Street Cred and Locker Room Glances

Abstract

Foregrounding the fetishization of textually represented ‘of-color Others’, the indissoluble links among sex, gender, sexuality, and race are exposed as responsible for the injunction against same-sex desire within the discipline. Surveying the history of whites’ fantastic constructions of these Others’ imagined inherent masculinity and heterosexuality, as well as the exploitation of their cultural production (including music) for the construction of the ethnomusicologist’s own gendered identity, homophobia is shown as concomitant with an unspeakable homoerotic/homophilic desire. Moreover, recent calls within anthropological research to abandon theory-driven distancing between researcher and subject—to instead share in experiential/sensual space—render any acknowledgment of same-sex desire highly dangerous, capable of exposing the precarity of gendered identities as well as the asymmetrical power relationships structuring ethnographic research.

The donning of the intrepid explorer’s drag, concurrent with that of the ‘rational’, scientist-subject who in fact textually objectifies (speaks for, monologically controls) an Other is certainly part of the masquerade of masculinity that is foundational to the discipline of ethnomusicology, a discipline that has in large part consistently hypervalued men’s words, works, and practices (on both sides of the subject/object divide)—and, concomitantly, eradicated by silence same-sex desire, indeed any type of desire that might problematize a hierarchical sexual binary. This eradication may also be related to the need of those in power to keep structural or ‘practical’ control of the discipline: specifically, motivations engendered by heterosexual, white, privileged men’s discomfort with the establishment of a site of inquiry (‘LGBT+ communities’—of all hues, in geographically diverse locations) to which they might not have the unimpeded access they have always enjoyed. By dint of the racial, social, and pecuniary registers which have been in many ways taken by ethnomusicologists (and the cultural construct in which they operate) to confer an unproblematic, God-given right to intrude anywhere—and in these far-flung anywheres remain as the self-constructed vertically superior subject¹—the possibility of perceived exclusion may still provoke apprehension.²

But if gay/queer/homosexual/(+) men have been constructed as passive, feminine (discursively figured in a patriarchally defined realm in manifestly negative terms), and inferiority incarnate in regards to tumescent heterosexuality, it could be expected that ethnomusicologists—accustomed to the role of powerful interloper, speaking for any number of Others—would simply keep masculine constructions and prerogatives intact by exploring music makers/consumers of non-normative sexual identities in ‘dangerous’ locations (thus, intrepid), ultimately taking textual control of their subjects’ voices and practices (thus, superior). The fact that this most certainly has not been the case (as attested to by the paucity of work over the course of more than half a century) makes it clear that the roots of this homophobia are both complex and deep-rooted, not simply the result of ‘practical’ matters such as the canard of ‘access’. If bloodless, sanitized rationality coupled with the enactment of pitiable caricatures were to be the means towards the avoidance of the feminized sensuality of music(ology) and at the same time the saviours of masculinity, it is important to remember that all human action, including that of ‘rational’, ‘scientific’ ethnomusicologists, is in significant ways motivated by affects and desires, often of a sensual/sexual/erotic nature—and perhaps nowhere is this more important to remember than in relation to music. In this regard it is essential to highlight the ways in which the body of the racialized, ‘of-color-Other’ (or ‘other-than-white-Other’) has been exploited as perhaps the deepest and most intricate locus for the construction of one group’s always already irrational conception of masculinity—and how the incoherence of these constructions relate, moreover, to a homophobia undergirded by fears of contamination or taint, and abdication of ultimate control. That the colony has often been figured by the colonizer as the site of sexual access and excess (to and of the colonized)—an anxiety-producing site of ‘degeneracy’ wherein ‘unconventional sex’ was figured as a ‘danger to the body politic’ (Rao 2020: 8)³—highlights the volatility of the very ‘laboratory’ that the ethnomusicologist has constructed, as well as the extraordinary tactics (including obliteration via silence) necessary to prevent devastation of the inextricably linked constructs of identity and discipline.

