Diverse People in Special Places

Abstract

Contextualized in relation to contemporary claims of a ‘post-racial’ society, as well as decolonial critique, the sudden appearance of queerness in ethnomusicological literature is examined. Rather than evidence of an inevitable meliorism or disciplinary evolution/enlightened thinking, the meeting of queerness and ethnomusicology is argued to be the result of several factors: the market’s exploitation of difference—including the variable of non-normative sexuality—in order to create economic profit (related to such strategies as ‘pinkwashing’ and ‘queer baiting’); the neoliberal university’s parallel exploitation and containment of difference as means to constructing the Western, academic sphere as modern, liberal, and progressive; and the metaepistemic compulsions and prohibitions common to both spheres that require an acceptance of ‘positive thinking’, concomitantly and conversely constructing critique as the enemy of a ‘progress’ ultimately measured in relation to capital.

That a damaging, rapacious, colonizing enterprise such as ethnomusicology continues to exist within the Western university—accepted as an example of ‘cultural diversity’ (understood uncritically as unmitigated good)—should stand as a troubling testament to the ability of power asymmetries to persist under cover of self-constructed identities promoting ‘equity’. However, the recent appearance of queerness within ethnomusicological texts has undoubtedly led some researchers to view the discipline’s future with a degree of optimism; this latest example of ‘inclusivity’ is perhaps understood as redressing the past exclusions I have been elaborating, a rebellion against the discipline’s masculinist stance, an act of reparation in relation to the rampant/unarticulated homophobia by which the field has long been tacitly defined. It is, I imagine, an appearance that many will understand as having been made possible only now, in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, in what is understood/represented as ‘our’ increasingly diverse, liberal, Western sphere. Yet what is to be made of the fact that ethnomusicology’s homophobic erasures have not been replicated to such an obliterating extent in a significant number of related humanities and social sciences disciplines over the course of the same time frame? Why is it that the publication of ethnomusicology’s addition to the ‘Queering the…’ ‘series’—Queering the Field—has occurred more than a quarter-century after musicologists first opened the door (with Queering the Pitch)?¹ And why, even for tenured faculty within the discipline (at heavily endowed institutions), has it has taken decades for them to read the current moment as propitious, to no longer see risk associated with a major undertaking related to ‘queer’ sexuality—as opposed to what ultimately became (was constructed as) the ‘safer’ variable of ‘gender’? Such an astounding time lag is certainly the outcome of numerous factors; yet rather than interrogate this glaring delay, queerness appears to be greeted as a triumphant, transparent reversal of what Bourdieu has termed an ‘oppression in the form of “invisibilization”…through a refusal of legitimate, public existence’ (2001: 119).

But such invisibilization is hardly a thing of the past; material and symbolic erasure, I will show, continue under the guise of visibility and representation. As a particularly apt example, it is materially, visually manifest in the very book cover of the latest, ethnomusicologically focused Queering tome, which features a face obscured/erased by a shadow. This choice of image is hardly meaningless; Barthes’s semiotic analysis of the Paris Match cover (1957/1987), rife with connotations and denotations of coloniality and racism, is but one (particularly apropos) example of how one might critically approach claims of an image’s innocence or insignificance, often via assertions of ‘authorial intent’. And in the same way that images cannot be taken at face value (semiotically and, in this case, literally), in this chapter I expose this recent turn of events not as a consequence of ‘enlightened thinking’ or ‘progress’ (identified by any numbers of dubious ‘post-’s), but as a response to and outcome of the complex interactions among administrative, financial, and disciplinary dynamics, each inextricably linked to the modern, Western, neoliberal university and overarching, unarticulated (epistemic and metaepistemic) compulsions and prohibitions. Such dynamics work upon, shape, and absorb the very sites that purport to maintain a critical stance towards inequity, and render both ethnomusicology and queerness as complicit.

