queers is precisely this lack of documentation—​or, in scenes that make active use of audio-​visual recording technologies such as “ballroom culture,” keeping control of recording within the circle of practitioners remains of vital 3 In 1997, for example, ABC’s television newsmagazine 20/​20 aired a lurid exposé of the Florida rave scene, highlighting the extent and intensity of drug use at raves, citing overdose deaths, featuring hidden camera footage of young ravers taking drugs, and framing these events as a mortal danger to the children of the viewing audience. This unleashed a chain of similar news stories and investigative reports across the US, which prompted demands for intervention by law enforcement and legislators. The ensuing backlash resulted in intensified policing and repressive legislation in nearly every corner of the nation, including increased surveillance by law enforcement, raids on events, the arrest of rave promoters on drug trafficking charges, and even specific anti-​rave bans in some municipalities. See also the accounts of Simon Reynolds (1998) and Mireille Silcott (1999).

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  339 importance. Furthermore, the altered states and illicit activities frequently present at these events raise thorny issues of consent. Although ethnomusicology has procedures and best practices for negotiating consent, they take on added complexity when applied to contexts involving stranger-​sociality, intoxication, illicit activities, sexual contact, and so on. How do you collect so-​called data without alienating the people around you? Respecting fun:  Interrupting fun is a genuine ethical problem when the fieldwork site is also a site of leisure for its participants. Partygoers have a diverse range of motivations for going out, but you can be sure that filling out a survey or engaging in a probing interview is not among them. Partygoers invest time, energies, and resources into seeking out experiences that provide them with consolation, empowerment, validation, distraction, relief, ecstasy, or simply an escape from the difficulties of everyday life. Is it right to interrupt their fun for our own curiosity (and professional career interests)? Noise! Lights!:  Music events are the heart of most nightlife scenes, bringing together performing, listening, dancing, curatorship/​connoisseurship, face-​to-​ face interactions, and economic exchanges. If such events cannot be missed, what sort of fieldwork can be conducted in a loud, dark, crowded, smoky place that is erratically bathed in disorienting, flashing lights? What do you have to offer?:  For those ethnographers of nightlife working in more privileged, predominantly white, urban and/​or suburban scenes, it is not out of the ordinary that their potential fieldwork consultants earn more money than they do and enjoy more social privileges. And even for those working in more marginal and underprivileged scenes, their interlocutors rarely see much value in the academic validation of their nocturnal pursuits. As ethnographers, we take their time, their words, and their experiences, and we make a (hopefully lucrative) career out of it; what can we offer our interlocutors in exchange? The costs of nightlife:  Most nightlife events take place in venues that earn most of their revenue by charging very high prices for beverages and entry. Also, both making and maintaining fieldwork contacts often includes the ritualized gift-​ exchange of paying for drinks or other consumables. All of these expenses add up, making fieldwork too costly to undertake with any regularity—​especially for graduate students, junior researchers, and contingent teaching staff. Exhaustion: Depending on the particularities of the local scene (available venues, liquor licenses, noise ordinances, closing times), an event may range

340  Luis-Manuel Garcia from a four-​hour blast of focused dancing and rapid intoxication to a multiday marathon with sporadic breaks for food and sleep. In almost every case, sleep patterns are disturbed and the body’s limits of endurance are pushed, which can also have an impact on mental health and acuity—​including memory, cognition, and language skills. This corporeal cost makes intensive fieldwork especially difficult to sustain when one also has responsibilities as an educator and/​or scholar. What roles do ageing, health, and disability play in nightlife research? How can fieldwork methods be adapted to the bodily diversity of researchers themselves? Sexual Courtship and Harassment: Most nightlife spaces—​ especially dancefloors—​are saturated with sexual desire. Women, queer, trans*, non-​ binary, and gay male researchers all frequently contend with becoming the object of sexual attentions that can range from unwelcome courtship to outright harassment and assault. At the same time, the sexualized atmosphere of many nightlife events is central to their meaning—​all the more so for queer nightlife spaces, where the manifestation of non-​normative sexualities functions as an index for queer counterpublic solidarity—​which complicates efforts to remove oneself from their sexual economies. How do you protect yourself from harassment? What is at stake in avoiding, tolerating, or accepting sexual advances? In addition to sexual desire, harassment has much to do with power, inflected through categories of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. Your presence, as an ethnographer with a body that will inevitably be mapped to these matrices of domination, influences these power relations and shapes the way people do (or do not) interact with you. How can you manage or mitigate this process? Are there ways to harness these forces for the purposes of advancing fieldwork? If so, what are the risks and ethical issues involved?

Notes from the Queer Field: Problems Unsurprisingly, most of the challenges listed in the foregoing section have to do with the circumstances of nightlife events themselves, which place particular demands on participation. This leaves the researcher of nightlife scenes with limited methodological options, either conducting fieldwork away from nightlife events or developing adapted methods to gather data within the constraints posed by these events. In conversation with four other ethnographers working on queer projects, I identified a number of broader issues that are relevant to queer-​oriented nightlife fieldwork. These intersect with the foregoing list at several points, clustering around four themes:  nighttime safety, health, embodiment and (sexual) subjectivity, and access and networking.

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  341

Nighttime Safety There is already substantial research across multiple disciplines showing how access to public space is limited along lines of gender, race/​ethnicity, class, wealth, and age. But in many ways these differences in access are even stronger at night. One can think, for example, of the notion of the no-​go zone, in which the threat of violence deters people belonging to a particular identity group from entering particular areas; in most large cities, one can speak of no-​go zones for Blacks or whites, no-​go zones for queer people (especially transgender/​gender non-​ conforming people), no-​go zones for women traveling alone, and even no-​go zones for particular social classes. This changes from city to city, but even in relatively “safe” cities, women, queers, and people of color have to think twice about the neighborhoods through which they are traveling before embarking on their night out. “Should I bring a companion?” “Should I get someone to walk me to my car/​the train?” “Will public transit be safe?” This leads to a particular affective orientation towards public life that can be stressful and exhausting, which Ellen Lewin and William Leap term hypervigilance:  “Hypervigilance is historically the interpersonal stance taken by gay men or lesbians [and other stigmatized groups], particularly when operating in contexts where exposure might have serious negative consequences” (1996:12). Concerns for nighttime safety have prompted hypervigilance for Belinda, a straight-​identified, female cis-​gender multi-​racial ethnographer who works in an urban drag scene in the USA. “For logistical and safety purposes,” she relates, “I realized that I really have to have someone with me, most of the time.” Attendance at drag events in nightlife venues is an essential component of her fieldwork—​indeed, the drag club is her primary field-​site—​and yet it was not one she could attend safely without company. “I don’t go to bars alone [as a cis-​ gendered woman], if I can help it—​even in [the local gay district] . . . Even if you feel safe in the space, there’s still transportation to and from.” And so for Belinda, even the most basic fieldwork outing required her to take precautions to ensure her safety on public transit, on the street between transit at the venue, and even at the venue itself.4 Belinda related numerous experiences of gendered sexual harassment, both on the street and in the club. When she tries to deflect her suitors by saying that she is married, the response she most often hears is: “Well, what are you doing out?” The implication in this sort of statement is that an “attached” woman has no business being “out” in nightlife spaces at all. Furthermore, it reveals an assumption that women who are out partying are by default unattached and 4 See the section on embodiment and sexual subjectivity for further discussion of the role that gender and sexuality play in Belinda’s choice of fieldwork companions.

342  Luis-Manuel Garcia sexually available. Notably, such statements were not limited to cis-​gendered heterosexual males. While at a lesbian drag event, Belinda was party to the following exchange: “Are you married to a man or a woman?” “A man.” “Because I was wondering what woman would let her wife out without her.”

Even in queer spaces, being an unaccompanied female is often read as an invitation for sexual engagement. Ethnographer James Wafer has highlighted how, in any fieldwork setting structured by patriarchy, unattached women and gay men are often seen as an erotic danger that requires neutralization (1996). Although queer nightlife spaces are meant to provide refuge from patriarchy, such refuge is an ongoing and partial process; patriarchy still seeps into queer spaces in muted and sublimated forms, which impact sexual courtship in turn.

Health Nighttime settings posed a different set of problems for Terrence, a queer, cis-​ male, multi-​racial ethnographer who conducted ethnographic work on both public sex and online sex before undertaking a new multi-​sited study of performance artists and activists who use drag in their studio practice. “My own life is so far removed from nightlife now,” he remarks, “I wake up between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning and do yoga and meditation for an hour.” Although he used to be a raver and clubber in the 1990s, his current daily life-​cycle simply does not fit with an ongoing engagement in nightlife. As a result, Terrence focuses his ethnographic efforts on off-​site, daytime encounters with these performers, but he nonetheless makes the effort to see all of his interview partners at least once on stage and “in the field.” And so on these occasions, he tries to prepare his body for the long night by taking a “disco nap” in the afternoon, before a late dinner and coffee. But this strategy is only so effective in a nightlife scene that is only beginning to gather momentum at 2:00 a.m., such that Terrence finds himself placing limits on what he will do for his fieldwork: “I was not willing to completely invert my life to go out more.” But the nocturnal schedule was not the only reason that Terrence avoids nightlife spaces. Since he has experiences with substance abuse in his past, he is wary of the temptations involved in spending a great deal of time in spaces where intoxicants of various sorts are easily available. How do you conduct nightlife fieldwork in a way that is both engaged and healthy? Based on his own experiences, Terrence offers the following advice:  “Be thoughtful of how you

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  343 want to participate in that scene. How willing are you to push your body in certain directions, as part of that scene? . . . Maybe it would be really good for you to take Ecstasy or to do something that gives you some insight into that experience. But just be really cautious. You can get caught up in something without really meaning or intending to.” As Terrence reflects on how health concerns have shaped his fieldwork, he raises another methodological question about nightlife research: “What could you learn about a nightlife without being out every night? How could you approach it?”

Embodiment and (Sexual) Subjectivity Although most guides to anthropological fieldwork are rather thin on the practical aspects of data-​collection or the ethical knots that can arise from them, many do focus on the “entry phase” of fieldwork: how to present oneself upon arrival, how to make contacts, how to insert oneself into the community. Budding ethnographers are encouraged to engage in “identity management,” to find and play a “suitable role” within the local society. The implicit question the ethnographer thus asks is: How do I make myself legible in a way that gives me access to this social world? As Lewin and Leap (1996) note, identity management is something that sexually marginalized people have to do all the time—​not just in the field, but at home in both public and private life. They also point to Erving Goffman’s theorization of “stigma” (1963) as “spoiled identity,” which requires social work to repair or at least mitigate this problematic identity. Similarly, ethnographers who are members of stigmatized groups often find substantial overlap between the skills for identity-​management (and risk-​assessment!) they have developed in their private and professional lives, and the skills they need to develop for fieldwork. For example, Belinda found that the companion she chose for safety during fieldwork outings often influenced the reception she got at drag shows. “I was aware, even before I started,” she says, “that I would be perceived differently if I was there with a gay male friend versus a lesbian friend versus another straight girl versus my husband.” In Belinda’s experience, straight couples tended to be viewed with suspicion, as “cultural tourists” consuming the drag event like a sideshow. Accompaniment by a gay man usually bestowed more-​or-​less immediate acceptance into the scene, as she fit the profile for a “regular patron” in the guise of a female friend of a gay man. A single female companion was often read as a lesbian partnership, which was usually viewed as benign at these events. But Belinda learned quickly to avoid attending with a group of women, because such groups were assumed to be bachelorette parties, which were associated with disruptive and disrespectful behavior at drag events.

344  Luis-Manuel Garcia In queer nightlife situations, the work of identity-​management also intersects with embodiment and sexual subjectivity. This was the case for Herbert, a white, cis-​male, gay-​identified ethnographer of gay tourism and sex-​work in Brazil. Among his primary research sites were gay saunas com garotos (with rentboys). These sex-​workers were usually straight-​identified men who serviced gay men within a nightlife establishment that was run as a de facto bordello. To begin with, Herbert’s body was a key aspect of his access to these spaces: as a cis-​gendered man, he was permitted entry as a potential client into this men-​only space, which otherwise only allowed drag performers and the occasional transwoman as bar staff. But this sexualized homosocial setting was also a source of deep discomfort for Herbert, since both patrons and rentboys were required to wear nothing but a small towel around their waist. “When I was back at the [university where he received fieldwork training], I never imagined that I would be sitting there, half-​naked, trying to do ethnography—​that I would be trying to do interviews wearing nothing but a towel.” The sauna-​bordello setting made a mess of the ethical training he had received during his post-​graduate studies, and so he had to improvise and adapt his methodological approach by trial and error. Since it was impossible to interview the sex-​workers in the common areas of the sauna, Herbert once tried to rent a cabine—​usually used for sex between rentboys and their clients—​in order to conduct an interview with a rentboy: “It was just super awkward,” he recounted, “It’s like, ‘Now we’re sitting up here and you’re basically naked on this bed, and you’re going to come back and fuck somebody on this bed in, like, twenty-​five minutes. After doing that, I resolved that that was not best practices for ethnography.” In this case, Herbert took his own sense of discomfort as an intuitive indicator of ethical transgression, but this raises difficult questions with regards to sexual propriety and queer erotic life-​worlds. Should nightlife ethnographers be comfortable with the nightlife practices they study? To what extent should their fieldwork ethics be informed by the micro-​cultural ethics of nightlife scenes themselves? The sexually charged atmosphere and the matter-​ of-​ fact approach to exchanges of sexual labor made it very difficult for Herbert to set and maintain his boundaries as an ethnographer. “By the time I sit down and get to know them and find out their real name and have a conversation about their hopes and dreams and whatever . . . I’ve already seen their dick. If I’ve met them, it’s almost always because they have approached me and solicited me for a programa.” By interviewing these sex-​workers, he engaged with them in ways that their clients did not, got to know intimate details about their lives, and spent a lot of time in their company; this resulted in a great deal of confluence between different modes of intimacy, such that many of his informants offered him free sex at one point or another as a gesture of affection. Herbert’s social, sexual, and bodily boundaries were constantly under pressure, and the conditions of the field-​site

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  345 as well as the affective consequences of the fieldwork process itself pulled his interactions with interviewees towards sexual entanglements that would transgress norms of methodological propriety in ethnography. Notably, while he was trying to maintain an identity as a friendly and unthreatening ethnographer, he was constantly being read and re-​read as a sex-​tourist—​one in denial, perhaps, but nonetheless a potential “john.”

Access and Networking While identity management in queer nightlife spaces is often concerned with negotiating sexual subjectivity in some manner, researchers also gain access to these scenes through identities that go beyond gender and sexuality. For example, Belinda found her identity as a fan of drag performance to be crucial to her entry into the ethnographic field: “I have found—​and this was not intuitive, this was something I had to discover in the process—​that establishing myself as a fan first would make people much more willing to talk to me.” In practice, this strategy involved attending drag events regularly until key actors (such as the event’s host or hostess) recognized her and acknowledged her. Only then did Belinda approach them and identify herself as a researcher. I experienced something similar in my own fieldwork, where it was often first as a fan or regular patron that I developed the social contacts that later provided me with the necessary connections for effective fieldwork. In Paris, it took me nearly five months of weekly presence at local dance music events before I was able to establish lasting connections. But gaining social access is not a linear process, and sometimes one’s access changes drastically based on one person, one connection. Certain contacts in the field can play a “fixer” or “mentor” role, where this person takes responsibility for your induction into the community, teaches you about the scene and its values, introduces you to others in their network, vouches for you, and so on. For Belinda, this mentor was a well-​known club kid and drag-​event promoter in the local scene, who noticed photos of his events that Belinda had been posting on Facebook and sent her a “friend request.” She has since come to know him and his assistant very well, thus gaining access to his significant social/​subcultural resources for her research as well as his mentorship in learning drag performance herself. Facebook and other social media have been central to Belinda’s fieldwork (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Ellison and Boyd 2013; Jung 2014; Juris 2012). This was not only a way for her to keep up-​to-​date on the scene and to hear about upcoming events, but also to connect to other actors in that scene, maintain those connections, and render her connections visible for other actors. She would take

346  Luis-Manuel Garcia pictures of performers at events and then upload them on Facebook, contact the performer, and invite them to tag themselves in the photos or to download them. “For the most part, that worked really well for me,” she remarks, “because other performers would see that I’m already connected with these drag queens, that this must be someone who either is a friend or at least an insider.” In this sense, Facebook allowed her to make her fieldwork network visible to other actors in the field, thus accelerating its growth. In my own fieldwork, I have come to rely on what I call a “trust network” to establish new contacts and secure interviews. In a manner similar to Belinda’s, this entails making social connections first and allowing them to develop into a relationship of trust over time. To use a German phrase, this is essentially a form of Kontaktpflege (cultivation of contacts), which allows the contact-​person to get to know me (for example, as a fellow dancer, queer person, music fan) and to address concerns they may have about my intentions. This can take weeks and months, involving repeated and sustained socializing both online and face-​to-​ face, during which I progressively disclose a fair bit about my own identity, biography, tastes, and connections to the local music scene. This method requires long-​term immersion in the field site and may not be well suited to shorter projects, but it has the advantage of facilitating access to actors who would otherwise be reluctant to speak with a researcher. Another advantage of trust networks is that existing contacts can serve as intermediaries for future recruitment by recommending potential consultants, providing contact information, making introductions, and vouching for my bona fides as a trustworthy person. This is similar to snowball sampling or chain-​ referral sampling, a recruiting method that involves the researcher asking each interviewee to recommend other potential interviewees for the project. Snowball sampling is frequently employed in research that focuses on hidden and stigmatized populations, such as youth subcultures, drug users, sexual minorities and sex workers (Adler 1990; Biernacki and Waldorf 1981; Demant 2013). This method does have its drawbacks, however: snowball sampling tends to produce an ethnography of a specific social network, and so claims to broader representativeness must be duly moderated. In my own research, I strive to mitigate this methodological weakness by engaging in activities that increase the likelihood of meeting people outside of my established trust network, such as going out to music events, engaging in small talk in the peripheral spaces of nightlife venues (queue, bar, toilets), and becoming a familiar face within the scene by turning up to as many events as possible—​all of which admittedly require substantial time and effort. But what is the status of the relationships that develop as one gains access? Facebook’s rhizomatic structure is based on the label “friend” as the basic unit of relation, but it is clear that Facebook users develop a variety of relationships

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  347 under this one term. Similarly, fieldwork relationships are often much more complicated than “researcher-​informant”—​especially when long periods of social contact and networking are a prerequisite for productive ethnographic engagement. Herbert sums it up well when he asks, “What does it mean to be doing research with people who are also your friends?” This is a potential problem for all ethnographers who do long-​term, immersive fieldwork, but this is especially so for those who do research in nightlife and leisure spaces; in these spaces, ethnographers must contend with expectations for frictionless, light-​touch sociability, which make the pursuit of academic distance socially inappropriate, counterproductive, and potentially disruptive. While other fieldwork contexts may also include expectations for friendliness and informality, the kind of polite, respectful distance idealized in conventional methods is often not an option in nightlife contexts, where it is likely to be read as cold or even hostile. And this is all the more so in musical subcultures like electronic dance music, where the informal underground approach to the music industry already combines the professional and the personal to a great degree. This also raises problems of conflicting relational modes, where the researcher may interact with the same person as a friend, research consultant, client, business partner, neighbor, and so on. When you see a fieldwork contact at the club, are you in researcher mode or fellow partygoer mode or friend mode? These distinctions cannot be discarded completely—​they are neither meaningless nor pointless—​but at the same time the divisions between them cannot be maintained as cleanly as they might be in other fieldwork settings.

Notes from the Queer Field: Tactics This is but a brief overview of a few keywords in what is a much larger field of challenges, surprises, and contradictions that one finds when doing fieldwork in queer nightlife contexts. All of the interviewees felt that their disciplinary training had not prepared them for these challenges, and most also suggested that it is likely impossible to fully prepare aspiring ethnographers for the particularities of these contexts. Nonetheless, they all responded to the challenges of queer nightlife with ad hoc ethnographic tactics that may be of use to those conducting research under similar circumstances. Furthermore, their narratives of methodological improvisation and trial-​and-​error revision may serve as the first and most important lesson for aspiring ethnomusicologists of queer nightlife. For example, Belinda developed several discreet techniques for recording on-​site fieldnotes, such as composing text messages on her smart phone and—​ where socially permitted—​combining them with photos and short videos. These

348  Luis-Manuel Garcia techniques arose out of a desire to avoid awkward and conspicuous behavior that could disrupt the social flow of nightlife gatherings. I share this concern with Belinda, having become especially sensitive to this when I was conducting fieldwork for my first ethnographic project, which focused on stranger-​intimacy at dance music events. Many factors needed to be in just the right place in order for someone to reach out and open up to a stranger—​and me pulling out a notepad or video camera certainly would not help. Violating norms of etiquette, privacy, and/​or personal space will only serve to make those around you uncomfortable and guarded (although there may be occasions when deliberate missteps can prompt a useful conversation about tacit norms and practices). There is a flow to every social gathering—​with music playing an important role in guiding and shaping it—​and music ethnographers are well served by learning to follow these social currents and to avoid disrupting them. Mostly, this involves understanding what is socially appropriate in a particular community and respecting these norms and habits. In some scenes, this might mean being talkative, tactile, and physically expressive in your dancing; in other scenes, this might mean being reserved, avoiding physical contact, and showing quiet respect for the performer. One of the first tasks during the researcher’s early fieldwork phase is to figure out what works in these contexts. It was very early in Belinda’s preliminary fieldwork phase when she realized that the conventional methods of ethnographic documentation would likely create uncomfortable situations: It’s very awkward to have a notebook in your hand when you’re sitting in a bar; I can’t take formal fieldnotes. [Instead,] I wind up putting jottings as messages in my phone—​at least a list of who’s performing that night and what songs they did. And it just looks like I’m texting, which everyone is doing anyway. . . . In your typical neighborhood bar now, everyone’s there with their phones, taking pictures and video. I think it’s also a way of connecting with the performers, by sharing [images] with them later.

