Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music

Theory and Politics of Ambiguity

Gavin Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317337126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine the theory and politics of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that there are both positive and negative implications in any gender and sexuality practices, both sameness and difference from heteronormativity, and unfixed possibility in the diverse nature of discourse and practice (rather than just "difference" among fixed multiplicities). Contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The authors examine the ambiguities of performance and reception, and address the vexed question of whether it is possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically. This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies.

1 Introduction

From difference to ambiguity

Gavin Lee

I was in San Francisco when, on 26 June 2015, the United States Supreme Court released its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. This decision overturned the Sixth Circuit appeals court ruling which upheld the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage. Thus, Obergefell enabled same-sex marriage in all 50 states, forcing the last 14 states which still resisted same-sex marriage to capitulate. Of course, the Supreme Court had already decided exactly two years earlier on the same date in United States v. Windsor (2013) that the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines on a federal level that marriage is limited to opposite-sex couples, was unconstitutional. Browsing the web for fun activities that summer of 2015, which I spent in San Francisco, I came across an event at a bar, Oasis, which ran this description for its party, “Gay Pride [28 June] we celebrated the Freedom TO Marry. But freedom cuts both ways. So this Independence Day [4 July], join us the Morning After for the Freedom NOT to Marry.”¹ This, in tandem with the rise of the discourse of the religious “freedom” to refuse to hold same-sex weddings in churches or to bake wedding cakes for said occasions,² might be taken as evidence that “freedom” has gone post-structural. Now that same-sex couples are free to marry, they need to be freed from being compelled to marry, and furthermore, religious persons whose beliefs are impinged upon by the Supreme Court decisions need to be freed from having to comply with these decisions.

In our contemporary moment, the discursive slippage discerned by post-structuralists has entered into mainstream American social life and media, displaying a proliferation of narratives. The Oasis event was humorously portrayed as a celebration of the freedom to fuck, paralleling the more sober academic injunction to continue to take the polymorphousness of queerness seriously, even as same-sex marriage—modeled after that august heterosexual institution—has now come to fruition.³ To quote the classic formulation by David Halperin of queerness as something that cannot be pinned down: “Queer is… whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”⁴ Halperin’s pronouncement captures for us one definition of the concept of “difference,” which as indicated by the recently published Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, continues to be a source of contention.⁵ The crux of the matter lies perhaps in that quixotic formulation, an “identity without an essence.” If essence refers to permanent characteristics of an identity that remain unchanged, an “identity without an essence” would be pure difference—pure difference from the normative and hegemonic. But how do we reconcile pure difference with group “identity,” which surely has to have some degree of stability—a core definition that stays the same—in order for members of that group to identify as such? Stable identity may take the form of negative stereotypes or give rise to the impression of group homogeneity without internal variation, but doesn’t the instability of pure difference create chaos—a chaos which is the nemesis of the actualization of new conventions like same-sex marriage? The anxious dialectic of identity and difference has been the focal point of debates in queer musicology. It is also this dialectic to which Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship responds, under the multiple rubrics of race, postcolonialism, gender, and sexuality.

This volume is committed to a rethinking of difference using the parameters of gender and sexuality. Conceptually, there is divergence between “difference” in terms of race and postcolonialism versus gender and sexuality. Difference is especially fraught in studies in gender and sexuality because of the unresolved ethical problems of articulating versus destabilizing identities. In contrast, the notion of “strategically” essentialist identity (purported identity differences between “whites” and “people of color”) for the purposes of political organization has gained traction as a necessary, albeit dangerous, fiction in critical race studies, even though such an identity may also occlude diversity of gender, sexuality, race, and class within that identity group.⁶ We can observe the problematics of identity in gender and sexuality studies in the following. From one controversial perspective, male-to-female transgenderism has been viewed as the colonization of women by men.⁷ This argument reinforces the binary gender identity system, failing to destabilize it through queer theorizing. The same problem is found in strands of transsexual theory that emphasize the experiences of preoperative transgenders who feel that they are in the “wrong” body, thereby supporting the notion of “right,” unambiguously polarized, binary genders.⁸ From these studies of gender arises a notion of difference in the sense of reified binary identities that perpetuate harmful stereotypes, yet the subjective transgender or transsexual quest for stable gender identity demands ethical consideration.

Other strands of queer theory have engaged the concept of identity by working against the stability of the social order itself. Lee Edelman has argued that queerness is the site where the heterosexual social order crumbles.⁹ For Edelman, heterosexuality is anchored in the figure of the child, which provides the raison d’être for maintaining the heteronormative status quo—in order to preserve a future for the child. It is reproductive futurity—a defining attitude of the culture of heterosexual reproducers, if not exactly a conventional “identity”—which is disrupted by queerness. Tavia Nyong’o has modified Edelman’s theory, criticizing him for retaining an identity-bias in that social crumbling is identified with queerness. Instead, she argues, the catalyst for social order and disorder can be located flexibly and dialectically; in her case study, queer subculture is utilized by punk to counter heteronormativity while at the same time becoming stereotypically portrayed.¹⁰ From these studies in queer theory arises a notion of difference from heteronormativity in the form of fluid social relations and forces that destabilize identities and stereotypes.

