The relationship between ethnomusicology and queerness might be conceptualized in two seemingly conflicting manners: either as cooperative and harmonious, or as antagonistic and combative. In the first instance, the two intellectual streams are understood as operating from the same ethically grounded standpoint, with the goal of faithfully and respectfully representing ‘diversity’, in order to combat the ethnocentrisms and normativities that are seen to undergird much academic inquiry and, more calamitously, the social world of human and non-human life. In the second instance, however—suggested by the foregoing chapters—either of two sub-scenarios may obtain. In sub-scenario ‘A’, via the promise and delivery of largesse (the magnanimity of allowing non-normative sexualities a modicum of space for the first time in the discipline’s history), queerness is required to divest itself of its volatility and radicality, transmuting to a quiescent, de-fanged, docile theoretical stance (proffered by docile bodies) that conforms to the dictates of the discipline’s overlords and structures; asymmetries between researcher/‘researched’ remain, the discipline’s homophobic/masculinist and colonialist/racist foundations persist, ethnomusicology triumphant. In sub-scenario ‘B’, however, queerness manages to maintain its critical edge, its subversive potentials, and ultimately fully dismantles the epistemological, methodological, and material exploitations that have continued within ethnomusicology for decades, ushering in a new era of equitable and empowering research practices and productions; queerness victorious (queer vincit omnia!) It is possible that both dynamics obtain to some degree, in differing contexts. However, what I want to highlight in the following chapters—from different vantage points—is what I consider to be of central importance to understanding, combatting, and ultimately eliminating the inequitable and injurious activities and products of these two enterprises: specifically, those animating forces shared by both that operate only at the level of the ignored or obscured. Overlooking these discomfiting sites of synergy—as we have ignored and continue to ignore the rampant homophobic masculinity in ethnomusicology—all but guarantees that exploitive business as usual will continue. However, the bringing to light of these sites of overlap—specifically, the avoidance of the material body, and the monologic discourse of the colonizer—at least cracks open the door to the possibilities of engaged, enraged, critical work (including but not limited to what is currently understood—narrowly—as ‘academic’) that aspires to less disciplinarily circumscribed, more holistic, and ultimately more equitable forms. As will become clear later in this text, the phrase ‘less disciplinarily circumscribed’ gestures towards futures I envision for both ethnomusicology and queerness that are likely to be unpopular with many, but which I nonetheless hope at least some will entertain.

In this chapter I will focus on the body—the sensate, erotic, fleshed, experiencing body, the understanding of which I take to be an integral part of the exploration of both auditory expressive cultural production and sex/uality. Yet both ethnomusicological research and queer theorizing have demonstrated a relationship to material corporeality that is ambivalent at best. While many might question this assessment—‘haven’t some of the most seminal texts produced under the rubric of queer theory been explicitly devoted to elucidating embodiment?’—I would suggest that such texts do indeed offer important, vital, and wholly necessary contributions to the exploration of the extraordinarily varied realms of social existence that might be signalled via the linguistic marker ‘body’. Yet it is exactly this idea of the explication of body being inextricably and primarily (at times apparently exclusively) linked to and dependent upon those modalities in which ‘linguistic marker’ is the fundamental (or even a relevant) operant—registers such as the ideological, the discursive, the performative (like iterability, a linguistically derived term) that is problematic. Reid-Pharr argues that we must ‘insist on a queer theory that takes the queer body and what we do with it as a primary focus’ in order to fully explore ‘the difference we create and carry in our bodies’ (1996: 84); yet it is largely or solely the incorporeal—to the deep impoverishment of the richness of subjectivity in and as the social—that is seemingly, continually assumed to offer the key to making sense of (senseless/insensate) body/embodiment. I am not suggesting that a focus on the experiential knitted, in part, to material/sensual registers functions as some sort of atemporal, universal theoretical solution, guaranteeing a superlative understanding of and access to the complexities of (sexual) subjectivity. But as much as materiality, sensuality, and the erotic must be understood as geoculturally temporally specific, it bears underscoring that any number of post-structuralist theories and concepts are no less situated. For example, as Mignolo points out, while scholars such as Braidotti (2013) have theorized ‘our’ current ‘posthuman’ moment, decolonial interventions offered by Wynter and Fanon ‘open up for a…critique of both the concepts of human and posthuman’ (2018: 171); understanding the extent to which ascription of (non-)human-ness has been central to the colonialist project for centuries, Mignolo finds ‘if today it is meaningless to universalize the Man/Human, it is equally limiting to conceptualize posthuman beyond the regional scope of actors, institutions, and languages managing the CMP [Colonial Matrix of Power]’ (172).