Here, Belinda takes advantage of the omnipresence of smart phones and SMS messaging technology to mask the rather unfestive activities involved in direct observation as a fieldwork method. In addition to text-​based notes that chronicle performers and their musical selections, she uses her mobile phone to take “lots and lots of photos”—​but very little video. Inspired by cabaret performance, beauty pageants, and runway fashion shows, drag performers draw upon genres of performance where photographic documentation is an essential means and marker of success. In this respect, drag shows differ significantly from other queer nightlife spaces by adopting aspects of “celebrity culture”: drag performers maintain a high profile as celebrities or “public figures” within their

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  349 scenes; audiences maintain “fan” relationships with performers that include photography; performances usually take place from raised stages; and photographic documentation of their “looks” and performances serve as both validation of their own identity management as well as vectors for their performing careers. Performers in these scenes are thus mostly comfortable in front of the camera and quite skilled at posing for photographs. “People who do drag for the most part like the attention,” notes Belinda, “They spent a lot of time getting ready.” Indeed, many drag performers have also adapted to the presence of camera-​ equipped mobile phones by actively inviting amateur photography from the audience; for example, Belinda recounts a performance she attended in Las Vegas, where a performer quipped, “I didn’t spend four hours in makeup for you not to take pictures of me!” Drag performers nonetheless place a great deal of importance on maintaining control over the circumstances of photographic capture and dissemination; while Belinda initially uses photography as a means of initiating and maintaining contact with drag performers, she later draws on these established relationships when negotiating consent to use these images in her own published research. That said, Belinda also observed that drag performers were quite vigilant about exerting control over the terms and circumstances of their audio-​visual capture: at most of the drag shows she attended, photography was permitted, but filming video was explicitly forbidden by performers, promoters, and venues. Belinda traced this discrepancy to concerns about intellectual property and competition, since a moving image reveals a great deal more of their performance and usually includes copyrighted music recordings. Nonetheless, excerpts from shows can often be found on video-​sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, usually uploaded by the event promoters or the performers themselves. Similarly, any kind of documentation of performers in “civilian attire” (that is, without makeup, wig, and costume) is frowned upon. In any case, this speaks to the wide range of attitudes towards visibility and documentation that one can encounter in queer nightlife scenes. At my fieldwork sites, predominantly straight dance music events, most participants were relatively blasé about amateur photography; but in queer and sex-​positive spaces, photography was entirely forbidden. Although scene-​specific (and venue-​specific) norms regarding documentation can vary widely, a broader pattern can be seen where the intensity of concern about respecting privacy varies with respect to the risks associated with exposure, and the wishes of those who have the most to lose are usually prioritized. While Belinda developed strategies for note-​taking, Herbert struggled with the logistics of interviewing in bordellos. The clandestine and fleeting nature of sex work made it imperative that he conduct a face-​to-​face interview as soon as possible after making first contact with a garoto de programa (rentboy); there was no way of knowing if he would see the same person twice. But the

350  Luis-Manuel Garcia saunas in which the rentboys worked were highly problematic settings for an extended ethnographic interview. To begin with, recording of any sort is strictly forbidden within most saunas, so Herbert needed to find a way to relocate the encounter to a space somewhere outside. But secondly, he usually encountered these sex workers when they were “on the clock” at their workplace, and so there were immediate financial consequences to their participation as research consultants:  any time spent away from the sauna is money lost. Thirdly, the garotos had to answer to the sauna management, who contracted them to work scheduled shifts, provided them with the built environment for sex work, and took a cut from their earnings. At first, Herbert had great difficulty securing interviews while he was on-​ site at the saunas, but he soon developed a repertoire of tactics that made the task more feasible. He often began by sitting at the bar and striking up informal conversations with whomever would approach him. This gave him the opportunity to establish a rapport by presenting himself and his research project in a non-​invasive way. If his interlocutor showed some interest, Herbert would then propose leaving the sauna and going to a nearby café for a more formal, recorded interview. As a form of non-​monetary compensation for the rentboy’s time, he would offer to buy drinks and food during the interview. Later in his fieldwork, when he had more financial resources, he also offered to pay for their taxi ride home. Herbert’s tactics were effective, but he was also well aware that they led him into ethical gray areas. For example, he decided early on in his fieldwork to circumvent sauna management and not to disclose his research to them: I didn’t tell management what I was doing, because I didn’t want them to kick me out or to dictate terms. But I was also not sure in the beginning whether there was an exploitative relationship [between the managers and the rentboys]: Are these guys pimps? . . . I didn’t want to discuss my methods with third-​party managers. I wanted to speak directly to the guys.

Ultimately, he justifies his decision as one meant to avoid further contributing to exploitative power-​relations while also giving the rentboys more agency in deciding if and how they participate in ethnographic research. But more troubling for Herbert was the similarity of transactional dynamics between his gifts-​for-​ service relationship with his interviewees (that is, drinks, food, and cab fare for private conversation) and the kinds of exchanges that go on between the rentboys and their johns—​especially the “gringo boyfriend” arrangement that some sex workers established with wealthier clients, where they would offer sexual favors “for free” in exchange for having some of their living expenses paid for, such as rent, schooling fees for their children, clothing, and medical care. In a sense, his

The Queer Concerns of Nightlife Fieldwork  351 concern resonates with broader disciplinary unease about how ethnographer-​ consultant interactions can be grouped together with more stigmatized and ethically troubling transactions as “the purchase of intimacy” (Zelizer 2005), where social ties of interdependence are articulated across domains that are often morally segregated—​like financial support and companionship, or institutional validation and insider knowledge, or food and life-​narratives. Herbert eventually decided to limit the total value of his gifts to 50% of the prevailing rate for a programa (sexual services measured in units of time), but he still remained very aware that this was a somewhat arbitrary boundary, placed within a vast ethical gray area largely for his own peace of mind. On the one hand, 50% of a programa with a garoto is equivalent to the full fee for a street hustler (with whom he was also conducting interviews); on the other hand, the full fee for a rentboy was nowhere near as expensive as the equivalent services with a woman sex worker. “Certainly, we never talked about the ethical quandaries of that in grad school,” he remarks, recalling classroom discussions about fieldwork ethics that were concerned with completely different scenarios of exploitation and misrepresentation. Instead, Herbert developed his methods through a self-​reflexive process of trial-​and-​error; he was constantly trying new tactics and discarding them if they left him feeling troubled or ambivalent.

Weak Methods Agile improvisation, trial-​ and-​ error development, pragmatic identity-​ management, and hypervigilance surface repeatedly in these accounts of queer nightlife fieldwork. Faced with substantial lack of fit between their field-​sites and conventional fieldwork methods, Belinda, Herbert, and Terrence developed new research tactics that were tailored to the specificities of their fieldwork contexts. These tactics—​only briefly and selectively summarized here—​are the beginnings of what I would call the weak methods of nightlife fieldwork. By “weak,” I do not intend to diminish the effectiveness of these methods, but rather intend to make reference to queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s contrast between “strong theory” and “weak theory” (2003). Drawing from Silvan Tomkins’s work on human affect (1995, 1962), Sedgwick defines a strong theory not by its ability to predict and avoid negative outcomes, but rather by “the size and the topology of the domain that it organizes” (2003:134). For example, Tomkins considers paranoia to be a “strong affective theory,” in that it is capable of recruiting a wide range of phenomena into a single explanatory regime (that is, a “paranoid delusion”). A weak theory, by contrast, can only account for a small range of phenomena, but it does so in great detail and with great flexibility. The strength of strong theory is its ability to bring varying and disparate fields of experience

352  Luis-Manuel Garcia under one simple and graspable explanatory regime, but it is also reductive and given to tautological thinking. The weakness of weak theory is that it can only explain a small domain of experience and it quickly loses effectiveness as it is applied further afield, but it provides a more ecologically valid, detailed, considerate account of what is happening in that domain than strong theory could ever generate. In this sense, the ethnographers of queer nightlife interviewed here have responded to the inadequacy of ethnography’s strong methods by developing weak ones that are highly contextual, site-​specific, and built upon local norms. For Sedgwick, the specificity of weak theory means that it is not as easily transposed to other archives and situations, and in a similar manner, weak methods are perhaps of limited pedagogical value in that their effectiveness is often tied to the specificities of the fieldwork site for which they were developed. Nonetheless, the weak methods detailed in this chapter provide useful examples that can be adapted and extended to similar settings, while the narrative accounts of interviewees exemplify the processes of improvisation, experimentation, and revision that are indispensable to queer nightlife fieldwork.

20

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis A Queer Look at Sex and Race in Fieldwork Sarah Hankins

Queer ethnographers have been working at the forefront of a larger “reflexive turn” in the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s, investigating the ways in which our own positionalities shape fieldwork relationships and ethnographic knowledge production. We have understood queerness as a powerful hermeneutic tool for deconstructing entrenched disciplinary notions of objectivity and truth, since for many of us, lived queer experience always unfolds in oppositional or at least problematic relation to institutional norms. We have engaged theories that posit queerness not simply as a sexual preference, but rather “a process . . . one of upsetting, making strange, unsettling . . . [an] act of questioning and of enquiry” (Jarman-​Ivens 2011:15). Despite our attunement to polysemy and instability, however, I think that queer music scholarship has normalized homosexuality over other queernesses to a certain extent. Some extraordinary, influential writings in the 1990s used lesbian and gay sex as models for interpreting socio-​musical meanings, which gave same-​sex eroticism a privileged hermeneutic position in our discourse that has yet to be displaced (Brett 1994; Cusick 1994; Wood 1994; Koestenbaum 1994). This makes sense. Same-​sex eroticism is after all an emblematic (if not exclusive) feature of much queer life, and ultimately, it has helped distinguish our work from other critical approaches in ethnography and music scholarship. Yet this also means “bisexual ethnography” might be a contradiction in queer terms, since if a project is distinctively bisexual (as opposed to gay or lesbian), it might decenter same-​sex eroticism as an analytic. We bisexuals are sometimes awkward members of larger queer communities. We share a lot of these communities’ politics and practices, but our opposite-​sex desires mark a deeply personal and possibly alienating difference. And just as I’d think twice before bringing my boyfriend to Provincetown during Women’s Week, I am shy about addressing bisexuality in a volume dedicated to queer

354  Sarah Hankins ethnomusicology. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to do so, because bisexuality played the key role in my “queerest” fieldwork experience to date—​the experience that most profoundly “upset, made strange, and unsettled” my ethnographic self-​perception and approach. I believe I can best contribute to the spirit of this volume (if not the letter, exactly) by investigating ethnographic situations that seem a bit “straight” on the face of things, including a nightclub field site with a mostly straight clientele, and fraught sexualized interactions with men in that space. More specifically, my interlocutors were African men: economic migrants from Nigeria and Ghana, and political refugees from Eritrea and Sudan, whom I encountered during fieldwork in Tel Aviv, Israel. As I will describe, many of our encounters were difficult in part because they forced to me to confront unacknowledged racial anxieties in myself, in a more direct way than any of my previous fieldwork had done. Yet it was, first of all, the fact of their maleness—​and my femaleness—​that underpinned our raced relational dynamics. This chapter asks why this was the case. Why did gender and sexuality inflect race and racial difference with such overwhelming intensity and immediacy during my fieldwork? I am obliged to lean on multiple conceptual frameworks in order to write about experiences that are still painful to remember, more than three years after they happened. I am a little mixed up here. I explore the queer dynamics of heterosexual interactions, and I think through issues of race by way of gender. I further complicate matters by weaving ethnographic discourses of positionality together with psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and the subject. I  want to bring psychoanalysis—​a process I have relied on in my private life to address these experiences—​into some kind of consonance with the academic discourses that have long been touchstones of my professional life. In maintaining these several investments at once, it is possible that my narrative will seem “bisexual” in a way that nobody really likes: neither here nor there, “confused,” squirrelly about declaring its identity. I am aiming, however, for that “other bisexuality” which Hélène Cixous has imagined, one which “doesn’t annul differences but stirs them up, pursues them, increases their number” (1976:884). By investigating the multivalent, confusing, and sometimes contradictory dimensions of my own fieldwork, I hope to encourage further conversations about how sexuality and race intersect in known and unknown ways for other queer ethnographers, in other cross-​cultural contexts.

Rasta Club, February–​June 2014 In the spring of 2014, I embarked on ethnomusicological fieldwork in Rasta Club, a small nightclub catering to a large population of African migrants and refugees

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis  355 who lived and worked in south Tel Aviv.1 It was an unremarkable venue—​just a bar, a tiny dance floor, a few tables and chairs—​situated among dozens of storefront clothing shops, electronics retailers, and takeout joints on busy HaRakevet Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in the south city. I was drawn to Rasta Club as a field site for the dissertation project I had recently begun, a study of musical aesthetics and racial politics within Tel Aviv’s multi-​community African diaspora. The venue quickly became one of my favorite places to do research: I loved to chat with the proprietor, Tony Ray, a Jamaican reggae musician and thirty-​year veteran of the Tel Aviv club scene who told wonderful stories about the “old days” and indulged me with nuanced commentaries on black diasporic life in Israel. In between these interviews, I would sit at the bar, drinking cheap beer and losing myself in the music: nightly DJ sets that featured a collection of genres and styles known colloquially in Hebrew as “musikah shachorah” [black music], ranging from American hip hop and R&B, to Caribbean reggae and dancehall, to various contemporary Afropop artists. For a while, maybe two or three weeks, I kept up this pleasant routine: arriving to the club around 10 p.m., visiting with Tony until the late-​night crowd showed up, sometimes introducing myself to the person next to me at the bar, though the music was so loud, I rarely felt obliged to strike up a meaningful conversation. Eventually, I started to notice raised eyebrows, questioning looks, leery glances. The other patrons, it seemed, were not sure what to make of me. I was a little disappointed by this realization—​so much for the “deep hanging out” I’d imagined I was doing with such aplomb (Geertz 1998)—​but it was hardly a surprise. Here I was, an unfamiliar white woman, sitting around with a recorder and a notepad, in a bar that had seen its share of police sweeps and immigration raids. I therefore felt relieved and grateful when some of the regulars, men I’d said hello to once or twice, set aside their wariness and started asking me to dance. It was infrequent at first, just a couple times a night, but I found myself with energy for more. I even made a few tentative overtures myself, approaching men whom I thought looked friendly, or at least not too drunk. After all, I told myself, nightclub fieldwork couldn’t be carried out from the bar stool alone. I was a real ethnographer; I would dance, dammit. In doing so, I’d win first the men’s favor (and by this, somehow, the acceptance of Rasta’s few women patrons), and then their trust, and then ultimately their stories. Interviews, oral histories, ethnographic materials: this was my end goal; dancing was just something I needed to do in order to get there—​wasn’t it? 1 For discussions of the complicated politics surrounding African refugees and migrant workers in Israel, see Kemp and Raijman (2004); Sabar (2004); Kritzman-​Amir (2009); and Müller (2015). For Afro-​diasporic musics in Israel, see Shabtay (2003); Sabar and Kanari (2006); Ben-​Ari (2010); and Ratner (2015). For ideologies of “blackness” and Africa in Israeli cultural history, see Harris and Rabinovitch (2006); and Bar-​Yosef (2013) (Hebrew).

356  Sarah Hankins Before Rasta Club, my most significant fieldwork project had been a 2011–​ 2012 ethnography of drag and gender performance venues in Boston:  queer, racially diverse spaces where I had strong pre-​existing networks of friends and colleagues. In writing up that project, I explored audience responses to erotic stage shows that turned on campy, often outrageous signifiers of race and gender (Hankins 2015). It was a challenge to write about my own experiences with arousal in this context, yet the fact that the gender performance scene was so overwhelmingly and explicitly performative made it easier. The whole ethos of the scene—​irreverence, playful deconstruction, blowing a giant raspberry in the face of normative social categories—​built a firm affective distance into all of my encounters. So, while I had a few flirty, sexy moments with other people on the dance floor, they always felt slightly unreal, like a game; and afterwards, I could theorize them as just part of the show. Having this background in nightclub ethnography and self-​reflexive writing, I thought that Rasta Club would pose no new challenge. I figured I was ready to deal with any number of embodied, relational “issues” around gender or racial difference that might arise on the dance floor. Except I realized soon enough that certain behaviors which struck me as obviously performative—​men kissing my hand, men bowing grandly while asking me to dance—​were not meant to “deconstruct” anything at all. On the contrary, these men were advertising genuine sexual attraction, real desire for access to my body. The more I danced, night after night, the more apparent this became. This man liked to wrap his arms tightly around my upper body; that other would grip my thighs; one man even got an erection, which I could feel through layers of clothing. Their irreducibly physical signs of desire overwhelmed my ability to gain any distance from the experience. I was simply slammed up against the bare fact of bodies: the man’s body, my body, our bodies in proximity to one another. What follows has been far more difficult to write about than anything in my queer Boston fieldwork. I’m not sure it qualifies as “self-​reflexive,” either: it is less a considered reflection on ethnographic subjectivity than an unreconstructed process of free-​association. Or maybe it’s that “other” fieldwork diary, the one tucked away in the suitcase, stashed in the drawer back home, unmentioned to colleagues over drinks, and unseen by any editor. Dancing with men in Rasta Club, I was beset by conflicting sensations: cascades of arousal and revulsion in turn; a physical impulse to surrender to intimacy, and, at the same time, an urge to wrench myself away and flee. In the position of “a woman who turns a man on,” I became acutely aware of my female body parts: that sturdy old trio, breasts-​butt-​box, but also even the ostensibly harmless bits, like my eyebrows and fingers. It was as if I’d never seen these objects on my own body before, as if they wrote sex all over me, and I’d simply missed this glaring fact. I felt myself as utterly female, not at all “queer.” Weirdly, even

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis  357 while I experienced my body as a grotesque amalgamation of sex-​pieces, I did not feel objectified by the men who danced with me, or who watched me from the sidelines—​smoking cigarettes, drinking, beholding. I wish I’d felt put-​upon and indignant. Instead, it seemed plain to me that any man’s desire was my doing, as if I was actively luring him in, and that on some level, I must want to do so. Worse, I was obsessed, horrified by the possibility that my dance partners might desire me “romantically.” It was one thing for my body to be heterosexualized; quite another to imagine myself as the cause of a man’s tender smile, his limpid eyes, his gentle yearnings for love. With the same gruesome clarity that I  perceived my own woman-​body, I apprehended the bodies of the men who danced with me. Their hands grasping my waist; their mouths against my ear; their chests, touching mine  .  .  .  their bodies were black. On the crowded dance floor, amidst all the noise, the overblown speakers, the cigarette smoke, the manic disco lights, I couldn’t untangle the specular image of blackness from my own physical sensations, vertiginous waves of arousal and aversion that crested inside me. This was frighteningly unpleasant, unacceptable—​because of course, I was Not Racist (TM). How could I be? I was dancing at Rasta Club in the first place precisely because it was a black and African venue: ergo, not racist. I had written about race for my queer Boston project: surely, I was no racist. I’d been an activist when called upon; I taught college classes about race and social justice; I’d dated women of color (“I have plenty of black friends”) . . . nope, nope, nope, I wasn’t racist. My inner monologue droned along, circling the same few mental constructs over and over again. I had spent plenty of time building up an ethical or political stance with respect to blackness, but this apparently had little relation to my sexual subjectivity. Dancing—​obstreperously sexual, messy, a jumble of flesh and motion—​ brought this home with a vengeance, knocking aside my comfy self-​perceptions. I couldn’t pretend to misunderstand what my body articulated so clearly: these guys aroused me as black men; they frightened me as black men. Desire and aversion, each constituted by and through the other, indivisibly bound up with the immanence of race. I’m describing these encounters in such nasty, personal detail because it’s the only way I can think to convey the abjection I was experiencing at the time. And by abjection, I don’t just mean extreme negative affect; I mean an actual identity crisis, a failure of subjective coherence. I am prepared to theorize that this was triggered by a phenomenon the psychoanalysts call the “return of the repressed” (Lacan 1966; Kristeva 1982; Hall 1982; Žižek 1989). Anxiety, wild emotions, physical symptoms of unreconstructed drives—​ unconscious fantasies and fears, always sexual in nature, that I never, ever acknowledged in my daily life. In fact, my whole identity up to that point had involved the foreclosure of even the possibility of such fantasies and fears. I was a queer bisexual, so I could not

358  Sarah Hankins have a rankly feminized body; I was a “not-​racist” ethnographer, so I could not have erotic racial fetishes. In Rasta Club, when all this “not-​me” material finally burst forth from inside “me,” I felt like I was encountering a loathsome stranger. As psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva has described, this kind of abjection implies a failure of subjectivity itself: “The abject is that which disturbs identity, system, order . . . it leads me to the place where meaning collapses” (1982:2). It certainly did for me. I stopped being able to carry out any meaningful fieldwork. My ethnographic project devolved into a frantic, flailing effort to put my identity back together again. My behaviors became extreme. For a while, I  tried dressing up as a much harder butch than I really was, thinking to turn the men off with combat boots, a flannel shirt, an army cap, but this only seemed to pique their curiosity further. My clothes also apparently signaled lesbianism to one of the few other young women in Rasta Club, Nava, a recent immigrant from Ethiopia. Nava commenced a ham-​handed flirtation that was threaded with incessant requests for money, alcohol, and cigarettes. I always complied. The comforting feeling of being desired by another female (even pretend-​desire) was more important to me than the obvious fact that I was being manipulated. But it wasn’t enough; neither my butchy clothes nor Nava’s attention could “re-​queer” the woman-​body that felt so disgusting to me. So, I swung wildly in the other direction, wearing tight tops and heels, makeup and jewelry. I took to performing flirtatious “solo dances” to a song I especially liked, Diana King’s “Shy Guy,” an exuberant dancehall/​R&B hit from the 1990s. Men around me would watch approvingly as I dipped my hips, swung my head, and butterflied my knees in an absurd approximation of the “dutty wine” dance (Carpenter and Walters 2011). I think I was trying to quash my racial anxieties by playing with blackness through the music, dancing and singing along to King’s Jamaican Patois: “Everywhere me go di man dem a rush me /​Yes a whole eep a pretty boy wah fi love me.” I am embarrassed to admit that I got drunk every night in Rasta Club, seeking a state of abandon where I could tolerate my own excessive behaviors, and the excesses of those around me. The more I drank, the more voluble and friendly I became, and the men’s overtures took on sharper edges. Two club regulars, a Sudanese man and an Eritrean man, commenced a sort of rivalry over me, arguing about who was allowed to dance with me, sit with me at the bar, or buy me drinks. Instead of disentangling myself from our increasingly intense dance floor interactions, I danced harder, lower, and closer. I was proving my “not-​racism” to myself (nobody else was calling me racist). Once, when I was washing up at the sink in the single-​stall bathroom that the whole club shared, the Sudanese man pinned me against the wall and kissed me. Fear and bile rose up in my throat, but I did not make any move to resist. Actually, I smiled at him. On another night, the Eritrean man took me outside, confessed that he “loved” me, exhorted me

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis  359 to leave off drinking and dalliances (with the Sudanese man), and urged me to embrace Christianity. I told myself that this was an ethnographic interview, even though he kept trying to kiss me while he was talking. “How can I be without border?” (Kristeva 1982:4). For Julia Kristeva, this is the question forced upon “the one by whom the abject exists,” the self whose “disavowed” materials have been revealed as constituents of self after all (1982:8). Such a person, Kristeva says, is no longer properly a subject, but instead a “stray” or “wanderer,” who cannot know “Who am I,” but can only ask, “Where am I,” in an ever-​shifting web of relations with others (1982:8). In Rasta Club, the more I tried to repair my fractured self-​identity through my relations with African men, the more alienated from myself I became. I could not keep this up for very long. My fieldwork, such as it was, finally fell apart one night in early June of 2013, about four months after I first came to the club. That night, the Sudanese man and the Eritrean man had both asked me to dance several times, but for some reason that I still can’t remember, I had declined all of their requests. I know I was feeling overtired and woozy from alcohol, and I think I was talking with Nava at one of the side tables for a long time. For whatever reason, I simply did not have it in me to go through the whole crazy dance-​floor ritual that night. The Sudanese man and the Eritrean man began arguing about this, blaming each other for my reluctance to dance. Their spat eventually turned into a shouting-​and-​shoving match. Tony Ray intervened, calling in his bouncer, a beefy Russian guy named Oleg. I felt guilty as I watched Oleg escorting my would-​be paramours from the club. It’s my fucking fault, constantly making myself a spectacle, of course they were provoked . . . But I drank more, and the shame, the whole episode, eventually receded. At six o’clock in the morning, I stepped out of Rasta Club into the glaring Tel Aviv sunshine. The sidewalks were steaming with heat, and empty of other people. I started walking home to my apartment, about a mile down HaRakevet Street, a grungy boulevard lined with car-​repair garages and sooty storefronts. Suddenly the Eritrean man appeared beside me. I had no idea where he’d come from. Had he been waiting all night for me out here? He began walking in step with me, speaking rapidly, and then he grabbed my wrist firmly. I laughed at first, I thought he was flirting, but then I saw that he was honestly trying to pull me, to direct my steps. He was moving very fast, looking all around—​for somewhere to take me, I realized. He seemed extremely strong, no more the sad-​sack who had confided his crush that night outside the club, weeks before. We reached the corner of a narrow side street, and I felt an undeniable trickle of cold fear. I stopped in my tracks, tried to freeze, but he pulled harder and walked faster, and then I was actually dragging my feet to slow him down. He was whispering urgently, through gritted teeth, come, come, come with me, and I was half-​shouting, out of breath, stop, what the fuck. It occurred to me with a dull shock that I had

360  Sarah Hankins never learned the Eritrean man’s name. He kept hold of my wrist with one hand and gripped my waist with the other. Then the other one, the Sudanese man, came puffing up out of nowhere. He seized my arm, digging into my skin with his fingers. All at once, for the first time in months—​I was wholly, keenly, precisely cognizant of being terrified. A spasm of adrenaline rocked me; I thought I would vomit. The Sudanese man pulled me towards him, the Eritrean man did the same, and for a moment I was suspended between them, arms outstretched, my shoulders straining in their sockets. Finally, a sharp jerk from the Sudanese man, and I stumbled against his body. His hands were everywhere on me for an instant, but then I tore free and ran. I caved at last on that impulse I’d been curbing night after night in the dance. Wait, he was yelling; I’m Sudanese, come back. Inexplicably, he was calling after me: Come back, I’m Sudanese, come back, I’m Sudanese.

