I am sceptical that more ‘queers’ (as [generic, disembodied, LGBT+] subject matter) and more ‘queerness’ (as a synonym for polite, co-opted, and—as I will argue—parochial theoretical constructions) can do little to radically alter ethnomusicology, a field in need of radical intervention via an envoicement of the erased. And such erasures are clearly not restricted to realms of ‘theorizing’ among a white, Western elite within this discipline alone; it is the entire discursive realm of sexuality that is implicated as well. As Tellis has argued (2012, 2015), the Western ‘queer movement’, in the context of globalization and the neoliberal economy, works through imbrications with classist, casteist, and sexist power structures in his local, Indian context, where the very usage and conceptualization of ‘queer’ has the capacity to alienate local subjects, to ‘[obscure] long histories of same-sex subjectivity not easily amenable not just to the term “queer” but to identity politics as commonly understood in general…violently [erasing] those histories and [leaving] the question of how to understand same-sex subjectivities in South Asian contexts unanswered’ (2015: 58).

This one observation of Tellis’s alone should spur central (rather than tangential) and ongoing (rather than occasional) discussions about the problematics of queerness itself, as well as its cross- or interdisciplinary relationship to other academic areas. If queer might be imagined as a saviour to ethnomusicology—queer as the ethical remedy, as ethnomusicology imagined its relationship to musicology—what is to be made of the fact that queer ‘intervention’ appears in most cases to leave the field (its methodologies, epistemologies, ontologies, performances, artefacts, bureaucracy) substantially the same as it ever was, save for more ‘diversity’? Understanding this relic of ethnomusicology as one of the most scandalously colonialist enterprises still in existence, as well as the centrality of questions related to language and taxonomization in queer theory (as sites of coercion, medicalization, pathologization; or self-representation, agentic identification),Footnote 1 how could queerness possibly seamlessly, collegially align with ‘ethno- ’anything, the appellation itself hardly a neutral, disciplinary/‘scientific’ marker but, to the contrary, a blatant, troubling foregrounding of the epistemological foundations of the field (Amico 2020)? Wouldn’t an engaged, activist queerness commence any sort of interdisciplinary dialogue—especially in locations redolent of coloniality—with such fundamental issues? Yet rather than such sustained, discomfiting dialogue (not footnoted; not inaudibly implied; not functioning as passing virtue signalling), when queer + ethno- meet we largely have silence—a silence replicating that of ethnomusicology’s three-monkeys-type (non-)response to LGBT+ people (including homo*s), a silence that speaks volumes. It is an absence signifying just how normalized asymmetrical power differentials emanating from the global North have become. And it is a clear indication that ethnomusicology and queerness operate from a shared stance in relation to what they have constructed as a de facto ‘the rest of the world’, an unacknowledged stance that is marked in fundamental ways by colonialism and imperialism, these indissolubly linked to masculinity. To imply that queerness relates to the type of fetishized ethnomusicological masculinity I have been discussing in any manner other than antagonistically (or, at the very least, critically), that the two might share any sort of foundational ideological motivations, will certainly strike many as outrageous. Yet the ideologies of specific masculinities are clearly not limited to expression and instantiation via variables that are visibly (one might say stereotypically) apparent (sartorial, corporeal, and/or emotional comportment, e.g.); as explored in the previous chapters, both ethnomusicology’s and queerness’s effacement of the body (understanding the corporeal’s construction as the feminine, the Other to the ideal/intellectual masculine) must be understood as the outcome of gendered motivations, rather than a quest for ‘objectivity’. Indeed, the extent to which queerness has perpetuated itself in consort with the very type of ‘scientific’, ‘objective’, citation- and canon-based artefact production that has been linked to the production of gender since the scientific revolutionFootnote 2 is yet another example of its deference to and adoption of the masculine. Moreover, and of direct relevance to the ensuing discussion, is the indissoluble and mutually constituting relationship of masculinity and colonial conquest and exploitation.Footnote 3

Mesquita, Wiedlack, and Lasthofer suggest that ‘US-based as well as non-US-based scholars continue to critique, adapt, and appropriate queer theory’ (2012: 18), and two special issues of the journal Social Text—with introductions by Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz (‘What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?’) (2005) and Eng and Puar (‘Left of Queer’) (2020)—are examples of important, widely read publications highlighting queerness’s professed commitment to self-critique. In the former special issue, the authors stress ‘that queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations has always been one of the field’s key theoretical and political promises’, a contention directly quoted in the latter (2005: 3; Eng and Puar 2020: 1). These key contributions notwithstanding, such promises in many ways often appear as aspired to (at least publicly), rather than fulfilled, with asymmetries and hegemonies enacted by, for example, ‘colonialism-and-race-amnesiac…white queer theory that dominates in the global North(s)’ (Bacchetta, Jivraj, and Bakshi 2020: 576). The Social Text editors, obviously aware of such problematic, noxious power differentials, argue for the necessity of the previously noted ‘subjectless critique’, a type of analysis that ‘allows us to apprehend the emergence of both a universal queer subject of rights and recognition, and a particular queer native informant consigned to the waiting room of history as two sides of the same representational coin’ (Eng and Puar 2020: 7–8). Yet what is striking here, as in other writing, is the significant difference between, on the one hand, analysing and interrogating the posits and epistemologies internal to queer theory produced in the West, used in relation to the exploration and understanding of subjects, objects, actions, and spaces across wide temporal and geocultural terrains; and, on the other hand, attention to the envelopment of just such wide swaths of time, space, geography, and corporeal subjectivities by the very rubric ‘queer’.