A valorization of the incorporeal is likely a consequence of queerness’s foregrounding of the productive, liberatory potentials of indeterminateness; as such, when it appears, materiality is often contrasted—manifestly or tacitly—as limiting, essentialist, or even nonexistent. Perhaps in line with the desire for a ‘subjectless critique’ (Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Eng and Puar 2020) which takes ‘the purpose of destabilizing both proper subjects and subject matters of queer theoretical inquiry’ (Eng and Puar: 1) as guiding aims, definitive, narrow understandings of the ambit within which sex/uality might be explored is understood as a constellation of constrictions/proscriptions/restrictions that foreclose upon a necessary complexity. Yes it is also possible that such propensities for perpetual destabilizing, resulting in a constant morphing, results in queerness’s often problematic, chameleon-like character in many ethnomusicological studies. The term may, within the same text, indicate a subversive, resistant stance (often apparently solely and automatically by virtue of any association with any non-cis, non-heterosexual action or representation), or just as likely serve as a de facto synonym for lesbian, gay, or bisexual; there is frequently an oscillation between a wholly anti-identitarian stance and a recourse to a stable sexual identity. Yet what remains as the frequent site of rapprochement between the two disciplined areas is the elision of the material, sensing/sensate body, this also the consequence of queerness’s poststructuralist roots. As Prosser argues, in the realm of poststructuralist theory—including that of Foucault and Butler, ostensibly ‘about’ the corporeal—‘materiality is our subject, but the body is not our object’; embodiment is engaged in the literature, rather, as ‘our route to analyzing power, technology, discourse, language’ (1998: 13).Footnote 1 In ‘ethnoqueer’ texts, it is not uncommon that even in those instances where an identity understood in relation to sexual desire or experience appears, queerness may often be encountered as largely or entirely de-sexualized and disembodied, thus dovetailing with or replicating the extant erotophobic (as suggested by Wong) (2015) ethnomusicological toolkit.

Queerness thus functions in many cases as simply the latest vehicle for the continuation of the decades-long, favoured ethnomusicological explorations of a palatable type of ‘subversive’ or ‘resistant’ ‘politics’ (all terms understood in the narrowest possible senses), now linked to a de-sexed sexuality easily added to the indexed, disciplined, and acceptable identities neatly confined to the space of ‘special (minority) subjects’ of interest to ‘special groups’. In this context, non-normative sexualities, operating at the level of represented diversities, may simply become this era’s window dressing: in much the same way that the discipline ‘allowed’ a modicum of visibility to ‘genderwoman’ (through containment), yet has for decades been reluctant to embrace the truly radical and arguably transformative potentials of feminist theory in relation to the entire discipline (not simply the ‘special interest’ of ‘gender studies’),Footnote 2 ethnomusicology short-circuits the revolutionary potential of an ideal queerness via representation (which can thus critique only in tacit, de facto manners). If, as Halberstam warned decades ago, queer was (is?) ‘in danger of stabilizing into an identity rather than remaining a radical category of identity’ (1997: 260)—a danger of which those calling for subjectless critique are clearly aware—queer’s fungibility within a field so wedded to ‘identity’ is more likely to be seen as fulfilling rather than negating such a prophecy.

Allowing queerness into the discipline of ethnomusicology—disciplining queerness—via its agreeing to operate at the level of historically vetted, properly ‘masculine’ concerns, thus functions to offer the ‘non-queer’ (male, heterosexual) practitioner the valuable opportunity for virtue signalling without risking the taint of being identified as working in a ‘feminine’—or, worse still, ‘gay’ (as implicit slur; as marking a sexed/sexual being)—realm. And understanding poststructuralism’s sedimented status as de rigueur Theoretical vernacular of the humanities, queerness’s vanquishing of the problematic body via this language, and ethnomusicology’s gendered relation to Theory, the relationship is both safe and beneficial. It comes into being, of course, at the very moment when a propinquity to one type of disciplined queer has become capable of offering at least a modicum of subcultural cachet to heterosexual ‘allies’ operating within a ‘diverse’ discipline, this wedded to financial incentives and imperatives (as I have previously discussed). I understand the importance of theoretical moves that attempt to confound essentialism, to court capaciousness, to do justice to the richness of sex/sexuality. But in the context of a bond with ethnomusicology, such a move appears to aid and abet a continued invizibilization of that which continues to be desired and, owing to the danger of this desire, concurrently constructed as anathema.

