The profound devastation of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida—affecting individuals, families, communities—engendered complex, manifold responses. There were many, I imagine, who amidst the audible responses to the horror—cries of grief, narratives of survival, calls for solidarity and strength, all mingling together—felt that the only possible response was silence, one reflecting a confrontation with a destruction that was experienced as inarticulable. Such silence, however—borne of respect, surrender, or an attempt to attain some sort of spiritual knowledge or succourFootnote 1—stood in stark contrast to an almost immediate and deeply troubling silencing (a pernicious action), the aim of which appeared to be a desire to erase yet again non-normative sexual subjects from material and symbolic social space. In one highly visible instance, the realization of such silencing led British journalist Owen Jones to walk angrily off the set of a televised news segment devoted to the shooting, after Sky News co-host Mark Longhurst repeatedly attempted to suggest that the massacre had had nothing to do with LGBT+ persons, but was an attack on humanity in ‘general’ (suggesting, as usual, an ‘unmarked’ white/male/heterosexual/Christian subject as ‘universal’).Footnote 2 The widely disseminated media appearance of one white journalist, however, must not obscure the troubling history and continuing reality of silencing impacting millions of subjects across geographic, temporal, and cultural locations: In an interview the following day, at which Jones and Scottish MP Mhairi Black were present, activist Noorulann Shahid warned against the ‘whitewashing’ of the tragedy, resulting in the erasure of the Latina/o/x identities of the majority of those killed.Footnote 3 Such an erasure was noted as well by Venezia III, whose analysis of the shootings highlighted how ‘solidarity on social media [rallying] around #weareorlando and expressions of sadness at this attack on “all Americans”’ (2016) was complicit in just such racial/sexual erasure.

What makes these attempted elisions even more troubling (if possible) are the ways in which such actions appeared to follow, in an extremely distilled form, the contours of initial official/governmental responses to the AIDS crisis decades ago, over a span of several years, perhaps best crystallized in U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s refusal—in the context of pain, suffering, and deaths of thousands of people—to even publicly acknowledge or name the syndrome. The recognition of the relationship between a failure to speak up/out and inevitable continuing devastation led to a vocal revolt, including creation of one of the most widespread slogans and iconic textual/graphic representations of the era: Silence=Death.Footnote 4 Activists, unwilling to remain inaudible, invisible, marginal, expendable, demanded and highlighted the importance of an existence that refused erasure from the sociocultural sphere. Yet despite the ensuing years of ‘progress’, of increased audibility/visibility, in 2016 it once again appeared that the coercive, repressive, and normalizing power structures enlisted in the policing of material and symbolic public space continued to construct barriers to those whose identities and embodied experiences were defined in any way by same-sex desire.Footnote 5 That those impacted by the Pulse atrocity—from victims to protestors to vigil-holders—were arguably allotted more representational space than those impacted by AIDS in the earliest decades of its emergence says more about a significantly changed media space than societal attitudes towards non-normative sexualities, not only in relation to the ease and rapidity of dissemination of ‘information’, but also the often subtle ways that such representation masquerades for a ‘diversity’ that, in essence, camouflages continued elisions and exploitations.Footnote 6 Frank Ocean’s Tumblr post in response to the shooting reminded the complacent (or willfully unaware) that any belief in a ‘post-homophobic’ world is unfounded; recounting examples across wide swaths of time and space he noted, ‘many people hate us and wish we didn’t exist’ (n.d. [2016]).Footnote 7 ‘Hate’ in the present tense.

The diverse machinations and bases of power (and the attendant violence enacted corporeally and ideologically upon the noncompliant) have received significant academic scrutiny over the past several decades, including examinations of power enacted by academic disciplines themselves.Footnote 8 As such, although it is difficult to imagine any social-ideological space that is not in some way complicit in the construction of exclusions and inequalities, some might have hoped or expected that academic realms—especially those constructed around disciplines and theories devoted to the critical examination of cultural production and structuration over wide temporal and geographic spaces—held the possibility, through increased self-reflexivity, of immunity from enacting the most destructive forms of social-symbolic control. And yet, over the past several years, surveying the disciplinary locations in which I have spent considerable amounts of time—ethnomusicology and gender/sexuality/queer studies—I have become increasingly confronted with the unavoidable understanding that these locations themselves, far from bastions of equity, are deeply problematic, founded upon and nourished by all manner of erasures, silencings, and exploitations. Such an understanding is, of course, far from prescient or exceptional, as throughout the previous decade calls for inculpation and reparation have extended to Western academia’s warping stranglehold on epistemological production—perhaps most vividly in the calls for decolonization of thought and discipline (including musical), which I will engage throughout this textFootnote 9—highlighting the fact that egregious asymmetries must not be allowed to be disguised by a superficial institutional claim to promote equity via the perpetual use of vague, non-threatening terms such as ‘inclusiveness’. Indeed, as Ahmed has noted, numerous scholars have explored the use of just such benign terms, finding, for example, that ‘the institutional preference for the term “diversity” is a sign of the lack of commitment to change and might even allow organizations such as universities to conceal the operation of systemic inequalities’ (2012: 53).

It is thus in this context that I approach both ethnomusicology and queerness. To be absolutely clear from the outset: this is not a book about ‘fixing’ ethnomusicology or celebrating its ‘evolution’ via a relatively recent, sudden embrace of ‘queer’ (where the latter, via its much-lauded incisive and subversive theoretical mettle is understood as capable of exposing and remediating the oppressive and repressive, transhistorically and transculturally). To the contrary, it is an unapologetic, emotionally, and affectively motivated polemic ultimately calling for the disappearance of both. Additionally, it is not a panegyric to the current state of ‘interdisciplinarity’—another vague term that, I will later contend, is both meaningless and suspect in the context of the Western, neoliberal university. While a text praising the interdisciplinary marriage of the ‘ethnoqueer’, gesturing towards a bright future of ‘more diversity’ in academia may generate warm feelings for those creating what are often self-serving narratives, in this long cultural moment marked by material and cultural upheavals that are largely the outcomes and magnifiers of what are disturbingly intractable and lasting structures of inequity and exploitation, such a text would be, in my opinion, not only untenable, but irresponsible.