While ethnomusicology is in theory defined by approach, not study object, in actual practice—as attested to by even a cursory glance at the artefacts that make up the discipline’s collected research—it is a field that finds its sine qua non in the exploration/exploitation/excavation of ‘non-Western’, ‘non-white’ Others (largely, throughout a majority of the discipline’s existence, by privileged, Western whites) (Amico 2020).⁴ The extent to which those of the Global North have used subjects of colour symbolically, materially, and financially—for example, the exploitation of black cultural (including musical) production in the United States—has not been confined solely to the realm of ethnomusicology, of course, as numerous studies from diverse disciplines demonstrate.⁵ Baraka, in his provocatively and aptly titled essay describes the ‘great music robbery’ as ‘an attempt by the bourgeoisie to claim and coopt, in a growingly more obvious way, black music as the creation of whites’ (1987: 331).⁶ White highlights much the same dynamic in a contemporary cultural landscape, lamenting this continued exploitation of blackness, founded and dependent on decontextualization, and perpetuated by upper classes that have systematically exploited the cultural production of ‘blacks existing at the margins of society, which since the 1960s have been privileged sites of authenticity by social researchers’ (2011: 28) (including, I suggest, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists). Labelling the appropriation and exportation of blackness a ‘global pandemic’ (29), with the centrality of hip-hop in transnational youth cultures based not on empathy but on ‘racial information that is…likely to be reductive or problematic’ (30), cultural production becomes ‘a tool to sell everything from sheet music…to sneakers’ (27).⁷ Additionally, highlighting the wide cultural terrain over which such dynamics occur, Hughey argues that the exploitation of black masculinity (in relation to the construction of white masculinity) occurs among groups often assumed to be ideologically, culturally, and often geographically distinct—specifically, in his study, white nationalists and white antiracists (2012). But while ethnomusicologists have striven—at least on a superficial level—to combat just such decontextualization as White notes, despite their self-presentation as the (‘woke’) ‘good guys’, it is clear that the discipline owes its very existence in large part to selling products (and making careers) through the mining of the cultural production of ethnically marked Others, via asymmetrical power relations.

It is essential to understand that this attraction to the ‘of-color-Other’ and his (most often, his) cultural production rests upon very specific attributes implied and inferred from the position of the exploiter, including—in the context of this discussion—the variable of the Other’s assumed masculinity. Europeans (and later, those from the United States and other Anglophone countries) have long created essentialist and racist myths about the sexuality of ‘dark primitives’, whereby this ‘primitive’ (including the black African),⁸ ‘close to nature, ruled by instinct…had to be heterosexual, his sexual energies and outlets devoted exclusively to their “natural” purpose: biological reproduction’ (Cole and Guy-Sheftall 2003: 165; in Collins 2004: 105).⁹ The possibility of the taint of feminizing homosexuality removed, the constructed (enunciated) ‘primitive’ thus stands as a pinnacle of heteronormative masculinity.¹⁰ Such constructions inevitably reveal more about the self than the Other, and with minstrelsy we may see, according to Lott, how white men have historically mediated their relationships with one another via the currency of exchange based on black masculinity (1993). This construction of/obsession with black masculinity was, unsurprisingly, quite visible in the middle of the twentieth century—the moment of ethnomusicology’s birth—often connected to the world of jazz and the jazz musician. Monson, in her examination of ‘white hipness’ finds that for whites ‘the “subcultural” image of bebop was nourished by a conflation of the music with a style of black masculinity’ (1995: 402), and indeed voices of the era (from Jack Kerouac to Mezz Mezzrow to Norman Mailer) highlight the ways white men have conflated blackness with a particularly potent type of manliness.¹¹ Gabbard, with a focus on music in U.S. filmmaking, explores the ways in which black musicians, audible yet perpetually invisible, have often been used by white actors and audiences as a means of bolstering constructions of masculinity (2004). Indeed, in contradistinction to classical music, jazz and blues could be exploited for both their ‘anti-institutional cachet’ as well as their connection to ‘the phallic power of black masculinity’ (Gabbard: 204). Such practices are, of course, not limited to the sphere of expressive culture; Gabbard also suggests that ‘Virtually every syllable of body language with which white athletes and white rock musicians exhibit their masculinity is rooted in African American culture’ (210), while according to Lott, ‘this dynamic, persisting into adulthood, is so much a part of most American white men’s equipment for living that they remain entirely unaware of their participation in it’ (1993: 54).¹²