It is important to note that concerns about queerness’s despecification-cum-desexualization have been voiced for decades, occurring since the term first gained traction, and long before any interaction with ethnomusicology. Although critics have understood the importance of a more inclusive, nuanced, expansive understanding of sexuality—one that, as noted previously, cannot be understood absent its co-constituting embeddedness within myriad social structures and discourses—many have found queerness problematic in any number of contexts or disciplines. Several have suggested that the concept’s theoretical manoeuvring may have the effect of rendering invisible (yet again) subjects who do indeed consider same-sex desire as a profoundly important (although not necessarily immutable) component of their personal and cultural identities. Yet the main targets of this invisibilization are not something on which there has been unanimous agreement.Footnote 3 Phillips, for example, suggests that queerness is implicated in the production of ‘a new closet’ owing to the disavowal of ‘any specific self-identification as either gay or lesbian (predicated upon same-sex practices)’ (1994: 16), while Halperin likewise voices concerns about the dangers of queerness’s ‘sexual despecification’ rendering it ‘all too readily available for appropriation by those who do not experience the unique political disabilities and forms of social disqualification from which lesbians and gay men routinely suffer in virtue of our sexuality’ (1995: 65). Noting, however, the disproportionate number of white, gay men among those highlighting such invisibility, both Jeffreys (1994) and Lauretis (1994) argue that this supposedly more inclusive theoretical model has been notable for its inattention to and erasure of both lesbian and feminist viewpoints and concerns, unless they are/were supportive of a gay male agenda.

Such conflicts might serve in fact as support for the contentions such as those from Walters who suggests that the movement away from strict identity categories afforded by queerness ‘has important political and intellectual potential’ (1996: 860), via an identification of those structural issues that threaten harm to any number of communities constructed as non-normative. Yet twenty-odd years later, perceptions of what has been seen as a problematic despecification/desexualization continue. Ashtor, referencing what she views as the past decade’s ‘self-critical turn’, highlights queer theory’s uninterrogated, uncritical reliance upon erotophobic psychological conventions, thus precluding any ability to subvert the status quo of normative sexuality (2021).Footnote 4 Additionally, as Freccero argues, queerness cannot be successfully enlisted in service of potentiating ‘every denormativizing project possible’, and to the extent that ‘queer does not intersect with, touch, or list in the direction of sex…it may be that queer is not the conceptual analytic most useful to what is being described’ (2007: 490). And Weber notes—in part in relation to her experiencing of the appropriation of queer by ‘white, heterosexual, cismale, poststructuralist’ researchers whose work has no relation to sex, gender, or sexuality—the extension of the concept to a generic embrace of ‘all things nonnormative’ is both analytically and politically unhelpful (2016: 13–15). (In line with Weber’s experience, I add my own, not only in relation to ethnomusicology but with music therapy: specifically, my reading of a recent special issue of one of the discipline’s main journals, Voices, entitled ‘Queering Music Therapy’. Contained in the issue were a significant number of contributions written by cis-gendered, hetero researchers, engaging one or two extremely general posits of queer theory, yet with no relation at all to questions of gender, sex, or sexuality) (Bain and Gumble 2019).Footnote 5

All theories are, of course, products of—and function/malfunction differently in—specific temporal, geocultural, and intellectual/disciplinary locations. And queerness’s despecifications, while possibly salubrious in one instance, may be deleterious in another. Thus, understanding ethnomusicology’s foundation upon a masculinist homophobia (as well as its supposed mission of giving ‘representational’ space to the specificities of cultural production, practice, experience, and taxonimization), and its necessary erasure of same-sex desire (indeed erotics of any kind, via a gendered methodology and pseudo-scientific apparatus), it would appear that especially in this field the most radical gesture would be to defy a generic capaciousness, to unabashedly and proudly engage that abject wretchedness (*shudder*) that is same-sex sexual (sensual, corporeal, experiential) desire—to envoice the abject, the unspeakable, to the level of screaming. In the age of queer—the concept indissolubly linked to temporal as well as spatial constructions, as I will shortly highlight—any reference to ‘the ‘H’ word’ (or ‘L’, or ‘G’, or ‘B’) may appear to some to signal a theoretical anachronism, a return towards an essentialist identity politics of days past, aligned with the erection of a discrete ghetto-niche in which, for example, ‘studies of homosexuals/lesbians/gays in music’ can exist. Ferguson, in fact, argues that the academic incorporation of sexuality exploited ‘homosexuality as the sign of a single-issue politics…[that] became the grammar for institutional participation and belonging and the barricade against alternative forms of queerness’ (2012: 217). Yet in the specific context of ethnomusicology (as well as numerous other disciplines), I maintain attention to same-sex sexuality (perhaps most disconcertingly, male-male sexuality), rather than re-inscribing minority status, can be conceptually and affectively instrumental in highlighting the very experiential corporeality that holds the potential to viscerally discomfit to such a degree as to dislodge the mechanisms that allow difference to exist only as a subservient periphery in relation to an ‘unmarked’, ‘normal’, ‘statistically defined majority’ ‘centre’. Queer, as I have been arguing, is ill-suited to this work, and gay appears to me equally inapt owing to its cultural and historical specificity. As such, although it may sound problematic to some (perhaps largely owing to the suzerainty of the Anglophone ‘centre’),Footnote 6 and is certainly not free of cultural, historical, and theoretical baggage, I imagine a marker-cum-concept that references same-sex attraction, desire, erotics, connections as a profound (yet neither immutable nor limiting) component of subjectivities, communities, and coalitions.