Indeed, the astounding ease with which one of the most egregious examples of colonialist scholarship—inexplicably continuing into the twenty-first century—has dovetailed with a theoretical/political stance that is self-constructed as standing in diametric opposition to just such exploitations, and the lack of critical attention that has greeted such a melding, signals a need to examine these instances of symbiotic unions as indicative of disturbing undercurrents at disciplinary, institutional, and pervasive socio/geocultural levels. While some may wish to draw the distinction between an ethnomusicology of queerness, and the queering of ethnomusicology—claiming it is the latter, a queering that will attack and remedy the most problematic aspects of the ethno- that we now see in operation—such a differentiation is meaningless if one refuses the narcotic of a compelled, superficial positive thinking, and trains even a minimal amount of scrutiny on these fields, individually and in consort. Ethnomusicology, for the vast majority of its existence, has been marked by a deafening silencing, an infuriating present absence of any attention to same-sex desire, an obliteration often explained away as an ethical, cross-culturally sensitive refusal to impose Western epistemologies or ontologies (‘homosexuality’, e.g.) onto non-Western sites and practices. Yet the very moment that non-normative sexualities are embraced by the ethnomusicological canon of vetted-as-safe theoretical foci, it is in fact via what is (I will argue) the most Western, most partial/provincial conception/construction of sexuality conceivable—queerness—one inextricable from and gestated in relation to capitalism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, an Anglophone/Eurocentric hegemonic monologue that perpetually endeavours to conceal just such a genesis. And these largely unacknowledged, actively obscured foundations, linked in disturbing manners to gendered, racist, and colonialist power structures which ultimately animate both disciplinary sites, cannot but perpetuate further exploitation.

My analysis progresses from a primary contention that any critical-theoretical undertaking intending to unmask structures of inequity that so often rest upon erasure and silencing cannot be successful if it operates via recourse solely to a broad, generic template; there cannot, for example, be a ‘universal method’ of decolonial, antiracist, or anti-homophobic scholarship that functions in all social/cultural/academic/epistemological spaces, places, and times. Rather, in order to most fully expose, extirpate, and eradicate the root causes of asymmetries, attention must be paid to the specifics of individual disciplinary and/or theoretical locations—in their cultural and institutional contexts—understanding what is elided, why these elisions occur, and how (and in what manner) a reversal of silencing might lead to a transformation that is more than simply cosmetic. Noting the unacknowledged racism upon which the discipline of music theory rests, for example, Ewell rightly notes, ‘we must…reframe how we understand race, which we cannot do if we rush to find solutions to problems we do not understand or acknowledge’ (emphasis added; 2020). I add, however, that as much as specificities are indeed necessary, it is also possible that knowledge gleaned from individual interventions may function as either catalysts or preliminary bases for action in other locations. This book is thus a close, critical examination of two particular sites of inequity and, at the same time, what I hope might be a stimulus or incitement for research, interventions, productions, and actions beyond these particulars.

My argument will progress in two broad sections. First, having already highlighted the continuation of homophobic erasure, in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 I undertake an exploration of the relationship of ethnomusicology to that which it has constructed as ‘unspeakable’—a relationship in which non-normative sexualities are marked by a disturbing, signifying absence for over half a century, preceding AIDS and continuing past Pulse—and expose this absence as more than some sort of unintentional oversight, capitulation to the ‘reality’ that no one discipline can fully or successfully engage all possible registers of cultural production, and/or, as noted, an ethical unwillingness to impose Western social-theoretical concepts on non-Western sites and populations. Rather, I argue that the de facto obliteration of specifically same-sex desire from the discipline stands as the predetermined and essential outcome enacted historically and currently by practitioners of ethnomusicology who, as both products and producers of power structures linked to a culturally specific, fetishized masculinity, have continuously embraced and reified both a methodology (fieldwork) and its concomitant discipline (anthropology) rich with significance and performative power; here, the establishment of masculinity comes about in contradistinction to the feminized connotations constructed around musicology (and music, as well as the sonic, in general). In this regard, I am taking the term masculinity to signify—in relation to what I will refer to as the Global North (with ‘Western’ enlisted as a more manageable adjectival marker)—a set of attributes (including those related to appearance, behaviour, comportment, and beliefs) that have historically been ideologically, discursively, and corporeally constructed as the inevitable correlates of a specific (biological, male) body, and the founding-resulting superior status afforded this specific alignment. This construction inevitably arises in tandem with a denigration of the dimorphic pair’s ‘Other’, the female/feminine.Footnote 10 While the term ‘toxic’ masculinityFootnote 11 may initially seem appropriate in relation to my coming analyses, I worry that the modifier may seem to suggest that there exist some forms of masculinities that are not ‘toxic’ or otherwise highly problematic (descriptors that might equally be applied to femininity). And in the context of the Global North I do not believe this to be the case.

If, for example, masculinity may be understood as having been historically defined via recourse to traits such as strength, candour, assertiveness, bravery, loyalty (etc.) (or femininity as marked by compassion, nurturing, softness, [etc.]), such qualities have already been manufactured, via numerous centuries-long, ideological-linguistic-corporeal apparatuses, as adhering to/inhering in one specific, ‘correct’ arrangement of genes, hormones, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics. As such, the very legibility of even the ‘subversions’ or novel re-combinations of these alignments—conceivably resulting, for example, in ‘nonce taxonomies’Footnote 12 which unmoor the alignments—remains dependent upon the understanding of behaviour, action, and/or ‘style’ as having been constructed as (or, for some, continuing in an essential manner to be) linked in some way to corporeal (sexual) morphology, within a system that is both hierarchical and limited to the binary. As such, applied to manners of acting, being, or seeming, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’—used without the strong caution of scare quotes or other visual/rhetorical methods—remain for me almost entirely negative, insofar as they implicitly/explicitly call forth, or explicitly/implicitly summon supposed foundational/essential/biological bases of gendered attributes that cannot be entirely erased within the span of mere decades. Rather, at the very least, they remain as seeping, echoing traces in innumerable visual and auditory cultural palimpsests that continue to proliferate (and thus suture legibility/comprehensibility to the dimorphic). As such, I would argue that the success of the ‘nonce’ or any other engagement of gender with an aim towards destabilization, would be ultimately dependent not upon its ability to expand the concept of gender, but to eradicate it—a hope, a suggestion made decades ago by Rubin (1975).Footnote 13 Moreover, and of central importance to my argument (as I will discuss shortly), this Western hegemonic masculine—critically understood to be (yet often unacknowledged as being) defined as much by a propensity for exploitation, extraction, depredation, oppression, denigration, and textual/epistemological elision (via a monologic/univocal apparatus) as the aforementioned idealized, laudatory attributes—is inextricably linked to, and cannot be fully understood apart from a mutually constituting relationship with the colonialist-capitalist with which these troubling, dangerous characteristics are continually replicated. As Cremin argues, masculinity is a ‘disorder’ engendered by capitalist systems, ‘borne from a sick society that none of us, whatever our sex and gender, is immune from’ (2011: 1).