Queerness’s ongoing venturing out in order to bring (Others) in—suggested by Eng and Puar’s ‘universal’ (but whose concept of ‘the universe’?)—has some obviously startling connotations that have been remarked upon both prior to and after the introduction’s publication. Prosser, for example, notes that for Butler (1994) one of the central questions of queer epistemology and ontology is its ‘capacity to include…[and] how far the term “queer” will stretch’. Yet Prosser finds it telling that it is apparently not a concern ‘whether queer should even attempt to expand; expansion, inclusion, incorporation are automatically invested with value’ (1998: 58). Assessing the motivations for such a desired expansion, moreover, promise to reveal dynamics affecting more than just an individual theoretical posit, contained within the rarified realm of Western academia. Noting specifically queer’s inclusion of trans*, despite the tensions between queer’s posits and the lived, embodied experiences of many trans* persons, Prosser asks whom the inclusion actually benefits, suggesting that queer (self-defined as ever-changing, all-inclusive, never static) can survive only through ‘adding subjects who appear ever queerer precisely by virtue of their marginality in relation to queer’ (58). And if such questions imply a congruence with colonial and/or imperial drives, other authors have made the connection explicit. Hoad, for example, suggests that queerness’s site of genesis in the North Atlantic marks its ‘inevitable complicity with legacies of earlier imperialisms’ (2007: 515), and specifically notes Warner’s use of the term ‘queer planet’ as more than a metaphor, not ‘unrelated to the site of queer subjectivity in the U.S and innocent of its own colonizing fantasies’ (516). Warner, himself aware of the implications of the term, thought it necessary to offer a striking caveat after the fact, decades ago. However, while I cannot count the hundreds or thousands of times I have seen/heard Warner’s definition of queerness—‘resistance to regimes of the normal’ (1993: xxvi)—gleefully, casually quoted, applied to locales and peoples from Brazil to Bangladesh to Belgium, it is rare that I have encountered such proclamations qualified by his subsequent understanding that ‘in the New World Order, we should be more than usually cautious about global utopianisms that require American slang’ (emphasis added; 1995/2005: 209).

The colonial, the imperial, is inherent in this contemporary normalization of the seemingly self-evident utility of the term ‘queer’ and associated vocabularies and epistemologies and, concomitantly, the relatively infrequent attempts to interrogate either—dynamics that are troublingly evident in countless actions and artefacts, with profound (and predetermined, but unacknowledged as such) consequences. Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan IV over two decades ago highlighted the necessity of attention to the complexities of ‘queerness’ as it ‘globalizes’—cautioning, for example, against the uncritical/tacit acceptance of ‘a unidirectional path in which the West, Western cultures, and the English language stand in as the “origin” of cultural exchanges and non-Western societies occupy the discursive position of “targets” of such exchanges’ (2002: 6). Yet as linked examples of the failure of such cautions to have resulted in a continued vigilance against such figurations, I note two recent conferences I attended, both of which foregrounded questions and dynamics of queerness and coloniality. Throughout the presentations and discussions, a hierarchical relationship was repeatedly, implicitly reconstructed and reconfirmed: queerness as an unmarked, overarching, indeed master category (one marked by, in fact, its operating as if unmarked, and its capacity to ‘include’ and explicate via similarly unmarked, overarching, theory) under which all ‘unique (non-Western) examples’ might be subsumed, to which all ‘specific (non-Western) instances’ were centripetally drawn (global South gender category X explicated via queerness; indigenous practice X as an example of genderqueer; etc.). Indeed, the choice to have used queer throughout was never remarked upon, apparently taken as an unproblematic given, and considered to be in need of no clarification or justification (as, e.g., the very use of ‘gender’—which is ‘queered’—as a universal rather than culturally specific construction; see Lugones 2008; Nzegwu 2020).Footnote 4 Such performances—these ‘ephemera as evidence’ (Muñoz 1996)—are likewise replicated in countless publications, to the extent that what should be remarkable becomes ‘mythologized’ (to use Barthes’s term) (1957/1987) into invisibility. Indeed, Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan not only retain the word ‘queer’ in the title of their edited volume, the ‘unmarked’ moniker/concept under which all discussions are subsumed (including the ‘local’ ‘variants’ of queer), but also declare in the introduction—suggesting, however unintentionally, an originary temporal/geocultural narrative—that ‘queerness is now global’ (emphasis added; 1). Such a declaration leads Tellis and Bala to ask several critical, destabilizing questions,Footnote 5 highlighting the fact that this ‘now’ places the West in the central, generative position, the ‘discoverer’ and definer of the supposedly previously unknown—a position it has not, apparently, ceded (2015).