As a way of disturbing ethnomusicology—and as a freely available option, an alternative to those for whom neither gay nor queer has ever been a comfortable fit—I imagine the (re-)appearance of ‘homo’ (or ‘homosex’). Not as a ‘subset’ of queer (or the puerile Other to a ‘mature’ ‘fluidity’—a suggestion of evolutionary, melioristic temporality unfortunately often implied in queer [and colonialist] texts),Footnote 7 but as a sign that refuses an identity based primarily upon an embrace of disciplined/administered status (‘married’) or a disembodied effect of discourse and ideology.Footnote 8 Rather than suggestions of a ‘narrow’, ‘binarized’ conception of self, homo—or, better still, with deliberate allusions to another marker, homo*—is as broad as the fecundating star suggests, multiple, multivalent, the variable of same-sex in no way signalling limitation; it is not exhausted by a linguistic marker (thus the * need not be limited to signalling a continuation of a word’s ‘prefix’), any more than queer assumes itself not to be. Indeed, I wonder to what extent a concatenation of ‘same-sex desire’ and ‘limitations’ is an ethnocentric, elitist reading, unaware of (or discounting) both the extent to which such desires are experienced as central to self-formation in locations both within and outside the global North, as well as the realities that ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’ and even ‘homo(sexual)’ are still used by men and woman of any number of ethnic, class, economic, or generational alliances or sociocultural locations who much prefer it to what they experience as a problematic, elitist, Westernized, Anglophone, and/or inscrutable queerness.Footnote 9 The impossibility of finding any one word in relation to sexual/erotic identity that is not coated with layers of culturally specific implications is, I believe, largely acknowledged—and neither ‘homo[*]’ nor ‘queer’ are exceptions. If the argument has been that the former—as prefix/substantive/adjective/verb—is untenable, owing to the historical connections to medicalizations/pathologizations it can never shed, how can the latter be seen to have transformed, via reappropriation, from epithet of scorn and disgust to self-affirmation? I would argue that either term—any term, as both word and concept, with which cultural analysis/exploration might be attempted—can never be defined only in relation to the impossible binarization of either/or, of past/present. Such terms, rather, would be better approached by what Capitain defines as a ‘heterophonic reading’, a concept that relates to Edward Said’s use of ‘polyphony’ in sociocultural analysis. Understood, with reference to compositional and performance practices, as related to yet distinct from a contrapuntal reading, it is an approach that ‘concentrates on the repetitions and transformations of themes between various voices’ wherein ‘the resulting cohesion between voices is not necessarily guaranteed according to detailed compositional prescriptions’ (2022: 20).Footnote 10 Both ‘homo[*]’ and ‘queer’ (or perhaps ‘queer*’),Footnote 11 approached as voices in heterophonic relationship to concepts, histories, geocultural locations, intellectual lineages, disciplines, bodies, and affects can both signify, agitate, connote, describe, define in myriad perpetually kinetic manners, never exhausted by one universal, master ‘deep’ [compositional] ‘structure’.Footnote 12 (My use of a specifically musical/sonic concept in this instance will resonate with similar concepts in the following chapters.)

Yet disciplined queerness (in contradistinction to any of the homo*s of the possible futures), embraced and inflected by the current ethnomusicological apparatus (to say nothing of any number of social or epistemological locations around the planet), carries the substantial risk of becoming unable to address the coercive and corrosive power structures currently in place within the discipline by refusing to highlight that which is most unbearable to the discipline’s practitioners. Here it is relevant to highlight the notable amount of research demonstrating that it is exactly negative reactions to male-male (physical, genital, anal, oral, embodied) sexual activity that is responsible for feelings of ‘disgust’ and homophobia (or ‘homonegativity’) among both male and female heterosexuals (see, inter alia, Morrison et al. 2019; O’Handley, Blair, and Hoskin 2017).Footnote 13 Understanding the importance of emotion, of affect, of shock (‘disgust’), and the lengths to which ethnomusicology has gone to keep erotics—or feelings of any kind—outside the discipline (as Wong notes) (2015), it is exactly those ‘disgusting’ corporeal, living, breathing, musicking, sexual, touching, fucking, audible, vibrating, material, resonant beings, groups, communities, assemblages that hold the possibility for agitation and disruption. It is just such beings/assemblages that might resist not only the discipline’s, but what Bacchetta sees as ‘the [entire] University’s “diversity management” strategies that…control us, deactivate us, render us ineffective’, in part by offering people of colour or queers ‘the option of becoming-functionally-white’ or ‘becoming-functionally-straight’ (Bacchetta, Jivraj, and Bakshi 2020: 580). Similar to Ewell’s observations in relation to music theory, where despecification allows for the genericism of ‘diversity’ in place of attention to racism (2020), queerness’s own inherent, historical relationship to desexualization, coupled with ethnomusicology’s disciplinary administration, risks perpetuating a refusal to see a foundational, exclusionary issue: a virulent, lethal homophobia.