I do not claim that it is only non-normative sexualities that ethnomusicology has erased; the discipline’s self-proclaimed ‘inclusivity’ is continually belied on numerous fronts by both its literature and the make-up of its privileged academic ‘personnel’. I will argue, however, that this field-defining homophobia (indeed, as I will show, a fear of same-sex desire, particularly that between men/males), explored and exposed confrontationally, is revealed as inextricably linked to essentialist, fetishized, desired, and perpetually reenacted constructions of masculinity that continue to exist in and as the foundation of the entire enterprise. And while many have, often privately and/or casually (in my decades-long experiences), lamented ethnomusicology’s past and continuing status as a sort of ‘big boys’ club, undergirded by frat-boy-like or laddish enacting and expressions of this privilege-conferring masculinity, it is remarkable that such a perpetual, discipline-defining dynamic has escaped even the most minimal critical scrutiny (a deficiency that mirrors the dearth of literature within the field devoted to critical studies of sex and sexuality, and one that serves to highlight the intractable nature of certain forms of power). That such low-hanging fruit has remained relatively untouched by any anti-normative, anti-colonial examination—that such inquiry is de facto forbidden; that the discipline has become an ally of queerness, rather than its target—is a significant part of my analysis. Specifically, understanding that the most blatant forms of homophobic silencing operate in plain sight for decades, what can this suggest about the surreptitious, the covert, and the various cloaking devices enlisted in attempts to keep structural control intact?

It is with this in mind that I turn to the second broad area of inquiry. Using my discussion of the economic and disciplinary exploitation of difference in Chap. 5 as a transitional space, in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8 I focus on academic queerness and its arguably less transparent but no less disconcerting links to masculinity-capitalism-coloniality. I note in advance that for centuries the aforementioned gendered-sexed correlations may have been (and continue to be) deemed immutable, replicated in stereotypical, rigid, and indeed threatening manners owing to ideological imperatives; however, as Cremin (2011) suggests, sex—perhaps especially so in the past two centuries—has ceased to be culturally constructed as incontrovertible guarantor of either the masculine or the feminine. And while this slippage or ‘freeplay’ may be argued to have salubrious consequences, a masculinity decoupled from sex may also be afforded the possibility of proliferating via stealth. It is thus not impossible, as will become clear, for female, trans*, non-binary and/or, especially in the context of my analysis, queer subjects to be equally motivated by and productive of the various circuits and structures of what has been defined as masculine for centuries. I also note, in order to clarify my specific uses of the terminology, that I engage ‘queer’ or ‘queerness’ throughout as terms indicating academic work and theoretical constructions emanating largely from the Anglophone Global North. Owing to the sociocultural pedigrees of such constructions, as well as the current state of Western Academia Inc., they are in profound ways equally indissolubly linked to the gendered functioning of capitalism and colonialism.

My engagement with queerness commences with an examination of the ways that non-normative sexualities have become co-opted by both capitalist structures and university administrations (including queerness’s symbiotic, disciplined relationship with ethnomusicology). In the following three chapters, I then turn to the thorny and often problematic relationships between queer and homo* (a term I will later unpack); here, understanding queer’s frequent de facto functioning not as a theoretical interrogation of identity, but as either a utilitarian, superficial shorthand for LGBT+, or as a generic marker of ‘subversion’ (having little or nothing to do with sex), I argue that ethnomusicology’s inclusion of a smattering of ‘queer subjects’ (where the second word defines both person and object of study) cannot in any way ameliorate the profoundly problematic nature of the discipline. Moreover, I will contend that in contrast to the often-encountered queer default to defining and exploring sexuality as primarily constituted by and with ideology, politics, and discourse, and a subsumption of various specificities under the broad umbrella of ‘non-normative’, an interdisciplinary relationship intended to combat ethnomusicology’s rampant homophobia would be dependent upon an unambiguous foregrounding of that which is so terrifying to the discipline—same-sex desire, engaged as not only ideological, but embodied, erotic, sensual, material, and experiential.Footnote 14 Such a foregrounding, coupled with a fearless embrace of ‘negative’ emotions—similar to the actions of early AIDS activists as well as BIPOC movements both historical and contemporary, and refusing current neoliberal mandates for ‘positive thinking’Footnote 15—could theoretically lead to queerness’s ability to battle ethnomusicology as a discipline (rather than being disciplined by ethnomusicology), culminating in a queer occupation and destruction of this colonialist enterprise and its silencing tactics. Ultimately, however, queerness itself—revealed to be every bit as colonizing in its monologic relationship to the discourse on (disembodied) sexuality—can only fulfil the potentials it has promised for decades, I argue, by submitting to an affectively motivated future, one in which its own silencing is the precondition for an equity that will only obtain via a truly dialogic, pluriversal, postdisciplinary or undisciplined space in which sound, music, sex/uality, embodiment, place, space, and other currently unknowable/unnamed sites of inquiry might converge in order to generate new forms of salubrious, equitable, generous knowledge and experience.