Queer Positionality When I  consider all these experiences from a vantage point several years removed, some of them appear much smaller now, much more manageable than they did at the time. I can see that I was probably going through some kind of depression, brought on by the loneliness and isolation of long-​term fieldwork, and exacerbated by other factors like alcohol use and poor sleep patterns. Sometimes, I can even laugh at my own melodrama, my hysterical certainty that I had lost queerness forever and was an irredeemably vile racist, all because I had complicated feelings for African men on the dance floor. But then I think about the sexual assault, and I remember that I must take those feelings seriously. I do not truly believe the assault was my fault, but I cannot ignore the role I played in creating the conditions for it to happen. From certain angles of memory, the assault looks like the disastrous result of my own messy efforts to “manage” sexual and racial difference in Rasta Club—​a particularly extreme manifestation of my own unconscious conflicts blowing up in my face. Even when I am being easier on myself, the assault reminds me that I was so caught up in my identity crisis, I ignored the fact that my associates had complex identities of their own. I still don’t understand my attacker’s cryptic refrain, but in my memory, it seems to distill the very essence of this failure. Come back, I’m Sudanese, come back . . . A fractured self-​identification, from a man I had never really tried to get to know. Was he perhaps telling me that because he was Sudanese, he was “safer” than the other man, the Eritrean? This seems possible, since larger Sudanese/​Eritrean community dynamics in Tel Aviv are fraught with ethnic and national tensions. Even if this tension had nothing specifically to do with the sexual assault, learning more about my associates’ backgrounds in general might have defused a lot of

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis  361 problems in the club. I might have been able to relate with African men as real people, not just projections of my own racial anxieties. Why wasn’t I  better prepared to handle cross-​ cultural fieldwork before I  went to Rasta Club? I’m a queer ethnomusicologist, immersed in disciplinary conversations around fieldwork ethics, methodologies, and ethnographic positionality. Like most of my queer colleagues, I search widely outside my own field for new ways to think about gender, sexuality, and race. I have engaged feminist and critical race theory, queer of color critique, and decolonial studies in my scholarship. Presumably, all this exposure should have helped me think through my own project ahead of time and readied me to handle the complexities of sexed and raced relationships in the field. Unfortunately, I suspect the opposite might be truer. I think I was ill-​prepared for cross-​cultural fieldwork in part because I was so steeped in academic discourses and theoretical frameworks. As a white woman academic, my privilege has often allowed me to substitute theorizing for actual lived experience, and I can easily use theory to validate, not challenge, my established self-​perceptions. For example, I have come to realize that my investment in queer and critical race theories that frame gender, sexuality, and race as socially constructed categories has enabled a deep-​down belief that such categories don’t really exist at all. Or at least, not for me, a queer bisexual and “not-​ racist” ethnographer. When I did fieldwork with drag and gender performers in Boston, I was able to hold on to this comfortable view, since my queer associates played so freely with their own identities in provocative stage performances. In Rasta Club, however, my approach proved much too flexible and loose. I was so accustomed to theorizing and “deconstructing,” I had no idea how to handle the actual realities of gender and sexuality in a cross-​cultural fieldwork situation—​ not as topics of ethnographic inquiry, and certainly not as factors in my own interactions and relationships. Okay, so if queer studies or critical race theory are too abstract for the context in which I  found myself, what about our own discipline’s wide-​ranging conversations around ethnographic positionality? Long before I went into the field, I was exposed to self-​reflexive ethnographic writing that made me aware of the significance of gender, sexuality, and race as constituting and complicating factors in fieldwork—​but this writing did not necessarily shed light on how such factors might play out for me. Many ethnographers who have examined personal experiences in fieldwork are straight people; conversely, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, a lot of queer self-​reflexive writing is gay self-​reflexive writing. I haven’t always seen my own positionality reflected in either body of work. Moreover, while some queer musicologists have written graphically about their bodily, emotional responses to musical sound, ethnomusicologists, whether gay or straight, have often shied away from this degree of intimacy in recounting private fieldwork experiences. For instance, ethnographers might concede that

362  Sarah Hankins they have special “friends” in cross-​cultural fieldwork, but they usually don’t go into detail about the racially charged erotic feelings. Others may write about the unique methodological challenges of nightclub fieldwork, but don’t say they faced alcohol or drug problems themselves. In giving these examples, I do not mean to criticize any of my colleagues. Rather, I want to point out more broadly that it is possible for ethnomusicologists to write self-​reflexively, without writing privately; it is possible for us to deal with positionality from relatively abstract or external perspectives. Perhaps one reason for this is, as a discipline, we fear intimate self-​exposure might be politically irresponsible. Ethnographers often work in marginalized communities, with peoples who make music against all kinds of social and political odds; we hardly want to minimize their struggles through self-​indulgent navel-​gazing. As the anthropologist Ruth Behar has cautioned, in one of the earliest volumes examining vulnerability in ethnography, “The exposure of the self . . . has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise get to. It has to be essential for the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake” (1996:10). All this is to say, ethnographic discourses of positionality do not always represent the kinds of intensely private experiences I had in Rasta Club. I am not certain that “positionality” is the same thing as “subjectivity” or “self.” I’m not even sure these latter concepts accommodate all our murky depths. In the period of reflection after Rasta Club, I have looked to psychoanalysis to fill in the gaps. The core psychoanalytic tropes of repression, unconscious fantasy, and disarticulated drives of the body invite me to consider why I  felt so blindsided by my own desires and aversions. In particular, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection has given me permission to examine very ugly moments on the dance floor, when I was disgusted by my own body or the bodies of black men, which seem too regressive for legitimate ethnographic discussion. Most of all, psychoanalysis has opened up space for me to address my own unconscious racisms in a serious way—​not merely to acknowledge I have them, or pile on theoretical jargon until they don’t mean anything, or talk abstractly about white privilege. Psychoanalysis is a modality for unearthing the real, fleshy, and psychic roots of racial anxiety inside myself, and addressing how this anxiety imbricates my self-​identity, and my relationships with others—​both in my personal life and in the field. Queer scholars of many persuasions have rightfully critiqued the Western psychoanalytic tradition for its histories of phallogocentrism, misogyny, and the pathologizing of homosexuality. We might also suspect psychoanalysis of being too individualistic, overly focused on the personal, to the detriment of the “political.” In truth, I believe that psychoanalysis, if engaged carefully, offers a remarkably open-​ended, queer hermeneutic for exploring the raced and gendered problematics of ethnographic positionality, because it emphasizes the ever-​ shifting formation of the subject, via complex networks of self-​other relations.

Ethnographic Positionality and Psychoanalysis  363 After all, as Jacques Lacan argues, even the most private dimension of selfhood, the “unconscious,” is structured by symbolic value discourses that were originally presented to us by significant others in the outside world (Lacan 1968). If psychoanalysis valorizes the inner psyche, it also reveals that interiority is fundamentally socially constituted and socially engaged. Such an approach resonates with our queer understandings of race, gender, and sexuality as social constructs that are equally and indisputably real: the intimate materials of lived experience for individuals and groups. This dialectical framework has helped me reflect critically on my own ethnographic motivations by denying any recourse to the concept of flexible identity to “theorize away” race, sex, and gender in fieldwork relationships. Psychoanalysis can enrich ethnography in another important way, by suggesting that our relations with others in the field are shaped by hidden parts ourselves, which we can’t readily perceive. Everyone has an unconscious, the analysts say, so nobody knows themselves as well as they think. This includes us queer academics, even though (perhaps especially because) we’re up to our necks in identity theory. I think it’s especially crucial for fieldworkers to recognize that our desires, aversions, and motivations are often obscure, that they shape our attitudes and behaviors with respect to race, gender, and sexuality in ways we do not always anticipate. For psychoanalysis, the starting point of self-​knowledge is the seemingly paradoxical recognition that the self is mysterious. That’s why we pay attention to the more baffling dimensions of experience: feelings and fantasies, embarrassing gaffes, and inexplicable mistakes. This rather disheveled approach is abundant with possibilities for queering the field. As Halberstam puts it, “Failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well” (Halberstam 2011:2–​3). Queer ethnographers will always face messy, complicated realities of difference in our fieldwork. At times, we won’t be able to get our bearings—​but those moments might be opportunities for our richest, most nuanced ethnographic work. To paraphrase Julia Kristeva (1982), we might do well to let ourselves remain “strays” and wanderers (8), posing our questions without demanding answers, constantly questioning our solidity, always starting afresh.

21

“Man Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas” Saluting the Oríchá in a Cuban Gay Bar Cory W. Thorne

Introduction: Everyday Life and Queering Identities How are gender, spirituality, sexuality, and ethics experienced in Cuban everyday life? For the queer community, performative acts such as drag shows allow us to examine and reconsider these categories in relation to the Global North and colonial perspectives while writing/​re-​writing the histories of gender and sexuality. Dichotomies such as religious/​secular, Catholic/​Santero, gay/​ straight, male/​ female, old/​ young, Cuban/​ tourist, and researcher/​ informant are regularly combined, divided, and renegotiated through drag rituals, thus moving the seemingly mundane into intense arenas of meaning production and contestation. Ritualistic music is at the heart of these structures of feeling, for it functions as the ever-​present tool that brings tradition into modernity, and which sustains the shift from everyday into highly marked temporal spaces of identity construction and celebration. As a cis-​male, gay, Canadian academic conducting field research in Cuba, I have been challenged by Havana’s drag shows. My experience attending these shows has pushed me to reconsider who I am and to better see the complexities of cultural translation, especially in relation to the limitations of critical and queer theory in uncovering the experiences of everyday life. (I speak here as both a folklorist and ethnomusicologist, with a focus on the intimate and informal narratives and performances of everyday life as the core basis of understanding similarity and difference.) This is a study of an Afro-​Cuban religious ceremony, held as a part of drag queen performances in a bar that is known to be frequented by gay men and male sex-​workers. It is about a ritual that is central to gay, lesbian, and trans communities throughout much of the world, but it is not necessarily a queer event (we are not transgressing the norm; rather, we are reiterating the Cuban vernacular, as guided by African deities).

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  365 My queering of Global North/​Global South identities is focused less on economics (though it comes into play) and more on Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling (1958, 2015) as it has been used in the exploration of cultural difference (and in particular the development of critical regionalism in the humanities) (Herr 1996). Structures of feeling and sense of place scholarship draw on popular and informal narratives and ethnography while contributing to our understandings of spatial inequality and power as experienced on the most intimate levels of everyday life (Hufford 2002; Reid and Taylor 2010; Soja 2010). Williams uses the phrase structures of feeling to critique trajectories of difference that are not fully formed or articulated, but which nevertheless contribute to dangerously uninformed assumptions of underdevelopment and disorder, unofficial and partly formed ideas that have great impact on spatial injustice. José Muñoz (1999) expands on Williams to analyze queer and Latino affect as it stands in opposition to Whiteness. This is a way of moving beyond the broad scope of critical and queer theory toward a more experience-​based, vernacular understanding of everyday life as experienced by non-​White and non-​ heterosexual individuals. I aim to demonstrate some of the ways in which queer individuals gain control over their own destinies in a community that is frequently assumed to be oppressed by predominantly Canadian and European tourist-​voyeurs (Zerva, Kourtit, and Nijkamp 2016). Inspired by Jafari Allen’s work on male sex-​labor in Cuba (2007), and their emphasis on looking at instead of through male sex-​ workers, my goal is to demonstrate the weaknesses of the above-​stated dichotomies and to treat these performances and individuals as empowered and purposeful, that is, to show how musical performances in Havana’s gay bars can debunk Global North assumptions of disempowerment. Not only is this a way of breaking the tourist gaze, but it is also an attempt to better explain and translate the highly contextualized experiences of this community to outsiders.

The Carnivalesque: Oríchá, Pingueros, and Drag While referencing a variety of elements of gay folklore and culture in Cuba, my emphasis here will be on a series of drag shows in the period 2010–​2013 that opened with Afro-​Cuban music and dance, enacting religious performances that are commonly known as batá, tambors, or drums,1 and which embody

1 These three terms are used somewhat interchangeably; however, batá refers specifically to the sacred two-​headed drums that are used in Afro-​Cuban religious rituals. Tambor can refer to any type of local hand drum. Religious ceremonies that are based around batá performance are often referred to informally as batás, tambors, or drums.

366  Cory W. Thorne many of the elements of religious performance with the exception of location and audience:  held at gay bars and government-​owned community centers and theaters for mixed audiences that embody the Bakhtinian carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968). Normally, Afro-​Cuban rituals are performed in private spaces, a holdover from the history of oppression when enslaved Africans were forced to convert to Spanish Catholicism, subsequently discovering similarities between certain Catholic saints and African oríchá (gods, or spirits). Due to fear of further prosecution, African-​based spiritual elements had to be hidden from public view. The performances that I focus on here took place in densely packed gay bars, alongside drag performers and scantily clad male dancers, to audiences that were a mixture of young Cuban men and women, as well as Canadian and European tourists, many of whom were being openly solicited by pingueros (young male hustlers/​sex-​workers, a term that I will further examine later). As reported by Matthew Leslie Santana (2018), such inter-​mixings can also be found in lesbian and non-​tourist queer venues in Havana. This diversity of locations supports my argument that Santería is part of the everyday life of many non-​heterosexual and non-​heteronormative individuals in Cuba; it is seen as the norm—​not marked as unusual, unexpected, or even transgressive. While my focus and experiences mostly relate to Santería, also known as Regla de Ochá or La Regla de Ifá, other related religions (sharing similar patterns of development in Cuba) include Palo Monté and Abakuá (a male secret society/​religious practice). Santería is a Spanish (and thus colonial) term meaning “worship of the saints.” In practice, the terms saint and oríchá are often used interchangeably. The issues explored herein not only apply primarily to Santería but would also be vehemently opposed by practitioners of some of these other Afro-​Cuban sects, even though they worship many of the same oríchá. One of my informants demonstrated this to me when explaining how his father and his brothers, who are Abakuá, ostracized him because of his sexuality, drinking, and other forms of deviant behavior.

Two Tambors: Sexuality in Sacred Spaces On my first visit to a traditional tambor, to which I  was invited by my close friend Alexander,2 I  thought I  was headed to a musical event, expecting to see drumming, dancing, and singing of traditional music. The term tambor, 2 Keeping with requests for anonymity, all informants have been given the opportunity to select pseudonyms. Some informants have given permission to use their legal names while others have selected new names and/​or drag or stage names.

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  367 however, references an event where drums are played, often as part of a religious ceremony where salutes (songs, dances, and associated rhythms) are performed in worship and offering to various oríchá, often resulting in trance-​possession. My first tambor, in 2008, was in a small apartment in old Havana, in a room with about twenty men and a dozen women. As confirmed by Alexander, many of them self-​identified as gay. During several hours of drumming, dancing, sipping on aguardiente, smoking cigars, and call-​and-​response singing, several participants became possessed by ancestors and began speaking in Yoruba (the ancestral language of much of Cuba’s enslaved population, as well as the language and spiritual basis of most Afro-​Cuban religions). I  observed one friend, approximately thirty years old, shift expressions and begin moving erratically. Another participant took his eyeglasses from him in order to stop them from being broken; another took his sandals as they flew off his feet. We formed a circle around my possessed friend in order to protect him from hitting himself on the furniture in the crowded apartment, and then he calmed down and began speaking in a different voice and in a different language—​he was now an enslaved African from Yorubaland, giving advice to his descendants. My second tambor, also with Alexander and held in an outdoor patio with about 150–​200 people in a suburban part of Havana, was a celebration for two specific oríchá, Elegguá (Saint Anthony) and Yemayá (Our Lady of Regla, the Virgin Mary). The ceremony was hosted by a Spanish-​Cuban woman who was visiting and giving thanks to the oríchá (ostensibly for aiding her to obtain a visa for Spain, and thus gaining financial success). After several hours, the oríchá took possession of the bodies of a black Cuban man and a black Cuban woman, who were then ushered inside the home, to reappear a few minutes later wearing the clothing of each saint (red and black for Elegguá, blue for Yemayá). They began moving through the space, selecting various celebrants in order to speak with them about their lives. After communicating with several Cubans, they arrived at a white tourist, and each gently held one of his hands, and began speaking about his life (with another participant translating into English). They told him that his blood was polluted and that he must seek medical help as well as visit the shrine and give offerings to Babalyú Ayé (Saint Lazarus) in El Rincón (a community on the edge of Havana). The man left in horror. Later, finding him sitting on the street in front of the home, he revealed to me that he had been recently diagnosed as HIV-​positive, but that this was a secret between him, his medical doctor, and his boyfriend. On discussing this event with various Cuban friends, several suggested that this was not uncommon, claiming that many HIV-​positive Cubans first learn of their status through religious ceremonies. Furthermore, they pointed out

368  Cory W. Thorne that Los Cocos, the largest sanatorium for HIV/​AIDS in Cuba, was built directly across the street from the shrine for Babalyú Ayé (Saint Lazarus). This site, which also once housed a hospital for leprosy, implicitly recognizes a connection between this saint/​oríchá and HIV/​AIDS. It is also the site of one of the largest religious pilgrimages in Cuba, held each December 17, which is frequented by both Catholics and Santeros (many of whom identify as both), including large numbers of gays and transformistas (an umbrella term representing the trans spectrum, including drag queens and cross-​dressers). Residents of Los Cocos are known for lining up along the fences and interacting with the pilgrims. While there are only a few studies demonstrating both contemporary and historical linkages between Santería and homosexuality (see Salvador Vidal-​Ortiz’s work with santeros in New York City, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2011; as well as Falola and Otero 2013; and Aisha Beliso-​De Jesús 2015a, for recent ethnographic work in Cuba), there are passing references in a variety of sources, including one by Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz (1993, reference in García 2013). I am most struck by William Bascom’s and Richard Waterman’s fieldwork in Jovellanos, Matanzas, in 1948, where they noted and struggled with understanding the presence of effeminate males, presumably gay and/​or transformistas, who not only took part in the religious ceremonies, but in some cases were possessed during these ceremonies. Bascom’s field notes show his suspicion as to whether these men were truly possessed or were merely performing for the fieldworkers (García 2013). The tambors are part of the core of religious ritual within Santería. While I was intrigued by the presence of so many gay men, as well as the openness to tourists and outsiders, these were sacred performances directed at mostly Cuban celebrants, hidden inside private homes/​sacred spaces. However, when moving to the almost identical performances by drag queens in gay bars, I faced questions of acceptability in terms of sacred/​profane, that is, the lack of separation of sexuality, nightlife, and religious ceremony. With an audience that included sex tourists, transformistas, and pingueros, I had to ask myself if this was crossing a line in terms of religious respect. According to my friends Alexander and Bach:  no. “God created transformistas, man created homophobia.” The oríchá are sexual beings who, just like humans, are sexually diverse and even gender-​fluid. Alexander in particular noted the mythology behind several of these spirits, giving examples of cross-​dressing and homosexuality among certain oríchá. While this went against some of my earlier teachings when studying batá drumming in the United States, they were adamant that there is no reason to be concerned by this mixture of homosexuality and the sacred.