For decades, students and junior scholars (to say nothing of the wider reading public of LGBT+ youths) have been greeted with a complete lack of attention (or at best, a grudging inclusion at the most minimal of levels) to same-sex desire in ethnomusicology’s supposedly ‘inclusive’ exploration of both expressive and repressive sociocultural formations: on foundation-level syllabi or textbooks; in graduate seminars; in peer-reviewed journals and multi-volume monuments of the field; in the conferences of professional societies; in the field-defining work of high-profile ethnomusicologists, often taken as templates for a successful career (or any career at all). Having received clear messages for half a century that explorations of non-normative sexualities might be best situated elsewhere, and aware of ethnomusicology’s dismal track record regarding all sorts of supposed ‘diversities’, is it possible to have faith that this new ‘queer’ ‘representation’—in this deeply disciplined environment—will have any significant, salubrious effect, will function as anything more than an administrative intervention? Such faith would be particularly difficult to comprehend or defend especially in the context of the visibility and force of current decolonizing enterprises. In this regard, I am certain many academics in the humanities or social sciences at least profess to understand the necessity of continued, sustained attention to questions of coloniality/colonization in a disturbing number of sites and populations, including university disciplines and structures; likewise, few would claim that past injustices are relegated firmly to that same past (via the application of a simplistic ‘post-’). Yet it appears, judging from the deafening silence about ethnomusicology’s injurious and painful exclusions, that the optimism greeting an at-long-last queerness locates a need for scrutiny as confined to the ‘not us/our disciplinary space’, and is rooted firmly in a tacit belief in a unidirectional, ineluctable meliorism, a sanguine stance at least partially engendered by an understanding of representation as panacea. Such beliefs and concomitant inactions—including the decades-long failure of even one representative of the field (especially those in positions of power) to call for a sustained, unflinching, and excoriating critique of the field’s homo/sexo/trans-phobia (and for others to join in that call)—allow root causes to stealthily continue. The colonialist creation and re-creation of fallacious, self-serving narratives of meliorism continues unabated, always complicit in the ongoing damage that now operates under the cloak of any number of comforting, anodyne, yet ultimately deceptive terms such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘inclusion’, ‘internationalization’, and the ubiquitous ‘diversity’.

As Villarejo argues, the positing of increased ‘queer visibility’ as a proof of society’s inexorable march towards ‘equality’ ‘is aligned with a continuist notion of historical change’; visibility politics ‘[relying] upon a binary logic of positive and negative’ ‘elide the complexities of representation…and flatten history into the march of progress’ (2007: 391). A simple conflation of representation and melioristic movement—for example the ‘progress’ of increased visibility of black performers in various fields of popular culture (concomitant with the alarming, continuing instances of violence against black citizens)—suggests, according to Davis, that we are ‘in a historical moment in which black lives mattering is being conflated with black lives mattering on the face of things’ (2019: 576). And as Boise notes, in relation to the rather optimistic construction of ‘inclusive masculinity’ (one having the potential to include, I would argue, the contemporary ‘woke’ ethnomusicologist), such concepts are ‘actively dangerous’ insofar as they suggest that ‘because homophobic speech and violence are less apparent in public contexts, that we are nearing some historical end-point for gender and sexuality discrimination’ (emphasis added; 2014: 334).² Finally, that theorizations of sexuality have often been dangerously and negatively linked to spatio-temporalized discourses of ‘evolution’ (homosexuality as ‘arrested development’ or ‘degeneracy’)—these formulations often indissolubly linked to racist and colonialist narratives, continuing to the present day (Hoad 2000; see also Amico 2019/2022)³—should raise alarm bells for any ethnomusicologist or queer theorist who has either explicitly or tacitly placed any confidence in the ability of inevitable melioration to address the discipline’s continuing offences.

As I noted previously, ruptures are an integral part of temporal movement (and history is not destiny). Yet there cannot be a binary choice between rupture/continuity; to do so would risk ignoring the deeply systemic, ideological, and theoretical bases/geneses of ethnomusicology and its disciplinary ancestors (and to ignore the significant temporal aspects of [meta]epistemes), mistaking symptoms (‘not enough [sexual] diversity’) for the complex problems, believing they can be successfully addressed via superficial cure-alls. Indeed, only the most stunning levels of hubris and self-delusion could support the belief that a discipline founded upon and defined for decades by virulent misogyny and homophobia (as supports for constructions of masculinity, these inextricably linked to a racist, colonizing stance) could somehow in the span of a few recent years, without sustained, unambiguous, public, and substantial critical self-assessment, transmute into a completely different animal. (And considering ethnomusicology’s anthropological fetish, its genuflection at the altar of fieldwork, this is a span of centuries rather than decades.) Moreover, the idea that individuals might ‘choose’, against all signs to the contrary, to endorse change as best effectuated via a genial embrace of (inevitable, gentle) meliorism must be understood in the context of (meta)epistemic structuring operating at a level beyond the individual.⁴ In this regard, it is arguably not ‘choice’, but pervasive and powerful injunctions and prohibitions that continually construct what one understands to be ‘safe’ behaviour so as not to damage one’s career; one’s professional reputation; one’s collegial relationships; one’s access to capital (in the form of, e.g., salary, funding, pensions, benefits, etc.)⁵ That scholars in any type of vulnerable position might face reprisals for their voicing a frank and unapologetic critique of the field was evident in the responses to Brown’s ‘Open Letter on Racism in Music Studies, Especially Ethnomusicology and Music Education’ posted on the SEM-Listserv (2020), with senior scholars asking if, for example, an ‘anonymous forum’ might be created in order to serve as a space for the airing of concerns without fear of negative consequences.