The concept of discipline, in numerous senses, occurs throughout this text. While I do not wish to foreclose upon the various, complex connotations this word may engender for the individual reader, I note nevertheless that my usage is inflected (though not exhausted) by a Foucaultian (1975/1995) understanding of discipline’s ongoing, protean, and structuring role over an expansive historical landscape, with special attention to its modern manifestations. Deployed neither by some central agency nor hereditary or elected ruler(s), discipline, rather, permeates culture/society through diverse, acephalous mechanisms of (hierarchical) observation, (normalizing) judgement, and examination. Although the various manifestations of these mechanisms often avoid announcing themselves as sites of disciplining historically understood as such (e.g., the prison), all contribute to the ultimate task of identifying, containing, normalizing, and confirming the regulation of the deviant subject—a ‘docile body’ as product of created knowledges. Arguing for the necessity of ‘[abandoning] the belief that…the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge’ (27) Foucault finds that, conversely, the two are inseparable, and central to the disciplinary project—a ‘power/knowledge’ that ‘determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge’ and, through its force, ‘the establishment of truth’ (28). Such truth-making knowledges may then be enlisted as instruments through and with which the mechanisms of normalization might best function. Operating from just such a Foucaultian understanding of power/knowledge, Ferguson’s (2012) keen analysis of interdisciplinarity within the modern, Western academy highlights the ways in which hegemonic society’s Others became/become disciplined by the very institutions they were to have altered (via the inclusion of their views, ideas, histories, and their very bodies).Footnote 16 My arguments comport with many of Ferguson’s, and I draw upon his work implicitly and explicitly at various points of this text. I engage, however, additional sociocultural, geographic, and epistemic sites. In my reading, both queerness and ethnomusicology, imagining themselves as battling against the exclusionary canons and ethnocentric elisions within academia have not only become fully disciplined, but have colonized numerous locations far beyond the rarified realm in which they operate, via profoundly gendered and monologic mechanisms that reduce Otherness to something mirroring and/or existing for the benefit of the self. They are, in short, not only produced by, but producers of power/knowledge.

Several additional overarching dynamics inform my discussion—at times explicitly, at times tacitly—the first two of which appear already in relation to my opening examples. Regarding this first—the silencing that occurred in relation to the Pulse murders—and understanding the specific Western, gendered histories of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and queerness, it is essential that questions of race and class are not elided by any sort of implicit suggestion of a ‘universal/unmarked’ construction of gender/sex/sexuality. In line with Shahid’s aforementioned cautioning, numerous Latina/o/x commentators have similarly pointed out how, if LGBT+ persons were erased in the media coverage of Pulse, then people of colour—the majority of those killed and injured—were doubly erased.Footnote 17 La Fountain-Stokes’s contention that many queer Puerto Ricans ‘live lives marked by invisibility’ (adding that ‘well-meaning LGBT white persons systematically exclude the voices of queer people of color’) (2016) highlights the necessity of an intersectional approach to sexual identity—and in the case of ethnomusicology, this silencing of sexual Others must be understood as significantly inflected by variables of gender, class, and race, relationships that are frequently highlighted in decolonizing literature. As Mignolo argues, for example, the ‘Colonial Matrix of Power’ (CMP) rests upon the three ‘pillars’ of racism, sexism, and (the invention of) nature (2018b);Footnote 18 similarly, Quijano views this matrix as instantiated via the control of economy, authority, gender/sexuality, and subjectivity/knowledge (2000) (an analysis problematized by Lugones who also highlights the mutually constituting interactions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the colonialist context) (2008, 2010).Footnote 19 And Haywood et al., with specific reference to homophobia, note that ‘[such] sentiments and practices [are] not just reducible to gender but situated and intertwined with…racialized and nationalistic discourses’ (2018: 96). Certainly some of the most incisive writing in queer theory has argued persuasively for the necessity of approaching what has been termed ‘sexuality’ with cognizance of a wide range of realms, sites, and dynamics intimately linked thereto—from militarization to economics to race and ethnicity.Footnote 20 Yet aware of the countless instances in which a veneer of passing references to ‘diversity’ mask an underlying Western or Anglocentric bias in queering practices, it is arguably necessary to constantly and explicitly highlight the need for attention to an often ethnocentric, assumed ‘we’ that dictates the very choice of those realms/sites/dynamics deemed essential and those implicitly constructed as marginal.

Another of La Fountain-Stokes’s observations—that is, the utility of ‘anger, fury, and rage’ in combatting ‘profound violence’Footnote 21—relates to my second example, that is, activist responses to the AIDS crisis in the early years of the epidemic. I engage both the experiential and theoretical complexities of this issue most fully in the second half of this book, where I argue for the importance of understanding the differences between the cultural legibility of emotion and the ineffable/indeterminate/intractable nature of affect, with an aim towards signalling the latter’s potential as a site of resistance to attempts at myriad types of disciplinary control. Understanding the ways in which an idealized queerness and affect are at least theoretically intertwined and ontologically similar (both voluble and resistant to fixity), I suggest that it is both ‘negative’ emotions and affective ceding of control—rather than a mandated acceptance of a pseudo-scientific methodology that serves as the singular marker of academic legitimacy (the very basis of its masculinist, silencing project)—that are necessary to effectuate change. Both Adebisi’s question—‘How illogical is it that the structure we are attempting to decolonize is the structure we are attempting to use to decolonise?’ (2019)—and Lorde’s famed assertion—‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (1979/1984: 110)Footnote 22—highlight the dangers of attempting to queer ethnomusicology, or to place any faith in the liberatory possibilities of interdisciplinarity, by enlisting (and leaving unexamined, intact) the very structures that guarantee a continuation of marginalization and silencing of some, concomitant with and dependent upon an entrenchment of enduring privileges and powers. This difference—between the safety and comfort afforded by the known, and the dangers that often accompany the enigmatic or unimaginable—will be instructive in exploring the possible ways to imagine (and engender) the dissolution of just those sites and structures that thrive on a rapacious disciplining, leading to a more undisciplined future for engaged inquiry.