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  369

Queering Religion and Complexing Homophobia Are these events truly queer (non-​normative) when based in and aligning with generations of religious ritual and mythology? Queer for whom (the tourist-​ voyeur perhaps)? As I quickly discovered, religious ritual and sexuality (gay or straight) are not divided in the ways that I was taught in my North American upbringing. Not only is sexuality viewed more diversely in this context in Cuba (often rejecting the Global North gay/​straight identity boxes), but religious entities such as the oríchá are likewise viewed as openly sexual and playful. As noted by Ortiz and reiterated in Maríela Castro Flores’s work on gender in Afro-​Cuban religion, “the black gods are generally very happy; they do not feel the philosophizing agony and ethical interventionism of the white gods, and they like to come down to have fun with their faithful, like over-​familiar pals” (2001:55). The “black gods,” oríchá, possess all the characteristics of humans. They play and, as demonstrated in Stephen Cornelius’s fieldwork, sometimes they get angry (1995). They have their favorite foods, drinks, colors, songs, and dances. They are sexual and gendered, but they exist outside of—​before and uninfluenced by—​the Victorian morals we inherited, and which are at the heart of much of Foucault’s discontent. While living in the United States and studying batá drumming, the music of Santería, I read several documents that cited restrictions on who could perform, play, or even be present in performances of fundamento batá, sacred drums (Amira and Cornelius 1992). These are the sacred forms of this hour-​glass shaped drum that have been blessed and which now contain the spirit of oríchá Aña (Cornelius 1995:45). In particular, I was taught that gay men and menstruating women could only play non-​sacred imitations of the drums. From a naïve perspective, this meant to me that Santería was a homophobic religion. Maríela Castro Flores takes up similar concerns in discussing the insufficient space for women in these rituals (2001). As we see in the above examples, however, there is certainly a strong presence of gays and transformistas within this religion, thus the need for closer attention to cultural translation in relation to religious mythology. I likewise see my naïve interpretation at the time stemming from my limited understanding of queer theory and identity politics. As previously questioned by Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz (2005), Deshotels (2014), and Manning (2016), what is queer about queer studies anymore? While the colonial boxes have been to some degree rejected in terms of gender, sexuality, and ethics, queer theory allows us to better see and analyze various forms of oppression as experienced by our subjects. We must take care, however, to avoid the all-​too-​frequent assumption that residents of the Global South are oppressed in the ways that are most commonly experienced in Global North or colonial

370  Cory W. Thorne settings. In advancing queer studies, “such a theoretical project demands that queer epistemologies not only rethink the relationship between intersectionality and normalization from multiple points of view but also, and equally important, consider how gay and lesbian rights are being reconstituted as a type of reactionary (identity) politics of national and global politics” (Eng 2005:4). There is certainly a growing and much needed gay rights movement in Cuba today; however, within Santería we see that there is already a well-​established space and power for sexual and gender diversity that has survived both Spanish colonial oppression and oppression related to the communist revolution and the Soviet era. When working in a community that in some ways rejects colonial models of heteropatriarchy as the organizing foundation of society, both everyday and ritualistic events function by rules that reject the above dichotomies. Out of respect to its participants, I am not sure we should call it transgressive, but rather acknowledge its surface-​ level identity:  a post-​ Soviet, post-​colonial ritualistic act that uses music and dance to reveal the complexities of Cuban everyday life. After multiple trips and after several months of living at a ranch on the edge of Havana, I began to notice a pattern of performances in the local gay/​trans scene. While my research focus was on material culture and underground economies, two of my closest friends there identified as gay and a third was in the process of exploring his gender fluidity (spending his days as a man, and increasingly, her nights as a woman).3 We took part in Havana’s queer community, attending parties, gay bars, and even official events such as the monthly drag show at our neighborhood cultural center (the government-​owned Casa de la Cultura). Likewise, our home acted as an informal center for the queer community—​a private gathering place visited by a variety of friends and acquaintances on the LGBTQI+ spectrum. Some of these used the term transformista to identify as drag queens, dressing part-​time as women for either parties or shows, and in some cases for late-​night prostitution with heterosexual-​identified Cuban men. A few were also receiving hormone-​therapy, living their lives full-​time as women with the official assistance and endorsement of the Cuban medical system. As I  frequently find myself explaining to the shock and disbelief of non-​Cuban colleagues, gender dysphoria/​sex-​reassignment surgery has been officially recognized and supported by the Cuban government and medical system since 2008, largely thanks to the work of Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of President Raul Castro and niece of Fidel Castro.

3 My selection of pronouns is in accordance with the preferences of my informants. In this example, this individual typically uses male pronouns during the day when at work while presenting as a man, and female pronouns in the evenings when presenting as a woman.

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  371

The Main Event: Sacred Ceremonies in Sexualized Spaces May 17, 2010, Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Cuba: I am seated in a theater with hundreds of gay, lesbian, straight, trans, drag, and cisgender individuals, old and young, grandparents and grandchildren, alongside pingueros (hustlers) and their papis (sugar-​daddies). It is a fabulous cross-​section of Havana’s queer and queer-​supportive communities. The lights dim, the master of ceremonies enters, and, following a discussion of the importance of the International Day Against Homophobia, he dedicates the show to the guest of honor, Mariela Castro Espín. The emcee reminds us of Mariela’s work in support of the queer community, noting in particular the importance of her office, CENESEX (El Centro Nacional de Educacion Sexual de Cuba), in the protection against harassment of gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals, and the promotion of safe sex. There is discussion of the progressive support of the queer communities by the Castro government, a not-​ so-​subtle reference to Cuba’s ongoing ideological battle that highlights weaknesses in the treatment of gay and trans individuals in certain parts of the United States. The show starts—​not with a patriotic anthem, but with something that I have come to think of as a vernacular form of Afro-​Cuban patriotism: salutes to the oríchá. A transformista enters wearing the red and black clothing of Elegguá, the spirit of the crossroads, who is both a warrior and a trickster figure who loves to celebrate, often with a childlike playfulness. Catholics call him St. Anthony; Haitians know him as Papa Legba. He begins dancing to the rhythms of the oríchá, to a recording of the batá drums, spinning and moving to a set of patterns that initiates would also recognize as Elegguá’s dance. After a few minutes, the rhythms change to indicate Obatalá, Elegguá’s father, and a second dancer appears dressed entirely in white. Obatalá is the creator of earth and owner of all heads. Associated with Our Lady of Mercy or Jesus Christ, Obatalá has male and female paths. Today, she presents as a woman. This continues with several more dancers including the warriors Changó (red and white, carrying a two-​headed axe, controller of thunder and lightning, the ultimate figure of male virility, connected to Saint Barbara), Yemayá (blue and translucent, lives in the oceans and lakes, a strong and independent woman and a motherly figure who fiercely protects her children, connected to Our Lady of Regla/​the Virgin Mary), and Ochún (gold/​yellow/​amber, a young sensual woman who lives in the rivers and controls her lovers, connected to Our Lady of El Cobre). This procession of oríchá, beginning with Elegguá, is typical of any religious ceremony, where Elegguá must first be given respect so as to gain access to the spiritual world (as guardian of the crossroads, Elegguá guards the gate between direct human/​spiritual interaction). Just as celebrants must request Elegguá’s permission at the start of any tambor, the transformistas have requested his support and protection for this gay ritual.

372  Cory W. Thorne After about twenty minutes, all have completed their dances. The music stops, the audience applauds, the oríchá bow, and the main show begins. We immediately shift to female impersonators lip-​syncing to Latin American divas and North American gay icons. The audience seems unfazed, and is actually energized by the salutes, as I hear people discussing the beauty of Ochún’s dance and the sexual intensity exhibited by Changó.4 I was invited to Karl Marx Theater by Alexander, my Cuban padrino (godfather), along with several other friends, including Diosvani and my close friend Yuli/​Julia, neither of whom are Santero. Diosvani used the experience not only to comment on the beauty of the dancers but also to reminisce about his years as a police officer when he was forced to attend speeches in this same theater, typically several-​hour-​long speeches by Fidel Castro himself. He jokes that he does not remember much of what Castro said, but he does remember desperately trying to stay awake, sitting only a couple of rows from the front, fearing punishment for failing to be attentive. Yuli, who when in drag adopts the name Julia (for Julia Roberts, with the English pronunciation), comments on the dresses in a campy but respectful fashion, asks Alexander about the identities of each oríchá, and jokes about the unexpected “santos” while he was expecting to see the standard divas. Alexander, however, uses the event to teach me more about the saints, helping expose me to more and more of the religion, beginning the process of educating me not as an informant, but rather as his ahijado (godson). I was already impressed by the event itself, an official celebration of anti-​ homophobia in a country that, only a few short years ago, was known for stalking, arresting, and sending gay men to re-​education camps. Here we were now, sitting alongside Castro’s niece, creating a form of gay pride while accentuating its intimate linkages to Afro-​Cuban religion. To me, this still felt like a transgression inside a transgression inside a transgression—​being openly queer in a conservative machismo environment, being openly queer and religious in a religion that many (insiders and outsiders alike) describe as homophobic and being openly queer and religious in an officially secular communist nation. Since that afternoon at Karl Marx Theater, I have seen drag shows at a variety of Cuban venues, including at Casa de la Cultura in a municipality adjacent to Havana, as part of a government-​organized safe-​sex campaign, several times at underground gay bars, at gay bars in Havana’s trendy Vedado neighborhood, and lastly as part of Havana’s 2013 Carnival along the Malecón seawall. According to one of my interviewees, Bach, a film-​maker who works with the local trans

4 While there are many texts and documents available on each of these oríchá, Changó and Yemayá have gained particular interest within the broader academic community. Both now have edited volumes documenting and analyzing their roles throughout the African diaspora (see Tishken, Fálolá, and Akínyemi 2009; Falola and Otero 2013).

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  373 community, drag shows have been a part of Cuban popular culture since at least the 1950s, but not in a sexualized way. “They were more about performances, something artistic and there were magazines talking about famous performers and about their shows.” They were not targeting gay audiences exclusively, but rather were focused on the art of female impersonation. This fits well with what I observed at several of these events, where drag queens performed in front of mixed audiences (from infants to the elderly). Bach explained that shows in this format mostly disappeared in the 1960s and ’70s, only to re-​emerge in the 1980s with a more focused interest within the gay community, held in private and hidden spaces and advertised by word of mouth. By the 1990s and early 2000s, these shows quickly gained popularity within the gay community, typically held at underground parties on the outskirts of the city—​parties that would shift locations each weekend, from ranches to crumbling estates, requiring a delicate balance with law enforcement. Officially, the new gay parties were targeted not for being gay, but rather based on laws regarding freedom of association. As seen during the International Day Against Homophobia at Karl Marx Theater, and at the safe-​sex events at my local Casa de la Cultura, however, this older form of female impersonation continues alongside the newer drag-​show model that is a more prominent part of Global North gay popular culture. I attended a drag show in 2013 at La Gruta, a large, dark bar located below street-​level, tucked underneath a movie theater on 23rd Street, in the Vedado neighborhood. This was among the first, though temporary, gay bars that had a stable location. Prior to this, as I experienced from 2008 to 2010, most gay parties in Havana were still held in undisclosed locations, often accessed through underground networks so as to avoid police harassment. The setting was typical of most nightclubs—​a small stage in one corner, a series of tables and chairs surrounding it, and a second level about one meter higher that gave better views of the stage. As anticipated, the show began with recorded batá drums,5 again performing the salute to Elegguá, accompanied by a dancer, and then the cycle through several oríchá. Once complete, the emcee took the stage, and the drag show began. While this show was very similar to the previous drag/​oríchá performances, this one took place in a bar that had a highly visible presence of sex tourists and others participating in illegal/​quasi-​legal activities.6 Of particular note were two 5 While some still oppose the use of recorded music in religious ceremonies, electronic recordings and videos are being increasingly used, both in traditionally sacred and secular spaces, particularly in ceremonies in the Afro-​Cuban diaspora. See Beliso-​De Jesús (2015). 6 While I have not directly observed any use of illicit drugs during these events, they are rumored to be present. An adjacent and competing gay bar was subsequently shut down, allegedly for trafficking cocaine. Two of my core research informants, one a former police officer and the other a well-​known pinguero, both insist that there is a thriving but well-​hidden drug trade in these spaces.

374  Cory W. Thorne older white German men (in their sixties or seventies), seated near the stage, each accompanied by several younger black boys (late teens or early twenties). During the salutes, I first noticed the boys serving them drinks and flirting with them. As the night progressed, however, the boys increasingly danced in front of them, massaged their shoulders, and appeared to compete with each other through highly sexualized play. These were pingueros, essentially a form of prostitution where young men act as escorts in exchange for money, drinks, dinner, even clothing. Many would view these pingueros, mostly young black men, through a racialized lens of hyper-​sexuality. This world of gay sex tourism and pingueros is a newly emergent vernacular tradition linked to the post-​Soviet economic crisis of the early 1990s.7 It was this performance in particular that inspired me to analyze more closely the performance of sacred Afro-​Cuban ceremonies in secular, sexualized queer spaces.

Vernacular Theorization and Resistance: De-​colonizing Queer Theory When I  ask non-​santero Cuban friends about sexuality and Afro-​Cuban religion, I am often told about homophobia and transphobia in Santería. One friend recited the story of a “friend of a friend,” whose mother took him to a babalawo (santero high priest), who attempted to cure him of his gayness. However, while hanging out with a group of gay santero pingueros at El Binbon, the unofficial gay cafeteria on 23rd Street, I am told that most gays in Cuba are santero, and that gays are more spiritually connected than heterosexuals. One reiterated this position by telling me how his boyfriend, identified from an early age by a babalawo as having special healing powers, continues to be visited regularly by individuals seeking his assistance. Given the economic imbalance between Cubans and tourists, the label pinguero is fluid, relating to questions of money, commitment, and availability. Some argue that all Cubans who have sex with tourists act as pingueros. Some of these men reject Global North identity politics by basing their sexuality on their sexual role (active or passive) rather than framing it as identity (thus, having sex with another man does not necessarily equate to a gay identity, especially if maintaining the active role, and even more so if using the proceeds to support a wife and child). Many of these men openly identify as santero through

7 Sex tourism within the gay community has been a growing area of research in recent years, as seen in Allen (2007); Cabezas (2004); Hodge (2005, 2001); Forrest (2002); and Stout (2008). For racialized sexualities within this community, see Allen (2011). For relation to post-​Soviet economics, see Stout (2014).

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  375 bodily adornments, wearing collares, protective beaded necklaces or bracelets connecting them to specific oríchá (through the process of initiation, all santeros discover their oríchá family, creating a lifelong bond to specific oríchá that are seen as their own guides and protectors). According to the pingueros that night at El Binbon: Santería is beautiful, even if some men are not. I sat down in 2013 with two Cuban friends for more structured interviews on the incorporation of Santería into drag performances in the increasingly public gay popular culture of Havana. I set out to compare and contrast the views of Bach, a non-​santero gay man who, as a filmmaker for ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute), works closely with Havana’s transformistas, and Alexander, my padrino, who is gay, and who is part of a large extended family of santeros. I have known both Bach and Alex since my first visit to Havana in 2006. Bach recently directed a short documentary on Havana’s transformistas. He has travelled outside Cuba twice for international film festivals and thus has some experience with Global North gay popular culture. He is a close friend of several of the transformistas that I  have seen perform, including Kiriam, one of the most well-​known transformistas in Havana who belongs to Yemayá, and who, two years ago, began opening her shows with a salute to Yemayá. Alexander, in addition to his extensive expertise and experience with Santería, holds a master’s degree in languages, works for the department of foreign affairs, and teaches Spanish to foreign diplomat families. He is familiar with European, particularly Austrian gay popular culture, having lived in Vienna for two years. Since 2006, Alex has taken me to multiple tambors across Havana, including in the Santería stronghold neighborhood Régla and in the Soviet Bloc housing projects in Bahía and Alamar. In the same month as this interview, we also travelled together, with a group of gay friends, to the city of Cardenas to take part in a larger ceremony for the mother of a mutual friend who lives in Germany (Cardenas is adjacent to Jovellanos, where William Bascom questioned the role of the effeminate santeros back in 1948). Both Bach and Alexander have various expertise with Cuban gay popular culture and with Santería. Both are familiar with Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz’s ideas on transculturation (Ortiz 1995). Both have personally experienced the challenges of cultural translation and transculturation. To initiate my discussion with Bach and Alexander, however, I began with a brief presentation based on James C. Scott’s ideas on vernacular resistance, asking if this could be a helpful tool for analyzing the negotiation of power within the queer santero community. As with Scott, I aimed to demonstrate that resistance is not always organized, public, or even recognized, but rather that everyday forms of vernacular resistance are about small acts to show discontent when living in a society where more open opposition is exceptionally dangerous.

376  Cory W. Thorne I presented both Bach and Alexander with Scott’s ideas on vernacular resistance (1985), asking them to contemplate whether or not drag performances of the oríchá might fit somewhere into this model, and if so, where they fit and what are they resisting. Using examples, I framed it around his seven categories of resistance: 1) Overt—​collective, visible acts, ranging from revolutions to community based movements; 2) Covert—​acts that are intentional, but frequently unnoticed; 3)  Unwitting—​accidentally or unconsciously acting in a way that others may see as resistant; 4) Target-​defined—​when one perceives that he/​she/​ they is the object of resistance even though the accused resistor fails to recognize his/​her/​their own actions as resistance; 5) Externally-​defined—​only a third party identifies the action as resistance, that is, the accused and the target do not see it as a resistance, but outsiders looking in recognize a pattern; 6) Missed—​it is recognized by the author and target, but exists in a space where it is not visible to third parties, that is, an action of resistance was taken and received, but fails to go beyond the immediate; and 7) Attempted—​the actor’s goals fail to be recognized by either the target or third party. Both Alex and Bach listened carefully, contemplated, and responded with their own interpretations of power and identity as personally experienced in Cuba.

Conclusions: Two Queer Cuban Perspectives Bach began by discussing how more and more Cubans are coming out of the trans closet, dressing as women not with any goal of resisting machismo identities, but rather out of necessity of admitting their own self-​identities. This idea that trans and machismo performances are not in opposition to each other is important and reflective of queer theory’s distinction between gender and sexuality. Likewise, trans identities are performed not as resistance to Latin American masculinity, but rather as a way of embracing and better defining gender differences and traditional gender roles. From Bach’s perspective, transformistas reiterate gender codes; they do not break or push them. Furthermore, I asked about the issue of trans sex-​workers, to which he replied that this is both a matter of economics and of pleasure. Given the economic problems in Cuba and given that many of these individuals lack residency permits to live in Havana (part of a system that is intended to reduce rural-​urban migration within the country),8 this is the only source of income for many of them. 8 There is a large community of undocumented migrants in Havana, people who have moved from the countryside into the city seeking better economic opportunities. Vernacularly referred to as palestinos, they can only work in the shadow economy. Previous studies of male sex-​work in Cuba support the knowledge that many pingueros are undocumented migrants who face the constant risk of being arrested, imprisoned, and returned to smaller, poorer regions of the country.

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  377 While as an outsider, I can read into this a variety of levels of resistance, that is, the need for sexual release among gay, bisexual, and trans individuals who must be straight within their communities, and the desire for more money to show off in front of others in a communist system where everyone is officially equal, Bach demonstrated to me how this is a well-​functioning system. There might be an element of unwitting or externally defined resistance, but because making money and having sex are seen as two necessary elements of life, it is not resistant. Rather, it is what allows this system to work, more akin to a hegemonic balance than to vernacular resistance. When I asked Bach about gay santeros and the use of oríchá in drag shows, he responded: There are some people that use Santeria to make money—​certain supplies, animals, buying stuff, paying the rites. Santeria has its own economy. And the sex . . . well sexuality is not hidden. It’s very very not hidden. You have to be careful with the babalawos, but nobody else cares. I know people in the military who are gay and santero. It isn’t a problem. They are the only ones who can’t be open about religion or sexuality, but everyone knows. Everyone says that Fidel uses the oríchá, and many think that Mariela is a lesbian.

While the legend about Fidel and Santería is widespread, the story of Mariela is more contested. Continuing with Alexander: There are many old santeros that are gays. There have been many big, important gay santeros in the last fifty years. Gays have had a big position in Santeria. Gays are the ones that know Santeria the best . . . because they try to find the time to study, to study how to do it better, how to do the right ceremony . . . you might find straight men who are Santero and maybe they don’t care. They don’t care about learning about Santeria.

I cannot help but think at this point that Alexander might have been comparing himself to his step-​brother, who became santero three years prior. While Alexander is a leader within the religion, his brother appears to be much less serious, moving through the rituals but not studying with the same intensity. I  observed this disparity specifically when, during his year-​long initiation—​a year when one is required to wear only white out of respect to Obatalá—​I saw him and his girlfriend argue over what clothing had too much color, about whether a printed T-​shirt and hat were too colorful to be considered white.9 He 9 For details on this ritual, see Carr (2016), a collection of interviews by a sociologist undergoing her own initiation-​year in white.

378  Cory W. Thorne liked to push the rules, to the point that Alexander and his mother sometimes had to intervene. On another occasion, I observed Alexander look in disgust at a santera initiate, dressed in white at a cafeteria, drinking and flirting with a group of men, and he said to me: “If I was her padrino, I would be very angry.” On gays and Santeria, Alexander continued: “If he is gay, he’s always trying to know more about how to be better, what sort of ceremony to do in the right moment, etc., etc.” and explained that not only was Santería open to the gay community, but that some oríchá, such as Changó, have characteristics that are masculine, gender-​bending, and even suggestive of homosexuality, while displaying strong machismo identities. He noted: “Changó wasn’t gay or transgendered, but he did dress as a woman to save [himself] in a war. . . . Elegguá is playful, he did it to save Olorun.” When I asked him to elaborate, he jumped again: We have an oríchá that is called Inlé, that is one that represents the gay community. In Catholic religion he is known as San Raphael, but in Santería he is known as Inlé. He was Yemayá’s husband, and Yemayá lived with him and she taught him that she was going to take him to the bottom of the sea, but when he came up he couldn’t say anything about what he saw down there, but he taught himself what he saw down there at the bottom of the ocean and then Yemayá cut out his tongue. That’s why . . . when you have a ceremony, Yemayá speaks in his place, instead of Inlé. Inlé cannot speak through the shells. It is Yemayá that speaks through the shells. That is . . . he dresses in blue and yellow. That is his costume. Blue and yellow. And then there is Babalyú Ayé, Catholics call him San Lazarus, the patron saint of HIV and AIDS.

By listing several oríchá and telling parts of their mythologies, he made his point clear: the oríchá often act just like humans—​arguing, gossiping, debating different viewpoints, and demonstrating through their stories a diversity of sexualities as well as genders. So, I ask, what about machismo? Alexander responds that in the 1980s and ’90s (during the height of gay prosecution by the Cuban government), it was difficult to find open interaction between gays and non-​gays within the religion. Today this has changed, and he explains how it is increasingly common for straight padrinos to have gay ahijados, and even for gay padrinos to take on straight ahijados. Digging further, I return to the question that has been plaguing me since I first began playing batá drums, when I was a student in the United States: “I know that gay men are not permitted to play the batá drums or become babalawos. Doesn’t this suggest that there is some homophobia in the religion?” Alex states:

“MAn Created Homophobia, God Created Transformistas”  379 Batás have a ceremony with a saint, the oríchá Aña, who is straight, who doesn’t allow men having relationships with other men, who doesn’t allow men to touch him. That is why gay men must not play batá. To become babalawo you belong to Aña. That is why gays cannot be babalawos. Aña is homophobic. But just like men, he is only one oríchá among many.

There is no resistance or conflict involved with drag queens performing religious ceremonies in gay bars. Everything here fits within the religion. It would only be a problem if the transformistas, or any gay men, attempted to touch the drums. In the drag performances that I’ve observed, however, no actual drums were present, but rather the dancers performed to recorded music. Certain babalawos might be offended or disturbed by these performances, and as such there is an aspect of vernacular resistance in terms of pushing for greater acceptance of gay and transgendered individuals in Cuba, but there is no conflict whatsoever in terms of Afro-​Cuban spirituality. We might consider an element of unwitting resistance, that is, the drag queens are resistant to dominant codes of masculinity through their existence, but this existence is an externally defined resistance to machismo conservatism, not to religion. As Bach implies, interpreting these performances is more of an issue of cultural translation than of any actual resistance within contemporary Cuba. To assume that there is a conflict or resistance between sexuality, spirituality, masculinities, and/​or politics in Cuba is a Global North interpretation that explicates the need for a more contextualized and decolonized queer theory. From an emic perspective, however, it is a well-​ balanced system that is recognized by many, even celebrated publicly.