It is instructive here to engage with analyses of contemporary claims of a ‘post-racial’ (erroneously suggesting post-racist) society—claims that are linked to the market as well as the university and which, in significant ways, are similar to the implicit, putative ‘post-homophobic’ dynamics one finds in ethnomusicology’s sudden embrace of queerness. Banet-Weiser, Mukherjee, and Gray, for example, find that post-racial discourses offer a ‘euphoric promise of racial justice, equality, and progress’ while they concomitantly ‘work to obscure the relations of structural racisms, concocting a heady palliative against the continuing resonance and necessity of progressive antiracial struggle’ (2019: 4); similarly, Giroux argues that a ‘privatization of racist expression and exclusion’ share the neoliberal market’s ‘abiding commitment to scuttle modes of intellectual inquiry and analysis that foreground questions of structure, power, inequality, and history’ (2010: 11). Ferguson also links such discourses to attempts to frustrate ‘radical’ interventions, these supported by ‘the fantastical abilities of liberal capitalism’ (2019: 73). Arguing that ‘postracial emancipation has come to mean that the fully developed citizen would identify with capital as the vehicle for antiracist progress’ (e.g., the ‘successful’ ‘minority’ subject as the proof of capital’s ability to engender ‘equality’), Ferguson maintains that the naturalization of liberal capitalism prevents it from being scrutinized, ultimately ‘[reaffirming] one of [its] strategies…to protect its models of freedom from critique and interrogation’ (emphasis added; 85). The continuing silence about ethnomusicology’s ‘past’ (= unacknowledged present) is not a ‘belief’ in meliorism, not a ‘pragmatic’, ‘sensible’ ‘choice’ to ‘move forward’ with ‘positivity’; it is, rather, a proscription (one cannot be angry, enraged, suspicious, critical; one must be optimistic, positive, productive [i.e., producing the disciplinarily sanctioned artefacts of ‘acceptable scholarship’]) engendered by deeply structural, gendered, and racialized/racist power dynamics that reproduce by deflecting scrutiny onto other (‘negative’) targets, the ‘enemies’ of (financial) ‘progress’. If in the past, an ethnomusicologist’s embracing ‘queerness’ in any way was perceived as dangerous (to their career or professional identity), the hazard today appears rather to be questioning queerness’s appearance within the discipline as anything but an unmitigated good (a queerness, it must be/will be noted as distinct from an unambiguously sexual same-sex desire). As will become clear, the sudden space allowed queerness in ethnomusicology may have more to do with Foucault’s refutation of the repressive hypothesis (we must now give place to non-normative sexualities in order to enframe, administer, contain them) (1978/1990) than with any sort of ‘progress’; yet to raise such concerns, guided by the need to question the violence of the ‘homophobia of the symbolic order, anonymous and collective’, risks ‘discrediting’ one’s self, ‘[appearing], like Don Quixote, to be tilting at windmills’ (Tin 2003/2008: 16).