From the Gay Liberation Front to the Radical Faeries to the early days of Queer Nation in the 1990s, homo* subjects have experientially and conceptually understood not only the formative role of sex in relation to identity and assembly, but its emancipatory, oppositional potentials as well. And these disruptive potencies, originating as lived experience, are theoretically extended via Hocquenghem (1972/1993) whose analyses I have engaged in previous work (Amico 2014; see Chap. 2). Hocquenghem’s synechdocal location of ‘homosexual desire’ in the organ of the anus, is a move animated by both material existence and theoretical engagement—an unashamed embracing and flaunting of those sites normally relegated in phallocentric/patriarchal society to the private, the invisible, in contradistinction to the public, hypervalued phallus, around which all desire must coalesce in patriarchal/masculinist culture. It is just such a disturbance of the hierarchicalization of the body’s myriad erotic, sexual zones that can prove to be one of many destabilizing agents to the foundational tenets of a given (homophobic, misogynistic, heteronormative) society.Footnote 14 Offering the possibility of deterritorialization rather than administration, Hocquenghem’s homosexual desire troubles the very concept (and reliance upon the utility of) ‘sexual politics’, a domain that ‘seeks to make desire conform to the rules and laws insofar as politics is defined as a truthful way of deciding’, and wherein ‘uncodified desire [submits] to codification’ (often at the level of recourse to ‘identity’) (Cohen 2017).Footnote 15

An ethnoqueer embrace of a de-sexed queerness-cum-(politically motivated/effectual) identity allows the extant system to eternally self-replicate; conversely, an unclothing of the homo* (in the very site where the disavowal of the centrality of such bodies/desires, as well as their banishment and eradication, must be perpetually enacted in order to function), as the disgusting, the abject, would threaten, in Kristevan terms, to ‘[disturb] identity, system, order’, to operate without respect for ‘borders, positions, rules’ (1982: 4). It is the abject, as ‘jettisoned object’, ‘radically excluded’, that ‘draws [one] to toward the place where meaning collapses’ (2). Understanding, moreover, how the abject confronts the subject with the terrifying possibility of losing linguistic-symbolic control—threatens in fact a loss of subjectivity itself, a return to a state of undifferentiated relation (no self/Other; thus, no hierarchy)—it is clear that, in the context of ethnomusicology’s methodologies, prohibitions, and occlusions, the disgusting-disavowed-unspeakable is a site of volatile possibilities. Hocquenghem’s theoretical contributions offer productive, alternative ways of approaching dynamics of power and subjectification, inflected by an understanding of physical existence and pleasures, thus arguably of interest to investigators claiming to place importance on the illumination of just such dynamics in relation to the lived experience of music in/as culture. It is, of course, predictable that his work is virtually nonexistent in the ethnomusicological literature.

Attention to same-sex desire and non-normative sexualities of many stripes, as implicated in constructions of personal and sociocultural identity, often bound up with discourses of modernity, the nation-state, democracy, and corporeal agency has, in many disciplines, revealed much about the bases for cultural production that are no longer possible to theorize via geography or ethnicity (two markers still used in much ethnomusicological work). Such attention can broaden possibilities of understanding dynamics of reception (rather than a unilateral focus on production), and of the cooptation of symbolic discourse, when unrestricted access to such discourses is structurally blocked. Paola Bacchetta suggests that decolonial queerness/sexualities ‘can offer a place from which to perform a subaltern, and possibly a subalternative critique of dominant analytics and modes and tools of knowledge production’ (Bacchetta, Jivraj, and Bakshi 2020: 576). Yet this ‘knowledge’ is not abstract, conceptual; Bacchetta notes that such ‘work of disclosure’ can ‘open the way for thinking, feeling, acting politically, and living otherwise’ (576). Acknowledging the importance of feeling and acting suggests a need to venture beyond the ideological, discursive, cognitive, or juridical, especially in the context of research on sound and music. Here, same-sex desire and sexuality, approached as forming within and formative of an immersive sonic (rather than the hierarchical visual, the basis of textuality, representation, and related theories and methodologies), has much to offer understandings of the interaction between experiential subjectivities partially constructed around an amalgamation of sex-affect-embodiment-ideology-aesthetics, and the affective, embodied, and sexual/erotic/sensual/aesthetic nature of our interactions with and constructions of the material/imagined/desired environments in which we live/through which we come to be. What obtains in the relationality of the sonic is what might be called a mutually constituting sonic ‘re-sonance’ (suggested by Nancy) (2002/2007) that short-circuits not only attempts at univocal representation (by the ethnographer/researcher), but the hegemony of the visual (or textual) in explorations of the very concept of representation.Footnote 16 In this regard, explorations that highlight music, embodiment, and sex/uality in relation to homo* subjects and sites do important work not only in relation to ethnomusicology’s omissions, but contribute to undisciplined knowledge in general.