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On Serendipity Or, Toward a Sensual Ethnography Peter McMurray

It’s difficult to imagine a more auspicious place to begin than Pauline Oliveros’s backyard. On a warm August afternoon in 2007, I interviewed the American composer for Eric Chasalow’s oral history project on electroacoustic music composers, sitting outdoors amid the gentle hum of late summer days. Among other things, I was particularly interested in her use of sampling in her iconic 1965 composition Bye Bye Butterfly. Her own program note to the piece explains: “Bye Bye Butterfly bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex. The title refers to the operatic disc, Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, which was at hand in the studio at the time and which was spontaneously incorporated into the ongoing compositional mix” (in Tick and Beaudoin 2008:697). This note highlights a tension, evident in more extensive analyses of the piece (compare Von Gunden 1983; Mockus 2008), between express (intentional) commentary about gender and sexuality uniquely bound up in Oliveros’s sampling of Madama Butterfly and a kind of chance operation in picking up a record “at hand in the studio,” giving a sense that any other piece of music could have served her purposes. When I asked her about her process in choosing Puccini, she answered wryly, “It was serendipity,” explaining that the record was the only one in the room but that it lent itself particularly well to her compositional aims. This serendipity embraced both what Martha Mockus has described as “lesbian musicality,” or overtly “conceptualizing the relationship between sexuality and composition” (2008:9), as well as the subtler playfulness of aleatoric performativity, an indeterminate compositional approach that, especially in Oliveros’s hands, maintains a poignant if less explicit element of queerness in its subversion of a composerly will-​to-​control. While the idea of serendipity has a long and complicated history, Oliveros’s answer resonates with recent theories about decentering willful forms of forging “success” without necessarily giving up hope for a better, more emancipatory future. Jack Halberstam has called for a less intentionalist mode of queer thought and activism, instead embracing a “queer art of failure.” Halberstam

On Serendipity  381 writes, “Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again’ ” (Halberstam 2011:3). For Halberstam, failure is rewarding in escaping “the punishing norms” of disciplining behavior, preserving “the wondrous anarchy of childhood,” and generally disturbing “clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers.” It stands as a salient remedy for the “toxic positivity of contemporary life” (2011:3). Similarly, we might also see Oliveros’s compositional process and self-​analysis as embodying the kind of future-​oriented, performative indeterminacy that José Esteban Muñoz sees in queerness’s utopian streak, often manifested in aesthetic practices:  “The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-​dawning futurity. . . . Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (2009:1). For Muñoz, indeterminacy plays a critical role as “both affect and methodology” (3) in experiencing utopia not just as a (perhaps impossibly) distant future, but also as a quotidian sensory experience. In light of these theoretical interventions, how might a queer-​ inspired notion of serendipity and productive failing allow ethnomusicologists to recuperate pleasure and rethink the encounters of bodies in ethnographic research? How could ethnographers attune themselves in order to attend more fully to the indeterminate sensations of queer quotidian experience? Prompted by a serendipitous email exchange of my own (described in detail in the paragraphs that follow), I consider here the possibilities of a sensual ethnography as a way of reorienting ethnography to consider the importance of sonic pleasure in a more serious and sustained way, especially in response to an emerging consensus in sound studies and sensory ethnography that has (perhaps inadvertently) enshrined sound first and foremost as a site of knowledge (Feld 1996; Taylor 1996; Hahn 2007). In short, sound is knowing, and other functional (or non-​functional) modalities of sound are either irrelevant or of secondary value. Yet a more pleasurable encounter with the sonic has the potential to re-​ open these fledgling fields to its sensuality. Doing so is not simply a “failure” to know but rather an embrace of serendipity, quotidian indeterminacy, and queer spaces that cannot simply be reduced to knowledge. To suggest that music and sound should be considered in terms of pleasure is not altogether new—​it hardly even counts as a reminder, given the powerful articulations of music and sexuality by Suzanne Cusick in Queering the Pitch, as she provocatively asks, “What if music IS sex?” Arguing that sex is no longer (and for some, never was) bound to reproduction, but rather is “a means of negotiating power and intimacy through the circulation of pleasure,” Cusick shows how the space between the pleasures of music and sex begins to collapse: “What

382  Peter McMurray if hands are sex organs? Mine are. What if ears are sex organs? What if music-​ making is a form of sexuality in which (as in some other forms of sexuality) the sites of giving and receiving pleasure are separated?” (1994:78–​79). While such a model of listening does not preclude the kind of listening-​as-​knowing espoused by soundscapers and acoustemologists, it offers up a different agenda for anyone setting out to listen at all, but especially for those, like ethnographers, who endeavor to listen to Others—​to hear cultural difference, including sexuality and more. In the spirit of such a sensual ethnography, I explore here connections between serendipity and sensuality, after which I turn to two case studies of sensual ethnography from my own ethnographic research in transnational Berlin communities, including a monthly queer club night and a weekly Sufi ritual. In both instances, the possibility of listening, sounding, and responding to sound through dance or other bodily movement is not bound up principally with knowing, whether for participants or myself as ethnographer, though forms of knowledge are certainly in play. Rather, these spaces of intimate sonic encounter privilege the exploration of the serendipities of the sensual and call on participants to engage with that sensuality in direct, sustained ways.

Reorienting Serendipity Imagine a man running naked from a bathhouse through a city while crying out intensely. So begins the history of serendipity—​at least in one account. When Archimedes had his famous epiphany on mass and displacement as he stepped into a bath, he could not resist the impulse to streak (or maybe he simply could not be bothered to get dressed), and he ran around calling out, “Eureka!” Royston Roberts’s history of scientific serendipity (1989) begins with “Archimedes—​the First Streaker,” followed by a long succession of serendipitous scientists. For Roberts, serendipity is “the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for or ‘the faculty of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident’ (dictionary definitions)” (ix). He, like many other commentators on serendipity, traces its origins to eighteenth-​century correspondence between Horace Walpole and Horace Mann about a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip” (an old name for Sri Lanka). One of the oldest tellings of the Walpole-​ Mann correspondence comes from M. J. Rosenau in a 1934 presidential address to bacteriologists; Rosenau begins, “Nowadays, I suppose no one reads Horace Walpole. Sixteen volumes of his letters rest patiently on the shelves of the library. If you pick up Volume II and turn to page 204, you will find one of his chatty letters to Horace Mann, in which he playfully boasts that he has a talisman by which he can find anything he wants by dipping for it. Then he tells how he discovered in an old book on Venetian arms the origin of the badge at the top of the Medici

On Serendipity  383 coat-​of-​arms” (1935:91). Rosenau then relates the following excerpt from a letter dated January 28, 1754: This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called “The Princes of Serendip;” and as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—​now do you understand Serendipity? (Rosenau 1935:91)

Rosenau, like Roberts, focuses on serendipity as a lens for telling the history of science—​or more precisely, of scientific discovery, which for him begins with Christopher Columbus. I will return shortly to the colonial politics built into the term, but not before recounting a sound-​centric moment in Rosenau’s history. “One of the best examples of scientific Serendipity,” he continues, “is the discovery, often told to me, by Emile Berliner of the principle of the microphone and telephone transmitter” (1935:94). Like my serendipitous encounter with Pauline Oliveros, the story emphasizes the unexpected merits of conversations on hot summer days: He was chatting with a telegraph operator at a fire station in Washington on a hot, trying day. The telegraph key was clicking dots and dashes, when the operator casually remarked, “That’s Jim on the other end. I can tell by the touch. A light pressure causes a different click from a firm pressure.” Berliner, who had been working on electric circuits, went home to his garret laboratory and worked out the principle of loose contact. (1935:94)

Here, Rosenau stresses the ways that audible touch was knowable. That’s Jim on the other end. And yet underlying this epistemological stance is a more basic affective engagement between body, telegraph machinery, and the electric current that transmits its signal. Such are the fruits of hot, trying days. This idea of a multi-​or cross-​sensory form of engagement with the world will figure prominently in the discussion that follows. Returning to the origins of serendipity, Robert King Merton and Elinor Barber point out both the Orientalizing and the quirky nature of Walpole’s reading. After laying out the initial circumstances of his correspondence with Mann, they write: “But all this tells us nothing of how it was that Horace Walpole, living in England, in the year 1754 came to merge these particular ingredients

384  Peter McMurray to fill a minute space in the English language by creating this strange new word, serendipity” (2006:4–​5). It would appear to be meta-​serendipity, pulled between broader cultural currents and Walpole’s own idiosyncrasies:  “From all indications, this [his invention of the word in the letter] was the result of two unrelated sets of circumstances: One is the great efflorescence of interest in the Orient in the eighteenth century; the other, Walpole’s idiosyncratic propensities, which he brought to the reading of the tale of the three princes of Serendip” (5). In elaborating on those idiosyncrasies, they describe him as a social deviant, explaining: “His sensitivity and timidity, his almost effeminate withdrawal from the social and intellectual rough-​and-​tumble of the time, might have made of him only an ineffectual and ridiculous eccentric had he not also had the unusual strength to turn his weaknesses into virtues” (7). In short, Walpole’s very word “serendipity” acts much like the word and concept of queerness, tugged between a troubled racial history and a kind of emancipatory affect.1

Sensual Ethnography In July 2014, a colleague wrote to ask me to review a new album of sound compositions and location recordings from the Middle East. Among other things, he noted that this album would resonate well with my interests in “sensual ethnography” and sound studies, noting my involvement with Sensate: A Journal of Critical Media Experiments and work I had done at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Both of these activities grew out of the broader project within a domain of anthropology that has branded itself as “sensory ethnography,” itself a kind of refashioning of visual anthropology. Like visual anthropology, sensory ethnography emphasizes aesthetic craft within the ethnographic process, with interest in experimental narrative forms and non-​visual media compositions as well. The timing was auspicious: I had just completed a 48-​minute, 16-​channel sound piece, God Hears Those Who Praise Him, based on location recordings from several Islamic congregations in Turkish Berlin. The piece was a companion to my recently completed dissertation on those same communities, and it challenged me to confront the possibilities and constraints of sound composition as an act of ethnography. But of course, this colleague had not actually asked about sensory ethnography—​ he had asked about sensual ethnography. In subsequent conversations (in person and by email) it became clear that he indeed meant sensory ethnography. And yet, I found his email—​or more precisely, the typo 1 For more on the history and queerness of the concept of “queer” itself, see Mel Y.  Chen (2012:57ff).

On Serendipity  385 in it—​weighing on my thinking in ways I consider serendipitous. In particular, it raised a question: What do we mean by “sensory” in sensory ethnography? The obvious answer, and one that circulates informally among colleagues I work with who self-​identify with sensory ethnography, is that ethnography in film or sound offers a way to circumvent the constraints of writing that made ethnography such a fraught social and political endeavor in the first place. In short, it was a solution to the “crisis of representation” in anthropology in the 1980s and ’90s, as articulated by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) and others. Roughly stated, that crisis was a critique of the ideology underpinning “thick description,” so prevalent a few years earlier, that suggested that careful, exhaustive, interpretive writing could give anthropologists the analytical tools necessary for ethnography. If thick description embraced the graphē in ethnography, the crisis of representation stood back with skepticism—​but still focused on writing. Because of this tenuous relationship with writing, the story goes, sensory ethnography then emerged as a way to create more equitable forms of representation in which the ethnographer played a less oppressively interpretive role. And yet does sensory ethnography really solve these problems of representation, or simply defer them? Certainly, observational documentary films or phonographic compositions have sometimes produced compelling pieces of ethnography that realign the relationships between anthropologist, “informant,” and reader/​viewer/​listener. But they have brought along with them an intellectual baggage that seems rooted in a much older form of anthropology, one which assures us that things and people and places are knowable, and that such knowledge is then the aim of ethnography. Some now-​classic pieces that make such claims of sensation-​as-​knowledge include Steven Feld’s work on acoustemology (1996, 2012), Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge (2007), and Lucien Taylor’s “Iconophobia” (1996), as well as work by Paul Stoller (2004) and Sarah Pink (2009), focusing on a more analytical kind of ethnography of (or rather, about) the sensuous and sensory. This broad claim was a useful bulwark against possible accusations of aestheticizing experience or effacing the political dimensions of cultural activity. For instance, in his extensive writings on the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Feld makes very clear that their sonic experience of place—​their acoustemology—​is not just a phenomenological encounter but also a form of knowledge. “I coined this new term,” he writes of acoustemology, “to join acoustics and epistemology, to argue for sound as a capacity to know and as a habit of knowing” (2012:xxvii). Sound for Feld is a site of knowledge and knowing. This gesture by Feld and others has been tremendously important in asserting the legitimacy of other non-​Western forms of cultural production, but by demanding that human experience with sound yield knowing/​knowledge, other kinds of encounters with sound have been largely pushed aside, especially sonic encounters of pleasure. Scholars of sound studies (which might be thought

386  Peter McMurray of as overlapping to some degree with sensory ethnography) have often similarly emphasized forms of sonic knowing (Bijsterveld 2014; Erlmann 2014; Ochoa Gautier 2014), striking an almost defensive posture relative to visual studies, as if to argue that the sonic can also produce knowledge, just like the visual. In both cases, a focus on knowing-​through-​sound reinscribes—​perhaps unintentionally—​the telos-​driven, goal-​oriented forms of academic knowledge production that have often buttressed a Cartesian, colonial-​friendly, heteronormative form of knowing the world at a particular distance—​not too close to be contaminated by the thing-​being-​known, but close enough to fit it into a scopic or otherwise sensory regime of modernity (Jay 1988). In other words, so long as sound is harnessed as a form of knowing (and only of knowing), it perpetuates those same problematic conditions of knowledge. A sensual ethnography, on the other hand, indulges sensation for its own sake. The body becomes a queer archive of pleasures—​past and present—​readily explored through failure, through rupture, through misalignment. For all the innovative contributions sound studies has made to music studies, it might be time to re-​evaluate the kinds of approaches that scholars of music studies have cultivated in recent years, especially with regards to the embrace of musical pleasure. Again, what if not just music, but all sound, is sex? Not only sex, or pleasure—​but also, not solely knowledge. If musicology can be “carnal,” as Elisabeth Le Guin (2006) has suggested, what might a carnal sound studies look, sound, and feel like? What about sensual ethnography? In hopes of beginning to answer such a question, let me put forward a few tentative focal points of a sensual ethnography. First, sensual ethnography attends carefully to pleasure, and also pain. These two categories’ relationship to knowledge is fraught, but neither category is reducible to knowledge, no matter how sensational it may be. (Perhaps it should be expected that Suzanne Cusick (2008) has also played a critical role in thinking about sound and pain in her work on American torture, euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation.”2) Second, the sensual often takes place at unusual proximities. Mel Y. Chen has written about animacies, or our notions of what possesses “lifeliness,” suggesting that such a notion can itself be queer, “work[ing] to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-​animal-​vegetable-​mineral with which it is associated” (2012:98). Queerness is a kind of “ ‘improper affiliation’. . . located outside of the heteronormative” (104). This blurring, as Chen notes, takes place, it takes space, it is located somewhere-​relative-​to-​something. From the vacuous notion of “soundscape” to a more focused, recent interest in presence, music and sound studies have struggled to articulate just how proximity—​whether between two people, 2 See also Sarah Coakley and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Pain and Its Transformations (2007), as well as William Cheng on “Pleasure’s Discontents” (2013).

On Serendipity  387 a human and an animal, a microphone and a loudspeaker—​affects sonic experience and vice-​versa. Third (though perhaps an outgrowth of the second), sensual ethnography would seek out intersections of sonic experience (both producing sound and hearing/​listening) with other senses, especially touching, smelling, and tasting. While sound studies has vociferously fought to attain equal footing with visual studies, it runs the risk of producing a default audiovisual stance—​ an audioscopic regime?—​in which the ethnographer stays arms-​length away from a person or phenomenon, but never so far that it moves out of visible and audible range. Fourth, if perhaps somewhat paradoxically, it would entail an embrace of surface and description. But by description, I do not mean here a return to Geertzian thick description, but something more akin to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s ravishing descriptions of athletic beauty (2006), more Pindar than standard academic prose. In a sense, Gumbrecht is simultaneously both caving to the pleasure of spectatorship—​a kind of haptic observation—​while also actively resisting the allure of interpretation, or at least of interpretation prior to savoring the pleasures and power of description.3 Such an ethnographic practice would neither preclude nor demand the use of writing. It might be “iconophobic” or iconophilic, soundscapey, or as silent as a PDF. It might draw on interviews, or on close listening, or on observations about communities and individuals which they may or may not agree with. Like any ethnographic method, it may be patently inappropriate in certain settings. Finally, it may be willful and well planned, but as Pauline Oliveros, Jack Halberstam, and my review-​seeking colleague have all demonstrated in different ways, a sensual ethnography most likely floats and twists serendipitously—​sometimes with, sometimes against the best-​laid ethnographic plans—​inhabiting the interstices of intuition, forethought, spontaneous performance (as ethnographer and as human being) in interaction with the world beyond the body—​but also always already slipping into and pervading the body. Again, a sensual ethnography is not devoid of knowing; it simply revels in the pleasures and pains of the world prior to indulging the pleasures of telling what it all means. As Rebecca Solnit has suggested, speaking in praise of Virginia Woolf, “the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation” (2014:88). And so with these assertions now out of the way, let me turn to a space of more nuance and ambiguity and 3 Gumbrecht’s language continuously veers toward a kind of affective excess emerging from surfaces. His writing evokes a notion of excess suggested by Mark Graham, who argues that “excessive or extravagant phenomena” are key tropes of the anthropology of queerness, including: “the indeterminate nature of matter, the litigious character of things, the unrepresentable fetish, the secretive commodity, the ambiguous and superfluous gift, nomadic smells, implicate value, repeat failures, the unheimlich in the everyday, and now the anthropologist’s body. Excessive phenomena are not recognizable by their scale—​size doesn’t matter—​but by their capacity to depart, to go beyond, to roam and wander off the beaten track” (2014:143).

388  Peter McMurray speculation—​namely, actual experiences I have had in the course of fieldwork-​ based research with Berlin’s diasporic communities, especially from Turkey, at the intersection of the queer, the serendipitous, and the sensual.

Example 1. Holding Hands in Gayhane I was surprised when he reached for my hand. It wasn’t the first time something of that sort had happened, but it had been a while. Years, I guess, as I think through it now. I simply wasn’t ready for it. As soon as our fingers clasped, I felt dryness, almost paper-​like, especially compared to the clammy sweatiness that had slowly distilled on my own fingers, mostly the result of holding an empty bottle of soda for too long. But before I had time to think more about his papery hands (or my not-​very-​papery ones) we had to negotiate what would happen next. I have to admit, in that moment, I was a little annoyed. It was going on 4:00 a.m., and I was more or less ready to leave the club, my friends having already gone home and my legs growing wearier with each beat. Beyond that, I felt like I had adopted a sufficiently antisocial posture to allow myself to dance, more or less alone, and simply soak in the scene. It was a moment of what some friends and I used to call “misanthropology.” And frankly, I had been enjoying it. But there we were, with a spate of decisions to make, all in a moment, all without any more discussion than a flick of the wrist and a hopeful aiming-​with-​ the-​eyes. Not expecting this encounter, I had no idea of where his body was, how he moved at the hips, who he had been dancing with before. I had noticed him with a group of four friends, one of whom had taken his shirt off a while—​maybe an hour?—​earlier. Now they were all looking on with big, laughy grins, which only exacerbated my own anxieties about what was supposed to happen next. Would we continue facing each other and simply dance holding hands? Would one of us turn? Which of us was leading? For a moment, my arm felt like a cog slipping against another, caught up in an uncertain holding pattern. Then—​and this entire encounter thus far probably lasted less than four beats of a standard-​ tempo house tune, so probably no more than a couple seconds—​he asserted himself quite definitively and, although he was several inches shorter than me, he raised his arm above my head and, haltingly, I spun under his arm and into his embrace. He laughed, and I could smell his sticky-​sweet breath. Within a moment, he then undid everything, spinning me back out to our original starting position, and I sensed we were done—​a four-​bar fling on the dance floor. But no, he pivoted hard toward me, pushed my hand up with his own, and assertively spun himself into my arms. Somehow, in that moment, my mind raced to an episode of Dancing with the Stars I had watched only a few days earlier, featuring Nyle DiMarco, a model and Deaf activist, who had

On Serendipity  389 danced blindfolded with his partner Peta Murgatroyd (Season 22, Week 9). With my eyes and ears, I still failed to manage this spin, and after a brief awkward laugh together, we simultaneously—​at last, coordinated!—​spun apart from one another. I leaned in toward him and asked (or yelled, really) what his name was. In German. He told me it was “Ahmad.” Our conversation got stuck there as I asked a couple other questions, first in German, then English, to no avail. He only responded, “Refugee!” I asked him in my own tentative Arabic where he was from, and he said, “Syria.” At that point, he nudged away from me and slinked back into the safety of his group of friends. Over the years, my usual routine at Gayhane—​a name riffing on the Turkish meyhane nightclub—​where this encounter with Ahmad happened, entailed convincing friends (who were interested but not otherwise planning on coming along) to join me, at least for a couple hours. Oftentimes those friends had friends there, other times we made friends there—​and sometimes we just kept to ourselves. I had first gone there exactly five years earlier, in May 2011, during a preliminary research trip, shortly before my daughter was born. When I first began my research, and before it drifted toward and narrowed in on the Islamic acoustics of Turkish Berlin, I had cast my ethnographic net wide. As such, I thought club events might figure prominently in my project, including Gayhane, held monthly at the famed SO36 nightclub in the Kreuzberg district, as well as events around the corner at Südblock, described by the German queer news site Queerio as follows: “The audience is colorful—​from longtime residents of Kreuzberg to international partygoers—​with a high queer-​ratio [Queer-​Anteil] but without really being an exclusively queer venue [Queer-​Location].”4 Gayhane, for its part, has become a venerable institution within Berlin’s nightlife as well as, according to one friend and former-​regular, “a gay tourist trap.” The SO36 website frames the event in terms of its connection to Turkish folk dance: “House of Halay for lesbians and gays. Belly Gogos, a midnight show and a Homo-​Oriental dancefloor from DJane Ipek and guest DJs. People stream in colorful masses to the monthly belly-​dance event with beats. . . . For 16 years now, lesbians, gays, trans people and their friends gather on the Homo-​Oriental dancefloor, which DJs Ipek, mikki_​p, Khandan and Ceto get moving with Turkish, Arab, as well as Greek and Hebrew [hebräischer] pop music.”5 In the ensuing years, I continued to go whenever I was living in or visiting Berlin, sometimes planning trips around the monthly event even after it became clear I would not be discussing it in my dissertation or (most likely) the resulting book. The event warrants its own much closer study, ranging from the music played to the ways social identities are crafted (or re-​crafted) on the dance floor,

4 5

http://​queerio.de/​lieblingsorte-​suedblock/​, accessed May 28, 2016. http://​so36.de/​regulars/​gayhane/​, accessed May 28, 2016.