It is the current structures of silencing, now masquerading as ‘representation’—inherent in the very epistemology and methodology of the field, supported by constructions of masculinity, perpetuated by the channels of administration—that call for radical intervention, and I shall turn to these in due time. First, however, I must highlight the specific geocultural/temporal contextualization of this miraculous appearance of queerness in ethnomusicology in order to further argue for the necessity of caution regarding a celebration. Understanding that cognate disciplines were somehow able (without significant injury) to engage with non-normative sexualities decades before ethnomusicology’s sudden awakening, I return to my opening question: ‘Why now’? The answer lies in understanding this specific, complex cultural moment in which dynamics of sexuality, race, civil society, gender, social justice (and many others) are inextricable from (digital) mediation, capital, popular culture, neoliberal subjectification and the neoliberal university, as well as ethnomusicology’s relationship and aspirations to institutional power. An exhaustive, detailed analysis of such intricate interrelations—growing for decades, but arguably having reached an apogee of maturity in the first decades of the twenty-first century—is beyond the scope of a single chapter. I will, however, focus on what I believe to be the registers most germane to my analysis, here noting not only the ways in which the market, via commodification, has functioned to absorb and de-fuse subversion, resistance, and (incipient) revolution (a disciplining explored in a wide array of media, from The Baffler to Black Mirror),⁶ but also how the lines between commodity consumerism and (supposedly) ‘socially progressive’, ‘liberal’ politics (e.g., ‘causumerism’) have become blurred.⁷ It is only in the context of such a confluence of forces that the deeply embedded masculinist strategies and structures of ethnomusicology—especially resistant to transformation—have been compelled to (appear to) alter.

With regards to non-normative sexual identities, the practice, the art of drag (posited by Butler decades ago [1990] as one of the means through which performativity’s straitjacketing, compelled repetitions might be countered) stands as an apt contemporary example. In this regard, while the now long-running popularity of the various mass-mediated RuPaul enterprises (including the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race [2009], RuPaul’s Drag U [2010], and RuPaul’s Secret Celebrity Drag Race [2020], as well as a successful recording career that spawned the drag ‘anthem’ ‘Supermodel [You Better Work]’ [1992])⁸ may be greeted by some as proof of society opening to ‘diversity’, several scholars (Buck 2019; Collie and Commane 2020; Hodes and Sandoval 2018; Kohlsdorf 2014)⁹ have highlighted the need for attention to the possibility of commodification’s pernicious effects upon these sites of sexual/gendered difference. Such difference, having moved from cultural peripheralization and invisibilizaiton to global dissemination may also be seen in relation to New York City’s ball scene/culture, from its first semi-mass-marketed presentation via Livingston’s documentary (Paris is Burning 1990), to contemporary television series (Ryan Murphy’s FX drama, Pose [Canals, Falchuck, and Murphy 2018]; HBO Max’s voguing competition/reality show, Legendary [Reinholdsten 2020]), to Jessie Ware’s recent music video for the song ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’ (2020b).¹⁰ Perhaps one of the most blatant examples of the blurring of lines among cultural production, racial/sexual agency, and capitalized commodification has been the video for Icona Pop’s song ‘All Night’ (2013)—a vehicle using the ball community for barefaced product placement of Absolut vodka.¹¹ In all such cases, the ‘safety’ of making visible, of allying with previously hidden/forbidden/vilified subjects and communities comes about, in this current economic-political-cultural sphere—moving from niche market documentary to mass-mediated artefacts in the pop culture ‘centre’—via the ‘proof’ of profitability. Such a courting of the LGBT+ consumer (the quest for the ‘pink dollar’), and the general commodification of sexuality, has been explored by numerous researchers in diverse fields of study,¹² as has the related phenomenon of ‘queerbaiting’ (an attempt by merchants, corporations, and advertising firms, among others, to lure consumers of any orientation via mere allusions to sexual difference).¹³ In general, the mechanism for increased profitability is the aligning of the producer/seller with an often merely implied progressive social agenda, this in an attempt to bolster its reputation (and thus, profits) among large groups of what are assumed to be younger consumers with disposable incomes and more ‘liberal’ social agendas.

Such dynamics are obviously not confined to the realms of popular culture and commerce. Sites and spheres assumed (constructed, desired) to be bounded and discrete, motivated by radically different forces (the ethical, academic vs. the pecuniary, mass mediated, e.g.) are, in fact, always mutually constitutive, as is evident—using only one example—with the case of Israel, the Eurovision Song Contest, and ‘pinkwashing’. Here, several have argued,¹⁴ segments of government, popular/expressive culture, and private industry have contributed to a geopolitical, military, ‘homonationalist’ (to use Puar’s term)¹⁵ project of constructing the veneer of an ‘open’, ‘modern’ state via the exploitation of ‘gay-friendly’ performances, texts, and images. Non-normative sexuality, the exploitable Western marker of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ is thus foregrounded spectacularly, in an attempt to draw attention away from Israel’s much-criticized treatment of Palestinians. Yet understanding the complexities of the symbiotic relationships that combine in attempts to consolidate and maintain power in the hands of the powerful, and the fallacies of constructing a simple binary of good/bad social actors, institutions, and realms, it is dangerous to limit critique only to the most blatant examples of avarice and exploitation. For example, as Chatterjee and Maira, and the contributors to their edited volume (2014) have demonstrated, the modern university’s increasing reliance upon corporate capital and, concomitantly, a relationship to the military, has resulted in its overt and covert censures and repressions of faculty who have attempted to focus critical attention on an institution’s imperialistic motivations and aspirations.