Voices from ‘the rest of the world’ have frequently endeavoured to draw attention to this asymmetry, this penchant of the West to universalize that which is in actuality no more than a parochial, provincial understanding. Macharia, for example, highlights the common practice of ‘queer African voices and experiences [being] absorbed as “data” or “evidence”, not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions of queer studies’ (2016: 185), while Rao notes how the dominant centres ‘provincialize vernacular categories (such as hijra, kothi, aravani, tirunangai/girunambi) while reinforcing the use of “trans” as an overarching signifier for gender non-normativity’ (2020: 29). And noting the U.S. provenance and use of English common to much contemporary queer scholarship, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz highlight a unidirectional relationshipFootnote 6 whereby ‘scholars writing in other languages and from other political and cultural perspectives read but are not, in turn, read’—‘[replicating] in uncomfortable ways the rise and consolidation of U.S. empire’ (2005: 15). Yet despite such observations, it has not become common practice (or uncommon practice, or any type of practice at all) for Western scholars to continually and actively de-centre the very concept of queer, to suggest/admit that this ‘universal’ might in fact be narrower, more problematic, less hermeneutically sophisticated than any number of indigenous concepts offering richer, broader, more expansive and or appropriate sites of theorization (or, on the contrary, richer concepts that productively problematize the very concepts of ‘expansive’ or ‘broad’ in relation to sex/uality).Footnote 7 If the thought of aravani or goluboi (голубой) or tongzhi coming to preeminence, dislodging queer, requiring scholars to learn new languages (in multiple senses of the word), connotations, and connections seems problematic, the reasons for this have little to do with intellectual/theoretical capaciousness and everything to do with Chatterjee and Maira’s observation that ‘U.S. imperialism is characterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended upon territorial colonialism’ (2014: 7).

Queerness, with a genesis in the United States, and in no less surreptitious, colonial-imperial manners, is instrumental in constructing not only subjects according to its provincial logics, but the very temporality, the singular history, in which such subjects exist—specifically, the temporality of the West, the global North, an understanding of time enlisted in the assimilation or extermination of other cosmologies and subjectivities. Inscribed within yet another overarching, unmarked structure—a temporal frame based on modernity, progress, development (Mignolo and Walsh 2018)Footnote 8—the Other in the colonial encounter was figured as outside or behind, including in relation to worthiness of the ascription of the very status of human (where a ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-’ was often taken to be a necessary qualifier).Footnote 9 Such ‘chrononormativity’Footnote 10 is not, of course, extinguished with the simple addition of the ‘post’ to colonial, the spheres of (Western, English-language) research on ‘queer’ sexuality standing as stunning examples. Kulpa, Mizielińska, and Stasińska, for example, argue that the discourse on sexuality most prevalent in academic discourse, emanating largely from the United States, has a foundation built upon a ‘Western logic [that] assumes only one (its own) possible teleological development and uses time/temporality as one of the tools of cultural hegemony’ (2012: 117); instead of being perceived as particular to one geocultural location it is, rather, ‘presented as the universal model of development’ (123).Footnote 11 And Rao explores ‘how time matters differently in the queer postcolony’, for those not living in the ‘smug afterlife of [Western, queer political] victory’ (2020: 2), in his effort to ‘provincialize the time of Western modernity’ (26) and thus highlight the ‘heterotemporality of the global queer political present’ (18). In a similar move, Macharia draws attention to the black diaspora as a site in which ‘fugitive temporalities’ emerge, conceptions and experiences of time ‘not simply “other” or “alternative” or even “counter” modernities but different configurations of time altogether’ (2016: 184–185). Moreover, to the extent that queer is often tacitly posited in contradistinction to lesbian, gay, or bisexual—the current, evolved understanding, rather than the narrow, archaic beliefs, as noted previously—the logic of development and evolution is continually reenacted.

The functional, structural, de facto ways that Western queer theories and theorists monopolize the ‘discussions’ (scare quotes required, as will become evident) around sexualities (the terminologies, temporalities, localities), and the manners in which such ‘discussions’ are implemented and disseminated (the publications/publishers and conferences, including the language of both) bring to mind Mignolo’s (2018) understanding of the role of ‘knowledge’ in the support of the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP). Comprising both enunciation and that which is enunciated, knowledge is central to the construction of coloniality: epistemology, created and maintained by the colonial power, the parochial masquerading as universal, is ultimately foisted on Others as the ontology of the colonial world and colonial subject including, as I have noted, the very ascription—or not—of humanity. Such dynamics are inherent in the numerous structures, artefacts, and practices—evident in both ethnomusicology and queer studies/theory—whereby the very possibility of occupying the position ‘enunciator’ is foreclosed for all but the colonial-imperial power brokers (the constructors of ‘the’ episteme in which Other features only as passive enunciated). Aware of the toxicity of such asymmetries, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for example, highlights the necessity of eradicating the ‘epistemic line’ cordoning off those constructed as Other to Western theory (‘special’, ‘local’ examples) in a move towards ‘cognitive justice’ (2018). Such constructions do not exist solely in some rarified, tangential academic realm, at the level of ‘only’ conceptual, but have far-reaching, ongoing consequences; as he notes, the ‘geography of reason’ has functioned to ‘dismember’ black people from the ‘human family’ (emphasis added; 24).Footnote 12 Alternate choices of terminology used to identify and define this cordoning off and destruction highlight the violence implicit in its enactment—for example, Sousa Santos’s ‘epistemicide’ (2014) and Rabaka’s ‘epistemic apartheid’ (2010)—and may be understood in relation to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the creation of ‘death-worlds’, ‘unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (2003: 40).Footnote 13 That Mbembe’s analyses highlight the insufficiencies of the Foucaultian biopower—a digital life/death choice—illustrates, moreover, what is at stake in the drawing of these borders: the epistemic line, epistemicide, epistemic apartheid—all exist not only to efface, eradicate Other(s’) thought (and the idea that Others have the capacity for what is constructed as ‘thought’), but the ability of the Other to think back, to trouble the preeminence and unassailability of ‘universal’ knowledge.Footnote 14