Morad’s study of the relationships between homosexuality/same-sex desire and music in Special Period Cuba is a work that gestures towards this possibility, in part via its engagement of dance, the body, and the experiential rituals of Santería (2014); to find that this diasporic religion had, in fact, a significant relationship to men who desired other men was for me a revelation, as decades of exposure to work on this very practice (in textbooks, in graduate seminars, in monographs, in conference presentations) had left, via silencing omissions, the tacit implication of a wholly heterosexual social space. I can only imagine how such a work would have inspired/affected me (at the level of affect), had I encountered it in college or graduate school. Yet these years were not entirely bereft of inspiration, including my exposure to an evocative and inspiring essay on same-sex desire, written at a time when daring to explore such things in the very conservative realm of music studies (to say nothing of a scholar’s unambiguous connection to and identification with such desires) was an act of significance and, arguably, courage. From the original Queering the Pitch (1994), Suzanne Cusick’s widely read chapter is as apposite today (understanding the continuing hypertrophy of the visual/textual in academic studies of musical sound and action) as it was when it was published more than twenty-five years ago, and certainly in the context of this discussion: her exploration of a lesbian relationship to music reveals the myriad possibilities opened up by thinking not only about music and sex, but music as sex—both understood as comprising the erotic, the sensual, the material, as well as dynamics of relationality (dominance, submission, pleasure, etc.) Highlighting how corporeal relationships with sound, with expressive culture, encompass all manner of imaginings, potentials, and possibilities (‘*’)—the very things that can never be amenable to ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ ‘analysis’ (alone? at all?)—Cusick’s insights begin with lesbian, and additionally gesture towards a re-imagining of relationships of all sorts, including the researcher’s relationships to ‘subjects’ that have for so long been disciplined and detrimentally restricted by erasures (of certain ‘dangerous’ sexual bodies) and asymmetries (enacted by ideologically driven methodologies). Cusick’s 1994 work, in musicology, stands in stark contrast to that of ethnomusicology where, more than a decade later, a rare study of AIDS and music that makes no mention of homosexual/bisexual (or any sexual) persons, that avoids the profoundly material and corporeal attributes of sex, illness, healing, and music, appears as unproblematic (because, via erasure, via ethnomusicology’s disciplining apparatus, it conforms to what is constructed as acceptable).Footnote 17

If disembodiment and desexualization occur in relation to both queerness and ethnomusicology, and if it is embodied and (homo*)sexed subjects that may contribute to ridding the latter disciplinary site of its homophobic masculinity, then there is scant reason to assume that ethnoqueer will be a marriage capable of (or interested in) intervening in the structural inequities that continue to proliferate. Practitioners within both sites might sincerely claim, might genuinely (consciously) believe that attention to pleasures, desires, erotics, affects are of secondary importance when faced with politics, ideologies, and discourses that impact upon millions of subjects in profoundly discriminatory and injurious manners. To the extent that bodies are critically engaged within research, it might be argued that it is chiefly theoretical constructions such as Foucualt’s, for example, that must be enlisted, in order to combat the discursive and ideological destructiveness of omnipresent/omnipotent (bio)power—an argument borne out by the extraordinarily wide use of that very concept. I do not, of course, deny the necessity of attention to spheres that have been termed ‘political’, ‘ideological’, or ‘discursive’, and the troubling ways that such domains might structure social worlds and the bodies in/with/through which subjectivity is lived; my invocation of the Foucaultian ‘discipline’ should make this clear. However, ‘body’ in Foucault—exemplary of the status of body in poststructuralist theory posited by Prosser—is largely that which is acted upon, its unique fleshed, blooded, sensing/sensate capacities and experiences often elided.Footnote 18 And I maintain that none of these favoured registers (because ideal, where ideal:male as corporeal:female) is even fully conceivable without an understanding of subjectivity that is materially, corporeally lived. From Panagia’s (2009) and Rancière’s (2000/2004) explorations of the connections between the sensible, the aesthetic, and the political; to LeFebvre’s theorization of the rhythmic, corporeally experienced constructions of sociocultural time and space (1992/2004); to Florensky’s conception of the crucial connection between the material world, beauty, and divinity/transcendence (1914/2004);Footnote 19 to the various strands of phenomenological research (from philosophy to neuroscience) that highlight not only the indissoluble links between body and environment (material, imagined, remembered, experienced) and self and other, but also the corporeal roots of language, conceptualization, and theorization;Footnote 20 countless explorations have repeatedly and convincingly shown the material to be something far more than an effect of discourse, a (com)pliant stuff upon which the social is ‘inscribed’, or a site of dangerous limitation (via discursive constructions placed upon ‘unreal’ materialities; or, via an unacknowledged, subconscious, and actually baseless fear that materiality might equate to some sort destiny). A personal, historical example may be apropos here: I vividly recall my participation, decades ago, in several local Queer-Nation-inspired actions: specifically, several ‘kiss-ins’ which were designed to agitate, to disturb, to reconfigure social space via a refusal of invisibilization, erasure, and obliteration. Here, I remember—via diverse registers of ‘memory’, including that of the body—the complex experiential, affective states that accompanied these actions, the mixture never wholly amenable to slogans or linguistic markers, a profound combination of empowerment and fear, of liberation, discharge and control, of ethics and—passionately kissing one of my then-fuck buddies, out in the open, in the middle of a straight bar in Brooklyn, among numerous other male and female couples doing the same—erotics.