390  Peter McMurray from the costumes of the performers (with mikki_​p typically donning a fez and male belly dancer Zadiel Sasmaz wearing just a pair of low-​cut, sequined pants) to the outside activist organizations supported by/​in solidarity with the event.6 The event poses a veritable goldmine of questions about intersectionality and identity; various kinds of gazes (is there an aural equivalent of a gaze?), including my own; Berlin’s relationship with immigrants; and so on. In short, the event is ripe for a queer acoustemological project—​about knowing and performing queerness through sound and vice versa. But what about a sensual ethnography? First, as I sit here writing this in the early morning hours, I hear a ringing in my ears—​and the first birds of morning outside my window. I don’t know if it’s still lingering from Gayhane a few nights ago, or if it’s simply the slow, steady march of hearing loss and tinnitus. But it feels very similar to what I feel every time I leave Gayhane (or other dance clubs, but they figure less and less in my research routines). My ears serve as a kind of recursive archive that strangely and unexpectedly draws me back to the light, an almost feather-​weight sensation of walking out of a club after sunrise and hearing those same birds in counterpoint with the same high-​pitched drone. The ringing also makes me sad—​it makes me wonder what my conversations in clubs might have been like with Ahmad and others were I able to hear better. I free associate, thinking of a gay and lesbian House of Halay as a kind of distant cousin of Marina Abramović’s media installation Balkan Erotic Epic (2005), with its sensual, homosocial imagery built on a foundation of traditional dance and ritual. More to the point, I think of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s interest in texture in her landmark book Touching Feeling (2003). In her discussion of Henry James and his “intense fecal interest,” she points out that “to perceive texture is never to ask or know What is it like? Nor even just How does it impinge on me? Textural perception always explores two other questions as well: How did it get that way? and What could I do with it?” (13). Texture quickly becomes a multisensory site that engages with questions of epistemology, but more typically tends toward phenomenology and affect, and especially the “particular intimacy that seems to subsist between textures and emotions” (17). That intimacy, I would suggest, is not just between people and things—​how does it impinge on me—​but also between people and people, between dry hands and sweaty palms, between ringing ears and the parched post-​sugar-​beverage film on my tongue and lips as I smile at Ahmad and his friends. As he twists under my arm or vice versa, we impinge on each other: texturally, bodily, touching-​feelingly, sonically.

6 As of this writing, no extended treatment of Gayhane exists in academic literature or the popular press, though it makes frequent, if limited appearances in discussions on queerness, race, and music in Berlin. See Petzen (2004:25–​27); Bridges (2005:231–​33); Kosnick (2005, 2007:65–​69); Kulish (2008); and Hildebrandt (2014).

On Serendipity  391

Example 2. Smelling God’s Names In all truthfulness, Gayhane only vaguely reminds me of Marina Abramović’s performance art. But it absolutely reminds me of the multisensory intimacies of shared corporeal space in Sufi zikrs. That association is part interpretive, part ethnographic, and part serendipitous. Mostly it’s my interpretation—​I have rarely heard anyone in the Sufi communities I work in suggest such a connection without my prompting. But some have, including a music teacher who used to talk about certain Alevi ceremonies (which are not universally regarded as having any connection to Sufism) as culminating in “entering a trance” (transa girmek). In addition, the ethnographic reading of this situation stems from the banalities of scheduling. When in Berlin, my regular Friday night activity has been and remains attending the weekly zikr of a small congregation, or zaviye, of Halveti-​Cerrahi (pronounced “Jerrahi”) dervishes in the district of Wedding.7 Schedules vary, but a typical night with them begins around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. and often does not end until 4:00 a.m., with extended sohbet conversations with the baba who leads the order and a zikr that typically runs about an hour, rarely starting before 11:30 p.m. This leads me to the serendipity of this pairing. After moving to Berlin for an extended period in late 2011, I attended my first zikr with Sheikh Abdullah Halis, who was also formerly associated with the Halveti-​Cerrahi order, at a Tai Chi Studio in the district of Schöneberg, only to then race over to SO36 in order to meet up with friends for Gayhane. But I aspired to continue yet further, staying there all night until the early morning prayers (at that time of year, around 6:00 a.m.), which included a special zikr-​like recitation just around the block from the club at the Mevlana mosque. Ultimately, I was too tired to make it through the entire combination, and I also had been discouraged from going directly from a club to prayers, even if I had not been drinking or doing anything else that would technically prohibit my participation. (To make matters worse, I also received a phone call while at Gayhane informing me that my daughter was seriously ill. Or at least that’s what I rightly surmised at the time, but I once again had a hard time finding a place that was quiet enough I could hear, and with decent cellular reception.) The date was January 28, 2012—​bleeding into January 29. In calling this night serendipitous, I mean not that it was a surprisingly auspicious moment that led to a Eureka! moment. There was certainly some of that, as I was confronted by what I perceived then and now in both groups as strikingly similar forms of bodily movement, driving sonic pulses, powerful and extended repetitions, communal intimacy and a homosocial erotics that cut across



7

For more on the Halveti-​Cerrahi order, see Yola (1982) and Özdamar (1997).

392  Peter McMurray the senses. But it was also a terrible stomach-​punch in which my own worst fears as an ethnographer were initially allayed by a “successful” first visit to Abdullah Halis’s zikr and subsequent arrival with friends for Gayhane, only to realize that my plans for the year were about to be profoundly overturned because of family health issues. Here was ethnographic pleasure and pain, back-​to-​back in a way that set into motion a string of poor choices and a spate of failures—​in research, interpersonal relations, and health—​in (what felt like) excruciating circumstances. These were not failures that then or now feel like queer successes, or anything that could be construed as such. But since the first time I  read Halberstam’s book, published shortly before I moved to Berlin (Fall 2011), I have held out hope that there may be some more queerly positive outcomes from what still today feel like abject failures—​that it might become “a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique. As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed, failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities” (2011:88). Or perhaps this was precisely the kind of creation of queer affect “which disrupts, momentarily, the fortification of the white hetero male body and opens it up to other forms of desire” (66). Whatever the case, this extended crisis (from my own otherwise “fortified” vantage) pushed me closer to the Cerrahi Sufi order as a point of consistency in an otherwise turbulent time. That search for intimacy, understood broadly, found quick reciprocation in their bodily and sonic practices. During their sohbet conversations—​derived from the Arabic root ṣ-​ḥ-​b, or friendship, and often called instead muhabbet, from the root ḥ-​b-​b, or love—​dervishes sat mostly silent while the baba who led the group held forth in response to questions. According to the rules of adab (or formalized etiquette), they were directed not to speak to one another in his presence. This verbal proscription, however, opened up other avenues for expressing love and affection for one another, through knowing smiles, winks, and looks, perhaps accompanied by quick bodily gestures (for example, placing the right hand over the heart and slightly bowing the head). Everyone sat on the floor around the perimeter of the room, making these kinds of expressions quite effective across the room. But whenever I would sit down, I found myself immediately being touched as a silent way of expressing welcome—​often with no visual acknowledgment—​from the dervishes on either side of me. They would squeeze my thigh or rub my back, or sometimes simply lean on my shoulder. In each case, these actions often extended from a single gesture (such as a thigh-​squeeze) to a longer-​term posture, as a dervish might sit with his hand on my thigh for several minutes. These gestures were both a huge relief and somewhat unsettling: on the one hand, they gave me reassurance every time I entered the group’s zaviye that I was a welcomed guest and, if

On Serendipity  393 not part of their community, at least I was not an intrusive nuisance—​I think. At the same time, they were unsettling not because they violated my personal space (though they did so, at least according to the norms of social spaces I typically inhabited), but because they made so clear that the physical terms of engagement were not and could never be fully commensurate across the cultural divide that separated their working-​class Turkish, Kurdish, and Laz bodies from my own academicized, white-​American body. I might be able to learn and even roughly replicate the social scripts that guided behavior there, but our bodies inhabited stubbornly different spaces nonetheless. Still, these hours-​long conversations with a friend draped on my shoulder or rubbing my back for long stretches heightened my sensitivities to the kinds of shared bodily practices that inhabited that mostly homosocial space, many of which emerged most powerfully in the zikr ceremonies. Zikr is usually translated as “remembrance” or “recitation of the names of God,” but it also entails distinct body positions during those recitations, including some which are designed to refine the body. In other words, they’re really painful. For example, part of the code of adab is to kneel/​sit on one’s feet when in the presence of the sheikh. This unsurprisingly limits circulation in the legs and feet, causing dervishes to lean forward at specified times in the ceremony and kick their feet together to get blood flowing, if only for a moment. On more than one occasion, the entire hour-​long zikr was spent in this posture (rather than standing up partway through), including one Thursday evening in April 2012 at the order’s main center in Istanbul, in which the sheikh, Tuğrul Efendi, decided to commemorate the passing of an earlier sheikh by having his dervishes remain seated throughout. From my small plot of carpet at the far back of the room, I found myself in tremendous pain because I was so tightly packed into the room with other participants that I could not even lean forward to relieve the weight on my feet and hit them together. Instead, all of us in my part of the room had to pull on the shoulders of the people immediately in front of us in order to kneel upright and lean forward enough to re-​establish blood flow. All the while, we were reciting names and attributes of God with very particular vocal timbres and rhythms, as directed by the sheikh. Mastering this pain, I would later be told repeatedly, was no accidental byproduct of the ritual procedure, but rather a central aspect of it, in which bodily sensation was brought into dialogue with this “recitation of names” or “remembrance.” To remember or recite was also to feel (or cease to feel) the usual physical markers of bodily function. But most days, after the opening portions of the zikr came the devran, or circular turning. Here the kind of touching-​feeling-​soundings were even more overt, as dervishes (and myself as a participant) would stand and hold hands to begin, then move hands to one another’s shoulders, ultimately culminating in a group formation called the Bedevi topu, a kind of snaking circle of dervishes with

394  Peter McMurray arms around one another that collapses on itself. Once everyone had packed closely together, with the sheikh at the center, dervishes put their hands on one another’s backs and began bouncing actively up and down. Several people told me that one of the key purposes of this moment was to feel the heartbeat of the person in front of you. But from my experience, the most palpable sensation in those moments was that of touching sweat, or rather, sweaty shirts. Not only could I feel the momentary state of the heart (at least in theory—​I found it difficult to feel that with much clarity given how much everyone was moving), but I could feel the recent history of my neighboring dervishes’ bodies soaked up in the fibers of their shirts. Furthermore, sweat was not merely a byproduct of this ritual process, but also a sign of its efficacy. One evening after zikr, I was asking İsmail baba (literally meaning “father,” but here a Sufi leader like a sheikh) about the confluence of senses in the zikr—​the powerful smell of burning incense, the recitations and religious songs, the taste of tea and fruit/​sweets that followed, and above all, the touching of/​by neighboring dervishes. He responded, telling a dervish I’ll call “Mehmet,” “Go and get someone’s shirt.” (Most of the dervishes changed shirts after the zikr ceremony.) Mehmet did so and brought it into the room and was then told to give it to me to smell. I took a quick whiff and smiled and nodded, unsure what was supposed to be happening. I was then asked again, “Does the shirt stink?” I said no, which I meant. It did smell like fresh sweat that, once dried, probably would stink. But İsmail baba was not satisfied, and asked Mehmet to push the shirt into my face so I could get a deep, intimate sense of its smell. After I once again affirmed its non-​stink status, he explained that there was a tradition that the sweat of a pious dervish would not smell bad after zikr. He then continued to explain how different recited names have different flavors on the tongue—​that zikr is something that is tasteable and smellable. Over the years that followed, I had many more experiences with these multisensory interfaces, as well as other more informal intimacies on group trips to Turkey:  sleeping next to other dervishes, listening to them snore; watching dervishes give each other extended back massages while in a warm spring; and yet being repulsed by French tourists at the same resort who failed to use changing cabins while putting on swim clothes. Based on vague, veiled conversations with dervishes (and statistical probability), I suspect that several dervishes in this group are gay but not out.8 But the kinds of erotically charged, homosocial intimacies that predominate the group’s 8 One Muslim friend who is out and who has spent time in Sufi rituals read an earlier draft of this article. Interestingly, he responded that while he agreed zikr was an intimate practice, he felt there was greater intimacy still in the particular arrangement of bodies in more traditional prayers (standing in rows with arms lightly touching with prostrations fostering proximity with the person one row forward and one row back).

On Serendipity  395 activities already have a queer flavor (and smell and touch) to them, independent of overt sexual orientation. While divine entities—​God, angels, the spirits of the deceased—​may not be the usual focus of theories of animacy (Chen 2012), these dervishes’ encounter with such entities through sonically rich acts like zikr creates a space of sensuality and blurred, liminal bodily states. But my serendipitous transit from a zikr to Gayhane suggested a powerfully connective, racially inflected queer moment (even if it would probably not be regarded as such by the dervishes involved) in which their religious, multisensory articulations of animacy resist the presumed forms of success. They may be failing in the eyes of the German government at “successfully integrating”—​though this attitude by German politicians has shifted dramatically since the mass arrival of Syrian refugees, suggesting a complex set of racial attitudes. Ultimately this dislocated, counterpublic modernity is perhaps suggestive not just of a general “queer art of failure” but also of a more specific queer of color form of that same art.

Conclusion: Beethoven Goes to Gayhane? To conclude, I return to Pauline Oliveros. As part of a 1970s “postcard theatre” collaboration with artist Alison Knowles, Oliveros dressed up (roughly) as Beethoven and posed in a garden for a photograph, which she then captioned, “Beethoven was a lesbian.” On some level, these postcards are most impressive in their dramatic interpretation of history—​with one short phrase, Oliveros queers the canon. But once again, they can be understood as something entirely more sensual than just a hermeneutic leap (which is not to say that such a leap in this case is not pleasurable!). More dramatically, Oliveros’s queering of Beethoven embraces the pleasures his music afforded—​pleasures that were too decadent for both the European avant-​garde (that is, Stockhausen and Boulez) and American experimentalists like John Cage (Mockus 2008:78).9 She thought of the idea as primarily humorous: “Beethoven was a lesbian . . . let’s twist this thing around! If we’re out of the camp, then let’s turn it around. I mean, who’s going to prove that he wasn’t? . . . You know, if we don’t have any ‘great women composers’ let’s make sure they weren’t passing as men” (in Mockus 2008:77). What if Beethoven was not just a lesbian, but a lesbian dervish? (Perhaps he would have been Bektashi too, given his Turkish March, ostensibly based on Ottoman janissary music.) Similarly, just a week before my encounter with Ahmad at Gayhane, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra presented a concert program, “Bye Bye Beethoven,” ostensibly because “Classical music is like a ship, 9 By posing as Beethoven, Oliveros is not merely re-​interpreting Beethoven; she is also emphatically (if subtly) inscribing herself within Western art music, as well.

396  Peter McMurray where everyone stands at the stern and looks at how beautiful things are where we came from. But no one dares go to the bow and see what will come next.”10 But doesn’t this just prove that Beethoven and Oliveros, with her now-​canonic Bye Bye Butterfly, are indeed on the same wavelength? (And if Kopatchinskaja freed him from classical music, he most likely would have been at Gayhane a few days later.) Serendipitous timing, indeed. And perhaps interpretation still holds sensual possibilities. Fittingly, Oliveros writes, “As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of release and change. In my performances throughout the world, I  try to transmit to the audience the way I  experience sound both when I hear it and when I play it. I call this way of experiencing sound ‘deep listening’ ” (in Mockus 2008:11). Maybe, then, sensual ethnography is just another name for the lesbian—​and more broadly queer—​musicalities of deep listening.



10

http://​www.mahlerchamber.com/​concerts/​tours/​17, accessed June 1, 2016.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number   Abakuá, 366 Alexander, Renée Jaqueline, 267–​68, Abdul Kahar, 211 269–​70,  271 ableism, 13–​14,  229–​30 Allen, Jafari, 190, 197, 365 Abramović, Marina, 390, 391 Allen, Matthew, 45–​46 Abu Lughod, Lila, 225, 244–​45 Allison, Anne, 335–​36n2 Abunda, Boy, 109–​10 alterity, 277–​78, 279–​80, 282–​83, 284–​85, 289–​ academia 90, 293–​94,  313–​14 teaching emphasized over research, 282–​83 Altman, Dennis, 180–​81n12 Academic Music Scholarship ambience (the) non-​Queer stance,  103–​4 term for Havana’s “gay scene,” 139 academic overuse of the term queer ambiguous sex hurts the word’s call to action, 327–​28 over voice-​chat,  309–​10 academy American Anthropological Association, 332 economic pressures that “straighten,” 217–​18 Statement on Ethics, 311–​12 acting American identity in Ireland, 217, 246, 248 topeng vs Western, 208 American Musicological Society, 312 Adler, Patricia, 336–​37, 346 Amico, Stephen, 124–​25, 126 Africa, 16, 56–​64, 124–​25, 268 Amira, John, 369 descendent in Panamá, 267–​69 Andersson, Muff, 63–​64 in Israeli cultural history, 353–​57 Andromeda, 286 African American music, 280 Anisensel, Aliénor, 120 Afrikaans popular music, see Zoid Anonymity, 316–​17, 335 Afro-​Cuban,  142–​43 of informants, 157f, 242, 254 diaspora, 373–​74n5 antirelational modes of queer analysis, 186 patriotism, 371 anti-​Semitism, 249–​50n27 Afro-​Cuban religion, 142–​43, 149, 366, 367, Appavoo, Rev. James Theophilus, 44, 45, 369, 372, 374, 379n5. See also Santería 46–​47,  50 Afro-​Hispanic choreography, 268 applicability of queer theory outside of modern Afro-​Nuyorican,  185–​86 contexts, 200 Afro-​Panamanian,  269–​70 appropriation Agawu, Kofi, 107–​8n2 ethnic cross-​dressing, 266 Aher, Abhina, 174–​75, 178f, 180f Arabic, 265, 388–​89, 392–​93 Ahmed, Sara, 9, 123–​25, 127–​28, 218n3, 219–​ Archimedes,  382–​83 20n5, 222–​23, 228, 231–​32 Arias, Arnulfo, 271 AIDS, 40, 176, 180–​81, 189–​90, 367–​68, 378 Archimedes,  271–​72 Alberti, Benjamin, 278, 280 Arias, Harmodio, 271 Alcoff, Linda, 324–​25 Armageddon,  278–​79 Alexander, Kathryn, 292, 296–​97, 302, 303, 305 Armstead, Cathleen, 102

430 Index Asia dissertations on, 228–​29 Asian jokes in video game spaces, 317 ask.fm, Rachel Bryk, 325 Ate, Henry, 57–​58 Atkinson, Paul, 335–​36 Attitude magazine, 160 Atwood, George, 35, 36 Augustine, 101 authenticity, 165, 170–​71. See also native ethnographer: authenticity vs. authority autoethnography,  294–​95 avoidance strategy “politics of silence,” 22–​23, 297–​98   Babiracki, Carol, 164–​65, 294, 301 Baez, Joan, 218–​19 Bailey, Marlon, 187 Bailey, Peter, 69 Bakalaki, Alexandra, 282–​83, 284–​85 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 324–​25n17, 365–​66 ballet, 76–​78, 80–​81, 142–​43, 145–​46, 147–​48,  170 ballroom, 108–​9, 187, 338–​39 Detroit, 187 Bangladesh, 163n1 Bangs, Lester, 278–​79 Barber, Elinor, 383–​84 Bar-​Yosef, Eitan, 354–​55n1 Barz, Gregory, 3–​4, 12, 19, 23–​24, 35–​36n9, 117–​18, 221–​22, 226–​27n13, 241n15, 335–​36n1,  336–​37 Bascom, William, 368 Batá, 149, 365–​66, 368, 371, 373, 378. See also Santería Battan, Carrie, 186, 189 Beaton, Margie, 296–​97 Beatty, Aidan, 249–​50n27 Beaudoin, Paul, 380 Beaudry, Nicole, 221–​22 Bederman, Gail, 270–​71 Bedouin, 242–​44n18 Beethoven,  395–​96 Béhague, Gerard, 268 Behar, Ruth, 35n6, 277, 361–​62 Beliso-​De Jesús, Aisha, 368, 373n5 Berger, Harris M., 123 Berlant, Lauren and Elizabeth Freeman, 9–​10 Berlant, Lauren and Lee Edelman, 61–​62 Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner, 245–​46 Berlin, 381–​82, 387–​88, 389–​90,  391–​92 Turkish, 384–​85, 389

Berliner, Emile, 383 Bernard, Russell, 335–​36 Bethman, Brenda, 226n12 Bhakti triangle, 45–​46 Biernacki, Patrick, 346 Big Freedia, 188 Bigenho, Michelle, 281 Bijsterveld, Karin, 385–​86 binaries, 9, 19–​20, 21, 114–​15, 121–​22, 210, 222,  250–​51 binaristic understanding of gender, 295–​96n1 bisexual, 353–​54, 357–​58, 361 “other bisexuality,” 354 bisexual ethnography contradiction in queer terms, 353 Black and queer in film, 165 Black feminism, 189–​90 blackface minstrelsy, 69, 78–​80 Blacking, John, 253–​55 Blackman, Shane J., 336–​37n1 Blackwood, Evelyn, 110n12, 111, 209–​10, 303–​4 Blanco, Mykki, 185–​86, 188, 190–​91, 192, 195, 196, 197 Bles, Geoffrey, 235n1 body of the ethnographer, 109, 110 Boellstorff, Tom, 198, 200, 209, 214, 215, 290, 313–14 bogeyman in the gay community black males, 193 Bohlman, Philip, 249–​50n26, 254n33 bolero, 142–​43,  148–​49 Bollywood, 38–​39n14, 40, 41 Bolton, Ralph, 158 Bonilla, Yarimar, 345–​46 Bonovitz, Christopher, 35, 36 Borisa, Dhiren, 47 Boulez, Pierre, 395–​96 Boulton, Laura, 95 Bourdieu, Pierre, 108–​9n6 boyd, danah M., 345–​46 Boyd, Nan, 10–​11 Brabon, Benjamin A., 11n1 Brahmanic practice, 42 Brahms, Johannes, 107n2 Brandes, Edda, 95 Bratton, J. S., 69 Brazil,  149–​50 gay tourism, 344 Breathnach, Breandán, 249n25, 249–​50 Brett, Philip, 7, 8–​9, 18, 353 Bridges, Elizabeth, 389–​90n6 Brison, Susan, 323–​24, 324–​25n18, 325n21 Browman, David L. 316–​17