There is also resonance here with Spivak’s invocation of Heidegger’s concept of worlding: ‘The assumption that when the colonizers come to a world, they encounter it as uninscribed earth upon which they write their inscriptions’ (1988: 129). Queer theory, queer concepts, queering—in written artefacts, often in English (operating conceptually and materially, and highlighting the aptness of Mignolo’s and Spivak’s recourse to linguistic terminology)—enunciate, inscribe, colonize. In line with Heidegger’s original use of the term, which suggests a ‘dwelling’, the West creates the discursive space of queerness, enabling its practitioners to ‘be at home’ around the world, to meet the Other in a place peopled with its own compatriots, one constructed as safe (because its own). But this ‘home’ has functions beyond offering a sense of succour or comity (or the now-commodified Danish/Norwegian concept of hygge); it is, in profound ways, a space not of domestic but of commercial bliss (although perhaps this is the one true blissful home of the colonialist-capitalist). If ethnomusicology, in true colonial (= masculinist) fashion operates within the extractionist model of capitalism—taking raw materials from the site of exploitation, and fashioning them into products for the domestic markets it has then created—then queerness has added an additional layer, creating markets for its epistemological (= ontological) and material products throughout the world (enjoying ‘enormous success as an export’; Leckey and Brooks 2010: 7), requiring the purchasers, moreover, to learn the correct (theoretical/English) language in order to become part of the ‘discussion’; they must, additionally, understand and be able to speak using the terminologies of the foundational ‘canon’, written by ‘white theorists we can care about’ (Macharia 2016: 186). Returning to the hypothetical of any ‘local’, ‘non-Western’ concept(s) displacing queer as the taxonomical/theoretical ‘unmarked’ centre around which knowledge dissemination and production circulates, I can imagine any number of proffered explanations as to why this has not happened: ‘Impractical; a lingua franca is necessary, and queer functions in this capacity’, and/or ‘despite its pedigree, queer can be inflected in any number of ways in any number of locations’,Footnote 15 and/or ‘it’s counterproductive to focus unnecessarily on what is only a generic term’ and/or countless others.

The Western/English-language marker ‘queer’ could never, of course, dissemble its actual power via claims of existing only as a general/generic term, one with the aim of bringing together socioculturally diverse subjects and movements with a common goal (assumed by many to be antinormativity and/or subversion). Conceptual artist Evgeniy Fiks’s Dictionary of the Queer International (2021) is an example of work that highlights the aim of reconciling the local and the global, a collection of ‘local queer languages around the world’, ‘[proposing] a vision of international, intersectional, and non-hierarchical queer culture…[and] an international queer language of multi-locality and horizontality’Footnote 16 Underlying such calls for creation, support, and celebration of an international queer subject/community/movement is almost certainly the desire of at least some living in sites experienced as repressive, phobic (a blanket hatred of Otherness resting upon a foundational ‘xeno-’), and antiprogressive, to be part of something they envision as the opposite—a ‘modern’, ‘Western’, ‘liberal’ site of self-expression, one attracting and attractive in part via the affective resonance of the English language itself. And the possibility of ‘queer’ contributing to the type of anti-hierarchical, global coalition envisioned by Fiks and countless others—laypersons, activists, academics—is reason enough for many to continue their investment in queer as a concept. Yet as Prosser reminds us, in relation to the aims of queer coalition or alliance building, ‘an alliance…suggests a provisional or strategic union between parties whose different interests ought not to be—indeed, cannot totally be—merged, sublimated for cohering—or queering—the whole’ (1998: 60).

As an academic field of inquiry with intimate links to English-language literary theory, a genesis within North American/Western European departments of English,Footnote 17 and an interest in highlighting the complexities and associated powers of language, the very idea of unproblematic translation (on both conceptual and linguistic levels) across countless geocultural landscapes cannot be ignored. Fukushima, attending to the sensitivities of translation across cultural and linguistic lines (the two inextricably linked), and using the apt example of the word ‘representation’, highlights the manner in which words always extend beyond themselves, vis countless links and associations. Noting the Latin from which the English-language word ‘representation’ is derived (repraestentare) and the associated ‘conceptual capillaries from philosophy to art, law, politics and even AI’, he argues that the translation to Japanese erases the concept’s historical connections, ‘the halo of the sweeping philosophical critique [dwindling] rather quickly (2005: 60).Footnote 18 ‘Queer’, emanating from a site of great power (to those who read—in ‘our’ language, but are not read—in ‘their’ language), its historical and cultural linguistic associations inscrutable/inaudible/invisible as it makes its way across the globe, may function less as a vehicle of mutual comprehension, and more as a means of standardization; it mandates a refraction through that, it is tacitly assured, which is ‘only’ a ‘general concept’ as precondition of an other’s very legibility/audibility/visibility. As such, it enacts its own ‘god trick of being everywhere from nowhere’ (to misquote Haraway) (1988), a metaphysical, universal truth without cultural (or earthly) origin.Footnote 19

