The relationship of music to masculine identity in Western culture has for centuries been, and continues to be, a complicated affair. Augustine’s much-noted anxieties concerning music’s ability to ravish, to annihilate the spiritual (and rational) via the lure of the sensual, is echoed in later assessments, in increasingly manifestly gendered terms. As Leach notes, Boethius, subscribing to the same rational/sensual bifurcation, ‘defines music of the highest character as “temperate, simple, and masculine”…rather than “effeminate, violent, or fickle”’ (2009: 23).Footnote 1 Such a conflation of sensuality and musical sound (and practice), and the misogynistic devaluation of the feminine (phantasmatically cordoned off in the female body)Footnote 2 were surely responsible for the various remedies enlisted in order to rationalize—and thus masculinize—music. From the creation of the cult of the agentic genius, to Eduard Hanslick’s formalization, to the modernist mania for abstraction (Brett 1994; Biddle and Gibson 2009), a considerable amount of panicked energy has been invested in constructing music as a support for masculine identity, rather than an ‘emasculated art’ with the power to bring shame upon any boy who would dare desire it (according to Charles Ives).Footnote 3 But if musicology has invested heavily in the stock of masculinity (as saviour from perceived dissolution), then ethnomusicologists—rebels against the ‘philistines’ of ‘art music’ (Nettl 2002: 208)—in the grand tradition of by-any-other-name pissing contests, were poised to go one better. And as both products and producers of these wider, masculinist power structures—understanding that ‘all musicians…are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room’ (Brett 1994: 17–18)—they embraced a methodology (ethnographic fieldwork) overwhelmingly rich with significance, due in part to its centrality to a discipline (cultural anthropology) likewise rife with a perceived virility.

In her 1970 essay, although not explicitly unpacking or elaborating upon her rationale, Sontag is incisive in her equation of anthropology (and anthropologists) with masculinity. The discipline exists, in her estimation, as ‘one of the rare intellectual vocations that do not demand a sacrifice of one’s manhood’ (189), an assessment gesturing towards those actions and alliances which produce the titular ‘Anthropologist as Hero’. With attention to Claude Lévi-Strauss,Footnote 4 Sontag highlights not only how the work of the anthropologist bears the imprimatur of a (heroic) paternalism—involved in nothing less than saving the ‘primitives’ of the worldFootnote 5—but also (recalling some of the gendered binaries noted previously in relation to music) the extent to which the anthropologist is defined by his embrace of a scientific rationality. According to Sontag, the heroic Lévi-Strauss was the archetypal ‘modern’ subject caught between conflicting poles of experience (rational/visceral), a subject who sought—through textual and theoretical actions redolent of colonialism—‘the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science’ (185). In her estimation, ‘for Lévi-Strauss there is no doubt that anthropology must be a science, rather than a humanistic study’ (192), an enterprise that ‘[vanquishes the] subject by translating it into a purely formal code’ (192). Indeed, the anthropologist himself (most often, at the time of Sontag’s writing, himself) saves not only the Other, but his own soul ‘by a curious and ambitious act of intellectual catharsis’ (emphasis added; 190).Footnote 6 The anthropologist—and, as I will soon argue, the scion ethnomusicologist—gains masculine power not only via a subject position requiring objectification of others, but also recourse to science (or theory) which, by implication, obliterates the corporeal, sensing, sensual (read: that coded as ‘feminine’) realms of experience. I will return to this gendering of the so-called ‘scientific’ throughout, including the ways in which it aligns with an effacement of the body, and ethnocentric (colonialist) claims of (evolutionary) superiority. For now, however, I turn to another matter briefly referenced by Sontag, but central to this discussion: the ‘puberty ordeal’ (186) known as fieldwork.