The contemporary, Western university’s administrative disciplining indeed functions in numerous subtle, yet no less decisive, manners, enlisting the very language of ‘liberal progress’ in service of agendas with far different aims. Ferguson’s previously noted analysis of the administrative university (as neoliberal institution) highlights the ways in which such institutions ‘[intersect] with corporate capital not only through maudlin, self-congratulatory categories such as “excellence” but also through the attempt to incorporate and thereby neutralize difference’ (2012: 213). Daring, in the age of compelled intellectual hyperconsumerism, to engage with ‘old’ scholarship,¹⁶ and attending to both racial and sexual difference, Ferguson argues that, following the appearance of radical movements of the civil rights era calling for social justice, and their cooptation by a newly instituted support of interdisciplinarity, ‘power…becomes the new name for calculating and arranging minority difference’ (7). The use of the ‘liberal veneer’ in service of a wholly conservative, neoliberal agenda in this instance has a clear resonance with homonationalism, especially in light of the university’s corralling of sexual ‘difference’ in service of its goals. Ferguson highlights, for example, that rather than engaging same-sex desire with a view towards deconstructing a heterosexist or binary understanding of human sexuality, the university displays its embrace of difference (a wonderful marketing tool) by ‘recognizing’ domestic partnerships—but only those meeting a strict set of criteria, thus serving to ‘[subjugate]…a whole diversity of sexual practices and subjectivities…to the privileges of normative and socially sanctioned domestic practices’ (218). Sexuality becomes ‘incorporated into the structural logic of the university’ (218) and, moreover—understanding the relationship between the contemporary academy and processes of globalization—we find ‘a new mode of power, characterized generally by the commodification of difference as part of an emergent global capital’, various differences (race, sexuality, disability, gender) incorporated ‘as objects of knowledge’ (emphasis added; 213). The academy, as instrument of power, concurrently works towards limiting the ‘collective, oppositional, and redistributive aims of difference’, while affirming it ‘to demonstrate institutional protocols and progress’ (emphasis added; 214). In short, as Weiss notes in reference to Ferguson’s work—and directly related to my suspicions regarding the ‘ethnoqueer’—‘in the marketplace of ideas, queer difference is too easily absorbed through an embrace of multicultural diversity that re-entrenches and bolsters, rather than unseats, the everyday workings of the neoliberal university’ (2016: 632). Difference is corralled, contained and, via disciplines—disciplined.

This enlisting of a language of empty or obfuscatory signifiers in order to divert attention from systemic inequalities has been recently and productively highlighted specifically in relation to music studies—although unsurprisingly the critique does not emanate from ethnomusicology, a discipline still brandishing its collection of diversities du jour as proof of its ethical preeminence. Focusing on music theory, and with attention not only to the intellectual/theoretical supports on which it is based, but also the composition of its practitioners/professorate, Ewell—drawing, in part, on the work of Ahmed (2012) and Feagin (2006, 2009/2013)—argues that the recent calls for ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ in the field serve rather as support for the discipline’s foundational ‘white racial frame’ (2020). Noting that ‘racialized institutions in the U.S. create an entire lexicon of inadequate terms to avoid racial terminology’, Ewell suggests that these practically meaningless, thus palatable, polite words draw attention away from the more discomfiting realities of racism that permeate the discipline—including, for example, the overtly racist writings/rantings of Western music theory’s most celebrated theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and the fervent assertions of many in the field that one’s intellectual theories and one’s ‘personal beliefs’ are completely unrelated. Undergirded by a ‘colorblind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003/2018), as with ethnomusicology (and musicology), superficial forms of ‘representation’ are chosen over acknowledgment of serious structural problems; indeed, as Giroux argues, ‘the commitment to colorblindness has…impaired our very capacity to think, to reason, to weigh and even be persuaded by evidence, to recognize error, to be reflective, to judge’ (2010: 11). Thus, the ease of adding, as Ewell notes, ‘a few examples of composers of color to a music theory textbook’ substitutes for the acknowledgment of the structuring white racial frame. Moreover, while one or two performers (or repertoire pieces) may be represented, the voices and works of non-white/non-Western theorists (again as with ethnomusicology) are strikingly absent (demonstrating that not only is theory gendered but also, as Christian [1987] argues, raced). What is necessary, according to Morrison, is a move past a ‘multicultural’ veneer in music studies, and a commitment to an approach including ‘diverse methodologies, topics, and the collective efforts of both majority…and structurally marginalized groups…who reflect the messiness and richness of the culture in which we exist’ (2019: 782).¹⁷ In the current system, unfortunately, examples of ‘difference’ are ultimately represented primarily or exclusively through the very structural, epistemological, theoretical (racial, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, elitist, Anglo-American, colonizing) frames responsible for their having been constructed as ‘different’; such diversity offers, according to Katz ‘little more than the old subordination in new bottles’ (2017: 88). I will return to this profoundly problematic dynamic in the following chapters, in relation to queer theory.