If not already so, it will likely become clear that my text, endeavouring to address ongoing inequities in academia (and, by extension, the culture in, through, and for which these institutional sites function) often veers towards the theoretical rather than applied/pragmatic, and that decolonial literature has contributed to my thinking about these pressing issues. As such, I note my awareness of critiques of ‘the decolonial bandwagon’, highlighting the problematic nature of ‘intellectual decolonization’ (Moosavi 2020) or a ‘metaphorical’ practice that ‘kills the very possibility of decolonization…recenters whiteness…resettles theory [and] extends innocence to the settler’ (Tuck and Yang 2012: 3). Moreover, Mignolo makes a distinction between ‘dissenting within the CMP’ (a ‘Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism’) and decoloniality, which is defined as ‘[delinking] from both Eurocentric regulations and dissent within Eurocentrism’; the former, while necessary, is ‘highly insufficient’ in relation to the task of supporting the ‘planetary diversity of local histories that have been disrupted by North Atlantic global expansions’ (2018a: 151). Although I do not view my text as a proper example of decolonial scholarship, to the extent one might take it as such, it is clearly insufficient and even, noting my use of theory emanating from the West, another problematic re-centring. However, if my views of an equitable future are at least partially congruent with those held by some decolonial scholars and activists, perhaps my work might contribute or serve an ancillary function to their numerous initiatives—which I hope will be the case. As a polemic, this book arguably blurs the distinction between theoretical/practical; but even taken as wholly in the realm of the former, I hold that an imaginative thinking, refusing the adherence to a mandated ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ method (a value-laden model in which the aforementioned attributes are but chimerical) is crucial, as are concepts engaging with and emanating from our lived, corporeal experiences. I will ultimately attempt to make clear that the re-centring marking this Eurocentric critique is only provisional: I theorize, in part, from the position of Western disciplinary administration in order to decentre—to ultimately call for a vanquishing of—those discourses, ideologies, disciplines, and practices most implicated in the perpetuation of inequities resulting from the continuing attempted colonization of material and conceptual geographies and temporalities.

As a site of theoretical inquiry, temporality features prominently not only in decolonial literature, but in musicology, ethnomusicology, and queer studies as well. Taking the aforementioned examples of Pulse and AIDS together—examples separated by decades yet joined by disconcerting similarities—underscores another of the central animating forces of my inquiry: the necessity of approaching ethnomusicology, queerness, or any Western disciplinary site in a manner that takes into consideration the importance of cultural-historical context, the cultural conventions of and investedness in history’s creation, and the complexities of temporality’s experiential and conceptual registers. On a subjective level, while my biography (my status as a same-sex-desiring-identifying person; my education and practice in the Anglophone United States and in Northern Europe; my age and ethnicity) has certainly played a part in my positing of specific disciplinary dynamics as most in need of scrutiny, I do not intend what follows to function as an exercise in self-reflexivity, extrapolating individual experiences into universal explanans or Rosetta Stone; ‘my’ erasure is, as noted previously, only one of several others that mark the fields of ethnomusicology and queerness, with questions of, inter alia, race, class, faith, (dis)ability, as much as issues of sexuality, likewise implicated just as profoundly via their signifying absences and segregations. Additionally, while it is essential to understand the temporal and geocultural geneses of the ethno-, the queer, and the ethnoqueer (including via attention to the artefacts each has produced), there is no suggestion that any of this text is meant to be read as a history of any of them.

Rather, my historicized approach may be considered (provisionally) related to another of Foucault’s formulations (1966/1989)—apt, I believe, insofar as much of my discussion will highlight Western knowledge production and restrictions (on, and emanating from, the production). Specifically, I approach the various (synchronic, socioculturally contextualized) manifestations of disciplinary products and practices archaeologically, understanding them as moulded by the compulsions and prohibitions of the episteme in which they come into being. As with the distributed, decentralized nature of power/knowledge, the structures, performances, actions, and resulting artefacts constructing and constructed by this epistemic space are understood as illuminating not the decisions and desires of individual actors (or even the deliberate, ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ thought[s] of groups of sovereign subjects in general) but, according to Foucault, the unconsciously motivated discursive-ideological context in and through which any utterance, practice, or formation occurs. As he notes, it is the ‘rules of formation…never formulated in their own right, but…found…in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study’ (xii) that are the markers of the various historical epistemes, the foci of his archaeological project. I admit, however, that in my hands both episteme and archaeology may not appear entirely faithful to their original, Foucaultian forms, and it is arguable that I work against as much as with them; while my analysis does indeed assume broad, prevailing, and unacknowledged constraints on what is possible to know or claim (as well as motivations for making such claims), I depart from Foucault in several ways.

First, understanding that the central knowledge formations with which I am concerned have roots spanning centuries, appearing as disturbing continuities in the present, it is difficult to support a heuristic in which strictly defined, discrete, disjunct epistemes exist. While much of my discussion focuses on academic spheres operating within the relatively short span of the last several decades, the hierarchicalization of human life and worth, for example—in countless manifestations, and underlying just such disciplinary formations—has a far longer lineage. Also, in direct relation to this ongoing (indeed ongoing, as I will argue) colonial project, while my analysis critiques disciplinary production in the Global North, I am equally concerned to highlight how epistemic restrictions operate to require an expansion that ultimately sucks in, absorbs, and injures (materially and conceptually) those it constructs as Others, often via a so-called ‘representation’ that functions rather as tangential location and quarantine. While the Foucaultian episteme is often thought of as a deep, structuring ‘worldview’, it is a ‘world’ that begins and ends with the Western subject. As Slater notes, Foucault’s theorizations of such concepts as sexuality or confinement (among others) may have relevance in locations outside of the Global North/West; yet they are notable for their failure to ‘connect with the critique of Eurocentric discourses of colonialism and imperialism’ (1992: 312n3).Footnote 23