To highlight the ritual characteristics of fieldwork (as anthropologists themselves have done)Footnote 7 is to once again underscore the fact that what ethnomusicologists embraced (for putatively rational purposes) was not simply a methodology, but a symbolic apparatus enabling their transition from boys (or sissy-boys) to men, in the service of their disciplinary patricide and the resistance of music’s feminizing connotations—a type of masculine cultural capital. Part and parcel of the enactment of said capital is the reliance on well-worn tropes of masculine, indeed colonialist, exploration and adventure—continually reenacted, from David Livingstone to Anthony Bourdain (or Gordon Ramsay)—which figure the intrepid voyager flirting with, and outmanoeuvring, danger. A number of contemporary anthropological texts, some with didactic aims, have highlighted the potential perils inherent in fieldwork,Footnote 8 and while it is indisputable that fieldwork may have risks (about which young students, especially, should be informed), it often appears that such risks function more as badges of honour, whipped out in order to out-Chagnon Chagnon.Footnote 9 While there are inherent problems in basing argument upon anecdote, the frequency with which I (and other colleagues) have been regaled in social and professional settings with (often, but not always, male) ethnomusicologists’ ‘war stories’ of ‘dangerous’ fieldwork is difficult to ignore—repeated tales, often delivered with an air of masculine ersatz nonchalance, relating how they faced, navigated, and triumphed over everything from war zones to machine-gun-wielding police officers to dysentery.Footnote 10 Such frequent accounts, coupled with the aforementioned prominence in the anthropological literature so central to ethnomusicological practice, would seem to be exactly the type of data one would consider were one an ethnographer studying (and speaking for) ethnomusicologists—but nowhere is this engaged in ethnomusicological texts. Instead, the ethnomusicologist becomes the self-constructed, structural opposite of the musicologist: the former appears as the active pioneer, valiant explorer, and risk-taker, while the latter is the effete, passive aesthete, seduced by the ‘beauty’ of bourgeois music, comfortably ensconced in the (one might infer ‘feminine’) safety of the library, office, or study.Footnote 11 (That any fieldworker of a marked category—female, trans*, queer, gay, lesbian, BIPOC, BAME—could be said to face much greater risk of harm in many ‘fields’, simply by virtue of their body or identity, is apparently left out of the equation.) Although the time has certainly been ripe to repudiate such easy targets as Chagnon (for professional practices, as much as gendered performance), it is arguable that his function as public whipping boy or embodied cautionary tale is a smoke screen used to camouflage the fact that such masculinist figures and tropes, and the desires for these, still function tacitly (including as a form of habitus, embodied yet not articulated) in Western academic cultures.Footnote 12

But neither fieldwork nor fearless bravado in and of themselves are enough to ensure the attainment of masculinity for this Western, humanist, academic subject. Although ‘anthropology [and ethnomusicology; author] [make] heroes of men…insisting that they exploit their alienation, their intrepid homelessness’ (emphasis added; Behar and Gordon 1995: 16), as Dubois argues, the idea that travel-running-seeking-exploring is the Kerouackian route to knowledge and an authentic manhood that escapes the structures/strictures of repressive (bourgeois, ‘feminine’) society is a blind loop, inasmuch as the very narrative of this path is already deeply established as a (banal cultural) narrative. Speaking of his own experience, Dubois notes ‘At the heart of what I wanted to run from were texts about that very act of running; I couldn’t escape, because the ways of escaping were already defined, from right in the heart of what I thought I was escaping’ (1995: 314). Moreover, for all the talk of freedom from stricture, both anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are still ‘at home in an institution that, even if it centres itself on a process of alienation from institutions, still functions as an institution’ (317). Additionally, as both Straw and Garlick suggest, certain figures of supposedly unadulterated, raw masculinity are problematic for myriad groups of Western, often white, and upper- or upper-middle-class men. The ‘brute’, for example—all action, no thought, a figure of ‘uncultivated instinctuality’, ‘independent of knowledges which originate and find value within the social and the symbolic’ generally ‘has not been a principal source of heroic or appealing imageries of the [Western] male’ (Straw 1997: 8);Footnote 13 similarly, the ‘caveman’ identity posited in part by sociobiologists,Footnote 14 with its ‘valorization of an animalistic, emotional, or primal-driven concept of male nature’ (Garlick 2010: 609) is ‘tamed’ (yet definitely not castrated) in contemporary culture, in part, by the union of sexuality and science-as-technology—specifically in the realm of ubiquitous online pornography that functions to ‘[allow] nature to be brought under control and channeled toward ends that serve the project of hegemonic masculinity’ (609.). Taken together, the implication is that bravado, fortitude, and testosterone-driven rebelliousness alone cannot a man make; rather, to be a man—a masculine, ‘modern’, ‘evolved’ man—the civilizing and interrelated ingredients of rationality and intellect are essential.Footnote 15

