Lecture Series: Steven Moon: "Heteromusicology and the Questions We Ask of Sound" (17.11.2021, Newcastle/online)
ICMuS Research Seminar Series: Steven Moon: "Heteromusicology and the Questions We Ask of Sound"
17.11.2021
Newcastle upon Tyne / online
We all study gender and music, whether we like it or not. Or perhaps, the political stakes of gender’s operative mechanics in/as musicking are present in everything that we do as music studies scholars. The proliferation of queer studies in music since the 1990s scaffolds for our current moment, if implicitly; the absence of explicit mention of gender is the erasure of a primary vector of power and frame of experience, typically from the top of the hierarchy. Deborah Wong has shown us that beyond women, queer people, and misogyny, discussions of musical erotics are too about “many other things we never seem to get to, especially heteronormative values” (2015, 179). And while a mode of escape from such values has changed in the decades since Suzanne Cusick’s powerful rumination on a lesbian relationship to music (1994), many of her questions remain, if further complicated by gender’s contingencies with race and disability.
I’d like, then, to consider the constitutive gender politics of the questions we ask, regardless of their explicit content. These politics crystallize as we differentiate between our research questions and our ethnographic and archival questions, a critical distinction that drives our research methodologies. To whom do we listen, and who can speak to us? How are the answers to these questions contingent upon the “we,” “us,” “I”? Drawing on my own ethnographic research in Turkey with primarily women academics and physicians, as well as anecdotal evidence from scholars in music studies, I demonstrate that our way out of the logics of compulsory heterosexuality in musicological research is not through the object of our study but our orientation towards it. The valuable lessons of queer and trans studies in music are not new taxonomies of musical practice, but instead liberation from such logics.
Dr Steven Moon received their PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021 and currently holds a US Department of State, Educational and Cultural Affairs Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for the year 2022. Their book project, tentatively titled Sounding Birth, Disciplining Music, examines the parallel restructuring of musical practice and pregnancy at a critical moment of Ottoman reform in the early 19th century, as well as its resonances in contemporary Turkish obstetric and nursing research. Their publications can be found in Current Musicology and Etnomüzikoloji Dergisi. Today’s seminar stems from their work on gender, race, and methodology in ethnomusicological inquiry.
If you would like to attend in person, the seminar will start at 4pm in the Ball Room, Culture Lab.