Garneau finds that ‘to translate (to make equivalent)’ is one of the driving desires of the ‘colonial attitude, including its academic branch’, an attitude additionally characterized by the need ‘to see, to traverse, to know…and to exploit…based on the belief that everything should be accessible…and a potential commodity or resource’ (2012: 32). Queerness, as ‘global’, ‘unmarked’ concept ostensibly arrives ‘from nowhere’ (but in fact most definitely from the English-speaking somewhere), requiring a difficult if not impossible translation by those in ‘other’ locations; at the same time, it translates those ‘local examples’ into legible entities that may be subsumed under the master category. Unacknowledged, moreover, is the function of moniker as that which can ensure a marketable and administrated dissemination of those new examples (resources) one has found in one’s travels, a dissemination leading to profit for the publisher (who sells more books/more library subscriptions), the conference organizer (who gleans more registration fees), and the individual scholar (whose citation metrics rise) (to say nothing of the implied ‘we’ for whom queer is assumed to be an incontrovertible necessity). To take the radical and necessary step of de-throning queer now would have profoundly positive consequences in terms of equity and the expansion of knowledge for and from the many, but disastrous effects for salability. If the thought of aviana displacing queer seems, viscerally, ‘wrong’ (to the Western ‘we’), this has nothing to do with ‘local’ vs. ‘universal’, or with ‘practicality’—unless practicality is understood to be that which is needed to ensure the best possible functionality within the capitalist system that defines that same functionality.

Tellis, keenly aware of the engulfment of queer by the structures of global capital, asks, ‘how is it that the Indian “queer”, for all its radical claims, has not interrogated the hegemony of this language and its appropriateness to the sociological contexts in South Asia? How has it not questioned the institutional structures which produce this discourse and the power relations between them (the donors) and the receivers (the NGOs)?’ (2012: 146).Footnote 20 Indeed, how is it that queer has become inextricable from the capitalization of the university, has become part of the ‘knowledge’ (in Mignolo’s and Walsh’s sense) it produces? How is it that the scholarly community congregating and coalescing around queer has not burned, struggled, endeavoured actively for the past thirty-odd years to dislodge what is a regional, parochial, ethnocentric construction that holds conceptual and linguistic hegemony over such a wide terrain? Why is it most frequently the constructed, enunciated Other—those like Ndlovu-Gatsheni—who calls for a provincialization of Western theoretical arrogance, concomitant with a deprovincialization of those Other voices speaking their own (cultural, theoretical) local and broadly applicable languages? And how is it that a concept founded upon dynamics of liminality, evanescence, mutability, subversion, resistance, has become disciplined, entrenched, institutionalized, administered to the extent that merely suggesting its demise is dismissed as tantamount to apostasy? In 1993, Butler indicated that queer might have to be ‘yielded in favor of terms that do…political work more effectively’ (19); similarly, in 2005, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz argued that ‘the reinvention of [queer] is contingent upon its potential obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any fortification of its critical reach in advance or any static notion of its presumed audience and participants’ (3). It is now 2023, and queerness, queer, queers—like ethnomusicology, the once ‘renegade’ discipline, self-appointed to topple the elitism and narrowness of musicology—appear solidified, comfortably ensconced within the administrative, disciplinary, economic structures of the university, at ‘home’ (with ‘us’, as ‘ours’) and, increasingly, ‘abroad’ (for ‘them’).

I wonder if such realizations arouse much (or any) anger among those in academic communities. And, concomitantly, I also wonder how many scholars have been completely indoctrinated into the current system to the extent that a slavish adherence to this culturally specific and intellectually/creatively straitjacketing notion known as ‘scientific objectivity’ (with unvoiced pretentions to a singular purchase on metaphysics) is never questioned, that even when claiming ‘subversion’ the very artefacts produced are immediately recognizable as playing by the rules of the game (this text included; my indoctrination noted). Understanding that in the Western contexts of scientific and academic debate ‘dissent, or challenges to the rules is manageable, because it also conforms to these rules, particularly at the implicit level’ (Smith 1999: 43),Footnote 21 I am doubtful that the type of sweeping intervention needed in ethnomusicology, queer studies/theory, and in academia more generally—encompassing both epistemology and methodology—can ever be enacted within the decorous constructions that currently define it. This is the realm wherein, for example, the gentility of the ethnomusicological conference space dare not be disturbed by big pink elephants (not) in the room (dissent either absent or consigned to the margins, audible but just barely); wherein ‘queer’s’ status as master signifier must not be challenged; wherein disruption and deviance are chastised, and conformity and obeisance (posing as disruption and deviance) are rewarded; and wherein arid, antiseptic, anti-erotic scholarship artefacts stand as the singular allowable markers of excellence, as monuments to this fetishized ‘objectivity’ (in part via the distancing objectification of textual representation, and an unquestioning belief that ‘truth…is to be found on the library shelf, groaning under the weight of scholarly books and periodicals, rather than “out there” in the world of lived experience’) (Ingold 2011: 15).Footnote 22 In such a context, what is the status of emotional investment in, or affective motivations for engaged, scholarly work? Sedgwick’s idea of reparative reading (2003)—a type of inquiry that is, according to Ann Cvetkovich, ‘affectively driven, motivated by pleasures and curiosity, and directed toward the textures and tastes, the sensuous feel, of one’s object of study’ (2007: 173)—gestures towards possibilities outside of the strictures of a narrowly understood scientism. Yet have the emotional, the affective—perhaps in consort with the erotic, the sensual—truly been unchained and embraced enough to reach their disruptive potentials, to dislodge a strangling, antiquated system? Or do one-dimensional counterfeits of both—stuck at the level of ‘emoting’ (timid pseudo-outrage at a system one upholds daily)—perpetually lead only to those things promising pleasure and profit, not distress, discomfort, divestiture?

