1st Queer Forum of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
1st Queer Forum of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
Friday 25th June 2021
Invitation to Participate
(The event is free. Please register your participation on Eventbrite by 3rd May 2021.)
The LGBTQ+ Music Study Group hereby launches a new biennial initiative, postponed from last year: “Queer Forum”. This day-long event aims to catalyse new ways of thinking, being, and doing music and scholarship in and beyond the academy. As José Esteban Muñoz writes, “[w]e may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (2009, 1). Yet notions of futurity seem even more ephemeral when considering the practices of the extractivist university and the current Covid-19 pandemic. Inspired by queer and feminist theorists – especially bell hooks and Sara Ahmed - who are dissatisfied with the present, who wrestle with existing institutional structures, and who propose new modes of scholarship and education, we entice you to join us in radical academic experimentation in search for new horizons and potentialities.
The 2021 forum urges participants to recover queer pasts and imagine new queer futures, however fragile they may seem. How do we create time and space in the academy beyond the logics of capitalism to allow for us to muse and act alone and in dialogue with others? What are the possibilities for forging strong/vulnerable subjectivities and caring solidarities within and beyond existing academic hierarchies? What freedoms can we gift ourselves to allow for experimentation in our musical writing, teaching, and performing? How do we nurture and share intersectional wisdoms in ways that centre the health, well-being, and vitality of our communities and ourselves?
The day will include no formal presentations; rather, it will be structured around a range of different creative, intellectual, and social activities – workshops, reading groups, group work, interventions – that tempt us to try out new conceptualisations and embodiments of queer music scholarship. The day will begin at 9am and end at 5pm BST. Participants are welcome to join us for a social event the evening before and also on the day of the event.
We welcome scholars, musicians and composers within music studies (including ethnomusicology, historical musicology, performance studies, popular music studies, theory and analysis, film music and musicals etc.) and beyond. The event is free. Please register your participation on Eventbrite by 3rd May 2021: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1st-queer-forum-of-the-lgbtq-music-study-group-tickets-150894715155
The event is organised by Marie Bennett, Rachel Cowgill, Thomas Hilder, Danielle Sofer, and Flo Toch. For any queries, please email: lgbtqmusicsg @ gmail.com