The importance of structure is again highlighted by Ferguson who, following Mohanty (1989/1993), notes the extent to which studies of that which is constructed as difference (race, gender, sexuality, among other variables) have been additionally constructed within the academy as ‘special issues’, ‘individualized matters rather than…structural or institutional ones’ (2012: 213). In this regard, such artefacts/actions as ‘queer’ panels at ethnomusicology conferences, or the publication of ‘special’ journal issues devoted to gender and sexuality (should the latter ever appear in the discipline’s [un]official journal)¹⁸ are hardly proof of progress. While one might be moved to ‘feel good’ and ‘be positive’ about such things after so much erasure, it is exactly this cordoning off, this defining as ‘special’, that implies in profound ways a peripheral nature; marking the queer as something of interest to a specific group of people allows the extant power structure (its concerns, its narratives, its colonialist constructions, its foundational fetish of masculinity) to retain its centrality. While individual researchers might argue that their work contributes to a changing of the disciplinary narrative, and is not simply an example of superficial representation, one cannot forget that all work exists in a highly (epistemologically, disciplinarily, financially, methodologically, ideologically) regulated sphere, within which individual artefacts and activities are enframed (as, e.g., ‘special interests’). We need only look at historical precedent in order to bolster a claim that, unfortunately, is quite discomfiting: with attention to gender, it is clear that, although the appearance of this area of inquiry decades ago portended the possibility of substantial, seismic, wide-ranging transformations to the field of ethnomusicology as a whole, forty-odd years later, the discipline is nowhere near parity in terms of the make-up of either its professoriate, the music-making practices represented in its publications, or the producers of theory (Theory) enlisted to explore such practices. ‘Gender’ remains overwhelmingly a discrete, ‘special’ area of study largely populated by female, non-binary, and LGBT+ researchers.

Moreover, Brown’s previously referenced recent open letter (2020), as well as the ensuing responses on the SEM-Listserv, highlight yet again how resistant to change the field has been for the approximately seven decades of its existence.¹⁹ Her forthright, piercing assessment—highlighting ethnomusicology’s endemic racial discrimination, colonialism, and imperialism, as well as the extent to which power continues to be wielded largely by white people (more often than not men)—belies the discipline’s self-congratulatory, constructed public identity as ‘enlightened’ and ‘diverse’. Much to the contrary, scholars’ self-presentations as ‘woke’ are, in her estimation, enacted for little more than ‘personal and professional gain’ and those terms—diversity, equity, inclusion—supposedly signalling the discipline’s ethical commitments, ‘have become “buzz words”, part of a…“diversity fad”’ with many (as, I argue, with queerness) ‘willing to jump on the bandwagon because it is timely; it is popular’ (emphasis added). Brown’s salvo was met with support from many scholars, echoing her contentions about the entrenchment of white power within the discipline.²⁰ Yet the president of the SEM, apparently oblivious to (m)any of the issues raised, suggested in a staggering response that ‘today’s’ ethnomusicology is a ‘very different place’ than the one Brown (and countless others) has experienced—something that should give great pause to any even tacit belief that ‘queer representation’ in ‘today’s’ ethnomusicology (operating within the same rules of the game, set by conference organizers, search committees, tenured department heads, trustees, manuscript reviewers, among others) will be successful in unseating the current, deeply entrenched, and in many ways invulnerable power structure. That the SEM, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, still has need for a ‘diversity’ committee—one that has, apparently, been unable for decades to significantly transform the inequities which undergird the discipline—should likewise make any scholar both despondent and enraged.

