Queer Musicology

Queer musicology is a field dedicated to the study of sexual and gender diversity as it relates to music. This may focus on people who identify with a specific minority group, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ). It may explore a sense of fluidity in the face of identity categories or binary thinking. It may seek to understand underlying cultural habits, regulatory systems, or gendered discourses that affect all people in a society. In other words, queer musicology raises a big tent, making room for multiple, even contradictory approaches (identitarian versus anti-identitarian, minoritarian versus universalist). Taking cues from feminist studies and following a critical turn in the 1980s toward the social, personal, and embodied dimensions of music, its original practitioners were motivated by a desire to remedy longstanding heteronormative practices in the discipline. Just as in the wider humanities, where gay and lesbian studies paved the way for queer theory and then transgender studies, there has been a continuous evolution of the field’s burning questions and representative voices. Important intellectual projects include historical reconstruction of suppressed life stories, the study of social groups, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and the theoretical exploration of music’s role in queer forms of knowledge.