I want now to offer neither mandate nor prescription, but an invitation to engage in a thought experiment, wherein I imagine an extraordinary outcome resulting from the meeting of ethnomusicology and queer, based on the willingness to embrace emotion and affect in all their unique volatilities. Perhaps especially in the university of today, research yielding ‘tangible results’ (those that can be quantified, proven according to the ‘scientific method’ and—of paramount importance—patented/marketed/monetized) is increasingly the lone species that is supported, rewarded, and valued. Yet the idea that the insidiousness of centuries-long injustices (human against human against non-human) might be comprehended (much less ‘solved’) with sole recourse to one figuration of what count as facts, ‘the master’s tools’ (Lorde 1979/1984), is mind-boggling. Much to the contrary, an essential component of combating the unjust must emanate from experimental thinking, from creative theorizing, from the risks of exploring what is beyond the literal, in the realm of the as-yet-unknown/unknowable (outside the [meta]episteme). Research in the areas of psychology and phenomenology has shown imagination and creativity to be essential components of human sentience and intersubjective existence, with the potential to effectuate significant sociocultural and epistemological transformation.Footnote 23 And several feminist/feminist-posthumanist theorists have explored the conceptual as a site of deliverance from the constraints of what is insidiously re-presented (by interested stakeholders) as an unchangeable ‘reality’, allowing us instead to ‘surround ourselves with the possibilities for being otherwise’ (Grosz 2012: 14). Of special note in the context of my coming arguments is Neimanis’s expansion of Grosz’s postulations away from an arguably strictly incorporeal (Deleuzian-Guattarian) status of ‘concept’, arguing instead for an understanding of ‘figurations’, ‘embodied concepts [that] are key to imagining living otherwise…[and] importantly grounded in our material reality’ (emphasis added: 2017: 5).Footnote 24

And again, I reiterate that, while ‘ethnoqueer’ is my one example, it is just that—one example among many possible sites of interventions that may be initiated by those whose (lived, emotional, intellectual, affective, embodied, historical) experiences have afforded them unique, situated knowledges regarding the complexities of exploitations, inequities, and possible remedies. I also stress that while I have consistently highlighted the importance of attention to systemic and structural variables, in this experiment I want to consider the possibility of irreducible individuality, subjectivity, corporeality—the sum of unique, situated, partial experiences and relations—which necessitates the understanding of the role of people as components of this same system, and ‘queerness’ as the actions of thinkers and doers rather than only an anthropomorphic entity. Taking into consideration the central, animating role of ‘the negative’ in what will follow, coupled with a call for the necessity of allowing oneself to be moved into action, while concurrently abdicating any claims of ultimate control, I imagine the denouement I portend is one many would rather combat than facilitate. I note, however, Halberstam’s encouragement not to ‘[resist] endings and limits’ but ‘instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures’ (2011: 186–187). And while the inequities engendered by the disciplines in which we complicitly operate are nothing to celebrate, to revel in, perhaps such a stance—accepting the inescapability of our many fallibilities, thus refusing the immobilization by feelings of profound culpability; cleaving to and reproducing mistakes as a way of perpetuating that pernicious amnesia that haunts academia, that sequesters our worst errors to a space where they no longer trouble us—can function not as exculpation, but as motivation to do good in our dealings with others, even when this ‘good’ appears as the very incarnation of that which we have been disciplined and administered to believe is very, very bad.

I thus turn first to emotion, return to the power of the ‘negative’, the furious, the restive.Footnote 25 Recalling a suggestion made at the outset of this text—an interrelated warning against the opiate of a deceptive ‘positivity’, and a call for a productive embrace of ‘negative’ emotions—we may witness the ways ACT UP was instrumental in countering the silences of ‘official’ culture in the United States. Gould, for example, highlights the importance of these so-called ‘negative’ emotions in the fight against AIDS; in her reading, shame is replaced by anger, and the latter becomes a galvanizing force among LGBT+ actor-activists in their refusal to accept a murderous cultural/juridical/political indifference (2009). An embrace of anger is, according to Lorde,Footnote 26 instrumental in combating the destructive effects of an often unacknowledged or strategically ignored racism (including that which is perpetuated, in my reading, within academic circles). In her estimation, ‘we cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty’ (1981/1984: 128)—an honesty that certainly includes acknowledging the ways that silence equates to a de facto quiescence to and continuation of racist and homophobic destruction.Footnote 27 To question the power of anger in light of historical fact to the contrary, as well as in the context of contemporary struggles motivated by a rage that refuses social silencing, that must be expressed (the George Floyd protests; Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Rhodes Must Fall; among others) is to almost certainly align ‘positivity’ with the wish for maintenance of the privileged status quo.