In such an environment, in light of such obstacles, what can the work of the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce within SEM (active for well over a decade) hope to accomplish, and whom does it benefit: scholars attempting to move music (and sex/sexuality) studies in fundamentally new directions, or the power brokers keenly aware of the need for ‘diversity’, the disguise donned in order to stave off critiques of coloniality, racism, sexism, classism, or homophobia? As late as 2006, the group’s former chair, Boden Sandstrom, correctly suggested that young researchers and graduate students in the discipline were given the unambiguous message that an engagement of non-normative sexualities was tantamount to professional suicide (as was I), and were actively dissuaded from embarking upon such research agendas (as was I).²¹ But as I have been arguing, such prohibitions need not be explicit and, in fact, proscriptions are not the only weapons from the arsenal enlisted in the defence of ethnomusicology’s masculinist, homophobic power structure. In addition to segregation and containment, there are also rewards; coercion may be replaced by temptation, seduction, and the ‘inclusion’ of ‘queerness’ within the discipline of ethnomusicology—at this specific point in time—may be seen as related to a series of homocapitalisms. Although Rao has coined this term—defined as the ‘holding out [of] the prospect of a rosy future redolent with growth and productivity should a state embrace LGBT rights’ (2020: 12)—in relation to geopolitical contexts and processes, operating as a lure proffered by the ‘enlightened West’ to that which this West constructs as a backward everywhere else, it is no less relevant to an understanding of the capital-driven, neoliberal university, and the individual disciplines that jockey, manoeuvre, and battle for ever-smaller pieces of the money pie. Why has ethnomusicology been so late to exhibit any attention to non-normative sexuality? Because it is, at its heart, one of the most conservative disciplines yet in existence, built upon a foundation of exploited racialized Others and the most stereotypical of gender constructions. And, as a truly colonialist enterprise, only capital(ism) (the ultimate incentive for the colonialist), amplified by the exigencies of the moment and the enframing of the (meta)episteme, serves as the motivator to (superficially) adopt ‘change’. Cognizant of the current bankable cultural ‘visibility’ of ‘queer folk’—including one version of drag proven to be successfully commodifiable, profitably shaking an unsexed money maker on the open market—ethnomusicology understands the embrace of (what I will argue are) theoretically de-sexed sexualities as both safe and potentially highly lucrative, the ideal potentiators of diverse forms of capital (where diversity = capital).

The ultimate goal of the modern, Western university is to turn a profit via the sale of its products—among these, inventions, patents, intellectual properties, publications, and something we might loosely refer to as ‘an education’. Regarding this last in the list of goods, it is clear that these institutions’ administrators and bureaucrats, primarily concerned with commerce, are as cognizant of the contemporary zeitgeist as are those peddling their causumerist, pinkwashed, wares. This corporate, capital-driven university works with and within the larger market’s desires and imperatives; understanding (on a gross level) the concerns of ‘Gen Z’, noting the increased numbers of ‘out’ persons in the mass media, and aware of the necessity of erecting a reputation as ‘enlightened, liberal, diverse’ (= ‘modern, Western’), humanities disciplines, while they may not offer bankable financial rewards (unlike the mighty STEM), are no less important insofar as they are essential for the selling of a valuable commodity: the illusion of Western (ethical) superiority. In this regard, the advertisement of a modicum of ‘queer’ courses and scholars among its offerings contributes to the bottom line of higher enrollment not only via the construction of the university’s (woke) reputation as a whole, but also via the ability to offer its ‘queer’, ‘diverse’ commodities as a means of courting and cornering a possibly growing niche market offering an additional revenue stream. The largely underfunded and precariously placed disciplines and departments that learn to adapt to the financial imperatives of the institutions in/by which they are contained, to back the products the employer deems as most profitable, are those most likely to exist another academic year. Moosavi cautions that ‘intellectual decolonization can be self-serving…when universities realize the marketability and profitability of decolonization and go on to commodify it in the interests of capitalizing on a timid version of it’ (2020: 349).²² Ethnomusicology is a disturbing and disheartening example of a relic-like, craven discipline motivated by just such pecuniary imperatives and machinations. But what of queerness?