Justin V. Bond singing at Occupy Wall Street

Over at Bully Bloggers, I’ve posted the short MLA presentation I gave on Justin V. Bond and Occupy Wall Street. In it, I am thinking, feeling really, my way through some ideas about Nancy’s concept of being singular plural, the occupation movement, and the transgender grain of the voice.

My main quarrel with the article is its US-centrism — as intimated by the above-mentioned genres. They have the inevitable effect of placing punk in “the story of American music,” where it does and doesn’t belong. Where is a discussion of punk in relation to ska, reggae, 2-tone? And, for an article on the relationship between academic theory and musical subcultures, I was truly surprised to see Bourdieu name-checked but not Dick Hebdige.

Maybe everybody is supposed to already know their British Cultural Studies backwards and forwards by now. But somehow I can’t help but feel that the historiography of punk is being placed in a too-convenient national frame (not just in this article, but it’s a case in point). The linearity of the national frame seems to make it easier to periodize punk through generational logics (“kids these days”), a “straight time” of reproductive temporality that would be complicated by transnational frames.

“Real America” converges on Iowa caucuses today for one last attempt at forestalling the inevitable Mitt Romney nomination. I’ve lost track of which candidate has been the latest to pop-up in the game of “I’m not Romney” wack-a-mole. But I hope it’s Rick Perry, he of the hilarious “Strong” campaign ad, complete with Brokeback Mountain jacket and ersatz Aaron Copland-esque music. We’re here, we’re queer, and we designed everything you’re wearing and listening to!

UPDATE: It’s not Perry, who is “returning to Texas” to consider his “options”: It’s Rick Santorum, which is even richer fun, if you’ve ever googled his name.

Generously, Warner resists the temptation to call the project over, or failed (although he does nominate his preferred theoretical concerns — secularism and normativity — as the ones that ought to preoccupy queer theorists most, at the expense of other keywords like — affect, temporality, and empire):

Far from being conceptually vacuous, queer theory now has the shape of a searching and still largely undigested conversation, rich enough to have many branches, some different enough to be incommensurate with one another.

Out of curiosity, after reading Warner’s essay I went through the Worldcat catalogue this morning, looking for books with the phrase “queer theory” in the title. To my surprise, I had read almost none of them. Most were trots of various genres: introductions, ‘key concepts,’ etc. This makes me think that, at least in terms of book publishing, queer theory is not so much undigested as ,predigested, something that people already think can be summed up and sorted. As a phrase it has fallen victim to the very powers of ignorant knowingness that the late Eve Sedgwick anatomized in The Epistemology of the Closet.

I look forward to celebrating the publication of the Sedgwick’s posthumous collection of essays, The Weather in Proust, later this week at the MLA in Seattle.

This blog is beginning with words, but I’ll be getting back to music anon. Happy New Year!

Sonic Work: Music, Labor, Value

A Special Issue of the Journal for Popular Music Studies

Call For Papers

Bollywood heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor sings for sex workers working as extras on the set of his film "Rockstar."

Marina Peterson, Jesse Shipley, Guest Editors

We are interested in papers from a variety of academic fields and sonic contexts that address issues of music, labor, and value broadly conceived. Making music involves labor of various sorts, whether playing an instrument, chopping up a sample, laying down lyrics, or performing for an audience. These practices resonate in and with urban and transnational soundscapes. Taking into account the changing technologies of production, circulation and listening, making music connects in literal and metaphoric ways to making money and making a living. At the same time, music is posited as detached from so-called worldly values in various ways-religious music is taken to be spiritually transformative, popular music is often escapist, courtly music is understood as linking political power to various ideas of aesthetic beauty. Yet in all of these cases, music converts aesthetic value into material value in various ways. And while some musicians struggle to maintain control of their music away from the effects of commodification, others strive for fame and fortune and seek to brand and package their music for mass consumption. We seek to elaborate on a range of aspects of the dynamics inhering in music, labor, and value, from the meaning and nature of musical practice to the transformations linking aesthetic, economic, moral, and linguistic modes of value. We are also interested in pieces that work with sound beyond music proper. Papers should be approximately 7000 words.

Subjects might include but are not limited to
-musicians’ unions and other collectives
-representations of musical labor in literature, film, television, visual arts
-music and symbolic capital

-music as queer labor

-piracy

-religion and music

-sound and urban space

-sounds of work

-changing technology and its relation to changing forms of labor

-digital and analogue, live and electronic modes of labor

-work and pay

-amateur practice

-scales of value, including local production and global circulation

Send abstracts to Jesse Shipley (jshipley@haverford.edu) or Marina Peterson (marina.peterson@gmail.com) by January 13^th, 2012.

Remix Theory.

I love the fact that the author holds up Reader’s Digest as an example of the remix.

I finally met Jennie Stoever Ackerman, who joined me in gleefully pounding crabs into submission Saturday night. She tells me the sound studies caucus is close to receiving official status at the ASA. Another dinner companion, Drew Daniel, told me about his new article on queer sound in the current issue of The Wire. I am eager to read that.

Daylenne English gave a talk on the ever fascinating Janelle Monáe. And Gus Stadler gave a rich talk on sound and recording technology in Andy Warhol that, I was thrilled to learn, is shaping into a book on the sensorium in Warhol. This was on a 10am Sunday panel on Warhol that was uniformly strong, with contributions from Homay King and Jonathan Flatley, and an incredible response from Eric Lott who took the queering of Mick Jagger — via Warhol — from implausible to totally convincing in bare minutes.

Back to school has taken its predictable toll on my free time, but two new arrivals in my inbox have brought me back to the blog.

• American Quarterly, the flagship academic journal of American studies, has a new special issue out entitled “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,” edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun. Table of Contents and full text here (subscription site). Sound supplement here (open access). Nothing directly on queer studies, at least from a quick glance at the titles, but the first section on sound and subjectivity looks, oops, sounds promising.
• A new open access journal of music studies from France, Transposition, kindly sent me there call for a special issue on “Music and Queer Theory.” Here is the call. The deadline is March 31st, 2012. I am very likely to submit something, as I am quite interested in how queer theory translates and transforms across linguistic and national boundaries. Submissions can be in French or English.

In other news, I am very much looking forward to taking part in a working group at NYU on Theorizing Sound Writing, led by my colleagues Deborah Kapchan and Jason Stanyek. The first meeting is next Friday, and we are to each bring a sample of writing about sound we find particularly provocative. I am hoping to bring something from the AQ issue or from this:

• Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). It’s hot off the press, and has a lot of beautiful writing about sound, music, and space.

Last, but certainly not least, I am very excited that the EMP Pop Conference (we are no longer allowed to spell EMP out as “Experience Music Project” for some reason) is coming to NYU for the first time next March. The theme is Sounds of the City, and the full call is here. I like EMP Pop because the event is free to the public (with registration) and draws a mix of academics, journalists, musicians and fans in a non-business oriented setting. Very different from either a music industry oriented event or an academic conference, although inevitably people more used to one grouse that EMP is too much like the other.

I am part of a group that is working on a call for EMP Pop proposals specific to gender, race and sexuality diversity, which can be found here: Turn it up! Listening to Difference. The deadline for that call is very soon, October 15th, 2011. Those accepted go into our proposal for the conference, and in case any one isn’t, they can still automatically be considered in the general pool of applications, due a month later on November 15th.

Shante posted this on google plus today. It’s the video to the debut video of Jessie J, “Do it Like a Dude” an immediately infectious dancefloor scorcher that leaves coy “I kissed a girl” pop lesbionica in smoking ruins. These folks do not agree.