What emerges from this overview of the terrain of gender and sexuality studies is a tension around the stability and destabilization of gender and sexual identities. Some contributors to the foundational volumes Musicology and Difference and Queering the Pitch, published in the early to mid-90s, arguably employ some form of identity essentialism.¹¹ In later edited volumes, the post-structural bent of queer theory can be felt in chapters which emphasize nonnormative, destabilized gender, in Sexing the Groove, Queering the Popular Pitch, and Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music.¹² Some approaches in the same vein focus in particular on vocality and hermeneutic reading. For Freya Jarman-Ivens, voices are queer when they are critically flawed, e.g. Maria Callas had audible breaks that accentuate the difference between gendered vocal registers associated with the “masculine” chest and “feminine” head.¹³ Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens embarks on hermeneutical assays, e.g. the heroic Odysseus is cast as a queen tied to a mast in order that he may enjoy the song of the sirens.¹⁴ Yet a dialectical turn away from the “destabilization” strategy can be discerned in essays within Queering the Popular Pitch that advocate for a stabilization of gender and sexual identity, in accordance with the musical-cultural participants’ subjective sense of self and group belonging.¹⁵ In a similar vein, Jodie Taylor’s monograph Playing It Queer focuses on substantive queer subculture and world-making rather than radical queer deconstruction. She examines how a “queer,” gender fluid, and women-friendly clubbing scene in Brisbane differentiates itself from a male-centric “gay” clubbing culture, through eclectic musical selections that counter what is perceived to be the commercialized house music of beauty-obsessed gay men.¹⁶ In Taylor’s study, there is the subtle confluence of gender fluidity which defines a stable queer subject position.

The crux of the tension around identity as (un)stable may be expressed as a politics of difference. Of particular salience here is the manner in which difference seems to alternately oppress and emancipate. Identity allows for both the cultivation of subcultural group support as well as the formation of stereotypical, binary gender and sexual identities. Destabilized identities allow for the avoidance of stereotype and yet are viewed with dismay by those who are unable to discern in them the potential for galvanized political action, which in equal rights struggle is critically dependent on the articulation of a recognizable identity. This ambiguous conceptual terrain is in a way not unexpected, given the post-structuralist bent of queer theory. In fact, queer theory, including the work by Edelman and Nyong’o, has long since moved pointedly away from the dialectics of difference and identity alone, towards consideration of social formations with alignments between different oppressed social groups. Edelman, for instance, theorizes that the common ground between the Republican objection to abortion and to homosexuality is the threat that both are considered to pose to reproduction.¹⁷ The contributors to this volume aim to rethink difference using the analytic of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not the invention of this volume, and difference and identity will necessarily be part of our discourse. What we can offer here is focused attention on the ambiguity of three aspects related to musical performance and gender/sexuality politics—action, reception, and ontology—explicating each of them through multiple lenses. Ambiguity means that political action through gender performance has effects that cannot be comprehended through the calculus of identity/difference alone—rather, the additional consideration of intention and pleasure helps us to grasp the full effects of political action. Ambiguity also refers to the reception and dissemination of gender performance across different constituencies, different historical periods, and in re-creations (covers, biopics). Finally, ambiguity refers to the uncertain ontology and nature of proliferating categories, material possibilities, and desires.

Action. In the performative theory of gender, the everyday becomes a spectrum of repetitive, performative acts that veer between confirming and destabilizing essentialized gender identities.¹⁸ However, there is still utility in separating “onstage” performance and recorded playback from “offstage” reception or re-creation. Although the agency of performers and audiences can be mutually impacting, the diffraction of musical performance through time, social groups, and re-creations means that multiple social and historical scenes will inevitably emerge. The three chapters in this section feature stage performers who are of key theoretical concern in dealing with issues of transgenderism and power, even as audiences are also taken into account to various degrees.

Ambiguity of gender, as read through Judith Butler’s articulation, is expressed in the failure of performative gender practices to match up to feminine and masculine ideals. There are many ways to critique Butler’s work, including her own clarification that gender is not something that can be chosen in the same way that drag queens adopt a (hyper)feminine identity on stage. Jay Prosser has described Butler’s work as transgender “troping”—using the figure of the transgender, a person whose gender identity is at odds with their anatomy, to advance what he calls “queer feminism.”¹⁹ This brand of feminism, Prosser argues, privileges gender over sex. In queer feminism, even sex is really gender: essentially, psychoanalysis is the means by which biological anatomy is enculturated as gender.²⁰ The result of the privileging of gender is that a whole new register of transgender troping becomes available. Since masculinity and femininity are no longer tied exclusively to anatomy, anyone can combine binary genders as they wish. Queer feminism, Pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: from difference to ambiguity
• PART I Ambiguity of action
• PART II Ambiguity of reception
• Part III Ontological ambiguity
• Afterword: the world only spins forward
• Index