Index  431 Bryk, Rachel, 325–​28, 328f, 332 Buckland, Fiona, 124–​25, 242–​44n18, 252–​53n30 Buckland, Theresa, 335–​36n1 Buckley, William F., 13 Buddhist, 199 Bullough, Vern, and Bullough, Bonnie, 198, 203 Bunzl, Matti, 283, 289–​90 burlesque, 69, 76–​81, 85 modern, 95 Burnim, Mellonee, 125–​26 Burt, Ramsay, 252–​53n30 Büscher, Monika, 335–​36n2 Bush, Billy, 319–​20 butch, 31, 37–​38, 49, 110n12, 111n15, 111–​13, 114, 187, 190, 288, 358 butch-​femme pairing, 111n15, 190 in the Philippines, 112–​13, 114 Butler, Jean, 250–​51 Butler, Judith, 18, 20–​21, 32, 107–​8n3, 145–​46, 208–​9, 278–​79,  323–​24 Byron, Lord, Mazeppa, 75–​76   Cabezas, Amalia, 373–​74n7 Cabrera, Lydia, 150–​51 Cage, John, 395–​96 Cahnmann-​Taylor, Melisa, 118–​19n28 Camp, 147–​49, 152, 159, 194, 195, 304–​5, 356, 372 candomblé,  149–​50 Cannon, Alexander, 97–​98, 120–​21, 134,  135–​36 Cantor, Libay, 114 Cape Breton Island, 291–​305 capitalism/​capitalist, 180–​81, 224, 228, 250–​51n28 Caplan, Ronald, 157–​58, 304–​5 Caribbean African, 268 Caribbean, 268, 270, 354–​55 carnivalesque, 310, 365, 366 Carpenter, Karen, 358 Carr, C. Lynn, 377–​78n9 Cartesian,  385–​86 caste, 32–​33, 34, 37, 38–​39, 41, 42, 43–​44, 47, 49,  50–​51 Castelo-​Branco, Salwa El-​Shawan, 311–​12n5 Castro, Fidel, 147–​48n7, 372 Cavarero, Adriana, 324–​25n17 cell phones, recording, 153–​54, 244–​45, 347–​49 Celtic, 292–​93, 301–​2, 305 implicit whiteness, 294 chain-​referral sampling, see snowball sampling Chalant, Nona, 7–​8

Chari, Sharad, 311–​12n5 Charice (Jake Zyrus), 109–​10 Chasalow, Eric, 380 Chauncey, George, 278–​79 Chen, Mel Y., 383–​84n1, 386–​87, 394–​95 Cheng, William, 12, 19, 22, 97–​98, 309, 312,  322–​23 Chomsky, Noam, 278–​79 choreology,  235–​36 Christian, Barbara, 258–​59, 332 Citron, Danielle Keats, 319–​20 Cixous, Hélène, 354 Clark, Robert, and Claire Sponsler, 264, 265–​66 classical music, 57–​58, 219, 238–​39, 395–​96 Beethoven,  395–​96 Clifford, James, 35n6, 246–​47n22, 335–​36n1, 336–​37,  384–​85 Clinton, Bill, 193 closet, 9, 15, 31, 39–​40, 43–​44, 47, 50–​51, 57, 60–​61, 66, 103, 104, 109, 114–​16, 124–​25, 157, 163, 218n3, 229, 230–​31, 235–​36n1, 240, 246, 247, 250–​51, 255, 256, 285–​86, 301, 309–​10, 317–​18, 376 Coakley, Sarah, 386–​87n2 Coding/​decoding data, 151–​52,  153–​54 Cohen, Cathy, 189–​90 Cohen, Jeffrey J., 269–​70 Cold War, 137 Collins, Hattie, 185, 188, 189 Colombia, 269, 270 colonialism/​colonialist, 36, 38, 128, 163n2, 164–​65, 167–​68, 182–​83, 199, 224, 268, 269, 284, 370, 383. See also Western ideology coming out, 47, 50, 110, 111–​13, 115–​16, 117, 118–​19n29, 122, 168, 172, 173, 179–​80, 256, 278–​79, 316–​17, 376. See also closet “out of the tumbler,” Irish saying, 238–​39n9 Communist drag shows, 146–​47 complexity theory, 149–​50 Morin, Edgar, 149–​50 Conaway, Mary Ellen, 12 Connell, R. W., 318–​19n11 Conner, Randy P., 149–​51 Connor, Steven, 321–​22 Conquergood, Dwight, 101, 164–​65n3, 317–​18 consent, 59, 239–​40, 241n15, 242, 348–​49 recording informants under the influence,  338–​39 constitutionally equal rights to marriage, 250–​51n29 Ireland,  237–​38 Cooley, Timothy J., 35–​36n9, 221–​22, 335–​36n1

432 Index Cornelius, Stephen, 369 covering, 104–​5,  117–​18 in the academy, 103–​4 as assimilation in fieldwork, 102–​3 Crane, Susan, 264 Craven, Christa, 311–​12n5 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 251n20 Creole, 76n5, 268–​69 crip theory, 252–​53n32 Crisp, Quentin, 380–​81 Croft, Clare, 10 Cross, Ian and Iain Morley, 106 cross-​dressing, 69, 83–​84, 141, 198–​99, 200, 368 drag,  145–​46 female to male, 67, 75–​78 (see male impersonation) Indonesia, 208, 210, 214, 215–​16 male to female, 70–​71 transgender performance, 198 Panamanian folk performance, 261–​68 Cuba, see Chapter 9 and 21 cultural transference, 31, 34–​37, 41–​42, 50–​52 Cushman, Charlotte, 75–​76, 83 Cusick, Suzanne, 54–​55n1, 62–​63, 69, 117–​18, 218–​19n4, 220–​21n8, 227, 353, 381–​82,  386–​87 cyberbullying, 326, see online trolling   Da Killa, Cakes, 185–​86, 187–​88, 190–​91, 193–​94,  197 dalang, 198–​99, 200–​1, 203, 204, 207–​14, 215–​16. See also topeng Dalit, 31–​49,  50–​51 Daly, Mary, 278–​79 Damarwulan, 200–​1, 203 dance a lens to queer tradition, 303–​4 Dancecult difficulties with nightlife fieldwork, 337 Dancing with the Stars,  388–​89 Darden, Ebro, 189 Das, Veena, 313n6 Dasgupta, Sudeep, 17 data collection, 37n10, 291, 343. See also recording Datta, Bishakha, 174 Daughtry, J. Martin, 321, 322, 324 Davis, Angela, 193 Davis, Dána-​Ain, 311–​12n5 Davis, Nick, 21 Davis, Tracy C., 73n4 Davison, Neil, 322–​23 de Certeau, Michel, 183

dedications, 96 Dee, Eddie, 146–​47 Dee, Ivan R., 69n1 Dee, Jonathan, 188, 189 Deep Dickollective, 188, 193 Defense of Marriage Act, 193 de Landa, Enrique Cámara, 64–​65 Delany, Samuel, 190–​91 de Lauretis, Teresa, 16, 17, 19 Dement, Iris and Gloria Rossen, 95 Dendabrata, Elang Yusuf, 207–​8n4, 211 Derrida, Jacques, 98, 99, 100 dervishes, 391, 392–​96 desire, 7, 8, 23, 38, 51–​52, 66, 106n1, 122, 128, 150, 158, 166, 198, 199–​200, 214, 215–​16, 219, 291, 336–​37, 340, 353–​54, 356–​57, 391–​92 Desmond, Jane, 252–​53n30 Detroit black queer culture, 187 Devereux, Georges, 57–​58n6 dialect local gay codes, 152 Diamond, Beverley, 19, 225, 297–​98, 301–​2 Dianteill, Erwan, 150–​51 Diaz, Robert, 111–​12 digital violence, 179–​80, 193, 270–​71, 296–​97, 310, 311–​13, 318–​19, 321–​23, 324, 325, 328–​29,  341 Dillane, Ailene, 236n5, 239–​40n13, 249–​50 DiMarco, Nyle, 388–​89 Dion, Celine, 109–​10 disability, 103, 339–​40 disidentification, 184n15, 185, 192, 218 diversity hires in universities, 229–​30n19 Dixon, Tasha reports about Donald Trump, 319–​20 Djuartika, Tuti, 212–​13n6 documentary filmmaking, 164–​65, 169–​70, 173–​74,  175 documenting fieldwork, 153. See also recording domesticating otherness, 128n4 Domínguez, Frank, 148 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, 193 Dor, George, 95 Dougherty, Conor, 313 Douglas, Mary, 280 Downing, Lisa, 21 Dowson, Thomas, 303–​4 drag, 20–​21, 104–​5, 142–​48, 153, 187, 257, 261–​63, 265, 266–​67, 287, 341–​42, 343, 345, 348–​49, 364, 365–​66, 367–​68, 370, 372–​73, 375, 376, 377, 379

Index  433 acceptable companions, 343 acceptance into, 343 civilian attire, 349 “colored queen,” 187 communist party events, 146–​47 drag shows distinct from queer nightlife,  348–​49 ethnic cross-​dressing, 264–​66,  267–​68 lesbian, harassment, 341–​42 safety, 341, 343 studio performance, 342 verbal, in online trolling, 321 Dubisch, Jill, 157–​58 Duggan, Lisa, 217–​18n1, 250–​51 Dumas, Alexandre, 76 Dutch, 199 colonialism in Indonesia, 210 slang for gay, 286 Dutta, Aniruddha, 163n2, 180–​81 Du Vere, Blanche, 84–​85   Edelman, Lee, 61–​62 egalitarian flirtation Swedish polska,  298–​99 electronic dance music, 337, 346–​47 Elegguá, 367, 371, 373, 378 Ellen DeGeneres,  109–​10 Ellingson, Ter, 64–​65 Ellis, Havelock, 289 Ellison, Nicole B., 345–​46 Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, 335–​36 emic and etic, 121–​22 Eminem,  188–​89 empathy and queer ethnographers, 101–​2, 104–​5,  157–​58 encapsulation as a mode of field existence, 152–​53 Eng, David, 369–​70 enhanced interrogation, 386–​87 Enlightenment voice opposed to violence, 322 ephemera, 183–​84n14 epistemology, 96, 109, 123, 252–​53n30, 259, 385, 390 texture, 390 equestrian dramas, 75–​76 erasure, 98. See also sous rature Erlmann, Veit, 385–​86 Errington, Shelly, 209–​10, 215 Espín, Mariela Castro, 370 espionage by anthropologists, 316–​17

ethical ethnography, 157, 236–​37, 284–​85, 310–​11,  328–​29 ethics, 8, 25–​26, 31–​32, 115, 239–​40, 241, 242–​44n18, 246, 254, 255–​56, 277–​78, 299, 310–​11, 311–​12n5, 327–​28, 332, 344, 350–​ 51, 361, 364, 369–​70 ethnocartography of homosexuality, 198 ethnocentrism, 260 ethnochoreology, 235–​36, 237–​38, 244–​45n20,  252–​54 history of queered scholarship, 252–​53 ethnographic truth, 169, 182–​83, 290, 353 Euben, Donna, 224–​25 Evans, Kristin, 335–​36n1 Ewanjé-​Epée, Félix Boggio, 180–​81 exoticism,  284–​85 exoticizing brown skin by homosexual elites, 199   Facebook, 55–​56, 187, 188, 244–​45, 345–​47 fieldwork networking, 346–​47 Rachel Bryk, 326 Faderman, Lillian, 38–​39n15, 45–​46n25 Fahrenthold, David A., 319–​20 failure, 106, 107–​8, 115, 121–​22, 182–​83, 184, 221–​22, 380–​81, 385–​86, 391–​92, 395–​96. See also queer art of failure Fairey, Shepard, 307n1 Farnell, Brenda, 260–​61, 266 far-​right,  229 fat theory, 252–​53n32 Feld, Steven, 126n2, 222, 381, 385–​86 Feld, Steven and Carroll Williams, 170 female impersonation, 69, 75, 372–​73 female impersonation in black minstrelsy, 69 feminist research as distinct from other social sciences, 102 Ferguson, Roderick, 189–​90, 193 fieldwork psychological harm in, 335, 338–​39, 356–​57 fiesta, 140–​41, 142–​45, 146–​47, 148, 153–​55,  159 Filipina/​o, 108–​9,  110 gender-​neutral third person pronoun,  112–​13 Filipino fatalism, 111 film as consummation, 171 independent queer film in India, 167–​68 queer hip hop music videos, 185–​86 filmmaking, see documentary filmmaking First Amendment, 322–​23. See also Middlebury College

434 Index Fischer, Michael M.J., 35n6 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 15 Flatley, Michael, 250–​51 Flores, Maríela Castro, 369 Flueckiger, Joyce, 38 Foley, Catherine, 203, 207–​8n3, 208, 212–​13n6, 213, 250–​51,  252–​53 folk evading complex gender politics, 298 folksingers activist,  218–​19 following role for women in traditional dance, 295–​96 Forrest, David, 373–​74n7 Foster, Stephen, 224 Foucault, Michel, 21, 22, 103–​4, 118, 212, 278–​79, 369, 381 regimes of normalization, 212, 215 Frankenstein’s monster, 288 a hybrid outsider, 284 Frazer, James George, 214–​15n7 Freeman, Elizabeth, 9–​10 Fretz, Rachel I., 335–​36 Freudian, 34n4 Fuchs, Barbara, 176–​77, 264–​65   Gaelic,  249–​50 Gaelic culture suppressed, 292 Gambino, Megan, 307n1 gamelan, 200–​1, 204–​5, 207, 209, 212 Gamergate, 326 games antinormative, 313–​14 (see video games) Garcia, David, 368 Garcia, J. Neil, 109n9, 110 Garcia, Luis-​Manuel, 335–​36n1, 337 Gareiss, Nic, 238–​39, 242–​44n18, 245, 247,  301–​2 Gaunt, Kyra, 280, 290 Gautier, Ana María Ochoa, 385–​86 gay rap, 185 gay sensibility transcultural,  143–​45 gaydar, 146, 152 Gayhane, 388–​92,  394–​96 gaze “Queer gaze,” suspicion, 13, 99, 100–​1, 263,  272–​73 “Queer veil,” 99 Geertz, Clifford, 142, 154, 246–​47n22, 355,  386–​87 Geller, Pamela, 303–​4, 306 gender hierarchical system, 302

gender and sexual identity five basic aspects, outlines, 295–​96n1 gender and sexuality distinction within queer theory, 376 gender confirmation surgery India, 163n2, 179 gender-​neutral third person pronoun, 111–​12 Genz, Stéphanie, 11n1 George, Richelle and Jason Okundaye, 195 George, Robert, 329 Gibsone, Harriet, 195 Giffney, Noreen, 248 Gilbert, Bethanie, 199–​200 Gilroy, Paul, 269 Global North, 364, 365, 369–​70, 373, 375, 379. See also Western ideology Goffman, Erving, 102–​3, 117–​18, 263–​64, 343 Goldin-​Perschbacher, Shana, 124–​25, 309–​10n3 Goldman, Ruth, 167–​68n5, 259 Goodman, Liz, 117–​18n27 Google, 99 Goris, Roelof, 199 Graham, Mark, 115–​16, 118, 386–​87n3 Grahn, Judy, 278–​79 Grau, Andrée, 253–​54 Grinberg, Ana, 264 Groesbeck, Rolf, 37–​38n12 Guevara, Che, 140, 159 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 386–​87 Gunkel, Henriette, 61–​62 Gurney, Joan Neff, 335–​36n2   Habermas, Jurgen, 34–​35n5 Hagedorn, Katherine, 122, 294 Hahn, Tomie, 114–​15n21, 381, 385 Halberstam, Jack/​Judith, 106, 121–​22, 182–​83, 242–​44, 294–​95, 307, 317–​18n10, 326, 363, 369–​70, 380–​81, 387,  391–​92 Hall, Michael, 310n4 Hall, Steve, 318–​19n11 Halley, Janet, 8 Halveti-​Cerrahi order, 391 Hammond, Nicol, 63–​64 Hankins, Sarah, 310–​11, 356 Hannerz, Ulf, 152–​53 harassment, 156–​57, 195, 309–​10, 314, 317–​20, 328–​29, 340, 341–​42, 371, 373. See also online trolling Harbert, Benjamin, 171 Harlem, 187 Harms, Erik, 130–​31 harms, to and by ethnographers, 311–​12, 335 Hast, Dorothea and Stanley Scott, 249n25 hate speech, 322–​24, 328–​29

Index  435 Havana, see Cuba Hawkins, Stan, 124–​25 Hayes, Eileen, 294 Heaney, Joe, 249 heavy metal, 257–​58, 259, 260–​62, 263, 264–​65 disrespected in academia, 288 Heidegger, Martin, 98 Hensley, Nicole, 195 hermaphrodite,  150–​51 Herndon, Marcia, 64–​65 Herr, Cheryl, 365 heteronormativity, 9, 21, 24–​25, 96, 97, 109–​10, 120, 182–​83, 185, 187, 188–​90, 192, 197, 200, 229–​30, 235–​36, 247–​48, 249, 251, 291–​92, 303–​4,  306 Hier, Sean, 338 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 192n4 hījṛā, 184, see Chapter 10 throughout Hildebrandt, Martin, 389–​90n6 Himmler, Heinrich, 15 Hindi, 179, 181 Hindle, Annie, 80–​81, 84–​87 Hindustani, 163n1, 168 hip hop, 185–​86, 188–​89, 192–​93, 194–​95,  196 hiring practices ethnomusicology,  228–​29 history of queer theory, 16–​20 HIV, 180–​81, 189–​90, 367–​68, 378 HIV/​AIDS NGO industrial complex, 180–​81 Hix, Lisa, 193 Hoad, Neville, 61–​62 Hodge, G. Derrick, 373–​74n7 Hodkinson, Paul, 335–​36n1 homoerotic tensions locker rooms, 321 homonormativity, 217–​18n1, 218n3, 229n17, 250–​51n19 “new homonormativity,” 266–​51 homophobia, 61, 185, 188, 192, 219, 238–​39, 245, 248, 252–​53n30, 321, 368, 372, 374 hip hop, 192–​93, 196 International Day Against, 371, 373 homosocial behavior, 32–​33, 34, 116–​17, 136, 310, 321, 344, 390, 391–​92, 393, 394–​95 Honigmann, John J., 335–​36 honorary male privilege, 42–​43 hooks, bell, 173, 242–​44n18 Houston, Whitney, 109–​10 Howell, William Deane, 76–​78n6 Hufford, Mary, 365 Hughes, Annie, 85–​86 Hunt, Geoffrey, 335–​36n1 Husserl, Edmund, 182–​83

Hyde, Douglas, 249–​50 hypermasculinity,  318–​19 hypervigilance by stigmatized groups, 341   identity through absence in text, 98 imperialism, 36, 57–​59, 61–​62, 180–​81, 224–​25, 246, 271 imposter syndrome, 115 India, see Chapters 3 and 10 Indiana Jones, 224 Indigo Girls, 219 Indonesia, see Chapter 12 intellectual queerness, 217 intersectionality, 111, 124–​25, 229–​30n20, 239–​40n10, 303–​4, 369–​70,  389–​90 invisibility, 61, 109, 113–​14, 130, 297–​98, 304 Invisible Goddesses, 170–​71, 173n7 Ireland, see Chapters 13 and 14 Islam, 49n29, 199, 207–​8, 209–​10, 210n5, 211, 213, 264–​65, 384–​85, 389. See also Sufi; Turkish; zikr Israel, see Rasta Club black identity in, 354–​55   Jackson Jr., John L., 121–​22, 165n4, 336–​37 Jackson, Peter, 180–​81n12 Jacobs-​Huey, Lanita, 284 Jagose, Annamarie, 19–​20, 215 Jain, Nishtha, 174 Jala, David, 292 James, Henry, 390 Japan, 114–​15n21 Japanese occupation of Indonesia, 213 Jarman-​Ivens, Freya, 107, 353 Jay, Martin, 385–​86 Jayasankar, K. P., 174n9 jazz, 193–​94,  279–​80 Jenner, Caitlyn, 326 Jewish, 76–​78, 220–​21n7 Jim Crow in the Panama Canal, 271 John Paul II, Pope, 239–​40n12 Johnson, E. Patrick, 164–​65n3, 174n10, 190, 249n24, 259–​60, 269, 301–​2 Jolly, Margaret, 166 Jones, Grace, 122 Jung, Eun-​Young,  345–​46 Juris, Jeffrey S., 345–​46 Jury, Brendan, 63–​64 justice (as opposed to truth), 329 Jyoti, Dhrubo, 47, 122   Kaczynski, Andrew, 319 Kalamka, Juba, 193

436 Index Kaluli, 221–​22, 385 Kaminsky, David, 299 Kang, Akhil, 37n11, 47 Karl Marx Theater, Havana, 371, 372–​73 Karnatak, 31, 32, 39–​40, 41, 42, 43–​44, 50–​51 Keith, B. F., 69 Kemp, Adriana and Rebecca Raijman, 354–​55n1 Kershaw, Baz, 335–​36n1 Khubchandani, Kareem, 167–​68 King, Diana, 358 King, Katie, 292 Kingsley, Omar, 70–​72 Kisliuk, Michelle, 36–​37, 122, 164, 173, 221–​22,  300–​1 Klosterman, Chuck, 278–​79 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 353 Koskoff, Ellen, 9, 19, 225, 297–​98 Kosnick, Kira, 381n6 Kovats-​Bernat, Christopher,  311–​12 Krell, Elías, 309–​10n3 Kristeva, Julia, 107–​8n4, 357–​58, 359, 362, 363 Kritzman-​Amir, Tally, 354–​55n1 Kulick, Don, 158, 301 Kulish, Nicholas, 395n6 Kyker, Jennifer, 389–​90n6   labor of reflexivity, 165 Lacan, Jacques, 357–​58, 362–​63 Lady Gaga, 288 Lamphere, Louise, 303–​4 Landes, Ruth, 149–​50 lang, k. d., 146 Lang, Nico, 188–​89 language barrier in fieldwork, 64–​65 Las Vegas, drag, 348–​49 Latino and queer in film, 176–​77 Latinx youth, 188 Le1f, 189 Le Breton, David, 335–​36n1 Le Guin, Elisabeth, 385–​86 Leap, Edward L., 336–​37 Leap, William L., 11–​12, 296–​97, 341 Leibetseder, Doris, 124–​25 Lennox, Annie, 18 lesbian musicality, 117–​18, 380 in the Philippines, 109, 110, 111–​12, 114, 115–​16n24 Lesbian Avengers, 220–​21n8 Leshkowich, Ann Marie, 130–​31 Leslie-​Santana, Matthew, 366