Monson finds that ‘the symbolic intersection of masculinity, music, and race perhaps explains the persistence of jazz as a fraternity of predominantly male musicians’ (1995: 405n36); and according to Reeser, on the one hand ‘certain cultural constructs often linked to black masculinity…can be employed to assuage white men’s anxiety of their own lacking masculinity’ (2010: 154), while on the other ‘identification with another racial masculinity may suggest a desire to subvert white masculinity by including non-white aspects within it’ (155). Taken together, these observations gesture towards the complex relationship between ethnomusicologists, their preferred objects of study, their disciplinary ancestors, and the gendered and sexed make-up of the academic field. The ethnomusicologist, already masculinized via the symbolics of fieldwork, enhanced theoretical mettle vis-à-vis what is constructed as an intellectually flaccid musicology, and the gendered position of the colonizer, gains further manly capital via disciplinary, textual, and literal propinquity to the possessor of untrammelled, unmediated, undiluted masculinity. Rather than seen as subordinated, however, the privileged, Western subject maintains power over these paragons of virility once again via Theory and text: while the object Other may risk the feminizing influences of music—rendering him too emotional, expressive, uninhibited¹³—the ethnomusicologist maintains a specifically Western, (upper-)middle-class figuration of alpha-male superiority via the production of rational, analytical texts that serve as the ultimate (structural) voice, the ‘word(s) of the father’ (to bastardize Jacques Lacan).

That textuality is closely related to visuality highlights the extent to which the constructed, hierarchical, and gendered positions of viewer/viewed (far different both theoretically and experientially than relationships sonic in nature) has figured so prominently in Western ‘science’ in general, and anthropology in particular. Of the former, Haraway notes that the specifically disembodied (‘scientific’, ‘objective’) gaze ‘signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White’, related to the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (1988: 581). And Agamben, focusing on Carl Linneaus’s System Naturae, highlights the botanist’s implicit definition of homo sapiens as ‘a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human’ (2004: 26)—an ‘anthropological’ ‘optical machine’, in Agamben’s words, whose very essence rests upon the ability to confer human/non-human status to self and Other (in line with the colonialist move explored by Mbembe [2013/2017], Mignolo [2018], and Wynter [2003], to which I have earlier referred—and to which I will return). Such optical/textual relationships are also explored by Wallace in his analysis of representations of black masculinity, including whites’ (mis-) perceptions of the same (2002). Wallace notes the simultaneity of black bodies’ subjection to both hyper- and invisibility, surveillance versus obliteration—a simultaneity that mirrors the status of the non-white ‘subject’ in ethnomusicology (serving as research ‘object’; under-represented or invisible in the discipline’s positions of power).¹⁴ With this foregrounding-effacing dynamic in mind, he enlists the neologism ‘spectragraphia’ to describe the manner in which the black male is visually represented, a ‘chronic syndrome of inscripted misrepresentation’, an ‘imperfect—indeed illusory—cultural vision’ distorted yet devoutly trusted at the level of ‘blind faith’ (30–31).¹⁵ Understanding the extent to which ethnomusicological research does indeed rely upon the visual—texts, in which the musical/sensual/sonic are often obliterated (thus the jesting/critical ‘eth-no-music-ology’)—Wallace’s highlighting of the ‘spectragraphic impulse…as willful blindness [that] protects the bemused from ever having to know’ (in contrast to Derrida’s assessment of the ‘European idea’ which ‘relates seeing to knowing’) (31) resonates with Lott’s findings in relation to his exploration of Elvis impersonators. Viewed as bound up with questions of both race and masculinity, such performances ‘[suggest] that the assumption of white working-class codes of masculinity in the United States is partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor but that the latter must remain only dimly acknowledged’ (emphasis added; 2017: 175). Both explorations are instructive not only in foregrounding the racialized construction of viewing, but also the limits of so-called ‘representation’.

4.1 The Terror of Touching

The concurrent and contradictory relationships between the surveilled and the effaced, of putative ‘representation’ and actual invisibilization in relation to racialized bodies highlights again the extent to which these edifices of academic masculinity inevitably lie upon supremely unstable foundations—and indeed, hierarchicalized raced and gendered constructions are invariably inherently internally logically incoherent. For example, while Stoler suggests that ‘the demasculinization of colonized men and the hypermasculinity of European males represent principal assertions of white supremacy’ (1991:56; in Guttman 1997: 389), both Kimmel (1994) and Reeser (2010) highlight the fact that the hierarchical relationships between white and non-white masculinities may be represented and experienced in ways that seem contradictory; the Other may be seen as demasculinized by the (self-constructed as) structurally superior writing/speaking (enunciating) subject, yet the perceived desire (or need) of colonizer to control indicates an Othered masculinity that is feared to be essentially superior. One does not need to control the powerless.