Indeed, as both Cvetkovich (2007) and Berlant and Edelman assert, so-called ‘negativity’ is, in many cases, that which ‘enacts the dissent without which politics disappears’, playing a ‘central role in any antinormative politics’ (Berlant and Edelman 2014: xii).Footnote 28 To these insights, Ahmed highlights both the coercive nature of constructions of ‘happiness’, and the punitive response towards those who refuse to be corralled into predefined (socially acceptable) narratives. Ahmed argues that ‘happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods’ (2010: 29), and that a refusal to follow such direction entails the risk of being labelled an ‘affect alien’ (30). But such affect aliens—including the ‘feminist kill-joy’ who ‘refuses to share an orientation toward certain things as being good because she does not find the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising’ (39)—remind us of the necessity of not succumbing to the seduction of the promise of (socially acceptable) happiness via (socially acceptable) objects/actions. One’s desires to own, inhabit, and/or have propinquity to the prizes of prestigious publication channels, dream jobs (in dream universities), academic fame (etc., etc.) may indeed prevent the voicing of a dissent understood viscerally to be essential. The disciplinary/methodological line continues to be toed by those who dare not risk the suggestion that they ‘do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are already attributed as being good’ (37). Lured by the promise of ‘good things’, is the most expedient, least disruptive way forward via the imagining of a pleasant, pliant queerness being led happily to its place at the ethnomusicological (children’s) table? But what of that furious, restive queerness, questioning the very necessity or ontology of ‘the table’—ultimately, in states of empowering anger, kicking over, setting fire to that fucking table?

In a welcome contribution to the special issue of Ethnomusicology Review devoted to the Pulse massacre (‘special’ = of interest to ‘certain people’?),Footnote 29 Pensis calls on us to listen to our ‘queer rage’, to ‘let this powerful surge of fugitive faggotry guide us to seek out new forms of living and loving in our worlds, where being out will not jeopardize being alive’ (2016). Noting the ‘horrific and familiar continuity of homophobia and discrimination that bedrocks hegemonic masculinity in the United States’, they further point towards the ‘neocolonialist and/or imperialist actions taken by some of the corporate sponsors in our current moment’ as well as the ‘deeply engrained ideologies of…white supremacy, surveillance and weaponry, citizenship, racism…and trans/misogyny’ as implicated in injurious homophobic attitudes underlying multiple, diverse discursive and sociocultural constructions, including those that manifest in/as appalling acts of material violence. Yet Pensis does not implicate the very administrative/institutionalized/disciplinary spaces from which they write—the ethnomusicological, the queer, the institutional academic, all built upon a foundation of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, homophobia, racism, fetishized masculinity (etc., etc.)—implying, as many of us have done, that these disciplinary optics, sites, and logics are solely instruments of critique, rather than instruments in need of both critique and condemnation. And I believe the difficulty in taking this additional, challenging, and necessary step may be elucidated via an examination of emotion and affect.

Although the former may be understood as a socially sanctioned and culturally legible ‘state’, the latter suggests those ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 1). While I have much faith in the utility, the requisiteness of ‘negative’ emotions in bringing about concretely manifested sociopolitical change, it is also possible that the ability to effect change beyond that which is imaginable may be constrained by remaining at the level/experience of legible emotion which is articulated via identifiable, known (sedimented, discursively/ideologically produced) categories. As Reeser and Gottzén state, when exploring the social and subjective formations of gender, one might, for example, focus on the ways in which ‘affect is channeled into “anger” and how that channeling functions as a tool serving hegemonic ends’ (2018: 151). This distinction (which resonates, in part, with Ferguson’s assessment of the academic administration of sexuality and other ‘minority’ difference) (2012) is important not in order to posit one as superior to the other (affect vs. emotion), but to add another layer to experiential analysis and, in the context of my argument, to highlight affect’s connection to an anti-institutional/administrative/disciplinary, volatile, movement that (operating in tandem with the abject, with deterritorializing desires, including that of homo*) may indeed be a profound catalyst for the formation of a type of engaged/enraged inquiry that refuses ethnomusicology’s homophobic, masculinist, and objectifying disciplinary stance, that refuses the colonialist/imperialist underpinnings it shares with queerness, that results in equities not imaginable within the current system. Stressing affect’s ‘open-ended in-between-ness’ (3), its alignment with (motile) becoming rather than (static) being, and its resistance to binarization (as seen with, e.g., emotion [positive/negative]),Footnote 30 Gregg and Seigworth, whether intentionally or not, simultaneously conjure visions of the most positive representations of queerness as the concept appears in Western, academic literature.