It is a dogmatic, intransigent belief in the impuissance (or deceptive nature) of pleasure, or the highlighting of the body primarily as a site of coercion, stricture, disempowerment that is, in fact, profoundly limiting—far more limiting that any ‘biology’ could ever (be imagined to) be. Indeed, numerous authors, thinkers, scholars—many of them BIPOC—have highlighted the erotic as site of both power and understanding; as Lorde famously and forcefully stated, highlighting the misogynistic denigration of corporeal pleasure, ‘the erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge’ (1978/1984: 56).Footnote 21 Lorde’s refusal of a masculinist asceticism (an anxiety masquerading as objectivity) is based upon, in my reading, an understanding of the fecundity of the erotic as that which is explored and as that through which we explore, experiencing it as an integral, motivating component of our work(ing) processes. Such an understanding has undoubtedly been foundational to the varied, vital ways that the desiring subject/body has been enlisted in exploring emancipatory erotics in relation to coalition building (Sandoval 2000, 2002) or popular music practices and cultures (Horton-Stallings 2015; Cooper 1993: Chap. 8; Lee 2010). The experiencing, sensate subject is also central to Bologh’s anti-masculinist, relational-feminist, and erotic-dialogic critique of Max Weber’s sociological theory (1990/2009), as well as Henderson-Espinoza’s exploration of a ‘decolonial erotics’ obtaining via the destabilization of power dynamics in D/S relationships (2018). Henderson-Espinoza’s exploration of sexual relation as it engages with/is experienced via the material body, kink, ethics, theology, and class highlights the extent to which corporeality is wrongly understood to guarantee inquiry marked by solipsism.

The meeting of kink and colonial also indicates the importance of attention to sex/materiality/sexuality in relation to exploring complexities of race and ethnicity (subjectively/corporeally and intersubjectively/intercorporeally experienced) that opens onto new possibilities for knowledges foreclosed by the decades-long, nearly exclusive focus on the textual/discursive/ideological. Race, body, and the erotic also meet in Macharia’s analysis of the black diaspora in slavery’s aftermath, wherein the metaphor of frottage is utilized to ‘[unsettle] the heteronormative tropes through which [this diaspora] has been imagined and idealized’, ‘[gesturing] to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds’ (2019: 4). And it is perhaps Reid-Pharr who most eloquently and affectively communicates the richness of possibility offered by, the intellectual-ethical necessity of, an attention to a corporeality that profoundly informs an ‘I’, an ‘us’, that affords great pleasures as well as opportunities to face the difficult realities of social structures founded upon inequity. Refusing the typical infantile, puritanical, academic language that cannot allow for frankness about the body and sex/sexuality, Reid-Pharr finds that ‘our relationships to the body’, the ‘expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs mouths, and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust, but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate’ is the ‘one thing that marks us as queer’ (1996: 75–76). As such, highlighting the importance of both the corporeal and the ideal, Reid-Pharr argues that queer theory’s avoidance of our material, embodied, erotic interactions—‘how we inhabit our various bodies, especially how we fuck, or rather, what we think when we fuck’ is a notable omission (76). He refuses, in this regard, the conception of corporeality as offering ‘a seamless connection with the rest of existence’, understanding ‘transcendence’ to be inextricably linked to constructions of race, a corollary of an ‘imagined transparence that…defines whiteness’. Fucking, he argues, is not a means of escaping race/racism; rather, escape is a fantasy that ‘marks the sexual act as deeply implicated in the ideological processes by which difference is constructed and maintained’ (84). In light of such compelling analyses—where fucking exists, where it signals the importance of attention to ideology and discourse and corporeality—it is impossible to maintain that the explorations of ethnomusicology and queerness, especially as they combine in relation to the sensual-corporeal-aesthetic-sociocultural complexities of sound, music, and lived experience, can be anything more than partial—indeed, distorting—insofar as they are marked by an embarrassed and embarrassing avoidance of our fucking, sucking, touching, pungent, wet, porous, sexed bodies.