The sense of insecurity engendered by unacknowledged understandings of the tenuousness of one’s own constructed sense of self has almost certainly been further intensified via a different set of voices emerging in anthropology (ethnomusicology’s real-man-crush) over the past two decades, calling for a reassessment of some of the field’s most foundational tenets and methodologies (methodologies shared with and foundational to ethnomusicology’s man-building remit). Harrison, for example, suggests the utility of embracing fiction as a source of anthropological information, enabling the ‘[encoding of] truth claims—and alternative modes of theorizing—in a rhetoric of imagination that accommodates and entertains the imaginable’ (2008: 121). Such a move implicitly and explicitly questions the (gendered) supremacy of ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ ‘data’, and ‘resists, protests, and works against the grain of those constructs of validity and reliability that…privilege elitist, white male representations and explanations of the world’ (121). Additionally, her call to dismantle supposed barriers between theory and practice resonates with numerous scholars’ reconceptualizations of the field’s methods, with far-reaching implications (Harrison 2016). For example, Fluehr-Lobban’s focus on the importance of participatory and/or collaborative work between the researcher and the native population—a mode of interacting derived, in part, from feminist research—calls into question not only issues of shared epistemological but also material space, implicating dynamics of embodiment and experience (2012). Indeed, the necessity of envisioning ethnographic fieldwork as contingent upon a sharing of experiential space is argued by many as central to the production of anthropological knowledge: Laplantine proposes a fieldwork based upon ‘an experience of sharing in the sensible’ (Laplantine 2005/2015: 2), and Pink, one that is ‘embodied, emplaced, sensorial, empathic, rather than occurring simply through a mix of participation and observation’ (2009: 63).¹⁶ Goulet and Miller, moreover—with reference to the work of both Amanda Coffey (1999) and Johannes Fabian (2001)—call for an ethnography wherein the hierarchy (and the very separability) of self/Other-researcher/subject is interrogated via a shared experiential, even ‘ecstatic’ space (2007), while Fabian himself entreats the researcher to crack open the ‘hardened little nut that “theory” has become’ and expose one’s self to ‘a world of interest and amazement, of desire and pleasure, of involvement and performance’ (2001: 6).¹⁷ And it is exactly desire and attendant pleasure—lying at the heart of the exclusionary phobia that has structured ethnomusicology for decades—to which I now turn.

If the layers of naturalization and/or essentialism (‘this is what is [not] studied in the discipline of ethnomusicology’) are peeled away, if the lie of ‘righting the wrongs of musicology’ as proffered ethical catalyst is exposed, what is ultimately revealed as lying at the heart of this obsessive, indeed fetishistic, interest in the racialized male Other that has so typified much of what has stood for the quintessential ethnomusicological, the brand sold to students, publishers, and colleagues? Although biology is not guarantor of gender, to gender a subject is, in significant ways, to sex and sexualize—and in this regard, myriad racialized-gendered Others (in the constructed sites of access/excess) have served as repositories for sexual fears and wishes. Both Baldwin and Fanon call attention to the ways black men have historically been, via the white gaze, reduced to a synecdochic sexual organ. Fanon writes that the Black man as subject is eclipsed, becoming only a penis (1952/2008: 130), while Baldwin—referencing both cause and effect—finds that ‘to be an American Negro male is […] to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others’ (emphasis added; Baldwin 1961/1998: 269–270). It is troubling to note how observations from decades past continue to resonate in the present—in relation to popular cultural production, political discourse, and academic practice and product, this last realm the home to production of a long-running, colonialist ‘ethnopornography’ (Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead 2020). As the editors to the volume highlight—suggesting that eroticization and control are not limited to analyses of practices that are manifestly sexual, but inherent in the very acts of anthropological fieldwork and artefact production—‘both ethnography and pornography are constituted by a particular individual or group’s desire to authenticate and render legible and knowable the “true” bodies and desires of the Other’ (6), with ethnography a type of ‘consumption [related] to the fantasy of penetrating both bodies and desires of human subjects’ for a Western subject (9).¹⁸ Furthermore, Kitossa argues that the Eurocentric, middle-class-preoccupied fields of masculinity, feminist, and gender studies exist upon a ‘bad faith’, tacit, and dehumanizing ‘epistemic dependence on sexualized tropes of Black men’ as a ‘protective shield that prohibits deconstruction’ (2021b: xxvii). Complex human beings are ‘abstractified’, ultimately transformed to mere ‘theoretical objects for (unaccountable) scopophilic, dependent ontology…brought into being as spectacularized objects of sexual desire and revulsion’ (xxviii). Ethnomusicology’s doubly unacknowledged role in such continuing projects (operating clandestinely as scientific research) that claims no relation to sex, sexuality, or gender—neither that of the researcher nor the favoured study object—is emblematic of that which lies at ‘the heart of academia and White supremacist popular culture’: an ‘eroticized desire for the Black man as a problem upon whom, and through whom, others work out their sense of themselves and their place in the world’ (xxviii).