However, although affect’s fungibility renders it amenable to ‘all manner of political/pragmatic/performative ends’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 5), it is also essential to highlight that with affect there are ‘no ultimate or final guarantees—political, ethical, aesthetic, pedagogic, and otherwise—that capacities to affect and be affected will yield an actualized next or new that is somehow better than “now”’ (9–10). Indeed, affect—as I have previously noted—resonating to a certain extent with Foucault’s formulations of discourse, circulates outside of and beyond the agendas, goals, or desires of any person, group, or discipline. As Gregg and Seigworth note

As much as we sometimes might want to believe that affect is highly invested in us and with somehow magically providing for a better tomorrow, as if affect were always already sutured into a progressive or liberatory politics or at least the marrow of our best angels, as if affect were somehow producing always better states of being and belonging—affect instead bears an intense and thoroughly immanent neutrality. (10)

Both emotion and affect are, I believe—conceptually and experientially—indispensable components in a move towards equity. And it may be useful to outline the different manners in which each might be engaged with (or might engage us)—not to posit a binary opposition between the two, but only as a heuristic, a conceptual jumping-off point, a thinking about that facilitates and fosters a doing, a doing that will always be inflected and modified in process. I would thus conceive of emotion (specifically anger) as centripetal; it consolidates, concretizes, situates, localizes (including temporally), personalizes, prezentizes; it is intentional (in the phenomenological sense of the word), and a galvanizing force that potentiates a willed doing. Affect, on the other hand, may be thought of as centrifugal; it expands, diversifies, diffuses, deterritorializes, futurizes (or detemporalizes); it moves at the level of ‘mattering’, but gives no details of how to name, plan, proceed. Emotion, as I imagine the future of my foci, leads to attack; affect, to surrender (but not impuissance as it is conceptualized and enacted—in its gendered [masculinized] sense).

In the meeting of queerness and ethnomusicology, in my thought experiment-cum-reverie, attack by the former disciplinary location upon the latter is driven by anger, rage, and a commitment to what many would intellectually and viscerally understand to be among the central, generative aims of queerness: to truly, powerfully disturb, disrupt, dislodge, discomfit. Incited by the masculinist homophobia upon which the field is based (and immune to the promise of rewards for ‘good behaviour’), queerness’s attack moves towards an ultimate occupation—an entrenchment in the field; a refusal to go to more ‘appropriate’ disciplinary locations, or to toe the epistemological/methodological line; a commitment to a constant, perpetual highlighting and dissemination (over and over and over, until it rings in the ears) of exactly those things about which no one should speak (encompassing both the silenced and the reasons for silencing; not simply ‘more diversity’, but an attack on the field itself). The implications of ‘occupy’ might, on the one hand, conjure connections to the dynamics of social movements, but on the other—especially in the context of some of my foregoing arguments—raise uncomfortable parallels to colonialist, imperialist motivations. But it is, in fact, exactly the latter that I see as instrumental in conceptualizing the power of queer occupation: that is, queerness must not attempt to represent itself in contradistinction to or outside those structures marked by venality, avarice, exploitation, and fetishization of a masculinity it is complicit in replicating, but must recognize its very epistemologies—its local, provincial epistemologies—as created and gestated within, and as a product of, those same structures. Queerness, inextricable from capitalism, postmodernism/poststructuralism, neoliberalism, Western/Northern/Anglophone hegemony (including its masculinist, colonialist formation), and thus intimately familiar with the machinations necessary to keep the system(s) running, would exploit the same in order to infect, enervate, and eradicate colonialist, exploitative disciplines such as ethnomusicology. Queerness does not need to break down the fortress walls in order to occupy; queerness is, to the contrary, already inside those walls it helped erect, and knows very well where the most vulnerable cracks in the foundation lie.

Rather than continuing the role of white (or Anglophone/Euro-US-centric) saviour on the world stage (or that of the greedy assimilator, seeking out, Borg-like, any and all Others on the planet, those ‘local examples’ destined to become part of itself), the furious queer has much to do at home—home-work not motivated by a reactionary, isolationist worldview, but by the understanding that such domestic occupations and eradications can lead to profound, systemic change far beyond its here and now. But what would remain after such domestic-colonial destruction-liberations? If queerness has no claims to ethical or ideological purity, admitting to its status as a product of Western, capitalist domination, and having ultimately functioned (as I have argued) in a manner consistent with the driving forces of the very systems it claims to subvert, can the colonializing, masculinist queer change their/her/his stripes overnight? Imagining some legerdemain by which such transmutation might be accomplished, does this result in only queerness remaining—the Western university as the site of queer action and education? And would this self-aware, victorious queerness, emanating from the new-and-improved (post-woke) Western university continue its messianic mission, educating the rest of the world about this next step in evolution? (*Shudder*.)

I imagine quite a different future for queer, one in which this capitalist manifestation (similar to Marx’s—or the accelerationists’—predictions) eradicates itself. It is a future that is conceptualized in relation to affects and echoes, a future in which the visual—the base upon which representation-dissemination have been built—cedes conceptual singularity to a plurality (itself understood not only or primarily conceptually) which allows for a necessary yet necessarily impermanent concern with the sonic.