The insularity of the episteme, a ‘worldview’ created and contained not only with little cognizance of that which is located (supposedly) outside itself, but also obliterating those Others within, is also related to its singularity; noting that ‘in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility for knowledge’ (1966/1989: 168), the episteme for Foucault often appears to have the attributes of an ontologically closed, essential entity, rather than that which is brought into being via an ongoing process of interaction. It is arguable that such closure and singularity is necessary for the very existence of that which has the capacity to structure the fundamental manner in which ‘the’ world is understood. However, in what follows, I want to suggest that there is the possibility not only for refusals of or reactions to ‘the’ episteme, but entirely different epistemes that question both what is understood about ‘the’ world, as well as the very nature of ‘understanding’. Specifically, while the Foucaultian episteme may be viewed as proliferating at the level of the ‘unconscious’, knowledges based upon materiality, sensuality, corporeality, subjective and intersubjective, hold the possibility for upsetting the oppressions that have marked Western academia for centuries. By refusing a dead-ended, consumptive ‘cognitive empire’Footnote 24 that owes its very existence to the understanding of docile, compliant embodiment as that which is discursively produced and acted upon (rather than a site opening on to alternative forms of knowing), the acting, experiencing, and sexed/sexual body becomes one channel for alternatives to epistemic monologic totality, from ripple to rupture.Footnote 25

Finally, although I am reluctant to draw lines of separation between distinct/disjunct epistemes, embodied subjects as (discursive/corporeal) objects or agents, or epistemic foundations and effects, I have fewer such concerns in relation to the gendered and gendering structure of masculinity as I engage with it here. In short, while it is likely that many, in line with the poststructuralist tradition, more comfortably conceive of sex/gender/sexuality as that which is constructed by disciplinary power/knowledge (occurring as a specific manifestation within unique epistemic worldviews), I have already made clear that I view masculinity as a central, foundational motivating force, a vital component of the CMP, responsible for myriad compulsions operating on unexpressed/unconscious/‘habitual’ (i.e., of the corporeal habitus) registers. One might argue that Foucault’s focus, in the context of epistemology and archaeology—that is, the production of and limits on knowledge—are quite different than those engaged by decolonial theorists such as Mignolo and Walsh (2018). However (and here I am comfortable suggesting an antecedence), what functions above or at the root of the various manifestations of the ordering of knowledges which reflect epistemic ‘worldviews’ (according to Foucault: resemblance; categorization; historicization; any others to follow) are not only the definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘world’, but how knowledge is to be known and made manifest, and who is that subject capable of knowing, defining, writing, articulating, positing, the sexed, gendered, raced (dis)-embodiment of the sole species with access to the most recondite foundations of the physical and ideal world and those realms beyond. There exists an incontrovertibly gendered metaepisteme that adjudicates what counts/what does not count as knowledge; and it operates not only in contemporaneous relation to each of those archaeological strata in which things are ordered, but also in relation to the contemporary ordering of the knowledge of the ordering (in this second instance, the understanding that what has been studied is/was ‘the’ knowledge of the period, ‘the’ worldview; and that the current analysis is likewise legitimate knowledge).Footnote 26

Returning to temporality, as related to history, I agree that an implicit or explicit belief in the inevitable melioristic flow of history (from the ‘problematic’ ‘past’ to the ‘enlightened’/‘woke’ ‘present’/‘future’) must be viewed not only as erroneous, but dangerous; Foucault’s successive epistemes are seen as discontinuities, their analysis representing not a ‘growing perfection’ of knowledge, but ‘its conditions of possibility’ (1966/1989: xxiii–xxiv). Ideological constructions predicated upon a fiction of development or evolution project culpability away from (indeed, the impossibility of its emanating from) the ‘enlightened’ self, and give rise to a simplistic, unreflective optimism engendered, in part, by an equally simplistic, binarized understanding of discipline, identity, sociocultural location, and ethics (to name but a few), these often combining as bizarre, internally incoherent constellations. As I will argue more fully later in this text, the careless and constant iterations of any number of ‘post-’s (as in ‘post-racial’), proof of a need (= desire) for a type of anodyne, exculpatory amnesia, would seem to be predicated upon such tacit, erroneous, and indefensible suppositions as racism having been eradicated with the election of U.S. President Barak Obama (or the assessment of #MeToo a pointless action in the age of Western ‘gender equality’). And it is exactly such suppositions that, although outwardly repudiated, in fact underlie academic production from within both of the disciplinary/disciplined fields at issue here.Footnote 27

That narratives conjoining temporality to hierarchy and worth have been consistently enlisted by Western, colonialist powers—for example, prefixes such as ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-’ ascribing or withholding the very status of human (Mbembe 2013/2017; Mignolo 2018b; Wynter 2003)—should certainly signal the extent to which ethnocentric, monologic control of epistemological production frequently and dangerously undergirds melioristic narratives; the location on the sequential, evolutionary narrative automatically marks a necessarily externally located ‘past’ as inherently and essentially backward, evil, degenerate, amoral, or any number of similar negative assessments, often explicitly applied to questions of gender and/or sexuality. Scott, for example, highlights how the constructed opposition enlightenment/oppression erroneously, facilely, and inevitably geoculturally situated (with the former term of the dyad ensconced in the West), rather than offering any sort of theoretical or practical (ameliorative) perspicuity, in fact obscures the complexity of ideological construction and the workings of power, allowing inequality and injury to perpetuate surreptitiously (2018).Footnote 28 Hoad also draws attention to the complexity and troublingly generative qualities of such narratives. Noting that homosexuality has for centuries been presented as some sort of backward/‘retarded’ practice (linked by Westerners to ‘primitive’ Others, in contradistinction to the heterosexual, white male as the apotheosis of civilization), he argues that this narrative is eventually perpetuated in the late twentieth century by the Western, most often white/male/gay scholars of gender and sexuality. The modern (gay) subject is ‘constituted by progress through its various others, which are then posited as vestigial, arrested, anachronistic, or degenerate’ (2000: 134)—‘living savages [who]…fill the fossil gap, through a spatialization of time written on the human body’ (135)—revealing the necessity of vigilant attention to ‘deep cultural blind spots as overdetermined consequences of often unconscious allegiances to predigested narratives and metaphors that are part of the legacy of colonialism’ (147). More than a decade after Hoad’s insights, various Others—some refusing a wholesale, compelled silencing—note with dismay the continuation of such narratives emanating from queer studies, whereby the geotemporality of the West remains hegemonic, ‘discursively presented as supposedly more advanced, while others are framed as backward’, via a specious ‘universal model of development…[that] forecloses a full recognition of local specificity’ (Kulpa, Mizielińska, and Stasińska 2012: 123).