Masculinity, of course, can never be thought of as singular, transcultural, or transhistorical; from the entire gamut of possible masculinities, individual instances relate to historical, geographical, and discursive/epistemic specificities. Moreover, as Boise suggests, there is a danger in positing various ‘types’ of masculinity, actions that may ‘pathologize a cluster of behaviors under a decontextualized, ahistorical label….individualize social problems and….ignore the contextual nature of various performances, presuming a certain essence to these constructs’ (2019: 149). Wishing to avoid such pitfalls, I highlight that in the specific context of the institutional/academic/(upper)-middle-class culture in which ethnomusicological identities are formed (in conjunction with discourses from the cultural context as a whole, as well as the foundations of colonialist epistemology), it is the intellectual/rational that is integral to the construction of this situated masculinity, performatively enacted via the use (at least) and/or production of (better still) Theory. While ‘intellectualism’ may, in certain contexts, be an epithet, in conjunction with a certain type of elite, privileged, and ultimately non-masculine subject and position, in the realm of the modern, Western university structure, it is the intellectual—the producer of Theory (the capital ‘T’ essential)—that accrues inestimable cultural capital and power.

In addition to (and in consort with) use and production, the very instruments of intellectual engagement themselves—as Lutz has persuasively argued—have profoundly gendered characteristics. In Lutz’s view, the type of theory most valued in contemporary academia is itself marked as male; conversely, ‘women’s words, work, and selves in U.S. society have been undervalued, judged less competent, less rational, and more emotional’ (1995: 250), often dismissed as mere ‘description (or complaint)’ (259).Footnote 16 Ultimately, it is that type of writing with pretentions to universality, depth, or timelessness, ‘denuded of…origin…stripped of…reference to a concrete phenomenal world’ (253),Footnote 17 which is coded as male/masculine and thus valuable.Footnote 18 Writing more than two decades later, Davidov states unequivocally, ‘everything Lutz described is still true’, arguing that ‘what gets recognized as theory is likely contingent on it announcing itself as theory—which, as Lutz notes, is a claim rooted in the entitlement and confidence that has historically been the provenance of men in academia’ (2018). The extent to which these gendered dynamics play out in high-profile, public, academic forums—in the ‘enlightened present’—is highlighted by Halme-Tuomisaari who notes the near-total eradication of any female scholars’ work from the keynote delivered by Didier Fassin at a major anthropological conference, and the speaker’s definition (whether implicit or explicit) of ‘critical theory as something that is entirely “male”’ (2016). Such an act ‘forms a textbook example of how the male dominance of […] academia is not only being actively reproduced, but even emphasized’, and is part of a larger dynamic with profoundly deleterious consequences for younger, female scholars who may question the purpose of devoting their lives to an exploration of human culture (contributing ‘the kind of data that it would simply [be] impossible for male scholars to produce’ emanating as they are from gender-specific contexts) only to have their work ‘ignored and erased from the debate’.Footnote 19 These divisions of labour, in true (gendered) colonialist fashion, play out at the level of geocultural location, as well. As Moosavi notes—in relation to decolonial theory itself—although ‘sophisticated [decolonial] theory has been produced in the Global South since the 1970s’, it was ‘only popularized in the Global North since 2014/2015’ (2020: 341), this in line with ‘the prevailing tendency to believe that events, developments, and questions only matter when they manifest [in the latter location]’ (334). As I will later discuss, hierarchicalizations of T/theory also play out in relation to queerness, itself related to coloniality; as Macharia highlights, reading through U.S.-produced work circulating as ‘queer African studies’, one is confronted by its ‘[indifference] to many of the conceptual frames in African studies’, so that it is ‘difficult to imagine that African philosophers…have ever written anything that conceptualizes personhood, individuality, or community’ (2016: 185).Footnote 20

