Transauralities: Thinking Trans in Music and Sound Studies- 2023 American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Denver CO
ABSTRACT:
This panel considers how by “thinking trans” within music and sound studies we might develop new histories and theories of sound, listening, and embodiment. Thinking trans considers transness as a methodology that can produce and complicate our epistemologies of music and sound. We are not seeking to add a new subject to music and sound studies discourses, nor do we propose that music/sound studies are entering a “transgender turn.” Rather, we are interested in how these disciplines have always already produced discourses of sex, gender, and the body that, by thinking trans, can be pushed forward into new registers of feminist thought and praxis. In this way, this panel puts trans theory into dialogue with foundational and current feminist music/sound thinking in order to promote a renewed political commitment to dismantling patriarchal and cisheterosexist paradigms, ones that even construct the category “trans” as something distinct or exceptional.
Engaging with sound and music, then, allows this panel to focus on ways the body (as another socially constructed category) is attuned to certain epistemological registers of sex and gender—registers that are inherently co-constituted with race. By considering what Third World Feminist writers describe as “theory in the flesh,” transauralities produces its knowledge by embodying trans experiences with sound. Papers in this panel engage the embodied, the corporeal, and the fleshly in a multiplicitous fashion, transcending any identitarian fixity that makes transness legible as a subject of discourse. We are more interested in the potentialities that thinking trans offers for returning to this body with an emergent sense of care; our panel signals both an emergence in music/sound studies for thinking trans as aesthetic critique and simultaneously a hailing to the political emergency of trans bodies that are subject to states of precarity and extreme forms of violence. Following Venus Xtravaganza, a trans woman of color featured in the 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning, transauralities takes seriously “all of this skin,” touching, feeling, and ultimately being vulnerable to the aural by eliding any particular commitment to naming sex, gender, music, or sound.
FIELDWORK:
Alejandrina M. Medina 