The cognizance of the ethnocentric, monologic concatenation of temporal and geocultural variables with hierarchies of (social, ontological, ethical) value, continually reconfigured and redeployed by various actors in myriad settings, must surely signal the dangers of the often-encountered, simplistic, and ultimately obfuscatory binary of good/bad, positive/negative. So often implicitly posited, appearing as de facto truths in need of no explication, such superficial dualisms—frequently with connotations of inside/outside—have often served as the cloaking devices par excellence for the perpetuation of hegemonies and exploitations. Mohanty, for example, decades ago drew attention to the ways in which feminism—a site of ‘good’—as a discourse co-opted by Northern voices and employing a ‘binary analytic’, rather than serving as a means to overcome oppression for all, functioned instead as a mechanism to place women of the Global South in negative relation to their ‘liberated’, ‘advanced’ Northern counterparts (1984). Yet a Western/non-Western, Northern/Southern split is also deceptive; highlighting the need for a more nuanced analysis of the postcolonial, for example, Rao argues ‘if postcolonial critique is to continue to remain meaningful in the contemporary world, it must do more than simply remind us of the enduring legacies of colonialism. It cannot avoid wading into the messy critical task of determining how responsibility for ongoing oppressions must be apportioned between colonial and postcolonial regimes’ (2020: 9). Finally, the often smug posturing of certain disciplinary realms, wherein the self is constructed and presented as both immune to and bravely battling that which is evil, venal, exploitive, coercive—always figured as residing in and/or with other times, places, and social actors—is one of the most evident yet least acknowledged or investigated dynamics structuring academia as a whole, and numerous specific sites it comprises. Thus within the ‘good’ university (apart from the ‘bad’ market), there is further hierarchical sorting, both according to discipline and the subjects enfolded within them. Ethnomusicology presents itself as ‘inclusive’, ‘diverse’ in opposition to ‘elitist’, ‘narrow’ musicology; and queer is the evolved, resistant, subversive, and ethical stance in contrast to the archaic sexual subject self-defining via a superseded ‘identity politics’ or—worse still—a co-opted, consumerist ‘gay’(male) (all of whom ‘are a fast lane for capitalist accumulation’ according to Halberstam) (Burns 2020).Footnote 29 As I hope will become clear, the positioning of a Western discipline, theoretical stance, or institution as somehow immune to, above, or outside capitalist (thus colonialist and masculinist) co-optation is often an indication of an increased need for urgent denudation.Footnote 30

Notwithstanding my agreement with a non-melioristic view of history, and the necessity of attention to rupture and discontinuity, I nonetheless reiterate the value in attending to the (diachronic) longue durée in addition to the (synchronic) break. For, as much as history is not teleological, moving towards some sort of modernist, utopian fairy tale of ‘perfection’, and as much as ruptures are surely part of temporal movement, they occur in relation to and as the consequences of some deeply systemic ideological, contextual bases that I have already outlined (i.e., the/a metaepisteme). In relation to this, I highlight the fact that the theoretical works upon which I am basing parts of my arguments span several decades. While not meaning to suggest total stasis or the impossibility of a voiced/embodied empowerment (due to the inevitable and invincible rule of the normative majority),Footnote 31 attention to the ways theoretical investigations related to gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity produced years ago may still seem depressingly relevant today can assist in revealing which power structures recur as the most intransigent (and by which means), resisting extirpation via critical, textual, engaged, enraged ‘exposure’. Moreover, equally important is the refusal to ascribe a melioristic omniscience to any given ‘current’ theory via implicit, tacit suggestions of perpetual, inevitable movement closer to ‘the’ ‘truth’ (engendered as much by the inevitable march towards progress as by the detached, objective, scientific-critical stance of the academician-theorist). Such narratives have marked the scholarly production of numerous disciplines; as only one example, Stacey highlights the frequently encountered narratives of feminist history marked by a move from ‘“naïve and simplistic” feminist theory to “wise and sophisticated” Feminist Theory’ (1993: 58)—a conventional ‘progress narrative’ where the contemporary scholar is ‘presented as the enlightened, knowing [subject] at the end of a progressional history’ (59).

This refusal is, additionally, linked to two others. First, I wish to resist the contemporary consumerist imperative—again understood as equally virulent in academia as in ‘daily life’—to hypervaluate only newer-better-shinier theory or the unofficial (yet no less compelled) canon, pitching all other ‘obsolete’ models to the junk heap. What drives the assessment of ‘old’ theory by (primarily) temporal criteria, thus judging it negatively (or, at least, lacking/incomplete), has of course something to do with the understanding of the importance of constantly remaining open to new possibilities of analysis, critique, investigation, and relation, in response to changing technological, social, material, biological, aesthetic, and affective phenomena. Yet as Korsyn argues, the current academic landscape is also marked by a ‘corporate mentality [that…] builds a certain planned obsolescence into scholarship, through an exaggerated reverence for scholarly currency’ (2003: 7), and it is attention to just such administrative, capital-driven dynamics that again highlight the necessity of critically assessing claims of immunity and impunity emanating from disciplinary locations. The relationship of the academic to the capitalist-colonial will be a recuring theme throughout this text. Second, by engaging in what I unapologetically term a promiscuous relationship to theories and texts—refusing the heteronormative imperatives of ‘monogamy’ and ‘depth’, breaching temporal and disciplinary boundaries, ‘pinging’ with pleasure from one to another, experiencing the texts as revealing new understandings approached in such a manner—I hope to at least gesture towards the limitations of the masculinist-colonialist epistemologies that devalue vast swaths of what is often a corporeally based, experiential production of knowledge.