Returning to music studies, Brett suggests that the penchant in modern ethnomusicology to rely upon theory—where ‘jargon’ affords the same sort of abstraction and mystification the modernists adored—indicates a desire to masculinize the discipline (1994: 15). While ethnomusicologists do not always aspire to produce ‘grand theory’ themselves, it is rare to find work that does not in some essential way rely on the work of one or another ‘major’ Theorist. And here it is essential to note—as did Halme-Tuomisaari, in the case of anthropology—that in the vast majority of cases, these theorists are men (overwhelmingly, white men of the Global North).Footnote 21 Certainly, owing to inequality, the percentage of (Western) men allowed into this self-constructed/self-perpetuating pantheon of excellence far exceeds that of women, so that one might (inconceivably) excuse the omission as a purely statistical matter. But it is implausible to argue that it is only statistics contributing to the absence of the work of female scholars as theoretical supports for ethnomusicological research. As only one example: while researchers of globalization such as Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, and David Harvey appear in literally hundreds of articles in the journal Ethnomusicology, searching for Saskia Sassen produces—as of mid-2020—zero hits.Footnote 22 To argue that the complete invisibility of a prominent theorist (of one of the central concerns of ethnomusicology for the past two-plus decades) is simply a matter of numbers would be both unfathomable and disturbing. Further to this, I would suggest that, to the extent that ‘amateurism’ has been conflated with the feminine (Biddle and Gibson 2009), ethnomusicologists, flaunting their conversance with Theory from Heidegger to Habermas (and scores of other white, European/U.S. male theorists), peppering their monographs with neologisms and supposedly paradigm-shifting (indeed, world-shifting) theoretical concepts, construct themselves and their discipline in superior contradistinction to what they mistakenly view as the antiquated, provincial, ‘feminized’ activities (collecting, describing, poring over minutiae—like needlework or lace tatting) of (strawperson constructions of) musicologists.

What both disciplines share—musicology with attention to the composer, ethnomusicology with reference to the theorist—is a continuation of the veneration of the cult of (male) power: The sophisticated manipulator of sonic-intellectual material on the one hand, sunburned and dust-covered explorer-theorist on the other.Footnote 23 But there is a significant difference here: if the voice of the musicologist is in some ways aligned horizontally with the voice of the composer/composition about whom/which he speaks (although not a ‘genius’, perhaps, the scholar is a doctor/scientist, speaking for or with another white, Western, male [product] of similar class background), the ethnomusicologist once again enjoys the vertical position of authority and power.Footnote 24 This scholar, working with the centuries-old tools of the colonist (including the attribute of a ‘civilizing’ rationality), constructs, speaks for, views, represents, and theorizes an Other—‘enunciating’ an ‘enunciated’, inventing an epistemology that becomes ontology (in and as the very materiality of the ‘object of study’) (Mignolo 2018)—who is textually subordinated and objectified by the subject/author/daredevil/scholar. Wynter’s ‘deciphering practice’ (1992) is relevant in this context, highlighting as it does the trap of claiming and identifying a specific ethic-ness (in the name of ‘culture-inclusiveness’) in the (transcultural) object of study without the necessary attention to those structural forces that allow for the very construction of both the object and its specific form of visibility. If ethnomusicologists have clung to Theory as an alleged tool for ‘interpreting’ their study objects-made-text with the necessary sophistication or complexity—a focus on what the texts mean—they have completely ignored the ‘“illocutionary force” and procedures with which [their texts] do what they do’ (Wynter: 267). That which Theories do—as rhetorical-textual devices supporting and fusing with the secondary rhetorical-textual aims of the ethnomusicological text—is obscured, including their functioning as means to perpetuate gendered identities and power structures.

