Queerness, Voice, Embodiment

2nd Symposium of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
https://lgbtqmusicsg.wordpress.com
20th-21st April 2018
Maynooth University (near Dublin)

Deadline: December 11, 2017

Elizabeth Woods’s essay ‘Sapphonics’ (1994) set in motion new discourses on the voice in music studies. With an example of the unique expressive qualities of lesbian difference and desire, Sapphonics questions the universally assumed traits of physical vocal mechanisms to emphasise the particular embodied circumstances of production and performance. Grappling with similar questions of difference and agency, Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) articulated the predicament of Subaltern voices addressing issues of(post) coloniality and patriarchy. Neither essay delimits the possibilities of what voicing entails, rather both cut across disciplinary boundaries in search of voices that intersect various dimensions of identity, including gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, to name a few.

This Symposium, the second of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Groups, revisits questions of voice to open dialogue in music studies on the many in/visible mechanisms affecting the voices of the marginalised in music disciplines. What are queer voices? Who speaks for and of whom? How do voices inscribe or limit agency of LGBTQ+ subjects? As LGBTQ+ politics become more mainstream, what other voices are left unheard? In addition to paper presentations, the symposium will include a panel on the subject of ‘LGBTQ+ Identities, ethnicities and nationalism in Irish and UK contexts,’ and a roundtable discussion of mental health and the LGBTQ+ community in university music departments. This year’s keynote speaker is Melanie Marshall (University College Cork), whose interests span sixteenth-century Italian music, modern performance of early music, intersectionality in music studies, gender & sexuality, and feminism. We welcome proposals for individual 20-minute presentations, shorter provocations, organised 60-minute panels and roundtable discussions that draw on and expand on music and the following themes:

• Queer of colour critique and further intersections of race, ethnicity, class, disability, caste
• Queerness, the body and embodiment
• Voice and trans experiences
• Queer approaches to early music and apparently heteronormative contexts
• Irish LGBTQ+ communities
• Queerness, religion and spirituality
• Embodying queerness in research and teaching
• LGBT activism, homonationalism, LGBT imperialism

Please submit an abstract (250 words for individual presentations and provocations; 500 words for panels and roundtables) and a short bio (50 words per presenter) by 11th December 2017 to: [email protected]

Interested in attending without presentation? Please register via the email address above by 2nd March 2018 and indicate if you require university accommodation. There will be a small registration fee for the event.