It is essential to understand, of course, that discourses and ideologies—including those that structure and make possible academic disciplines—do not confine themselves to textual perpetuation. Much to the contrary, as numerous authors have shown (including, inter alia, Beauvoir 1949/1953; Bourdieu 1977; Mol 2003; Heyes 2007; Horton-Stallings 2015; Lorde 1978/1984; Macharia 2019; Merleau-Ponty 1958/2005; Sandoval 2000, 2002; Scarry 1987), the ideological is often played out at the level of the body, from the structuring of access to social space, to the adoption of bodily postures signalling hierarchies of norms and values. MacDougall’s concept of ‘social aesthetics’—‘a [wide] range of culturally patterned sensory experience’ (2006: 98)—is instructive in this area, perhaps particularly as implicated in relation to the construction of privilege (see Fahey, Prosser, and Shaw 2015).Footnote 32 And Haraway’s discussion of ‘situated knowledge’ foregrounds—in line with much phenomenological theory—the ‘need to learn in our bodies…how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners’ (1988: 582). Clearly the ‘objective’ and the theoretical do not exhaust the entire field of possible avenues of making/gaining knowledge; rather, both are animated in significant ways by affects (neither wholly objective nor theoretical), states of corporeal/social/intersubjective perturbation and possibility that are every bit as much a part of ‘real’ ‘history’ as artefacts or events.

This understanding of corporeality as an essential site of experiential meaning/knowledge making runs throughout the chapters of this book. And in this regard, I highlight—I admit; I reveal my experiential biases—that the longue durée to which I refer, encompassing ethnomusicology (and, to a significant extent, anthropology) as well as LGBT+ and, later, queer studies, is not one that I approach solely or primarily via text or ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’, or temporally distant perspective. Rather, it is a (my) lived-in-the-world experience of decades of the corporeal-affective, of the various forms of hatreds, exploitations, erasures, exclusions, cruelties, and punishments associated with homophobia—including the homophobia of/within academia. I have navigated through and grown/aged in relation to times, actions, and events including the activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation; the March on Washington; the constant threat and sometimes enactments of the physical violence of ‘fag bashers’; media artefacts from The Celluloid Closet (1995), to Visible: Out on Television (2020), to the dramatic revisitings of AIDS via such engaging streaming fare as When We Rise (2017); the challenges and ravages of AIDS, and the prophylactic promise of PrEPFootnote 33 (for the wealthy who could/can afford it); Section 28 (the UK, 1988–2003) and the ‘Gay Propaganda’ legislation (Russia, from 2013 onward); and numerous other experiences that have shaped my understanding of all manner of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ homophobias. My understanding of AIDS, Pulse, ethnomusicology, queerness, and the structures and ideologies that connect all of these, is not something engendered (only/primarily) by an ‘objective’ perspective (events that occurred in ‘other’ times/to ‘other’ people, and most ‘in’ ‘the past’); rather, it is via experience of and as what others might understand (only) as a ‘then’/‘there’/‘them’ (the ‘past’ struggles at odds with the ‘current’ ‘unproblematic’ status of LGBT+ people) that my partial, situated observations and analyses come to be. There is, I contend, no understanding of social dynamics absent the foundational importance of experience which encompasses both feelings we believe to be articulable, and those we viscerally understand as resistant to any sort of linguistic closure—and this includes one’s experience of and in academia, a realm that does not exist in some rarified, ‘objective’ location outside society. Only through these complex (objective, material, affective, critical, individual, social) experiences, in dialogue with other partial, situated knowledges, can the silencing monologic and oppressive be challenged.

The decade has begun as rupture. And although it is the appearance of a novel, biological pathogen that has engendered profound material consequences around the globe, the effects cannot be understood as material alone. Rather, this newest rupture, owing to the ripples of its seismic effects, is only the latest instance of a physical, tangible catastrophe (from viruses to hurricanes to wildfires) that has laid bare the disturbing social and cultural inequalities that perpetually manifest across continents and centuries. Yet understanding the most current eruptions of resistance to these disparities as the newly enraged legacies of movements gaining and having gained momentum within and extending from the previous decade (from Black Lives Matter to #SayHerName), one might dare to believe that a tipping point has been reached, that the assumed inviolability of innumerable spheres of privilege, oppression, and exploitation might finally, via action, be refuted. Indeed, a call for reckoning in relation to one of the disciplinary sites explored in this text appeared at approximately the halfway point of my work on this manuscript—coming, conspicuously, not from those in power, but from those who had refused and thus situated themselves outside (or at the margins of) power’s strongholds. Two separate ‘open letters’, one from an ethnomusicologist (Brown 2020), to which I will turn later, the other a joint initiative between Project Spectrum and ‘The Scare Quotes’ (a coalition of BIPOC and queer ethnomusicologists) have made it undeniably clear that the indefensible may be close to reckoning.

If I sit somewhere at the interstices of being too old to be wholly naïve, and too young to be irredeemably disillusioned, of one thing I feel certain: in order to stoke the possibility of this long-overdue reckoning, confrontation is necessary. As such, as I have noted previously (Amico 2020), I am unapologetic in my embrace of the polemical, the furious, the ‘negative’. As Ebert notes, the foregrounding of the polemic (and the manifesto) ‘is one of the most urgent tasks of theorists and pedagogues in part because [they] desediment the settled discourses of culture and, in doing so, open up a space for the struggle for change’ (2003: 560). And Flannery reminds us that in avoiding the confrontational, ‘restricting conviction to what propriety will tolerate…we also run the risk of losing the generative possibilities of volatility and contestation’ (2001: 128).Footnote 34 The polemical—kin to the manifesto—brings about a ‘coarse thinking’ (Ebert: 556)Footnote 35 and, at historical junctures where ‘cracks in the well-regulated society’ appear, it ‘can be seen to sprout like weeds in the sidewalk and to open up the cracks further’ (Flannery: 120).

This cultural moment is one in which the cracks produced by rupture have become too gaping to be concealed with yet another skim coat of cement (in the form of ‘scientific objectivity’, token representation, virtue signalling, or ersatz wokeness). I hope this monograph, at this moment, will assist in turning cracks to chasms, by which the structures of exploitation might finally be swallowed. Audre Lorde’s words continue to resonate: ‘There are so many silences to be broken’ (1977/1984: 44).Footnote 36