Gendering may be clearly seen as operative in the realm of globalization theory, which I have referenced previously. Here, Freeman makes an important observation that it is not only the epistemological posits emanating from the canonical voices defining the area of inquiry that have been gendered as male/masculine, but ‘the very processes defining globalization itself’ (which include ‘the spatial reorganization of production across national borders and a vast acceleration in the global circulation of capital, goods, labor, and ideas’) (2001: 1008), leading to the dichotomization global:masculine :: local:feminine (see also Freeman 2014a; Massey 1994).Footnote 25 It is not difficult here to map these gendered contours onto the very enterprise of ethnomusicology, where the mobile, networked, and economically privileged researcher, making use of ‘universally applicable’ grand Theories, occupies an asymmetrically advantageous power position to those various ‘local’ music-makers whose representation is determined within the various artefacts (texts, lectures) also globally, digitally sold and disseminated via the circuits of capital-backed university systems—much the same as we will see with queer theory. It should come as no surprise that a masculinist enterprise—tasked primarily with constructing the identity of the practitioner, as well as the subordinate positions of those relegated to appearing as little more than objects of study—makes near-exclusive use of the very theoretical constructions that are themselves seen to uphold a gendered stereotype and the hierarchies it reproduces.

It is vital that the disciplinary posturings I have been discussing not be dismissed as mere instances of intellectual arm wrestling, cordoned off in a rarified academic realm, impacting only upon those whose primary aim is the production of their specific gendered identities and structures. It is true that Theory plays a prominent role in these productions; as Harrison, with reference to the work of Lutz (1995), Mafeje (1998), and Haraway (1988) argues, ‘theory-making practices are integral to the formation and workings of situated knowledges…which are grounded in matrices of interlocking hierarchies of inequality and power, and materialized through historically-specific divisions of intellectual labor’ (2016: 162). But the creation and implementation of Theory—far from what may often appear to be primarily a self-aggrandizing exercise, the goal of which is personal gain (of capitals both financial and cultural)—has important applications and implications. Harrison concludes her discussion with the critical reminder that ‘to those for whom theory/theorizing is a tool for struggle against imperial forms of globalization, white supremacy, poverty, gender and sexual oppressions, environmental injustices, militarism, and the merciless negation of human rights and dignity, the crafting of convincing conceptual frames and useful theoretical tools emanates from the interlocking imperatives of intellectual efficacy and social responsibility’ (172). Theory is, as Lutz maintains, intimately involved in the ‘historical struggles over the authority of women and of minorities of both sexes to speak’ (1995: 253)—and not only within discrete, bounded, privileged realms.

While the ethnomusicologist may claim to be motivated by the ethical imperatives suggested by Harrison, it is clear that, as an unfairly advantaged, powerful participant in the struggles Lutz describes, other motivations are operative. The assumption of specific theoretical voices and positions may be undertaken to give the illusion (and delusion) of a representational space of agency for those denied any presence in music scholarship for centuries. However, understanding this specific academic/intellectual realm as primarily a site of the practitioner’s own self-gendering, the representation via gendering and gendered theory serves primarily as proof of the ability to control the Other, to upstage the father (the musicologist), and to construct the study of music as something real men (are allowed to) do. And it is essential to highlight that for the ethnomusicologist this theorized other, approached through the exhilarating danger of fieldwork, is, as I will argue—and as is inevitably the case in colonial contact—a racialized and desired Other.