This unacknowledged, foundational underlying eroticism-cum-desire, the very source of a repressed and inexpressible insecurity, is in fact the motivation, the truer catalyst, for the fanatical investment in (manifest as creation ➔ exploitation of) a specific gendered-sexed-racial-ethnic Other, and the tacit exclusionary tactics ethnomusicologists have employed to preclude the very existence of examinations of same-sex desire within the field. It is—within the specific milieu in which ethnomusicology has developed and sedimented—a socially inexpressible homoerotic urge, a disciplinarily proscribed longing (partially sexual, certainly sensual) for that masculine, exotic Other, the possessor of the self’s imagined lack. In many ways, such dynamics are similar to those explored by Woodard in his nuanced and disquieting analysis of the institution of slavery and its aftermaths, and the relationships between whites and blacks in these contexts (2014). Highlighting the discursive and material practices and symbolics of consumption (including cannibalism), he argues that this urge to consume—one certainly conjuring associations to lack and/as capitalism/colonialism—is undergirded by strong yet unutterable homoerotic desires.

Such urges have been explored specifically in relation to musical practice. Gabbard, again with a focus on jazz, notes that the desire of the invested white male fan must be rationalized by him as dependent on artistic and aesthetic variables, so that he ‘need not concern himself with the homoerotic and voyeuristic elements of his fascination with black men as they enact their masculinity with saxophones, trumpets, guitars, and other phallic instruments’ (2004: 212). Lott likewise finds similar investments in relation to the black male body in minstrelsy, suggesting a ‘white male attraction to and repulsion from the black penis’ (1993: 59), arguing that both ‘performers and audiences also found in blackface something closer to a homoerotic charge’ (55) (which is ‘deflected by identifying with potent male heterosexuality’) (56).¹⁹ That Woodard views the linked dynamics of cannibalism and homoeroticism as ‘transhistorical phenomena’ (linking slave narratives and experiences to the political insurgences of the 1960s) (27), and that his use of the word ‘consumption’ is in some ways motivated by its ‘rootedness in modern notions of market economies, commodities, consumer appetite, and so forth’ (18) signals the extent to which ethnomusicology (a consuming practice undergirded by racialized and ineffable homophobic/homoerotic urges, perpetuated in part via the commodities engendered via consumption) does not stand outside or in privileged relation to those sites labelled as ‘exploitive’. Indeed, the extractivist logics that are the hallmarks of capitalist-colonialist depredations could not be any more fundamental to ethnomusicological research: not only is the colony mined for the practices and artefacts ultimately reconfigured and re-marketed for the profit of the researcher, but what is misperceived to be an ‘essence’ of the native himself is extracted and internalized (cannibalized) for the fundamental formation of the researcher (who then produces and markets the research, in an endless loop).²⁰