Lewin, Ellen and William L. Leap, 11–​12, 224n10, 296–​98, 303–​4, 336–​37, 341, 343 Lewis, C. S., 235–​36n1 Lewis, Lynette A. and Michael W. Ross, 151–​52,  154 liberation theology, 43–​44, 46, 47, 50 Dalit,  43–​44 Lim, Eng-​Beng, 199 Lindsay, Benjamin, 192 Lipton, Jacqueline D., 319–​20 locker room, 309, 318–​20, 321, 328–​29. See also online trolling #Pussygate,  319–​20 denial by athletes, 319–​20 Donald Trump, 319 Longstreet, C. Shaun, 226n12 Lorde, Audre, 54–​55n1, 226–​27n13 Los Angeles, black drag, 187 Louÿs, Pierre, 73n4 Love, Heather, 288 Lutz, Catherine, 224 Lyng, Stephen, 335–​36n1, 336–​37   MacDougall, David and Judith, 171 machismo, 372, 376, 378, 379 MacIsaac, Ashley, 304–​5 Madison, D. Soyini, 165, 247–​48, 317–​18 Madonna, 108n5 Magliani-​Belkacem, Stella,  180–​81 Mahabharata, 200–​1, 203 male impersonation, 67, 69, 75, 80–​81, 83–​84 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 157–​58, 289–​90 Mallarino-​Bidlack treaty, 270 Manderson, Lenore, 166 Mankowitz, Wolf, 76 Mann, Horace, 167–​68n5 Manning, Jimmie, 369–​70 Manuel, Peter, 268 Marcus, George E., 35n6, 335–​36n1, 336–​37,  384–​85 Marin, Malu, 111, 115–​16n24 marked as queer, 8, 99 stigma, 99 (see also unmarked) marketplace competition between sexual minorities,  189–​90 Markham, Annette N., 335–​36n1 Markowitz, Fran, 132 Marsh, Charity, 338 Massie, Chris, 319 Masunah, Juju, 212, 213 Matory, Lorand, 150–​51

Index  437 Maus, Fred Everett, 313–​14n8 Maxwell, Ian, 335–​36n1, 336–​37 Maynard, Kent, 118–​19n28 McClary, Susan, 108, 327–​28 McCune, Jeffery Q., 167 McDermott, Nate, 319 McKay, Ian, 298 McPhee, Colin, 129, 199 McPherson, Alan, 270–​71 Measham, Fiona and Karenza Moore, 335–​37 Mehta, Deepa, 38n13 Meiu, George Paul, 289 Melin, Mats, 299–​300, 301–​2 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 75–​76 Merriam, Alan, 123 Merton, Robert King, 383–​84 Mesiani, Zane Leo, 16 mestiza, 269, 271–​72 metaphysical themes Indonesian topeng,  207–​8 method (ethnographic), 101, 238–​39, 335–​36n1, 336–​37,  387 Meyer, Leonard, 113n19 Middle Ages, 264 clothing,  264–​66 Middle East, 229n18, 384 dissertations on, 228–​29 Middle Passage, 186–​87 Middlebury College, 311, 329, 330 Miller, Michael E., 325, 326, 326–​27n24 Miller, Toby, 229n17 mind/​body hierarchy, 101 misogyny in hip hop, 192–​93 Mitchell, Gregory, 124–​25 Mockus, Martha, 380–​81, 395–​96 Mohanty, Chandra, 225n11 Moisala, Pirkko and Beverley Diamond, 19, 225,  297–​98 Moloney, Molly, 335–​36n1 Monson, Ingrid, 100–​1, 105 Monteiro, Anjali, 174n9 Moore, David, 335–​36n1 Moore, Karenza, 335–​36n1, 336–​37 Moors, see Chapter 15 Morad, Moshe, 145–​46, 148–​50, 159n11, 160, 225 Morcom, Anna, 33, 225 Morin, Edgar, 150 Morley, Iain, 106 Morris, Bonnie, 231–​32 Morrisette, Alanis, 278 Motley Crüe, 278–​79

Motorhead, 286 Mulhall, Anne, 250–​51 Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz, 75–​76 Müller, Tanja, 355n1 Muñoz, José Esteban, 182–​83, 183–​84n14, 184n15, 186n2, 194–​95, 218n3, 311, 365, 369–​70,  381 Murgatroyd, Peta, 388–​89 Murray, Charles, 311, 329, 330–​31 Muslim, see Islam Myers, Helen, 335–​36n1, 338–​39   Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 198 Narawati, Tati, 211 Narayan, Kirin, 283 Naroll, Raoul and Ronald Cohen, 335–​36 National Sexual Budget, 15 native ethnographer, 35, 56–​57, 277, 279–​80, 283, 284–​307 Naze, Alain, 180–​81 Nazism, 15 Ncube, Gibson, 124–​25 Ndegeocello, Meshell, 124–​25 Nelson, David, 32 Nelson, Linda Williamson, 284 Ness, Sally Ann, 268 Nettl, Bruno, 95–​96, 297–​98 Neuman, Daniel, 163n1 New Orleans queer bounce artists, 188, 189–​90 New York City queer hip hop, 188–​89, 196 queer rappers of color, 189 Newton, Esther, 187, 194 Newton, Natalie, 130–​31 NGO HIV activism, 167–​68 Nguyễn Vĩnh Bảo, 128–​29, 132, 133–​36 Nguyễn-​võ,  130–​31 Nicaraguan criminal initiation rites, 311–​12 Nichols, Bill, 170, 171, 173, 174n9, 175 Nicholson, Helen, 335–​36n1 nightclub, 124–​25, 127, 138, 248, 252–​53, 353–​55, 356, 361–​62, 389 nightlife, 166. See also Chapter 19; weak methods Nilsson, Christine, 73n4, 86 Nobby, Sissy, 188 Nokia, Princess, 185–​86, 190, 191–​92, 195, 197 normalization of queer itself, 314 normative queer, 258–​59, 263, 266–​67 Norton, Barley, 120, 131 Nova Scotia, 291, 292, 298. See also Cape Breton Island

438 Index Núñez, Luis Manuel, 150–​51 N-​word,  103–​4   Ó Canainn, Tomás, 249n25 Ó Laoire, Lillis, 249 Ó Riada, Seán, 249–​50 O’Connell, John M., 325n19 O’Connor, Sinead, 259n12 O’Dell, Nancy, 319 O’Riordan, Dolores, 239–​40n21 O’Rourke, Michael, 19 O’Shea, Helen, 237–​39, 249 Obama, Barack, 307, 308–​9, 317 Odell, George, 69–​70 Oja, Carol, 129n5 Okundaye, Jason, 195 Oliveros, Pauline, 380–​81, 383, 387, 395–​96 Omar, Kingsley, 70–​71 online trolling, 309–​10, 313–​14, 318–​19, 321, 325, 326. See also Gamergate Orange, Donna, 35, 36 orientalist, 128, 167–​68, 224 Ortiz, Fernando, 365, 369, 375 Otero, Ángela María Requena, 262–​63, 368, 372 out in the field, 118–​19, 122, 317, 336–​37 Out Magazine, 192, 229n18 Özdamar, Mustafa, 391n7   Pacquiao, Manny, 109–​10n11 Paige, Aaron, 32 Palo Monté, 366 Panamá, see Chapter 15 Panji,  200–​1 Paris is Burning, 173n7, 176–​77 Parker, Andrew, 8 Parkin, Simon, 326 Parmar, Pratibha, 175 participant-​observation fieldwork, 101, 252–​53 Passaro, Joanne, 288 passing, 100–​2, 103, 300–​1, 395–​96 Pastor, Tony, 69, 84–​85 Patriarchy, 46, 288, 342 Paudler, Heather, 263 Peletz, Michael G., 209, 214, 215 Pennell, Summer M., 124–​25 Peraino, Judith, 324–​25n17 performativity, 107–​8n3, 145–​46, 266, 309–​10, 321–​22, 324–​25, 327–​28,  380 Peritore, N. Patrick, 311–​12 Perrone, Dina, 335–​36n2, 336–​37 Perry, Imani, 188–​89, 192–​93 Petzen, Jennifer, 389–​90n6

Phạm Ngọc Lạnh, 134–​35 Phạm Thuý Hoan, 135–​36 Phelan, Peggy, 183 phenomenology, 107–​8, 114–​15, 122–​24, 125, 127, 132, 135–​36, 390 Philippines, see Chapter 7 Piemonte,  264–​66 Pilzer, Joshua D., 121 Pineda, Roselle, 109n9 Pink, Sarah, 385 pinkwashing,  180–​81 Plant, Richard, 15 politics of gender evaded through “folk” nostalgia, 298 politics of queerness, 118–​19 politics of respectability, 185, 193–​94, 196 Pollman, Tessel, 199 pornography, 54–​55n1, 73, 73n4 postcolonial, 41–​42, 59, 166, 182–​83, 225, 284–​85,  324–​25 postcolonial ethnography, 59, 284 postmodernism, 103–​4, 277, 278–​79, 282–​83 Powers, Madelon, 81–​82 pre-​colonial tolerance, 198–​99, 214 Price, Bijou L., 85–​86 Price, David H., 316–​17 Pringgodigdo, Sulaeman, 207–​8n3 privacy importance in queer spaces, 244–​45n19, 286, 347–​48,  349 productive distanciation, 169 prostitution, see sex workers protest music, 63–​64 psychoanalysis, 31n1, 34n4, 34–​35, 36, 41–​42, 354,  362–​63 psychoanalytics, 35, 36, 37, 354, 362 Puar, Jasbir K., 215–​16 Puccini, Giacomo, 380 Puri, Jyoti, 122   quare (queer), see Chapter 14 quare theory, 236–​37, 248, 260 queer Annamarie Jagose’s definition, 20, 215 compared with LGBTQ, 10 defined, contextually, 21, 26–​27 queer ethics, 25–​26, 310–​11 queering, verb, 13, 15, 310–​11 queer of color (see Chapter 11) queer optimism, 25–​26, 311 queer art of failure, 380–​81, 394–​95 

Index  439 Rabinow, Paul, 35n6 racial anxiety, 362 racial difference, 26 racial fetishes, 357–​58 racism, sexual, 32 Racy, A. J., 128n4 Ramayana, 200–​1, 203 Ramírez, Horacio, 10, 11 Rand, Erin J., 16–​17 rap, 185, 186, 189, 192–​93 lack of examination into, 254n33 Rasta Club, Tel Aviv, 354–​55, 356–​62 Ravens, Chal, 195 Ravn, Signe, 335–​36n1, 336–​37 Red, Katey, 188 Reddit, 325 Reddy, Gayatri, 167–​68 Rees-​Roberts, Nick,  16–​17 reflexivity the reflexive turn in gender and sexuality methodology, 335–​36n2 reggae, see Rasta Club reggaetón, 143–​45,  146–​47 Regla de Ocha, 191–​92, 366 Reid, Herbert, 365 rentboys, see sex workers reproductive capital, 229 Requena, Ángela María, 261–​63, 267, 268 research as activism, 61 research as advocacy, 9, 174n10 Research Ethics Committee, 241–​42 resistance seven categories, 376 respectability politics, 185, 192, 193–​94, 195, 196 Rey, Mario, 117–​18 Reynolds, Simon, 338n3 Rice, Timothy, 123, 164–​65, 169, 305–​6, 322–​23n14 Ricœur, Paul, 34–​35n5 Rigg, Marlon, 175 Rivera-​Servera, Ramon H., 252–​53n30 Roberts, Royston, 382–​83 Robertson, Carolina and Gerard Béhague, 19, 268 Rodger, Gillian, 26–​27, 70n2, 81–​82, 83, 84–​85,  100 Rodgers, Dennis, 311–​12 Rogers-​Aguiñiga, Pamela, 199–​200, 203, 212 Rohy, Valerie, 220–​21n8 Ronai, Carol Rambo, 335–​36n2

Rooke, Alison, 116–​17, 165–​66, 241 Roosevelt, Franklin, 103 Rosa, Jonathan, 345–​46 Rose, Tricia, 192–​93, 196 Rosello, Mireille, 17 Rosenau, M. J., 382–​83 Ross, Laurie Margot, 199–​200, 203 Rouch, Jean, 170 Roy, Jeff, 49 Roy, Raina, 163n2 Royster, Francesca T., 122 Rumyang, see Panji androgynous, 203, 207–​8 Ryan, Annie, 85 Rycenga, Jennifer, 11–​12   Sabar, Galia, 354–​55n1 Sabar, Galia, and Shlomit Kanari, 354–​55n1 Sadoh, Godwin Simeon, 95 Saigon, 134–​35, 138 Saint Anthony, 367, 371 Saint Lazarus, 367–​68, 378 Salon, 188–​89,  194–​95 same-​sex eroticism, 38n13, 353–​54 emblematic of queer life, 353 santería, see Chapters 9 and 21 Sarkissian, Margaret, 95 Saturday Night Live, 239–​40n12 Saunders, Ralph, 136–​37 Savigliano, Marta, 294 Sawyer, Diane, 326 Scalia, Antonin, 323 Scapegoating,  63–​64 black culture, 185, 192–​93 (see also hip hop: scapegoat for misogyny) Scarry, Elaine, 325n20 Schachter, Carl, 107n2 Schechner, Richard, 146 Schenck, Paul, 323 Scheper-​Hughes, Nancy,  246–​47 Schieffelin, Bambi, 222 Schroder, Kim Christian, 170 Schwenkel, Christina, 130–​31 scientific innovation, see serendipity scopographic power, 167 Scott, James C., 107–​8n4, 375–​76 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 21–​22, 109n9, 188, 324–​25n17, 335,  351–​52 Seidman, Steven, 103 Sekulow, Jay Alan, 323 Senelick, Laurence, 69 sensory ethnography, 381

440 Index sensual ethnography, 26, 381–​82, 384–​87, 390, 395–​96 serendipity, 380–​84, 391 Setswana,  59–​61 sex work, 142, 152n9, 167, 349–​50 sex workers, 346, 349–​51 sexual assault, 319–​20, 324 in nightlife, 340, 360–​61 shadow puppet theater (wayang kulit), 201, 212 Shahani, Parmesh, 174–​75, 182n13 Shanghai, 304 Shavit, David, 199 Shaw, Linda L., 335–​36, 335–​36n1 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, 35–​36n9, 277–​78,  386–​87 Sherinian, Zoe, 32–​33, 35–​36n9, 38, 43–​44, 45n24, 47 Shilts, Randy, 278–​79 Sierra Madero, Abel, 151–​52 Silcott, Mireille, 338n3 silencing of the past, 4 queer black history, 188 Sinnott, Megan, 302 Sixx, Nikki, 279–​80 slavery, 45–​46n25, 186–​87, 255 Slobin, Mark, 152–​53, 249 Slominski, Tes, 249, 302 Smith, Barbara, 189–​90 Smith, Beverly, 196–​97 Smith, Hazel, 335–​36n1 Smith, Linda, 42 Smith, M. R., 124–​25 Smith, Peter H., 107n2 Snediker, Michael, 311 Snorton, C. Riley, 173n8 snowball sampling, 244–​45, 346 Snyder, Robert, 69n1 socialism Vietnamese music, 135 Society for Ethnomusicology, 18, 31–​32, 100, 220–​21, 231–​32, 239–​40n10, 241n15, 332 Society for Musicology in Ireland, 239–​40n14 Soja, Edward, 365 Solimar, Otero, 368 Solnit, Rebecca, 387–​88 sonic knowing, 385–​86 Sontag, Susan, 159 sous rature, “under erasure,” 98 South Africa, see Chapter 4 South African Broadcasting Corporation,  63–​64 Sparling, Heather, 297–​98

Special Period, Cuba, 141, 146–​47, 147–​48n7, 149–​50, 155, 159 Spies, Walter, 199 Spiller, Henry, 204, 204–​5n1, 208–​9, 225 Spinoza, Baruch, 283 Sponsler, Claire, 264–​66 square dance, 291–​92, 294–​97, 298–​300, 302–​3,  304 egalitarian and gendered, 298–​99 Stacey, Judith, 101–​2 Stanger, Allison, 329, 330–​31 Stanyek, Jason, 64–​65 Starn, Orin, 336–​37 step dance, see square dance step dancers Irish, 242–​44, 296–​97, 299–​300,  301–​2 Stern, Howard, 319–​20 Stickney, Sallie, 70–​71 Stigma, 16, 99, 102–​3, 117–​18, 325, 326–​27, 338–​39, 341, 343, 346 Stockett, Miranda, 303–​4, 306 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 395–​96 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 317–​18n10 Stokes, Martin, 124, 159, 239–​40n13 Stoller, Paul, 385 Stolorow, Robert, 35, 36 Stone, Ruth, 306 Stout, Noelle M., 373–​74n7 strong affective theory, 351–​52 and weak theory (see weak theory) Strongman, Roberto, 150–​51 Stryker, Susan, 199–​200, 212 Stuart, Charles Edward Battle of Culloden, 292 Stychin, Carl, 11–​12 Suanda, Endo, 208–​9, 213 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 103–​4 subtext transgressing the surface text, 117–​18 Sufi, 207–​8, 209–​10, 381–​82, 391, 392–​93,  394–​95 suicide Rachel Bryk, 325–​26 stigma and responsibility, 326–​27 Supreme Court of the United States Schenck v. Pro-​Choice Network of Western New York,  322–​23 surveillance, public, 142, 156–​57, 160, 311, 314, 316–​17,  338–​39 Swanepoel, Karma-​Ann,  57–​58 Swedish polska,  298–​99 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 76 swing, 279–​80,  285–​86 

Index  441 Tait, Peta, 70–​71 Talburt, Susan, 114–​15 Tan, Michael, 110n13, 111–​12 Tansey, Seamus, 249–​50 Taylor, Jodie, 107, 118–​19 Taylor, Lucien, 171, 385 Team Fortress 2 (TF2), see Chapter 18 Tedlock, Barbara, 283 Tel Aviv, 7–​8, 104–​5, 353–​55, 359–​60, 361–​62. See also Rasta Club Terra, G.J.A., 214–​15n8 Thailand, 180–​81n12 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 269 The Guardian, 185, 186 The New York Times, 188 theater, 19th century, see male impersonation Theology, feminist, 42–​43n19, 46 therapeutic, 37n10 Thomas, Susan, 268 Thompson, Lydia, 76–​78 Thomson, William, 107 Thornton, Sarah, 124–​25, 338 Thorsen, Sidsel Kirstine, 335–​36n1 Tick, Judith, 380 Tinsley, Omise’eke, 186–​87, 191–​92 Titon, Jeff, 35–​36, 37–​38, 123 tomboy, 190 Filipino,  109–​14 Tomkins, Silvan, 351–​52 topeng, see Chapter 12 torture (American), 386–​87 “tough love,” 24–​25, 185, 192, 195, 196 Touré, Nakhane, 124–​25 tourism, 137, 147–​48n7, 180–​81, 293, 298 sex-​tourism, 344,  373–​74 Tracy, Honor, 246–​47 Transference (and countertransference), 31, 34, 35, 35–​36n8, 36–​37, 41–​42, 46–​47,  50–​52 Transformista (Havana, drag), 367–​68, 369, 370, 371, 375, 376, 379. See also Cuba trans-​hījṛā, see hījṛā transphobia, 111–​12n16, 288, 311, 326, 374 transvestite as a term, 213, 214 transvocalities voice-​chat,  309–​10 Trawick, Margaret, 38n13, 38–​39, 41 Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph, 188 Truitt, Allison, 130–​31 truth as opposed to justice, 329 Tuan, Yi-​Fu, 125

Tucker, Sherrie, 164, 279–​80, 285–​86, 288 Turkish, 265, 267, 384–​85, 389–​90, 392–​93,  395–​96 Turnbull, Colin, 12 Turner, Victor, 247 Twitter Rachel Bryk, 327 Tyson, Lois, 259   unmarked categories, unmarked spaces, 8, 9, 11–​12, 95, 96, 97–​98n1, 99, 100, 118–​19n29, 297–​98, 299–​300, 303–​4, 305–​6,  317 upward mobility culture ostracizing Queer and musical persons, 82, 111–​12, 121 urban fieldwork common challenges, 153, 339, 341 Urry, John, 335–​36n2 utopian streak in queerness, 381   Valentine, Gill, 146 Vallely, Fintan, 248n23 van der Kroef, Justus M., 209–​10, 214–​15 Van Maanen, John, 335–​36n1 Vander, Judith, 95 Vanita, Ruth, 38n14 variety theater, 67, 69–​70, 73–​75, 80–​81, 85 vaudeville, 69–​70, 85 Vidal, Gore, 13 video games, 311–​12, 313–​14, 316–​17. See also Team Fortress 2 (TF2); voice-​chat connection to ethnography, 313–​14 effect of violence on the player, 313 Vietnam, see Chapter 8 Village People, 126 Villar, Giney, 113, 114 Virgin Mary, 45, 367, 371 Visweswaran, Kamala, 225n11 Vivian, Charles, 84–​85 Von Gunden, Heidi, 380 Vulliamy, Ed. 13n2   Wade, Peter, 260–​61, 269 Wafer, James, 342 Waldorf, Dan, 346 Waldron, Jeremy, 324–​25n18 Walpole, Horace, 382–​84 Walters, Gavin, 358 Wangi, Indriya Taham, 212–​13 Warner, Michael, 16, 17–​18, 244–​45n19, 245, 246 Waterman, Richard, 368

442 Index Waugh, Thomas, 167–​68, 175 weak methods nightlife fieldwork, 335, 351–​52 weak theory, 156–​57, 335 Wesner, Ella 81, 84–87, 89 West, Cornel, 138 West, Isaac, 19–​20 Western acting as compared with Indonesian topeng, 208 Western art music, 219, 226–​27, 229–​30. See also Western common practice Western common practice, 57–​58, 64–​66 Western ideology, 32, 34–​35, 200 Weston, Kath, 198–​99, 280, 283–​84 Whelan, Bill, 250–​51 Whiteley, Sheila, 11–​12 whiteness, 57–​58, 128, 229–​30, 270–​71, 294, 365 white supremacy, 229–​30, 330–​31 Charles Murray, 311 (see Middlebury College) Whitehead, Tony Larry, 12 Wierzbicka, Anna, 318–​19 Wilbourne, Emily, 266 Wilde, Oscar, 246–​47, 278–​79 Williams, Raymond, 365 Williams, Sean, 95–​96, 249

Winfrey, Oprah, 109–​10, 112–​13 Witchger, Katian, 335–​36n2 Wolf, Eric, 188 women in the field, 3–​4 Wong, Deborah, 7, 11–​12, 51–​52, 176, 226–​ 27n14, 226–​27n15, 294, 299–​300, 303–​4 Wood, Elizabeth, 353 Woolf, Virginia, 387–​88 working class, discrimination of, 43–​44 Wu-​Tang,  188   Yankee, Daddy, 146–​47 Yola, Şenay, 391–​92n7 Yorùbá, 150, 151, 191–​92, 367 Yoshino, Kenji, 102–​3, 117–​18 YouTube, 55–​56, 349   Zelizer, Viviana A., 350–​51 Zemp, Hugo, 170–​71 Zenobi, Diego, 316–​17 Zerva, Konstantina, 365 zikr, 391–​92,  393–​95 Žižek, Slavoj, 357–​58 Zoid, Karen, 53, 55–​56, 57–​58, 59–​60, 61, 63–​64,  65–​66 Zombie, Rob, 278–​79 Zoyara, Ella, 70–​71, 85, 88