Each of these author’s insights (among many others not cited here) remind me again that, while I believe my unique history and circumstances as (a) homo*, an ex-ethnomusicologist, and a researcher of sex/uality and gender in the global North give me an important, lived understanding of the structural inequities upon which the epistemologies and disciplines in which I have operated are based, my assessments are nonetheless limited and partial. Yet I hope that my awareness and voicing of the exclusions and inequities I understand as operative in my specific academic locations might contribute to a broader movement towards equity; as Haraway argues, it is just such corporeal, partial, situated knowledges that have the possibility of short-circuiting the ‘god trick’ of objectivity (1988) so foundational to much of what is continually reproduced in western academia at the level of artefacts, epistemology, and ideology, all of which are essential to the masculinist imperative of a disembodying scientism. In this regard, remembering both the centrality of the situated, material body and the shields of theory-objectivity-technologies wielded by ethnomusicologists and many queer theorists in order to keep the disturbing variables of sensual-sexual materiality and affective intercourse (with their subjects; with ‘feminizing’ musical sound) at bay, I note again Garlick’s explorations of the mutually constituting relationships among masculinity, technology, and sex. With attention to online erotica, Garlick finds that it is sexuality occurring outside the parameters of male technological, appellative/classificatory ordering control which offers the possibility of effectuating (the beginning of) an assault on hegemonic masculinity (2010).

It is just such mania for control that manifests in academia—from Lévi-Straus’s ‘coding’Footnote 22 to the dry-as-dust delivery of data that marks so many publications and presentations in virtually every disciplinary location within the Western university—and often in relation to a silencing of sexual beings understood as dangerous to the status quo. Such sexual beings may take many forms, including homo*—and understanding the causes and perpetuations of coloniality, homophobia, racism, and sexism as having complex, situated geneses and foundations, that there is no universal, generic formula via which any of them can be attacked, it is vitally important that all situated knowledges, sexualities, erotics are enlisted in the confrontations. I am not arguing that ethnomusicology, queerness, or any other site of intellectual inquiry devoted to the exploration of expressive sociocultural life and production should become, from this day forward and in perpetuity, defined by a mandated primary or singular focus on the corporeal, the erotic, the sexual, the sensual (or the homo*) (etc.); the point is not to swap one set of dogmata for another. I am, rather, saying that only with the obliteration of those structures perpetuated in methodologies, that dangerously limit understandings and representations of human interaction and expressivity—specifically, those that perpetuate the homophobia (and racism, and coloniality) upon which any field stands—can meaningful, foundational change occur.Footnote 23

Attention to the compulsory lacuna is not an end point, but a commencement—a rupture in service of a proliferation of additional ruptures which comprise practice, methodology, and epistemology. Gage Averill, in his response to Brown’s previously noted 2020 open letter makes reference to the ‘older white “silverbacks”’, over-represented in positions of power in ethnomusicology, and ‘threatened by new voices, diverse perspectives, and direct intellectual and ideological challenges’. Yet combatting just such powerbrokers, Brown suggests—by, for example, opening up of positions of real power to BIPOC within the field—may lead to ‘the academic equivalent of white flight’. I am likewise convinced that a sea change in ethnomusicology, wherein questions of embodiment, (emotional, affective, somatic, material) relationality, and human sex/sexuality supersede the current, decades-long obsessions with neatly defined and often one-dimensional conceptions of politics, identity, and resistance, wherein experimental and more equitable methodologies and modes of scholarly production and dissemination are encouraged, could very well lead to a type of ‘guy flight’ (from an academic ‘guyland’)Footnote 24—a frightened retreat from a discipline deemed to be becoming ‘too feminine’ (or, as Wong says, marked by a ‘double feminization’) (2015: 178), unable to continue in its primary mission of conferring the status of ‘masculine’ upon the practitioner. (That fields such as ethnochoreology, dance history, fashion studies, and gender studies are among the few academic disciplines in which women hold majorities, that the foci of their concerns have been discursively marked as ‘feminine’, and that heterosexual male scholars—intent on holding the reins of power in the vast majority of disciplinary sites within the university—have resisted encroaching upon these spaces can hardly be seen as coincidental). Such ‘flights’, however, although they may engender panic for some—portending not only upheaval, but eradication of a long-held position of privilege—may also be embraced, even encouraged, insofar as they may promise the removal of obstructions to a more equitable academy, and equity in the societies to which such academies owe their privileged existences. What such flight—or, as I will suggest, expulsion—might portend for the futures of ethnomusicology, queerness, and the broken university will be the focus of the following two chapters.