Obsessions with masculinity are, to a significant extent, obsessions with the men seen as its possessors, indicative of a desire to be and be intimate with these constructed paragons. To obsessively attempt to enact masculinity is to reveal one’s desire to internalize (consume, cannibalize)—and thus to be open to the allowing into the self that which has been phantasmatically constructed as a ‘real man’, that most valuable and desired object. The ethnomusicologist, hiding behind the myriad masks of science, objectivity, textual control, race, capital, and disciplinary/intellectual superiority, ultimately longs to fill his lack, to have a ‘real man’ inside himself. The danger of this homoerotic impulse, in the context of a relationship that is itself based on a potentially (supposedly) emasculating practice such as music, is intensified by the aforementioned movement in ethnographic research in which both asymmetrical power differentials and scientific rationalization are called into question. To lose one’s structural vertically superior position is, for those who benefit from such a location, cause for terrified alarm. And to be called upon to ‘merge’ with an Other, the relationship to whom is based upon an unspeakable desire, more terrifying still; here, there is the possibility of provoking a closeness with a homoerotically invested co-subject on a level of true intimacy (engendered, in part, by what Nietzsche [1872/1999] views as the very ontology of music itself),²¹ rather than mediated via the academic’s version of the closed-fist body-bump male hug that is (male/masculine) Theory. Such prohibitions on naming or even private acknowledgment might, as Lott (1993) suggests, conceivably be maintained by an even stricter adherence to the masculine symbolics discussed throughout this text—even in the context of calls for parity in the field. But the acceptance and embracing of non-normative sexualities within ethnomusicology risks too much. An ethnomusicology that looks unflinchingly at desire—and specifically same-sex desire²²—that accepts it as a valid site of inquiry, that understands it as a foundational motivation for ‘scientific analysis’, plays with fire, insofar as such an optics brings scrutiny upon every asymmetrical power differential and mode of exploitation inherent in the field. As some anthropologists, often operating from a feminist standpoint have argued, ‘the disciplinary silence about desire in the field is a way for anthropologists to avoid confronting issues of positionality, hierarchy, exploitation, and racism’ (Kulick 1995: 19). It is also a way of hiding and denying what are consciously and/or subconsciously understood as one’s own shameful, non-heteronormative sexual/sensual desires.

It indeed seems as if what has been constructed is what Deborah Wong has termed an ‘ethnomusicology without erotics’ (2015). This move is fueled in part, in her estimation, by a ‘deep commitment to cultural relativism’ which then becomes ‘a firewall that often prevents any engagement with work on sexuality from other disciplines’ (180). But it is also perpetuated by the implicit imperative that work within the discipline revolves primarily around what have been constructed as the Big, Important Issues, an imperative-cum-defence against the field’s ‘double feminization’ (178)—a feminization, I have argued, that is held at bay, in large part, by the fetishization and reification of methodology. Wong is, I believe, entirely correct in her assertion that enabling and supporting critiques of heteronormativity within ethnomusicology would ‘queer’ the field ‘in critically useful ways’ (181). But such a critique must relate not only to the practices and products studied by ethnomusicologists, but to the very enterprise of ethnomusicology, ultimately shining light upon the extent to which such enterprises are indissolubly linked to production of the masculine subject. Felski suggests that the valuation and exploitation of specific academic/intellectual methods and/or stances on putatively objective/scientific grounds are actually instrumental in the construction of a discipline’s and practitioner’s identity, an observation that, in my estimation, appears to implicate the gendered component of such constructions; ‘critical detachment’, for example, ‘is not an absence of mood but one manifestation of it…a way of making one’s argument matter…tied to the cultivation of an intellectual persona that is highly prized’ (2015: 6). Highly prized, by some, because gendered in specific ways.

With this in mind, we may understand the intertwined erasures and reifications (of, e.g., exploitative methodologies claiming access to ‘truth’ via technologies of the collection and analysis of ‘objective’ data) and their consequences in mediating the sensual and vaunting the techno-scientific (including acts of taxonimization). Garlick analyses just such mediations in his explorations of sexuality, masculinity, and pornography (bringing to mind the previously noted ‘ethnopornography’), making a compelling argument that masculinity ‘is a symbolic or imagined position of ontological security from which nature and the world can once again be viewed as ordered and under control’ (2016: 39);²³ in relation to the sexual, the lure of which threatens a relinquishment of subjective power, it is pornography that ‘stages a confrontation between man and nature’, (2010: 608) both women’s and men’s bodies mediated and submitting to the control of technology. Noting both the reduction of multifarious desire to discrete ‘categories’ one might find on any number of adult websites, as well as the tendency to present the male body as ‘a machine that functions with an almost emotionless, technical efficiency’, (608) Garlick (with reference to Heidegger’s concept of ‘enframing’ [Gestell]) argues that via the technological/pornographic, ‘complexities of desire, emotion, and bodily response are swept up into…categories of standing reserve’ (610).²⁴ Ethnomusicologists’ attempts to ‘tame’ (to obliterate; to ‘turn into formal code’) the erotic, (homo)sexual, sensual power of the people, processes, and products they study, their approaching music and music-making, as I have been arguing, via myriad manners of (assumed) technological restraining (from Levi-Strauss’s ‘scientific’ heroism, to arid textual representation, to the colonialist discursive productions of nature and the [non-]human) is exemplary of masculinity’s fear of the (power of the) sensual, the sexual, the erotic, the specifically homoerotic.

This construction of a gendered armour, however, has had and continues to have devastating consequences for those roped into the game against their will. As Wynter has argued, the colonialist project rests in significant ways upon the transformation of an idealized vision of self—inextricably linked to the specific Western European cultural-historical context in which such a subjectivity arose—into a homogenized, singular, universal version of ‘Man’, the gendered/sexed term understood to confer the very status of that which was to be deemed human (2003). Two successive versions—‘Man1’ (homo politicus; the Christian secularized as the rational, political subject of the Renaissance) into ‘Man2’ (homo oeconomicus; the bio-economic subject of the late eighteenth century onwards)—rested upon claims of, respectively, physical and biological ‘scientific’ ‘proofs’. Understanding the entire figuration as structured on a bifurcation of a (Darwinian) ‘naturally selected’, ‘superior’ group in contradistinction to a ‘dysselected’, inferior group, it was the militarily expropriated and enslaved peoples (Indians; Black Africans) ‘that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other’ (266).²⁵ The wishful fiction that such centuries-long figurations, perpetually engendered in relation to the gendered metaepisteme within and through which they metastasize, might have been miraculously superseded within the course of a few recent decades—a refusal to face the ‘systemic ongoingness of Western colonial history’ (Thiele 2021: 23)²⁶—is gainsaid by an ethnomusicological practice that continues into the third decade of the twenty-first century. At the level of the construction of the qualitative attributes of both subject and object, as well as the apparatuses put in place to mediate the relationships between them, it is clear that ethnomusicology perpetuates a bifurcation (subject/object = enunciator/enunciated = rational/emotional-sensual) whereby the bestowal of a fully ‘human’ status, according to the logics of the colonist, is withheld; nowhere in the humanist-masculinist-ethnomusicological universe does a fully human ‘Man3’, a homo sensualis, exist. Indeed, ‘depth of feeling’ and ‘nonrational knowledge’—understood by Lorde (1978/1984: 54, 53)²⁷ and other feminist theorists to be powerful components of cultural production and the experience of being—are obscured in relation to both the (masculine/masculinizing) social-science enterprise and those who sustain and are sustained by it. Such powerful dynamics are, rather, cordoned off as belonging to those constructed as occupying ‘distant/inferior position[s]’, (53) and who are then, in true colonialist practice, ‘psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters’ (54).²⁸ As dysselected, not-yet/quite-human, they are no more than commodity, casualties of ‘the profitable brutalities that attend the realization of Man-as-human’ (McKittrick 2015: 7)²⁹

But if this ‘non-Man’ is to have any place in the ethnomusicological canon, he must, of course, remain heterosexual (‘close to nature’, fulfilling his ‘natural’, reproductive purpose).³⁰ Because an ethnomusicology that allows for the examination of specifically same-sex desire and erotics—most dangerously among men—risks, for its practitioners, even more than a questioning of hierarchy and asymmetrical power. On a relatively apparent level, while many white, middle/upper-middle-class heterosexual men may indeed desire and take pride in their adjacency to the racialized and/or (‘lower’-)classed Other, it is likely that very few would revel in the chance to have their identities formed, primarily (through publishing, through research agendas, through fieldwork sites) or even tangentially (through teaching, through attendance at symposia), in relationship to any type of ‘queerness’ that has the unambiguous scent of gay male sex; self as constructed/instantiated in relation to a ‘going native’ marked by playing the djembe versus sex play with dildoes. I imagine this last comparison—conjuring images of actual (anal) sexual activity, as opposed to the generics of ‘sexuality’ or ‘non-normativity’—makes many uncomfortable. That is the intention. While the former, the ‘ethnic’, offers a type of subcultural capital and academic street cred, the latter, the homo-sexual, promises nothing but the (assumed, terrified) risk of contamination.³¹ But even more profoundly, examinations that dared to engage this site of feared contamination would potentially reveal the very foundations of the enterprise—a concurrently homophobic and homoerotic construction of a chimerical masculinity that (recalling Brett’s assessment) whips the ‘faggot’ out of music,³² and keeps masculinity-obsessed men in power at the expense of countless textually and materially disenfranchised humans. A true assessment of ethnomusicology’s motivations and asymmetries would lead to the threat of—rather, a demand for—a radical reorganization, indeed destruction, of the entire discipline, rather than its cosmetic interdisciplinary rehabilitation.